Diagnosis: Slower Growth

The Presidential election is over, and the Affordable Care Act (ACA) is a fact of life. But despite the complex nature of health-care reform, providers are finding that small changes in health-care operations can make a big difference in quality of care and the bottom line.At 155-bed, not-for-pro...

By David Rosenbaum • Dec. 15, 2012

Gaming the System

A salesperson is playing a video game at work. He’s a lowly squirrel hunter looking to move up the ranks until he reaches his ultimate goal of becoming a top-level whale hunter.But this game isn’t a smartphone download or a time-wasting Facebook application. It’s embedded in his company’s custome...

By Taylor Provost • Dec. 15, 2012

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

CFOs Are Shaky at the Cliff’s Edge

The U.S. CFO Optimism Index has dropped yet again in the latest Duke University/CFO magazine Global Business Outlook Survey, to 51 out of 100. Down from 52 last quarter and 59 at the beginning of the year, optimism levels among senior finance executives have dipped in part because of mounting con...

By Kate O'Sullivan • Dec. 12, 2012

Europe’s CFOs Betting on Recovery

Keep very quiet or you might scare away the recovery.There are, we can dare to hope, a few signs that the European economic environment is looking just a little bit healthier, with businesses making more positive noises about their own prospects and investment plans. These crumbs of comfort are t...

By Andrew Sawers • Dec. 11, 2012

Software Companies: The Bicoastal Divide

It appears that what many suspected is true: the West Coast is far more aggressive in pursuit of growth, more top-line-focused than the conservative, bottom-line-oriented East Coast, at least when it comes to software companies.In the 2012 Software Benchmarking Industry Report released today by t...

By Taylor Provost • Dec. 10, 2012

What VC Money Buys

BOSTON — When I dropped in last summer on Pingup, a technology start-up that lets people text rather than call businesses (and lets businesses reply in kind), the company’s name was not on the directory mounted in its building’s lobby. Consequently, I spent a while riding up and down the elevator...

By David Rosenbaum • Dec. 10, 2012

Basketball and the Fiscal Cliff

With the fiscal cliff looming, members of Congress are staking out positions and engaging in negotiations that have the feel of a sloppy game of hoops, full of turnovers, technical fouls, and missed opportunities.  Like any competitive sport, basketball is a zero-sum game of us versus them. The c...

By Scott Drobes • Dec. 7, 2012

Strategic Acquirers to Stay Risk-Averse in 2013

U.S. companies aiming to merge, consolidate, or acquire assets or companies next year are in the minority, and that will make for a sluggish M&A market next year, according to an Ernst & Young report.“Macroeconomic ambiguity combined with a continued corporate focus on lower risk, organic...

By Vincent Ryan • Dec. 5, 2012

Prepping for the Big Data Future

BOSTON — Matt Fates envisions a world where no one talks about Big Data anymore. Using the totality of an enterprise’s data to make forward-looking business decisions, develop new products, and improve marketing efficiency will be so common that there won’t be a name for it.But getting to that po...

By Taylor Provost • Dec. 3, 2012

Small-Business Owners Express Epic Pessimism

Small-business owners are more pessimistic about their businesses’ future than they’ve been since the third quarter of 2010, according to the Wells Fargo/Gallup Small Business Index released Friday.The numbers are “jaw-dropping,” says Doug Case, small-business segment manager for Wells Fargo, cur...

By David Rosenbaum • Dec. 3, 2012

Restarting the U.S. Small-Business Growth Engine

There’s mom. There’s apple pie. And there’s small business. As the U.S. economy struggles to go on climbing out of the downturn and create jobs, no hero stands taller in the nation’s political and business psyche than the small-business owner. With good reason. Small businesses, defined as compan...

By John Horn and Darren Pleasance • Nov. 29, 2012

Black Friday Sales Rose Online, Sank In Stores

The tendency of consumers to buy stuff via their online and mobile devices has been in place for a while now. Indeed, since November 1, folks have spent $13.7 billion online, according to comScore, a business-analytics firm. But it all seemed to crystallize on Black Friday, when online sales topp...

By Taylor Provost • Nov. 26, 2012

Small Biz Whipsawed by Uncertainty

The National Federation of Independent Business’s November Optimism Survey (conducted before the presidential election) reported that small business enthusiasm for the economy rose a tick in October, signifying (according to the NFIB) not very much. That’s because 23% of the over 2,000 small busi...

