CFOs on the Move: Week Ending Aug. 29

Robert Olson Dish test shoot in Englewood, Colorado on Monday, Aug. 27, 2012. (Chris Schneider)Finance chief Robert Olson is retiring from Dish Network, effective Oct. 15. He will be succeeded by senior vice president of programming Steve Swain.Steve Swain Steve SwainCME Group has promoted John ...

By Joan Urdang • Aug. 29, 2014

How Outsourcing Fails

With companies continuing to slash expenses to meet their desired bottom lines, it’s become increasingly popular for many to use outsourced talent for a project. That’s especially so within the IT market.But that doesn’t mean things won’t get lost in translation and errors won’t get made between ...

By Iris Dorbian • Aug. 28, 2014

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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

Let the Innovation Games Begin

You may have a crack research-and-development team, but that doesn’t mean it should be the company’s only source of innovation. Indeed, the pipeline of ideas likely will gush more bountifully if you find ways to stimulate everyone’s creativity.The big prize that awaits the champion team. One busi...

By David McCann • Aug. 21, 2014

Small Businesses Left Out of Lending Spree

Small business lending is still below its pre-recession levels, according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Although banks held $585 billion in small business loans on their books at the end of the first quarter, up 1% versus last September, small business loans were still off 18% from their...

By Iris Dorbian • Aug. 19, 2014

SEC to Clamp Down on Credit-Ratings Agencies

To prevent a reprise of the 2008 financial crisis, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is set to “finalize” new rules for credit-ratings agencies, says the Wall Street Journal. The effort is in response to criticism leveled against the firms for not being vigilant when assessing “flawed m...

By Iris Dorbian • Aug. 18, 2014

Eurozone Economy Flatlines in 2Q

While the eurozone prepares to feel the effects of the sanctions imposed on Russia, apprehension is growing in the region as the gross domestic product of Germany shrank and France’s stagnated in the second quarter, says Reuters.The less-than-stellar report is making the other 16 member states pa...

By Iris Dorbian • Aug. 14, 2014

More Enterprises Deploying Mobile Apps

Corporate America is becoming increasingly reliant on mobile devices for business operations, confirms a study released Tuesday. Mobile enterprise app activations jumped 20% in the second quarter of this year versus the first quarter, according to Good Technology, a Sunnyvale, Calif-based mobile ...

By Iris Dorbian • Aug. 12, 2014

‘Social Norming’ Boosts Employee Adherence to Company Policies

As the CFO, you are the chief policy enforcer for your company, the protector of the process, the crusader for compliance. It drives you nuts when people flaunt company policies.Jeremy Van Ek Let’s say your policy is that business expenses must be submitted for reimbursement within 30 days. Your ...

By Jeremy Van Ek • Aug. 4, 2014

Companies Seek Bigger Payoff from Sustainability Efforts

While companies tend to trumpet their sustainability efforts, they don’t always reap strong benefits from those efforts, a new McKinsey study suggests.In McKinsey’s past surveys, when asked about their companies’ top reasons for pursuing sustainability, respondents most often cited cost cutting o...

By Iris Dorbian • Aug. 2, 2014

Telecommuting Opens Doors for Hackers

Working from home offers a plethora of advantages: no commuting, freedom from office politics and the ability to check e-mails in one’s pajamas. Unfortunately, it won’t protect the employee from hackers and, for the employer, opens another network weak spot that cybercriminals can exploit, says a...

By Iris Dorbian • July 31, 2014

Five Tips for Preventing Cyber-Security Breaches

Discount retailer Target recently admitted it spent $88 million to improve its cyber-security systems following last year’s data breach, says finance resource site Proformative. And the meter is still running, with the firm most assuredly on the hook for legal costs for defending itself from laws...

By Iris Dorbian • July 28, 2014

Industrial Sectors Will Buoy the Global Economy: Moody’s

The outlook on global nonfinancial industry sectors is the best it’s been since the end of the financial crisis, according to a new report issued Thursday by Moody’s Investors Service. But don’t start the party just yet.Moody’s says the overall trend for corporates is positive, “with broad shifts...

