E-commerce, Unplugged

On a recent spring day, Jay Marks walked into a house he had been hired to sell for his employer, Arlington, Texas-based RE/MAX Associates. Marks, an associate broker at the global real estate company, immediately began doing what real estate brokers do: writing down the number and size of the ro...

By Randy Myers • June 15, 2001

Global Confidence Survey

Call them contrarian. Now that the high-flying, roller-coaster economy has come to a screeching halt, CFOs, it seems, are a bit more comfortable with domestic and global prospects. In fact, 31 percent of U.S. CFOs feel confident about the global economy over the next year, up from last quarter’s ...

By Marie Leone • June 1, 2001

Explore the Trendline➔

Tax policy shifts: What CFOs need to know to stay ahead

Discover how evolving tax policies are creating new opportunities and challenges for CFOs.

By CFO.com staff

Darkness Before the Dawn

Did you read the news from Japan today? Oh, boy. Two years after the end of its “lost decade,” the Land of the Rising Sun remains stuck in an economic slump. Stocks have plunged to levels last seen in the mid- 1980s. Real estate values have been hammered, bankruptcies are rising, unemployment has...

By Edward Teach • May 1, 2001

We Test in the Land Down Under

For many CFOs, investing in a Web site is a lot like a ride through a house of horrors. Web designers dressed in black float by, mouthing strange phrases like deep linking and scripting. The designers, who seem to appear only at night, charge inhuman fees, launch the site late, then leave. Other ...

By Elizabeth Fry • April 15, 2001

Royal Ambition

Royal Ahold isn’t exactly a household name, at least outside the Netherlands. But the Dutch food retailer, operating some 8,500 stores on its own or through joint ventures in 24 countries, happens to be a tough competitor in an industry whose low margins make it difficult to succeed even in one c...

By Ronald Fink • April 1, 2001

Grey Matters: CFO’s Third Annual Knowledge Capital Scorecard

A corporate balance sheet, prepared according to generally accepted accounting principles, does a reasonable job informing about the physical assets and financial capital employed by a company. But when it comes to the increasingly important intangible assets of corporate enterprises, it provides...

By Andrew Osterland • April 1, 2001

Fighting Information Overload

Despite its corporate intranet, its vast network of servers, and plenty of business intelligence tools, Ericsson Research Canada knew full well that there were lots of duplicate efforts among its 103,000 employees. One big reason, says Anders Hemre, the company’s chief knowledge officer, is that ...

By Alix Stuart • March 1, 2001

On Further Reflection

The first thing Jim Rutledge did when he became CFO of Baldwin Technology Co. in January 2000 was throw out the performance measurement system.Not that he was shunning the idea of measuring performance. Far from it. The problem was the confusion that surrounded the economic profit program that Ba...

By Alix Stuart and Bill Birchard • March 1, 2001

Expense Management Software Grows Up

Managing expenses and collecting revenue is a piece-by-piece affair, and Extensity Inc. is attempting to integrate three major areas — travel expenses, procurement expenses, and timesheet tracking — into a single set of software modules.The company’s first application was travel expense managemen...

By John Xenakis • Feb. 28, 2001

Why Singapore is Less Risky than the U.S.

There are many obvious benefits of expanding internationally, including access to larger markets and the availability of cheaper labor and capital. But as managers of multinational corporations well know, there are also many risks involved.The trick is to hedge those risks in order to tilt the ba...

By Jennifer Caplan • Feb. 14, 2001

Web Metrics

For Julian Culhane, it must have felt like he’d climbed aboard a rocket just as it was taking off. When he joined Lastminute.com as its CFO in November 1999, the online travel and gift retailer had revenue of only £195,000, or $283,000. One year later, that figure had soared 1,800 percent to reac...

By Justin Wood • Feb. 1, 2001

On Balance

When Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton published their Harvard Business Review article, “The Balanced Scorecard– Measures that Drive Performance,” in 1992, they had no idea they were about to launch a revolution. They were simply pointing out the shortcomings of using only financial metrics to...

By Lori Calabro • Feb. 1, 2001

How to Weather the Down Cycle

Layoffs. Plant closings. Earning shortfalls. Lowered growth projections. The signs of a slowing economy are all around us.What should companies do in order to adjust to this new environment? Absolutely nothing, if they had been running their business correctly all along, insists Stanley B. Frieze...

