Budgets and budgeting

It's about knowing how to reallocate - and deallocate - resources.

Spend on tomorrow’s opportunities, not just today’s needs.

By utilizing the reality show format, corporations can create a more effective forum for pitching innovative products.

Rather than highlight short-term accounting profits, budgets should emphasize future cash. That, as Warren Buffet knows, is where a company's growth potential...

A senior design engineer for a large American automobile manufacturer recently complained to one of his colleagues. “Those marketing guys want everything. They’ve decided that what they need in the next design series is ‘The All-American Car.’ They say it’s got to be large enough for a family of five (plus dog), small enough to […]

Valuation used to be the province of finance specialists. That’s no longer true.

The performance measurement system in many decentralized companies actually works against good management. It encourages profit center managers to cover...

It has to do with job insecurity.

To stay competitive, companies need to be able to shift how they allocate capital in response to changing business conditions.

Today’s technology can put adjusted present value into the arsenal of every general manager.

"Efficiency" has become a corporate watchword as the era of cheap capital has ended. Amid layoffs and uncertainty, this Spotlight explores how companies...

Three key tactics that make these projects successful.

Green initiatives can, by reducing costs, enhance a company’s bottom line. Actions that harm the environment can have the opposite effect. Now, thanks to a burgeoning market in greenhouse gas emission credits put into effect by the Kyoto Protocol, environmental considerations will increasingly affect not only companies’ income statements but also their balance sheets. A […]

Eight ways to re-position for growth as the economy improves.

It has been another long, exhausting budget meeting. As the presenters showed you their plans, you challenged every number, explored every assumption. In the end you raised their targets a little, but, if you’re honest, you have to admit it: the budget this unit will have to deliver next year is not very different from […]

It’s time for a more rational, disciplined, value-oriented framework.

This article contends that to be effective every formal long-range planning system must achieve a compromise between “creativity” and “practicality”—goals for planning that are often in conflict. The authors also argue that the problem of maintaining a satisfactory balance can be directly addressed by varying the design features of the planning/budgeting interface. After specifying the […]

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 […]

Lessons from a study of 5,700 global businesses.

A friend of mine who had taken over running a major government department noticed right away how abused the word “strategy” was. “Everything has to be a strategy in order to get noticed,” he told me. “You practically need a strategy for visiting the restroom.” The second thing he noticed was that nobody was actually […]