The Turning Point

Blockbuster Corp. has looked at life from both sides now. When it leaped out of the gate in 1985, it quickly swallowed its mom-and-pop competitors to become the dominant player in the fast-growing video-store industry. Today, it faces the grimmer side of the corporate life cycle as emerging techn...

By Kris Frieswick • April 1, 2005

HP Reinvents, Slowly

When Carly Fiorina unexpectedly resigned as CEO of Hewlett-Packard Co. last month, the question was raised yet again as to whether HP is caught in a no-man’s land between the vast product and services offerings of IBM and the ruthless cost-competitiveness of Dell. While it’s far too early to tell...

By Doug Bartholomew • March 30, 2005

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

Inflation Is Busting Out All Over

It’s time for companies to shift into inflation management mode for the first time in many years.On Wednesday morning the Labor Department confirmed the Federal Reserve’s warning from the previous afternoon: Prices are trending higher, which could put further upward pressure on interest rates.The...

By Stephen Taub • March 23, 2005

Return on Infrastructure Employed

When Arinc Inc. makes decisions about technology projects going forward, it begins by looking backward.The Annapolis, Maryland-based company, which provides systems engineering solutions to the airline industry, has taken to examining its ROIE (return on infrastructure employed). ROIE is a retros...

By Russ Banham • March 23, 2005

Senate Rejects Minimum-Wage Increase

Yesterday the Senate turned back two efforts to raise the minimum wage for the first time since 1996.Both measures were offered as amendments to a bankruptcy bill that has long been sought by lenders including banks and credit-card companies, and that would grant less relief to many individuals w...

By Stephen Taub • March 8, 2005

Health Care, Deficit Top CFO Concerns

Nearly two-thirds of U.S. chief financial officers believe is very important for Congress to address the cost of health care; a similar percentage feel that way about addressing the budget deficit. Only 31 percent of CFOs, however, believe that it is very important to implement Social Security re...

By Don Durfee • March 7, 2005

Fiorina Considered for World Bank

Carly Fiorina, who was tossed from the top spot at Hewlett-Packard last month, is now a “strong candidate” to become president of the World Bank, according to The New York Times, citing a Bush administration official. The current president, James Wolfensohn, will step down in May after a second f...

By Stephen Taub • March 2, 2005

Future Shock

Five years into the new millennium, a cloud of uncertainty hangs over Corporate America. The lackluster economy, the war in Iraq, public and private fiscal imbalances, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act — all this obscures the financial landscape, inhibiting new investment, and with it, innovation and growth...

By Ronald Fink • March 1, 2005

Closing the Strategy-to-Performance Gap

Companies are delivering only about two-thirds of their potential due to failures in planning and execution, according to a new survey of 197 senior executives at companies with sales of at least $500 million. The survey was conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit (a sister organization of C...

By Stephen Taub • Feb. 22, 2005

Innovation Blowback: Disruptive Management Practices from Asia

In the days of the rudimentary pistol, unlucky shooters were now and then hurt when unburned gunpowder escaped backward toward their faces. They came to describe this unpleasant experience as “blowback,” a term that has subsequently gained wider application in military affairs — to any event that...

By The McKinsey Quarterly • Feb. 16, 2005

How CPM Software Empowers Users

To manage construction on an oil-and-gas delivery system, you have to like to travel — and not always to places familiar from tourist handbooks. That means a lot of miles logged on back roads and a lot of time spent in places where Internet connections — if they exist — are not always fast and re...

By Eric Laursen • Feb. 15, 2005

HP’s Fiorina Ousted; CFO Steps In

Carly Fiorina has resigned as chairman and chief executive officer of the Hewlett-Packard Co., effective immediately, under pressure from the company’s board of directors. In a statement, she cited differences with the board “about how to execute HP’s strategy.”Chief financial officer Robert Waym...

By Stephen Taub • Feb. 9, 2005

IT, Compliance, and Performance Management

While U.S. companies have spent billons on information systems in recent years, only now are they translating their IT capabilities into true performance management (PM) systems. They’ve discovered — the hard way — that although IT investment is essential, it is not sufficient alone. That’s becau...