By Ed Zwirn • Jan. 29, 2001

Exclusive: Will Devine be Divine?

The car business may look like it’s on shaky ground right now. Bottom lines are suffering and plants are getting shut down. But, General Motors’ new CFO John Devine says he’s seen this picture before. In 1988, his bosses at Ford Motor Co. sent him to run the company’s First Nationwide savings ban...

By Joseph Radigan • Jan. 23, 2001

Back to Basics

Now that the bull-run party could be coming to an end, and corporate America is bracing for an economic slowdown, many companies are getting back to blocking and tackling. They are focusing on the basics, like quality control, customer service, and good old- fashioned cost-cutting. Six Sigma, a m...

By Lisa Yoon • Jan. 3, 2001

Consumers Prefer Service Over Price

Consumers making purchases prefer good customer service more than low prices and fast shopping when asked about the ideal shopping experience, according to a new study from Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business and KPMG LLP. About 40 percent of the 2,120 consumers polled nationwide said ...

By Stephen Taub • Dec. 29, 2000

2001 Economic Forecast

‘Tis the season to hear forecasts. And at last week’s luncheon sponsored by the University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business, three distinguished economic and financial experts looked into their crystal balls and offered economic predictions for 2001 before a crowded Waldorf Astoria confer...

By Jennifer Caplan • Dec. 14, 2000

Building Better Budgets

From VisiCalc to Lotus 1-2-3 to Microsoft Excel, the electronic spreadsheet has earned a special place in the hearts of finance folk. But when budget time rolls around, that affection can be strained — especially at larger companies, where spreadsheets from many users must be combined. “Spreadshe...

By Tim Reason • Dec. 1, 2000

Ship-Shape: Our Seventh Annual Cost Management Survey

There are tightly run ships, and then there is Apache Corp.For every dollar of operating revenue it generated in 1999, this $2 billion (revenue) Houston oil and gas exploration and production company spent a mere 33.1 cents on operating costs, including selling, general, and administrative (SG&am...

By Randy Myers • Dec. 1, 2000

Nortel Sees the Light

When Frank Dunn joined Nortel Networks Corp. as a management trainee out of college in 1976, the company was still known as Northern Electric. It had revenues of $1.1 billion and sold most of the circuit switches, transmission gear, and phones it manufactured to parent Bell Canada Enterprises (BC...

By A CFO Interview • Dec. 1, 2000

Taming a Bully

How do you compete in a market that professes to be competitive, even though it’s still dominated by a bully? You start by negotiating with international bodies, like the World Trade Organization, as the U.S. has begun doing in the case of Mexico’s telecommunications market. You try to get the co...

By Michelle Gabrielle • Nov. 28, 2000

Veteran’s Day

Carly Fiorina didn’t bring a bevy of lieutenants with her when she headed west to Hewlett-Packard Co. from Lucent Technologies Corp. in July 1999. In the finance area, she counted on CFO Robert Wayman, entering his fourth decade at HP, to reinforce her message that the transformation she envision...

By A CFO Interview • Nov. 1, 2000

Transformation of Budgeting and Planning Processes

Andrew Stoneman knew he faced a big challenge. In April 1999, he joined Jones Lang LaSalle, or JLL (www.joneslanglasalle.com) as its European finance director just weeks after Jones Lang Wootton of the US and LaSalle Partners of the UK, two property-services and investment-management firms, final...

By Cliff Saran • Nov. 1, 2000

The Class of 2000

Every class has its standouts. In the case of the CFO Excellence Awards, there are 11 in the Class of 2000. Hailing from companies as diverse as Oracle, Merck, and Capital One, this year’s winners are truly at the top of their profession. Each one has broken through the traditional boundaries of ...

By A CFO Interview • Oct. 3, 2000

2000 Excellence Awards: Kim Patmore

After 30 years as a senior accounting associate at Western Union, now a division of First Data Corp., Pam Kotowski was ready to retire. “Every day, I recorded journal entries, pulled down the back reports, and did the transfer to treasury. It was very predictable,” she says. “I was pretty much bu...

By Alix Stuart • Oct. 1, 2000