“The first phase of the 2012 Republican presidential campaign, ending with the 10 states that vote this week on Super Tuesday, has been about money and message. The next several months will be about maps and math.”
It was those four M’s that caught my attention: money, message, maps and math.
Any candidate for any major office inevitably needs to concentrate on that last M – the math.
CFOs see greater need for accurate, timely data, but may do it on the cheap. They want to boost finance’s analytic, modeling, and forecasting capabilities while maximizing tech’s ROI, says Hackett, even though cost pressures will limit them.
This series of articles is intended to help organizations of all sizes achieve the best results possible from their performance management initiatives. In each article, the goal is to provide at least one simple step that can increase the odds of a successful outcome. This month we look at the list of vendors to be…
I am certain that I have broken the rules of meters in my limerick poem below. My excuse is that I am not a poet!
“Finance transformation” is a trend gaining favor with strategic consultants. The term is associated with the objective of shifting the focus of CFOs and finance departments from transaction processing toward more strategic and higher-value functions.
The Financial Services Roundtable, the lobbying group for the biggest financial companies in the U.S., has a new “white paper” out with the rah rah title, “Financial Services: Safer & Stronger in 2012.” A few of the bullet points:
•Banks insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation have $1.5 trillion in capital — the highest capital levels in the history of American banking.
• The largest U.S. banks have increased Tier 1 capital — the core measure of a bank’s financial strength from a regulator’s point of view — by nearly 50 percent over the last four years.
• Executive compensation has been reformed significantly to align with long-term performance.
• Banks have developed fortress balance sheets, improving credit quality by 54 percent, increasing net income and, restoring aggregate lending to pre-crisis levels of nearly $7 trillion.
New generation BI tools like 1KEY BI do not need semantic layer. The semantic layer is a business translation layer that sits between the database and the end user which was the traditional way of generating reports with old aged BI software tools.
Over the years, I have met a lot of entrepreneurs who have been frustrated by low profits, lack of growth, or the stress of the never-ending demands. Many struggle with all three. While every business is different, there are common denominators. In fact, I believe there are 10. The tricky part is that failing to have a handle on just one of these areas can result in mediocre performance, a stressful existence, or ultimate and intimate failure. That is one reason the failure rate for small businesses is so high (here aresome others).
I was just reading about how Barack Obama and George W. Bush are the most polarizing presidents of the past 50 years, meaning they had the largest gap in approval ratings between democrats and republicans.
Some think there’s a chicken and egg aspect to the question of which came first, our divisive leaders or our divided nation, but I think it’s entirely a function of leadership. If Obama and Bush were effective leaders, the nation wouldn’t be so divided.
I hit a big goal of mine – finally – just before 2011 ended. I finished writing the novel I began five or so years ago. When I say finished, however, what I mean is that the very first, very rough draft is complete, ringing in at just under 80,000 words.
Know how that novel got written? One single, small word at a time, with lots of mistakes along the way. I learned what not to do, and through that, I learned what works.