By Peter Krass • Feb. 9, 2005

Greenspan Sees Improving Trade Deficit

The growth in the U.S. trade deficit — “and its attendant financing requirement” — may soon begin to see improvement, according to the text of a speech delivered Friday by Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan.Addressing a business conference in London, Greenspan said that market pressures “app...

By Lisa Yoon • Feb. 4, 2005

The Long Haul

The nation’s air-service net-work is still reeling from 9/11, economic doldrums, its own bloated capacity, waves of defensive fare-slashing, and expensive fuel. But along with the daunting challenges has come an opportunity for CFOs: to reshape their airlines to fly profitably in the industry tha...

By Roy Harris • Feb. 1, 2005

Controlling the Flow: The 11th Annual Cost Management Survey

See the 11th Annual Cost Management SurveyThe good news for cost-conscious companies is that revenues are rising. That’s also the bad news.According to our 11th annual Cost Management Survey, a joint effort of CFO magazine and Stamford, Connecticut-based Archstone Consulting LLC, revenue growth o...

By Lori Calabro • Feb. 1, 2005

Big City Blues

Pittsburgh doesn’t look like a city that almost didn’t pay its bills last year. Its streets are clean. Crime rates are low. A gleaming new convention center and two stadiums rise along the banks of the Allegheny and the Ohio, two of the city’s three rivers. Pittsburgh’s nonprofit sector, which in...

By Don Durfee • Feb. 1, 2005

New Highs Expected for Q4 Earnings

Most stock indices surged to multiyear highs as 2004 wound down, and one driving force may have been the impact of strong corporate earnings.When the companies that make up the Standard & Poor’s 500 start reporting their December quarterly results next week, they are expected to set a collect...

By Stephen Taub • Jan. 4, 2005

Ernestine, Meet Julie

Try to book a train ticket on Amtrak’s home page and you might just swear off train travel. For sure, you’ll swear. A recent attempt to book a journey from New York to Boston, for example, required toggling between windows, looking up obscure station codes, and waiting for slow page repaints. Whe...

By Karen Bannan • Jan. 4, 2005

Growth Mode

“We’ve become obsessed with the notion of double-digit growth,” says CFO Kristen Onken. That’s an understatement. Since Logitech brought her on board as finance chief in 1999, the Swiss computer-accessory company has been in pure growth mode. Through some of the worst market conditions that techn...

By Jason Karaian • Dec. 30, 2004

At Year-End, Mixed Signals on Hiring

Is the employment picture improving or deteriorating? It all depends on which data you look at.In the past few days, Merck & Co. Inc., Cardinal Health Inc., and Delphi Corp. have announced combined jobs cuts of more than 13,000 in advance of the holiday season.Merck, whose share price and ope...

By Stephen Taub • Dec. 15, 2004

Travelin’ On(line)

At the peak of the dot-com boom, network-equipment vendor Extreme Networks became frustrated with the high booking fees and inflexibility of its travel-management company and began to explore online alternatives. Initial experiences with a new service from Sabre called GetThere worked out so well...

By John McPartlin • Dec. 14, 2004

Too Many Chiefs?

Under pressure to deliver organic growth, a number of U.S. companies — Heinz, Interpublic, and Honeywell among them — have recently appointed chief growth officers, executives whose main purpose is to find value-enhancing revenue opportunities. Will this new, vaunted post be the growth elixir tha...

By Ben McLannahan • Dec. 10, 2004

CFOs to Bush: Clean Up Iraq, Deficit

Will 2005 be the year that the U.S. economy finally stages a full recovery? Don’t hold your breath, the findings of a new survey of CFOs suggest.Indeed, chief financial officers of U.S. corporations are less bullish about the economy in 2005 and are particularly concerned about health-care costs ...

By Don Durfee • Dec. 9, 2004

In the Fast Lane

(Editor’s note: On October 24, several top employees of Hendrick Motorsports, including members of the Hendrick family, were killed in a plane crash. Hendrick CFO Scott Lampe was interviewed for this article before the accident. He subsequently told us that despite the tragedy. it might be helpfu...

By John Goff • Dec. 7, 2004