The Plight Before Christmas

For the first few months of this year, the U.S. economy was moving steadily toward recovery. The Credit Managers’ Index (CMI), a key indicator of corporate economic trends, registered a rise each month from August 2009 until April 2010, and other benchmarks gave cause for optimism.Then came May, ...

By David Katz • July 15, 2010

Alternate Realities

For the past five years, finance chief Mona Leung and her fellow senior executives at Alliant Credit Union have gathered annually to imagine how the company would survive various long-shot scenarios. “We don’t just ask, ‘Are we going to be in a recession?'” says Leung. “We try to find scenarios t...

By Kate O'Sullivan • July 8, 2010

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

The Recovery: Still Jobless

Finance chiefs are still uncertain about the economy, and their lingering doubts continue to hinder employment, according to the latest quarterly Duke University/CFO Magazine Global Business Outlook Survey. The survey, which polled 1,102 senior finance executives worldwide in late May and early J...

By Kate O'Sullivan • June 9, 2010

From Adversity, Better Budgets

“When you realize that the net you’re building is 20 yards behind you, it becomes a lot easier to decide to fly without it.”So says Kurt Kuehn, CFO of shipping giant UPS. He’s describing the company’s new view of budgeting, planning, and forecasting. “Normally, we are very obsessive about buildin...

By Kate O'Sullivan • June 1, 2010

Have No Fear, the Consultants Are Here

Over the course of his finance career, Jeff Henderson, CFO of Cardinal Health Inc., has hired consulting firms to offer insight on strategy, outsourcing initiatives, expense-reduction tactics, and large IT projects. While he believes strongly that consultants are an important management resource,...

By Russ Banham • June 1, 2010

Ready, Set, Grow?

Cutting. Tightening. Restricting. Limiting. Scrutinizing. Postponing. And, of course, laying off. Those activities have dominated corporate life for the past two years as companies have endured the endless economic winter known as the Great Recession. Many CFOs now say, however, that a change of ...

By Kate O'Sullivan • May 1, 2010

In Search of the New

After fading during the financial crisis and the recession, innovation has returned to the top of executives’ agendas, according to a new study by The Boston Consulting Group, which surveyed 1,600 senior executives around the world on the topic. Sixty-five percent of finance executives say innova...

By Kate O'Sullivan • April 19, 2010

Slouching Toward Recovery

At last, some good news. For the first time in more than a year, finance chiefs expect double-digit growth in earnings and significant growth in capital spending over the next 12 months, according to this quarter’s Duke University/CFO Magazine Global Business Outlook Survey. Finance executives al...

By Kate O'Sullivan • April 1, 2010

Pep Boys Does Budgeting for Less

With many companies, even large ones, still using spreadsheets for budgeting, planning, and financial reporting, the growth potential for vendors of performance-management software is vast. After all, the software promises to handle the same tasks more efficiently than spreadsheets, while allowin...

By David McCann • March 30, 2010

Accountants Head to the Cloud

Unlike the development curve of many business trends, the use of cloud computing to lower accounting costs has gained an early foothold among smaller companies. There is practically limitless room for growth; what almost everyone regards as the most successful cloud software provider to date, sal...

By David McCann • March 24, 2010

No Longer by the Book

One of the eye-opening lessons of the downturn is just how few industries are truly recession-proof. Textbook publishing, long seen as a dependable cash cow of a business, is not among them, as many in the industry have learned to their dismay. At Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH), the nearly 200-y...

By Kate O'Sullivan • March 23, 2010

Testing, Testing: The New Innovation Game

Business innovation, once the province of teams in white lab coats doing research and development, is moving into the front lines. Increasingly it derives from continual tiny experiments in such areas as business processes and customer relationships rather than a single, company-transforming idea...

By David McCann • March 15, 2010

Finance Chiefs Look Warily Ahead

According to more than 100 finance chiefs who responded to a survey by CFO at last week’s CFO Rising conference in Orlando, Florida, the worst of the economic downturn is over, but the economy won’t fully turn around anytime soon. Only 6% expect the economy to decline further in the next year, bu...

