Accounting

What you measure is what you get. Senior executives understand that their organization’s measurement system strongly affects the behavior of managers and employees. Executives also understand that traditional financial accounting measures like return-on-investment and earnings-per-share can give misleading signals for continuous improvement and innovation—activities today’s competitive environment demands. The traditional financial performance measures worked well […]

A three-step path to sustainable growth.

In this article, Bob Zider, president of the Beta Group, a California-based firm that invests in commercializing new technologies, presents an analysis...

Know what your project is worth in today's dollars.

Do you know what your most profitable product is?

In an earlier, groundbreaking article, Balanced Scorecard -- Measures That Drive Performance, the authors proposed a new measurement system that provided...

By making the most of organizational capabilities--employees' collective skills and fields of expertise--you can dramatically improve your company's market...

By now most companies have committed to sustainability efforts--and yet many CFOs still see those efforts as a cost rather than a source of value. That...

The Association for Financial Professionals surveyed its members about the assumptions built into the financial models they use to evaluate investment...

No company can totally avoid the impact of increasing costs. And most managers have learned to adjust to the effect inflation has on current operating costs. But few have factored it into their competitive strategies. And most managers, particularly those in capital-intensive industries, have not paid enough attention to the way increasing capital requirements affect […]

In 1988, less than 2% of large deals were paid for entirely in stock; by 1998, that number had risen to 50%. The shift has profound ramifications for...

The pandemic has placed a new spotlight on working conditions in factories that supply global companies. To avert problems, firms often impose codes of...

In the classroom, activity-based costing (ABC) looks like a great way to manage a company's limited resources. But executives who have tried to implement...

The financial worries of New York City in the early 1970s began registering in the bond market in October 1974, when the city first encountered difficulty selling its securities. These problems reached a crisis stage in 1976, and it was not until then that the bond rating services reduced the city’s bond rating. In this […]

On July 30, at a ceremony in the East Room of the White House attended by congressional leaders of both parties, President George W. Bush signed into law the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 addressing corporate accountability. A response to recent financial scandals that had begun to undermine citizens’ confidence in U.S. business, the wide-ranging act […]

A new study by Zakary Tormala of Stanford Business School looks at how the certainty of a person's opinion affects his ability to influence others. A...

Less than a decade after the frantic merger activity of the late 1960s, we are again in the midst of a major wave of corporate acquisitions. In contrast to the 1960s, when acquirers were mainly freewheeling conglomerates, the merger movement in the 1970s includes such long-established giants of U.S. industry as General Electric, Gulf Oil, […]

With companies' financial statements being scrutinized as never before, executives are under pressure to forecast the cost of major projects accurately....

A mezzanine financing package may be the right thing for a small business that is having trouble finding long-term capital to finance its growth. Mezzanine...

Cisco’s CFO explains how the company has made real-time accounting a reality.