Strategic Finance articles from December 2003

Strategic Finance archives from December 2003

Career mapping: charting an employee's path to success.(Careers)(Corporate growth)
December 1, 2003... Strategic plans are essential for any company to succeed. They guide leaders and employees in their decision making and help ensure everyone understands and meets objectives. This type of formal document can be just as valuable for those in...

Attention, shoppers: economic expansion and rising stock values make growth through M&A appealing again.(Finance)
December 1, 2003... Merger and acquisition activity is typically influenced by economic trends, and this year--so far--the economic environment for increasing acquisition activity is steadily improving. The fundamentals of many public companies are improving....

Make your own avatar.(End Note)(Book Review)
December 1, 2003... They're called avatars ("an animated, articulated representation of a human which represents you"), or embodied agents, virtual humans, or synthespians. You might have talked to one when you called customer support, or maybe you recognized them...

Before you invest in venture capital: you need to ask a few questions to make sure you're choosing the right capitalist.
December 1, 2003... Wealthy individuals, corporations, and institutional investors are negative about venture capital right now because they are still absorbing old bad news rather than assessing the current potential. VC has been out of favor because of the year...

Performativity.(Best Practices)(women's Exercise physiology)
December 1, 2003... THE MOST DANGEROUS ITEM IN A HEALTH club, it seems, may be the mirror. A study at Canada's McMaster University found that exercising in front of a mirror may de-motivate women to the extent that they won't exercise, the Associated Press...

Health & productivity: are H&P programs for you? CFOS and other financial professionals can help their companies achieve organization-wide savings and operational improvements with H&P programs.(Benefits)
December 1, 2003... What are health and productivity (H&P) programs? Why are more and more organizations turning to this approach? Why is integrating certain programs good for business? How are substantial savings and corresponding return on investment (ROI)...

Timing is everything: tax planning for capital asset disposal is complex yet necessary.(Taxes)
December 1, 2003... One issue in an array of decisions involving capital assets is taxes. How to treat those gains and losses is likely your most important tax issue for capital asset investment planning regarding disposal decisions and the maximization of cash...

IMA's financial reporting committee: your voice to the profession.(Perspectives: message from the chair)
December 1, 2003... If you're a management accountant who thinks that changes in the area of financial reporting aren't relevant to your work, you may want to think again. New requirements and rules will change the information you must provide and reports you must...

Accounting education's role in corporate malfeasance it's time for a new curriculum!(Careers)(Business education needs updation)
December 1, 2003... The white-hot glare of media, public, legislative, and legal scrutiny has created media frenzy over the corporate malfeasance of several large, very successful firms. The finger pointing, for example, among Enron, Arthur Andersen (its...

Bring on German cost accounting: U.S. companies should take a look at the ways their international counterparts successfully measure and manage organization performance in order to resolve limitations in North American practices.(Accounting)(management )
December 1, 2003... In "The Case for Management Accounting" (October 2003), I issued a clear call for action. Financial accounting priorities are dominating business measurement and management to the detriment of good management accounting practices. Management...

The segments, offerings, needs matrix.(Strategic Management)
December 1, 2003... Executive teams wrestle with a myriad of tough topics when they are reviewing existing strategies and conceptualizing new ones. Key issues include the determination of which market segments are most valuable and what goods and services should...

PCAOB wants advisory group nominations.(News)(various articles)(Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, Robert Denham appointed Financial Accounting Foundation chairman, Sarbanes-Oxley Guide from Protiviti, tax deductible inventory clear out)
December 1, 2003... THE PUBLIC COMPANY ACCOUNTING OVERSIGHT BOARD (PCAOB) IS soliciting nominations for members of a standing advisory group that will help it carry out its standards-setting responsibilities for auditing. The 25-member group will have expertise in...

Employment offers.(News)(Employee benefits)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2003... When asked which benefits they were least likely to offer executive-level job candidates, CFOs in a Robert Half Management Resources study said executive perks (like company cars and club memberships), stock options, signing bonuses, and...

10 steps to an effective ethics and compliance program.(Ethics)
December 1, 2003... IN TODAY'S BUSINESS CLIMATE, ETHICS ARE NOT OPTIONAL. STUDIES SUCH as the 1999 Hudson Institute and Walker Information National Business Ethics Study (www.walkerinfo.com) show that companies that pay attention to ethics receive the direct...

PCAOB proposed standard on auditing internal controls.(Government)(Rules on Pension Plans, Corporate Tax Cuts)
December 1, 2003... THE PUBLIC COMPANY ACCOUNTing Oversight Board (PCAOB) met some of the concerns corporate financial officials have voiced about the upcoming auditors' standard on the "attestation" of corporate internal controls, but it definitely didn't meet...

Protecting digital assets.(Books)(Defending the digital frontier)(Book Review)
December 1, 2003... * IN THEIR BOOK, DEFENDING THE DIGITAL Frontier, Mark S. Doll, Sajay Rai, and Jose Granado define the digital frontier as the tradeoff between productivity gains from the use of computer technology and probability of failure of that system due...

The basics of e-file.(Taxes)(tax return electronic filing)
December 1, 2003... BEGUN AS A PILOT PROJECT IN 1986, E-FILE IS the Internal Revenue Service's (IRS) program for the electronic filing of tax returns. It has been so successful that the IRS expects at least 80% of all returns will be filed electronically by 2007....

High tech for the holidays.(tools of the trade)(Pogo Products)(Hewlett-Packard DVD Movie Writer dc3000, Pogo Products Radio YourWay, Nokia N-Gage)
December 1, 2003... The Hewlett-Packard DVD Movie Writer dc3000 will let you transfer personal home videos to your PC or DVD+R/+RW discs. Just plug in your camcorder or VCR, and you can copy your movies unattended with the automatic Video Transfer Wizard. Or use...

A studio and a great manual.(Painter 8(painting software))
December 1, 2003... Corel Painter has been a standard for professional illustrators for years, and now Painter 8 has two significant enhancements that make it a complete studio for serious hobbyists who paint, water color, sketch, airbrush, or do calligraphy....

Ready for another acronym?(Tech Forum)(Email filtering software, Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication)
December 1, 2003... * The ever-increasing amount of information aimed at each of us every day is overwhelming. Because some of it's necessary and yet most of it's as useless as spam, the problem we face is how do you safely sip from the proverbial fire hose...

Modigliani and Miller live on.(Franco Modigliani)(Merton H. Miller)
December 1, 2003... STUDYING THE "MM" THEORIES of capital structure and dividend policy has remained de rigueur in most advanced corporate finance courses. MM, of course, stands for Nobel laureates in economics Franco Modigliani and Merton H. Miller, who devised...

IMA sponsors XBRL international student competition.(XBRL)(THIRD ANNUAL XBRL INTERNATIONAL student competition award to Daniel Jose Diaz, Javier Rubianes, Luciano Repetto and others)(Microsoft and EDGAR Online gets into ion)
December 1, 2003... THE THIRD ANNUAL XBRL INTERNATIONAL student competition, sponsored by the IMA and XBRL International, recently awarded the highest honor to a team from Argentina. Professor Jose Luis Pellegrini and the student team of Daniel Jose Diaz, Javier...