By David Rosenbaum • Nov. 21, 2012

Adding Sales Staff: What You Need to Know

Not only do your quarterly sales figures look good, your gut is also telling you there’s even more revenue out there waiting to be hunted down, tied to the roof of the car, and carried home. Your product is a hit; your salespeople are making their quotas, so why wouldn’t you hire a few more? If y...

By David Rosenbaum • Nov. 20, 2012

China’s Economy: Two Views, Both Bad for Europe

The political leadership may have changed in China but the fundamentals of its economy haven’t – and while two economists take opposing views on the outlook for the Chinese currency, neither scenario is good news for Europe.Savvas Savouri is partner and chief economist with hedge fund manager Tos...

By Andrew Sawers • Nov. 19, 2012

No Fad, Big Data Is Big Deal

BOSTON — When he was asked at Thursday’s MIT Sloan CFO Summit if Big Data is just a buzzword, a marketing tool vendors use to sell more software to CFOs, Justin Borgman, the founder and chief executive officer of Hadapt, a data-analysis software vendor, answered honestly: “Yes. It’s an excuse to ...

By Taylor Provost • Nov. 16, 2012

Frothy Growth

Craft beer is often defined by what it’s not. It’s not mass-produced; a craft brewer typically makes less than 6 million barrels of beer a year. (By contrast, Anheuser-Busch shipped 97.9 million barrels in the United States in 2011.) It’s usually not a low-alcohol light lager, like Budweiser or C...

By David Rosenbaum • Nov. 15, 2012

A Taste for M&A

Name: Gordon Stetz Position: CFO of McCormick & Co., the spice and flavoring maker. McCormick, a Fortune 1,000 company, brought in sales of $3.7 billion in 2011. Previous Positions: CFO of Europe, Middle East, and Africa at McCormick; VP of finance and administration, U.S. Consumer Products D...

By Marielle Segarra • Nov. 15, 2012

Start Me Up

Among the never-ending stream of books on starting and growing new businesses, one of the most thoughtful and complete to appear in recent months is The Founder’s Dilemmas: Anticipating and Avoiding the Pitfalls That Can Sink a Startup, by Noam Wasserman (Princeton University Press, $35). “If ent...

By CFO Editorial Staff • Nov. 15, 2012

Latin America: A Sunnier Outlook

While CFOs in the United States and Europe were increasingly gloomy in the third quarter, and as Asia’s finance chiefs warily watched that region’s slowing growth, a bright spot stood out in the latest Duke University/CFO Magazine Global Business Outlook Survey: Latin America, and Brazil in parti...

By Kate O'Sullivan • Nov. 15, 2012

An Interest in Pinterest

You may not know it, but your company has probably been “pinned.” That is, someone, somewhere, has taken a liking (or disliking) to its products or services and shared images of them on Pinterest, the social-networking website. By one count the third-busiest such site in the United States, after ...

By Taylor Provost • Nov. 15, 2012

Euro-Zone Growth Flounders

If you were looking for a euro-zone recovery in 2013, forget about it, says rating agency Standard & Poor’s. Its previous forecast of 0.3% growth in gross domestic product has been cut to exactly zero. Moreover, 2012 is now looking worse, with euro-zone economic activity expected to contract ...

By Andrew Sawers • Nov. 15, 2012

Office Politics

It’s said to be unwise to discuss sex, religion, or politics with anyone other than close friends. That particularly applies in the workplace, where strong emotions can interfere with productivity. Apparently, however, the top officers of three companies either never heard that truism or decided ...

By David McCann • Nov. 15, 2012

Sandy’s Gone, but the Threats Remain

Hurricane Sandy was an awful, albeit salutary, reminder of the importance of effective IT disaster recovery and business-continuity planning.  Whether or not you think the climate scientists are right, Mother Earth is indisputably volatile and unpredictable. Exceptional events do and will continu...

By Rob Livingstone • Nov. 14, 2012

Transformation of a Salesman

Change is the new normal, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that one of the world’s oldest professions — sales — has changed.A survey conducted in 2009 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and SKK University of more than 400,000 U.S. companies showed a growth in inside sales positions (p...

By David Rosenbaum • Nov. 13, 2012