Budgeting: A Career Maker… A Career Breaker?The reason why managing the budget process is a high wire act should be obvious. 1) Every corner of the organization is involved or impacted by the process in some way. 2) The process impacts people where it hurts – their wallets. 3) The most senior ranks of the organization are engaged in the process,… Read More |
Should you involve your user community in solution development?When I first moved to Ireland with Pepsi, I brought a lot of New York headquarters ways with me. Some good, some bad. But one of those ways was in how to develop solutions to vexing problems. The foundation of solution development was always the formation of a cross functional team to bring together multiple… Read More |
How to your involve your user communityThe question of how to involve your user community in solution development is an important one; because the ultimate success or failure of any new system is wholly dependent upon whether or not it’s actually embraced by the user community… or rejected. There’s a lot of shelfware out there, and getting your users involved in… Read More |
The role of leadership in BudgetingI don’t often do this, but a colleague of mine sent me a short video from the last TED Conference that I wanted to share with you. It’s on leadership, and it’s by a brilliant guy named Derek Sivers. It’s short (3 min), funny, and makes some very solid points. We don’t often associate Leadership… Read More |
Getting the story behind the numbersWhen I worked at Pepsi as a FP&A Manager it was drilled into our heads that our job was to “get the story behind the numbers” and be able to communicate that story intelligently. But what does getting the story behind the numbers really mean? The report that almost every finance organization runs each month… Read More |
Changing the face of budgetingI hate the word paradigm, don’t you? It’s been so over used, it hardly seems to have any real meaning left. But in fact it does have meaning — “A framework of understanding; a mindset based on a set of precepts.” The paradigm (don’t cringe) most of us have when it comes to corporate budgeting… Read More |
Overcoming the Twin Traps of Impact Bias and FocalismIn a previous blog we talked about how Impact Bias and Focalism and lead to some really bad decisions. In a nutshell, the problem is we so focus on our personal needs when it come to business decisions — like what budgeting system to buy – that our perceptions get distorted. Like a fun house… Read More |
How Impact Bias and Focalism Make for Bad DecisionsPeople who study purchasing behavior have discovered a curious phenomenon they call Impact Bias. It’s a tendency to overestimate the impact a particular change will have. There’s another phenomenon called Focalism; the tendency to magnify the importance of one thing until it overshadows everything else. Taken together, Impact Bias and Focalism distort reality, like a… Read More |