By Iris Dorbian • July 24, 2014

Know Your Customers, But Don’t Trust Them

According to the old adage, “the customer is always right.” That is a sales precept since time immemorial, one that has become the standard rule for dealing with customers.But according to Entrepreneur, based on research and data, the adage is also very flawed for three reasons: One, the customer...

By Iris Dorbian • July 24, 2014

Obamacare Subsidies Ruling Buoys Plans to Drop Health Benefits

A federal appeals court ruling yesterday could lead to the collapse of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), some reports are saying. Less dramatically, the decision may be encouraging news for companies that were considering whether to stop offering employee health-care coverage, now that the public in...

By David McCann • July 23, 2014

Operating System for Drones Nabs $25M in Funding

San Francisco-based drone startup Airware has raised $25 million in funding.This funding news is intriguing because a slew of companies, most notably e-commerce giant Amazon, have stated their interest in building drones. Citing a CBS Evening News report on the topic from May 2013, The Verge note...

By Iris Dorbian • July 23, 2014

Unwed Millennials: A Drag on Consumer Spending?

Bad news for young singles — and markets that depend on healthy consumer spending. According to a new report, a young person’s unwed status could be an ominous indicator of their inability to buy a home, let alone amass wealth.According to a new Urban Institute study, an unprecedented number of m...

By Iris Dorbian • July 21, 2014

The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Digital Enterprises

The age of experimentation with digital is over. In an often bleak landscape of slow economic recovery, digital continues to show healthy growth. E-commerce is growing at double-digit rates in the United States and most European countries, and it is booming across Asia. To take advantage of this ...

By Kate Smaje and Tunde Olanrewaju • May 29, 2014

Private Companies Shift into Hire Gear

Private companies, expecting revenue growth to soar far past that of gross domestic product (GDP), are in a hiring mode not seen since pre-recession days.While various GDP forecasts for the United States call for 2014 growth of less than 3 percent, the average predicted revenue gain for the next ...

By David McCann • May 14, 2014

Proposed FCC Rule Poses Danger for Smaller Companies

Is our two-decade romance with the Internet finally about to break up?Twenty years after the medium arrived in the consciousness of the masses, it still holds romantic appeal to the majority of fair-minded folks who see it as a mostly level playing field for Davids and Goliaths alike.But the Fede...

By David McCann • April 30, 2014

Per JOBS Act, Small Firms Raise Funding on Their Websites

It’s been about eight months since the Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act general solicitation rule went into effect. Now companies are starting to raise money on their own websites as permitted by the act, in some cases easing the process by using a plug-in from Alphaworks.For example, Q...

By Marielle Segarra • April 25, 2014

It’s Complicated

The sources of business complexity are, paradoxically, simple to trace. But separating out and subduing the strands of corporate convolution requires constant vigilance. Complexity spreads rapidly, like ivy, creeping into every function and department, squeezing the vitality from an enterprise. T...

By Josh Hyatt • April 14, 2014

Heartbleed: The Mother of All Data-Security Bugs?

There may be a door ajar on your company’s website, as well as the websites of your suppliers, business partners and perhaps many of the other organizations your company deals with daily.Word spread this week that a version of OpenSSL, the open-source browser-encryption standard used by perhaps t...

By David McCann • April 9, 2014

Millennials’ View of the Workplace Is Fantasy

You have a boss, and at the same time people report to you. In fact, at the company where you work, every employee reports to a single other person.Actually, that’s the way it works in just about every company, notwithstanding a popular perception that the trend toward flatter organizations equat...

By David McCann • April 8, 2014

More Than Just a Number

If you’re responsible for the financial performance of a company, can you afford to avoid thinking about retirement — that is, your employees’ retirement?In 2013’s end-of-year Duke University/CFO Magazine Global Outlook Survey, we asked about the potential consequences of proposals to extend the ...

By David W. Owens • April 4, 2014

Big Data, Bigger Job

At Kevin Knapp’s most recent graduate school networking event, the chatter focused on “an issue that was close to the hearts of many of us,” as he puts it. No, he’s not talking about which of their classmates has gotten hitched most frequently or which fellow alum has funneled the fattest donatio...

By Josh Hyatt • April 3, 2014