Charles (Dickens and Darwin) and Continuous Improvement
“You show me a successful complex system, and I will show you a system that has evolved through trial and error.” ~ Tim Harford
Government Accounting Systems: Where Will We Be in 20 Years?
The more information we collect and share, the smarter we become. The same applies to today’s smart technology. How will technology continue to evolve government accounting systems in the next 20 years?
3 Keys To Fostering Innovation And Better Performance Management In Finance
The key to better performance management is creating an environment that promotes innovation in finance. An article on the Journal of Accountancy website highlights several ways to create an environment conducive to innovation in an effort to improve performance management. This effort includes three factors: promotion, support and incentives.
Strategy Without Execution: When Leadership Goes Begging
What is the one consistent element of every successful significant project or initiative?
Of Products and Customers, Cabbages and Kings
Product evaluation criteria can utilize these four categories:
1) Fails to make money under any and all measures
2) Does not cover variable costs, but breaks even when future / downstream / derivative / service / after-market revenues are included
3) Covers its variable costs (which already includes standard direct and indirect costs, since he is assigning all costs via ABC)
4) Covers its variable costs and its associated cost of capital
Once you’ve segmented your products (or customers) by profitabiltiy, one of the basic tenants of activity-based management is to take the necessary actions to move the losers into the break-even column, and shift the break-even products into profitable territory. Yet his history showed that, once introduced, products tend to improve their profitability up to a point, then peak and level off there, no matter what actions R&D, manufacturing or marketing may attempt to propel them to the next level.
Prescription? We need to be better disciplined about terminating the losers.
Are Your Human Resource Metrics Relevant?
There are many presentations and discussions about how analytics and “Big Data” can improve decision making—a simple Google search on the terms returns close to 8 million results. Organizations find their workforce analytics especially challenging as human resources (HR) departments attempt to grow beyond creating reports for the sake of reporting. When you think about…
Visualizing the world’s Twitter data
This is the most unique presentation relating to the topic of Big Data I’ve ever seen. One example used by this presenter is “how would you visualize all those twitter posts relating to someone tweeting about where they just landed in order to get an idea of where people are traveling to?” Words can’t do…
Academy Awards and Analytics-based Performance Management
I always find the acceptance speeches at Hollywood’s Academy Awards to be inspirational. The ones I enjoy most are Oscar recipients who thank the teams that contributed to their receiving the award. Success comes much more from teams than from an individual’s performance. My favorite acceptance speeches are from Oscar recipients in science and technology.…
The Health Care Crisis: Something’s Got to Give
OECD data shows the per capita cost of health care in the U.S. at twice the OECD average, with a lower measure of outcome (average life expectancy). I’ve no qualm with health care costs rising as a percentage of GDP; efficiencies in agriculture, mining and manufacturing are going to show up as higher spending levels elsewhere in the economy, with improved health care a clear priority for additional resources for most citizens. But at twice the cost?