Business Analytics for Value Creation

Leo Sadovy
Leo Sadovy|August 4, 2011

Welcome to the new internet location for my “Value Alley” blog (same Bat Title, different Bat Channel – remember to bookmark this new site if you are a regular reader. This new WordPress platform should make everything about “The Value Alley” easier for both of us; easier to post and [...]

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Consolidator? Or Consolidatee?

Leo Sadovy
Leo Sadovy|July 21, 2011

Borders is set to begin liquidating their remaining book stores tomorrow, closing 399 locations and laying off almost 11,000 employees after being in the business for 40 years. Most of us remember a dozen or more book chains in operation not but a decade ago; now by this October there [...]

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A Plethora of Black Swans

Leo Sadovy
Leo Sadovy|May 27, 2011

I was under the impression that Black Swans were supposed to be rare. Rare enough to be effectively non-computable by standard methods. Nassim Taleb’s formulation of the Black Swan Theory is comprised of the three traits of: outlier (rarity), extreme impact, and retrospective predictability (i.e. 20/20 hindsight). I write this [...]

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Data + Context = Business Intelligence

Leo Sadovy
Leo Sadovy|May 13, 2011

“Our performance last month was 46.” Oh, you don’t have to thank me, I was just doing my job. Not very well, I might add. 46? 46 what? Or 46 who’s? Without context, 46 is just a number, just data. In context, perhaps that’s 46 out of 48 (not too [...]

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Systems Thinking

Leo Sadovy
Leo Sadovy|March 25, 2011

This week I had one of those rare but wonderful moments as a proud parent when I had the privilege of being in the audience when my son Garik gave a TED Talk at TEDxNCSU (North Carolina State Univ), a fifteen minute lecture which he entitled, “How LSD changed my [...]

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Plan V

Leo Sadovy
Leo Sadovy|February 11, 2011

Quiz time. Just to see if you learned anything from the last go around. The “V”, by the way, could stand for “volatile”, as in the 2008-09 global economic meltdown, or perhaps “volcano”, as in the 2010 eruptions of Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull volcano. Did you have a Plan V for the [...]

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One-Way Street

Leo Sadovy
Leo Sadovy|January 28, 2011

There’s nothing better than getting out of the office to rock your world from time to time. As I have previously mentioned, strategy is just a hypothesis – you have to periodically test it in the real world. Are your assumptions accurate? Are your priorities in the right order? Is [...]

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What’s a Budget for?

Leo Sadovy
Leo Sadovy|November 18, 2010

With the exception of the occasional James Bond movie that proves the rule, we don’t as a matter of course combine our modes of transportation into one all-purpose vehicle, and we even tend to park our cars, boats and planes in separate facilities. But when it comes to financial management, [...]

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Want to add Value? There's an App for that!

Leo Sadovy
Leo Sadovy|November 5, 2010

The goal among finance management professionals for as long as I’ve been in the business has been how to move their group’s effort from being primarily transaction oriented towards adding more value in the decision support arena, moving from an 80/20 weighting in favor of transactions to 80/20 in favor [...]

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How Certain is that Number in the Window

Leo Sadovy
Leo Sadovy|July 23, 2010

My introduction to the issue of risk in business decision making came rather abruptly and rudely during what I thought was going to be another routine quarterly business review with the executive committee. My particular agenda item was to present the business case for a “lite” version of one of [...]

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