256 Posts found for Source: Business Finance Magazine

“What reasons are valid to change a budget?” It’s a question I often get. Here’s my response that provides ten quick reasons to change a budget.

Content: Article | Author: Steve Player | Source: Business Finance Magazine | Subject: Finance

When I speak with managers about profit generation, one of the most frequent topics that come up are the pitfalls and logic traps that lead to major profitability drains. Here are the biggest offenders:

Contribution – Why shouldn’t we take business that contributes to overhead, even if it doesn’t cover full cost?
Product line – Why shouldn’t we carry products that lose money if they are … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Jonathan Byrnes | Source: Business Finance Magazine | Subjects: Finance, Management

A balanced scorecard reports causal linkages and its key performance indicators (KPIs) should be derived from a strategy map. Any strategic measurement system that fails to start with a strategy map and/or reports measures in isolation is like a kite without a string. There is no steering or controlling.

Content: Article | Author: Gary Cokins | Source: Business Finance Magazine | Subject: Management

The bedrock of the traditional management process is multi-year strategic plans, static annual budgets, quarterly forecasts, monthly reports, and—most dangerous of all—a compensation philosophy that’s as likely to reward failure as it is success. We need a new manifesto for business performance management, one that recognizes that volatility, uncertainty and risk are here to stay. And we must implement behaviors, processes, and systems that allow … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: David A. J. Axson | Source: Business Finance Magazine | Subjects: Finance, Management

Leading companies like Fed Ex and others have found that a daily metric that tracks occurrence of errors that frustrate customers can be a simple and easy way of measuring and predicting when a customer might leave and never come back.

Content: Article | Author: Mark Graham Brown | Source: Business Finance Magazine | Subjects: Customer Related, Management

One way to counter IT security threats is through the 20 Critical Controls strategy. The SANS Institute, which describes itself as a cooperative research and education organization, is behind the 20 Critical Security Controls, which already is being used in government agencies and other large enterprises. The idea is to focus on the key controls that block known attacks.

Content: Article | Author: Alan Radding | Source: Business Finance Magazine | Subject: IT / Technology / E-Business

We can measure how prolific a baseball player is, how profitable a company might be and how effective a salesperson is at his craft. But when it comes to measuring a company’s progress in achieving organizational targets, we often make glaring errors. Rarely do we measure the right things for the right reasons. Rather, we choose the wrong metrics to track the wrong trends, measuring … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Mark Graham Brown | Source: Business Finance Magazine | Subject: Management

Top financial managers have an opportunity to boost their companies’ profits to new heights. The key to success: become your company’s Chief Profitability Officer. How can a CPO reverse his or her company’s massive embedded unprofitability and generate new streams of profits? Three essential steps: develop a profit map; define priorities and serving models for your important account/product segments; and align compensation throughout your company, … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Jonathan Byrnes | Source: Business Finance Magazine | Subjects: Finance, Management

It’s rare a singular metric like turnover or a customer survey score is by itself a good measure of an organization’s performance. Most of the more meaningful measures on dashboards of executives today are indices, made up of three to five submeasures. I review the nine most useful and creative performance measures I have seen in government and business organizations over the last few years. … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Mark Graham Brown | Source: Business Finance Magazine | Subject: Management

Imagine that you are now the CEO. Further imagine that your organization is underperforming. Worse yet, your organization has low employee morale, high labor turnover, declining market share, falling profits, competitors that are under-pricing you, and constant criticism from your board of directors, investors and investment analysts. Sound like a fun job? What are you going to do?

Content: Article | Author: Gary Cokins | Source: Business Finance Magazine | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

The business case process is seriously flawed in all too many companies. This is a very important issue, because evaluating business cases is one of the core processes for allocating capital to move the company forward. How can such a logical process be misused? This typically occurs in six areas.

Content: Article | Author: Jonathan Byrnes | Source: Business Finance Magazine | Subjects: Finance, Management

The four cornerstones of corporate finance start with the axiom that companies exist to meet customer needs in a way that translates into reliable returns to investors. Together, the cornerstones form a foundation upon which executives can ground decisions about strategy, M&A, budgets, financial policy, technology, and performance measurement—even as markets, economies, and industries change around them.

Content: Article | Authors: Bill Huyett, Richard Dobbs, Tim Koller | Source: Business Finance Magazine | Subject: Finance

Consider some of the business disciplines that are often held above reproach: revenues are good, costs are bad; give the customer what they want; don’t mess with a good thing; and supply chain integration is always a benefit. Those beliefs have passed their expiration, according to Jonathan Byrnes, a consultant and senior lecturer at MIT. According to Byrnes, some of those disciplines are merely myths … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Jonathan Byrnes, Peter Alpern | Source: Business Finance Magazine | Subjects: Finance, Management

The key to enterprise performance management is to identify an organization’s value drivers, focus on them, and align the organization to drive results. It’s as simple as that; and it is the hardest thing to do. The fact that there are many management methodologies, such as the balanced scorecard, performance prism, and five forces to name just a few, makes it harder. What is the … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Frank Buytendijk, Thomas Oestreich | Sources: Business Finance Magazine, Oracle | Subject: Management

If your firm has gotten used to using the Black-Scholes Options Price Model (BSOPM) when valuing options and other derivatives, you may want to rethink your practice. The reason? The BSOPM may not be entirely accurate when pricing derivatives that are other than “plain vanilla.”

Content: Article | Author: Karen M. Kroll | Source: Business Finance Magazine | Subject: Finance

Extending operational excellence to management excellence is the next strategic imperative for organizations of all sizes. Oracle’s strategy-to-success framework describes a comprehensive set of management processes that lead organizations toward management excellence. The framework consists of six management processes, in which the output from one becomes the input for the next.

Content: Article | Authors: Frank Buytendijk, John O’Rourke, Thomas Oestreich, Toby Hatch | Sources: Business Finance Magazine, Oracle | Subject: Management

The balanced scorecard is a management concept that has been so thoroughly boiled down to its essence that it no longer provides much application guidance. As a result, many of the best practices of the balanced scorecard are widely misunderstood. As much an art as a science, the balanced scorecard is a living process that must be adaptive to constantly changing external forces and internal … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Frank Buytendijk | Source: Business Finance Magazine | Subject: Management

Ensuring that a company’s risks are effectively identified, evaluated, and managed is among the most important responsibilities of a board of directors. The science of risk management continues to evolve. Lessons learned from past failures are being leveraged to ensure that a company’s risk management is built on the right foundation and evolving in the right direction. By asking the following seven questions today, directors … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Eric Krell | Source: Business Finance Magazine | Subject: Risk Management

Have you ever worked for an organization where you doubted the leadership capability of your CEO, managing director, division president, or agency head? Have you ever been disturbed that your organization is not living up to its full potential in terms of its enterprise-wide performance management? Imagine that I am media journalist. How would you like to work for an organization whose leader answered my … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Gary Cokins | Source: Business Finance Magazine | Subjects: Leadership, Management, Organizational Behavior

To get your forecasts back in gear, IBM suggests avoiding seven sins that undermine your efforts.

Content: Article | Author: Alan Radding | Source: Business Finance Magazine | Subjects: Finance, Management