The nine-foot Aviator

Leo Sadovy
Leo Sadovy|May 9, 2012

Integrated Business Planning.  Ever since I first mentioned this in a blog post late last year (“I wonder what the king is doing tonight”) as THE number one issue being tackled by the best practice organizations, I have been trying to get my head around not just a good, working definition, [...]

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Triangles, tools and transformations

Leo Sadovy
Leo Sadovy|April 25, 2012

I have three children in college at the same time.  They are all in the school of engineering, and all attend the same college, which, if nothing else, makes paying the tuition bill convenient.  That’s all I’ll say about that.  My middle child, Weston, is studying to become a mechanical engineer, and [...]

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Conversational analytics

Leo Sadovy
Leo Sadovy|March 28, 2012

When you begin your career your most important skills are your hard, technical skills; the finance and accounting, the statistics and economics, the physics and chemistry, the engineering and calculus.  But as I tell my business school mentees, as your career progresses, the emphasis changes such that much sooner than [...]

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Relationships, relevancy, and changing the subject

Leo Sadovy
Leo Sadovy|February 29, 2012

Ten minutes into the first speaker of last week’s conference, I knew exactly what I was going to write about in this post.  The speaker was Rey del Valle, Senior Vice President of Finance for Live Nation, on the subject of “Growth Opportunities in the Music Business”, and I was [...]

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The future is not what it used to be

Leo Sadovy
Leo Sadovy|February 15, 2012

Although he later qualified much of what he said with the statement, “I really never said everything I said”, Yogi Berra is also well known for his famous phrase, “Prediction is very hard, especially about the future”. In an attempt to make Yogi’s dilemma slightly more manageable, three of my [...]

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Rolling forecasts, or Who ordered that?

Leo Sadovy
Leo Sadovy|November 29, 2011

I have previously dealt independently with issues of forecasting, planning, and budgeting in separate posts, and the time has now come to pull them all together in one place and just come out and say what I really mean. This integrative post was prompted by a recent invitation I received [...]

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I wonder what the king is doing tonight

Leo Sadovy
Leo Sadovy|November 15, 2011

Yes, that’s me, as Don Quixote, singing ‘Dulcinea’ from’ Man of La Mancha’ in a Broadway-themed variety show benefit concert (sort of like “Glee” for forty-to-fifty-somethings) raising money for anti-malaria netting in Africa (I did this as a medley along with ‘I, Don Quixote’). The total amount raised was over [...]

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Normal accidents, Risk, and the Man who Saved the World

Leo Sadovy
Leo Sadovy|November 1, 2011

If you are feeling out of sorts, a bit down and out, and want to take it all the way to full-blown depression, have I got a book recommendation for you: “Normal Accidents”, by Charles Perrow (1984). Perrow’s premise is that we have designed certain systems, nuclear reactors being his primary [...]

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Encountering analytics

Leo Sadovy
Leo Sadovy|October 19, 2011

In his recent article for the McKinsey Quarterly, entitled “The Second Economy”, W. Brian Arthur of the Santa Fe Institute states, “In any deep transformation, industries do not so much adopt the new body of technology as encounter it, and as they do they create new ways to profit from [...]

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Playing 'Marco Polo', and other forecasting approaches

Leo Sadovy
Leo Sadovy|September 13, 2011

Here is a four-stage approach to financial forecasting. I urge you to seriously consider adopting at least level 1, then next look at how layering on the other stages might transform your approach to business planning. The four stages are: (1) Multiple Forecast Inputs,  (2) Marco Polo,  (3) Driver-based forecasting, [...]

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