Why is Only 5% of Finance Delivering Value?

Setting Expections in SaaS - the Service Level Agreement

The emergence of the Software as a Service (SaaS) model has necessitated new relationships between the service provider and the consumer with respect to service availability, service performance and response times. The Service Level Agreement (SLA) has evolved to become a useful tool which governs both service expectations and the consequences of failure to meet
these agreed upon metrics.

Improving Strategy Execution through Effective Budgeting

Budgeting is nearly always portrayed as a management process that helps an organisation  to execute strategy.  Fine words indeed, but how many budgets and associated budget processes actually support that ideal?  Surveys reveal the reality that most budgets are totally disconnected from strategy and that the resources essential to success are often missing or unavailable.  In this short, practical article based on the best practices of high-performing companies, we show you how to design a budget process that will directly [...]

How to Stop Hospitals From Killing Us

Medical errors kill enough people to fill four jumbo jets a week. A surgeon with five simple ways to make health care safer.

When there is a plane crash in the U.S., even a minor one, it makes headlines. There is a thorough federal investigation, and the tragedy often yields important lessons for the aviation industry. Pilots and airlines thus learn how to do their jobs more safely.

The world of American medicine is far deadlier: Medical mistakes kill enough people each week to fill four jumbo jets. But these mistakes go largely unnoticed by the world at large, and the medical community rarely learns from them. The same preventable mistakes are made over and over again, and patients are left in the dark about which hospitals have significantly better (or worse) safety records than their peers.

Getting Big Projects Done: Balancing Task-Focus with Goal-Focus

Successfully completing large, complex projects can bring great commercial, scientific or artistic rewards. Unfortunately these types of projects, by their very nature, also provide endless opportunities to falter along the way.

Early hiccups can send motivation into a tailspin, doubts cloud good judgement and the wood is lost for all the trees. There are so many reasons to jack it all in or do a bad job, and we need only choose one. That’s why any insight from psychology is welcome.

How do you get team members to learn how to divide their attention between task- and goal-focus?

Don’t Look Now, There’s a GPS Tracker in Your Kit-Kat Bar

Nestle Embeds GPS Trackers In Candy Bars To Hunt Down Eaters. Select Kit-Kat bars in the UK will contain GPS devices, which Nestlé will use to find the buyers and give them a cash prize.

Customers buying Kit-Kat bars in the United Kingdom could be unwrapping a 21st-century version of Willy Wonka’s Golden Ticket-a GPS unit the candy-maker will use to find them, apprehend them and give them a prize. Nestlé claims to be the first to market its chocolatey wares with a GPS-based promotion.

Crazy? Sinister?

Why Do Some CEOs Take More Risks?

Everyone has different attitudes to risk. Our individual judgments, interpretations and preferences influence the way we approach risky decisions. Sometimes, we can weigh the odds in a fairly rational, mathematical way. But when chief executive officers (CEOs) take big decisions such as acquiring another firm, it is very hard for them to know in advance how likely different outcomes are. Risk taking is not so much an economic calculus as an interpretive act.

Why is Only 5% of Finance Delivering Value?

?Only 5% of respondentssay their Finance organization is delivering Game Changing Value today? What’s that about?? Find out.

Frustrations of a Mover and Shaker for Managerial Accounting

Many who just read “managerial accounting� in this blog’s title are not bothering to read this. Why? They do not care. They only care about external financial reporting for regulatory agencies, bankers, and investors. This frustrates me because I interpret this as their not caring about managers and employees who need better internal managerial accounting information for insights and foresight to make better decisions compared to what they are currently provided by their CFO’s function.