Solving Ambiguous Problems – What Successful Companies Get That the Rest of Us Don’tI’ve had the distinct pleasure of working with some of the best run companies over the years and I’ve come to appreciate what really separates them from “the merely good”. Some of what makes great companies so successful, like hiring great talent, is quite obvious. But in this blog I’d like to share one of… Read More |
Who is Raymond Panko… and why should you care?Raymond Panko, a professor at the University of Hawaii, is the leading expert on spreadsheet errors. Who makes them, why they happen, what rate they’re seen in the average spreadsheet, you name it. He wrote a paper on the subject called What We Know About Spreadsheet Errors first published in the Journal of End User… Read More |
A New Method… at MethodI came across an article from CFO Magazine I wanted to share with the community. Method Products, a San Francisco-based maker of environmentally friendly home and personal cleaning products, has enjoyed years of healthy growth, becoming a $100 million, 100-person company since its founding in 2000. But just recently the CFO has led a project… Read More |
15 Things You Can’t Do in Excel for Budgeting (but should)Excel is an amazingly great application that has probably delivered more value than just about any other business software in the past 20 years. But as a platform for budgeting… well, it has some serious limitations. Like wouldn’t it be nice to be able to spread budgets based on last year’s actual spending pattern? That… Read More |
The 8 Killers of Budgeting (and what to do about them)When I was a Manager of Financial Planning & Analysis for Pepsi in New York we experienced some challenges with our planning process. Doesn’t everybody? I thought these struggles were localized, so when I took a two year assignment with Pepsi in Europe, I thought I’d see a different set of issues. I didn’t. They… Read More |
Just how fast is the world changing?Every once in a while I’m reminded of fast the world is changing, and at the same time small it’s getting (truly we live in a global village). Our planning processes are supposed to be informed by these changes and keep pace with them. A colleague of mine sent me a link to a short… Read More |
Incredible Video on Coordination & PlanningHow do you get 185 people in 12 countries, who have never met before, to come together and sing in a virtual choir? Coordination & planning, that’s how. I don’t want to give too much away, but this video will set you back on your heels. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7o7BrlbaDs I could spend a lot of time explaining… 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 |
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 |
Mega Trends in Budgeting: Renewed Focus on CommunicationThis mega trend is something that’s come full circle; and it’s such a major trend we’ve actually done a whole webinar on this topic… which you can find a link to on our website. It’s tough to boil a whole webinar down into a couple of slides, but let me give it a try. Think… Read More |
