From the category archives:
Loading up your Kindle or travel bag with summer reading? Business Week features a list of summer reading recommended by business professors. As you would expect, business books dominate – but there are a wide range of topics – and even a few novels.
I can personally recommend these titles from the list:
The Ascent of Money [...]
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Every now and then, I get brought in to trouble shoot a payments initiative gone awry. For the last week I was hunkered down in triage mode with a client team suffering from a derailed project. They were exhausted, drowning in user complaints, struggling to fix bugs, and disillusioned with their vendor.
I’ve thought long and [...]
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CFO.com interviews Ben Heineman, author of High Performance with High Integrity:
According to CFO.com:
Ben Heineman got an eyeful of the C-suite during his 18 years as general counsel for General Electric Co. until his retirement in 2005. A book by Heineman published in June, High Performance with High Integrity, argues that a chief financial officer can [...]
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Check out Bussiness Pundit's list of the 25 Best Business Books Ever with convenient links to Amazon.com for those you haven't already read. They asked themselves: Based on prominent reviews, academic use, and popularity, which
business books would be considered “classics?” Of those, which are the
best? There aren't many surprises, and I am glad to see [...]
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My work often involves bridging gaps, resolving misunderstandings, and fostering collaboration between the finance department and other parts of large, complex organizations. So I was intrigued by this recent research from HBS on " interaction patterns in modern, complex, multiunit firms."
Key findings:
Communication is heavily constrained by formal organizational structure: the vast majority of [...]
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A recent guest post by Mike Kavis at the IT Project Failures blog underscores that the reason IT projects fail has little to do with IT and everything to do with change management and leadership.
Most large business transformation projects fail because IT leaders don't acknowledge, or at least underestimate, the impact of change on [...]
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Are CFOs ready for the spotlight? According to CFO.com research from Greenwich Associates reveals that for the first time an annual survey of Wall Street equity analysts ranked the credibility of a company's finance chief as more important to the overall IR effort than that of the chief executive.
But it was the endorsement of the [...]
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I'm not a fan of comic books, nor of superhero movies, nevertheless I enjoyed Iron Man very much (lovin' the Robert Downey Jr comeback).
This post on management lessons inspired by the movie at the Business Pundit blog is fun.
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It's tough being a CFO – the responsibilities are increasing, the work is getting harder, and the personal liability risks have grown – it's no wonder that CFO turnover is up. The average tenure for a CFO is less than three years (down from five years). Both voluntary and forced departures have increased, but voluntary [...]
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Benchmarking is a critical first step in identifying opportunities for process improvement. Used correctly, benchmarking allows companies to compare their processes versus the best practices in their industry and develop a road map of how to adopt best practices within their own organization.
Mark Brousseau at the TAWPI Blog compiled a list of Benchmarking DOs [...]
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(graphic courtesy of The New York Times)
Corporate decision makers are honing their accuracy by tapping into the collective wisdom of employees and customers via web-based prediction markets. An article to today's New York Times explains:
Corporate prediction markets work like this: Employees, and potentially outsiders, make their wagers over the Internet using virtual currency, [...]
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Ace Hardware has painfully realized the importance of employee training. A mid-level employee in the finance department caused a $152 million accounting discrepancy between the GL and actual inventory. Journal entires were made that made it look like the ledgers were reconciled when they were not. Ace Hardware will restate earnings for fiscal years 2004-2006 [...]
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Robert Levering and Milton Moskowitz, authors of the annual FORTUNE "100 Best Companies to Work for in America" survey, have determined that trust is the key ingredient of a good workplace: "A good workplace is one where management trusts the employees and where employees trust the management."
Learn more about employee-employer trust at the Great [...]
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The latest McKinsey Quarterly describes research demonstrating that initiatives to address “soft” management issues—such as talent, culture, and values—may have a direct financial payoff. An analysis of hundreds of global companies has identified a strong correlation between organizational and financial performance. There seems to be an especially strong link between the bottom line and efforts [...]
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You may have seen the headlines and dramatic photos of the tanker truck accident and explosion that melted a freeway exchange in the East Bay (details here). The accident took place April 30th. CalTrans estimated that it would take 60 days and $20 million to repair the two freeway connectors that were damaged.
A freeway [...]
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Glenbrook Payments Boot Camp
Mar 10-11, 2010, Santa Clara, CA
May 19-20, 2010, Santa Clara, CA
Headlines from Payments News