By Kate O'Sullivan • March 12, 2010

Instead of Best Practice, Next Practice

For the most part, CFOs have forgotten an oft-repeated lesson learned in grade school: keep your eyes on your own work and don’t pay attention to what your peers are doing.Of course, companies can’t afford not to keep tabs on their competitors. However, they may be spending too much time benchmar...

By Sarah Johnson • March 10, 2010

On the Mend

At last, some good news. For the first time in more than a year, finance chiefs expect double-digit growth in earnings and significant growth in capital spending over the next 12 months, according to the Duke University/CFO Magazine Global Business Outlook Survey for the first quarter of 2010. Fi...

By Kate O'Sullivan • March 3, 2010

Relax, Your Board Loves You

Thanks to the recession, CFOs have been asked to provide their corporate boards with more and better information. Apparently, such demands have triggered CFOs’ penchant for rigorous self-appraisal — perhaps unnecessarily so. In a recent survey of board members and senior finance executives conduc...

By CFO Editorial Staff • March 1, 2010

The Shape of Things to Come

Much of the recent talk about an economic recovery concerns what shape it will take — literally. Will the plunge and rebound conform to the “V” shape that described the 1973–74 recession, be akin to the “U”-shaped recovery seen after the 1981–82 recession, or sputter into the dreaded “W” — twin r...

By Russ Banham • March 1, 2010

Crowd Control

In 2003 Motorola rolled out a system through which employees could propose ideas for products or anything else that might boost the company’s value. By one measure it was an unqualified success: it produced 10,000 ideas over the next four years.But the volume of submissions to the system, called ...

By David McCann • Feb. 10, 2010

Knowing Failure When You See It

As conditioned as they are to a tight focus on success, corporate finance executives might be better off if they paid more heed to failure.In fact, one of the most important roles finance can play is defining the criteria for abandoning investments, according to David Axson, a business consultant...

By David McCann • Feb. 8, 2010

All the Right Data

What do kinesiology, a wine connoisseur’s palate, and employee smiles have in common? Answer: companies have analyzed data about these intangible factors to improve operating results, says Jeanne Harris, an executive research fellow at the Accenture Institute of High Performance. In addition, sen...

By Marie Leone • Feb. 2, 2010

A Force to Be Reckoned With

Which stakeholders will have the biggest impact on your company over the next few years? It may come as a surprise, but in a recent survey of nearly 1,200 executives worldwide, McKinsey & Co. found that government comes in second on that list, well behind customers but ahead of employees, inv...

By Scott Leibs • Feb. 1, 2010

The New Normal: A Spot Check

As businesses slowly emerge from the worst of the Great Recession, they are assessing the damage and looking ahead to better times. A December survey conducted by CFO Research Services, in conjunction with American Express, examined finance executives’ views on managing in the new business enviro...

By Scott Leibs • Feb. 1, 2010

The Long and Grinding Road

Optimism continues to increase among finance executives, but don’t pop the champagne corks just yet. This quarter’s Duke University/CFO Magazine Global Business Outlook Survey, which polled 567 finance chiefs in the United States, found that 48% are more optimistic about the economy than they wer...

By Kate O'Sullivan • Feb. 1, 2010

Best of 2009: Budgeting and Planning

Budgeting and planning was a frustrating — if not completely futile — exercise for finance chiefs in 2009, as volatility on many fronts made this critical task more difficult than ever. Annual and quarterly forecasting became weekly, and CFOs found themselves managing a wide range of possible sce...

By CFO Editorial Staff • Dec. 29, 2009

Baby Steps

The economic recovery is shaping up to be a jobless one, judging by the response of finance chiefs to this quarter’s Duke University/CFO magazine Global Business Outlook Survey. While CFOs say they will increase capital expenditures and technology spending in the next 12 months — the first positi...

By Kate O'Sullivan • Dec. 16, 2009