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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

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

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

When a Process Can’t Fail, Be Brilliant About the Basics

From time to time I’ve consulted on or been responsible for managing processes that couldn’t ever go wrong. A process failure could have had catastrophic safely or economic consequences. A lot of times, the critical issues were to do with technology, but plenty were also dependent on human beings...

By John Parkinson • April 2, 2014

Machine Dreams

“You go to war with the army you have,” former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld famously remarked, “not the army you might want or wish to have.”The same can be said of companies today, as they battle to capture market share and profits. But victory in business often goes to those who secure a t...

By Josh Hyatt • April 1, 2014

Developing Leaders Is HR’s Most Important Function

Some may regard human-capital management, fairly or not, as a rather soft, amorphous, ill-defined discipline, compared to such razor-edged financial and business pursuits as capital acquisition and allocation, mergers and acquisitions, and product development.But here is a statement that could no...

By David McCann • March 20, 2014

Controller Was Apple CFO’s Successor All Along

Long-time Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer will step down in September, after 18 years at the company. Oppenheimer helped Apple earn “record profit and [build] a significant pile of cash,” according to the New York Times.Image via CrunchBase He’ll be replaced by Luca Maestri, corporate controller at A...

By Marielle Segarra • March 5, 2014

What Do CFOs Do on Twitter?

No, it’s not a trick question. There are CFOs who use social media. A recent survey by Leadtail, a social media marketing agency, analyzed tweets and shared links from 502 U.S.-based senior finance professionals (CFOs and VPs of Finance) in the fourth quarter of 2013. Here’s what they found:News ...

By Marielle Segarra • March 4, 2014

Readers Sound Off: The IT Talent Problem

It’s no secret that technology talent is in short supply when, perhaps, it is needed the most. But what’s not so clear is what to do with technologists who you hire and are not business savvy. As CFO columnist Martha Heller wrote last March, if business executives had one wish, an overwhelming nu...

By Martha Heller, Aram Zucker-Scharff, and Vincent Ryan • Feb. 25, 2014

Innovative Recruiting Enabler Brings In Its First CFO

Are you familiar with Glassdoor.com? If not, you should be. You can find out what your employees are saying about your company. If you care about that sort of thing, that is.On Glassdoor, present and past employees can publish anonymous reviews about a company. Just be prepared: It might not be a...

By David McCann • Feb. 18, 2014

Mercedes-Benz USA CFO Harald Henn: Video

Harald Henn is a gearhead. Lucky for him, he works at one of the best-selling luxury automobile manufacturers in the world, Mercedes-Benz USA (MBUSA). In January, the unit of Daimler AG reported the highest annual sales volumes in its history with 312,534 vehicles sold, a rise of 14 percent over ...

By Marielle Segarra • Feb. 5, 2014

Profits Up, Jobs Flat

Optimism in the U.S. business environment was stuck in something of a holding pattern at year-end, but at least it was heading in the right direction, according to the results of the Duke University/CFO Magazine Global Business Outlook for the fourth quarter of 2013. In this quarter’s survey, we ...

By David W. Owens • Feb. 1, 2014

Don’t Be Sidelined by ACA Delay: Act Now to Avoid ‘Play or Pay’ Flag

Last July the IRS granted employers an extra year before it will begin imposing penalties under the employer shared responsibility provisions of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). But there is plenty to do right now to prepare for the 2015 tax season, when the penalties will commence.In what’s become...

By Don Garlitz and Mary Bauman • Jan. 30, 2014