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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Know when to hold them, know when to fold them.

Leo Sadovy
Leo Sadovy|October 12, 2011

Buy low, sell high. We have all heard this one piece of can’t miss investment advice, but few of us can execute that simply strategy consistently. The difference, it turns out, between the pros and the amateurs, is predominantly about just one side of that equation, the sell side. Most [...]

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200 Helicopters

Leo Sadovy
Leo Sadovy|September 28, 2011

Perhaps the most intriguing and important piece of information to come out of last week’s IE Group conference on Financial Forecasting and Planning in Boston was an observation made by Dieter John, CFO of Eurocopter:  China has 200 non-military helicopters, India has 700, the United States – 10,000. Let that [...]

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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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Stop reporting variances, start impacting results

Leo Sadovy
Leo Sadovy|September 1, 2011

How do you know when you’ve given a great presentation?  When someone remembers it a year later and writes a blog post about it.  That great presentation in this case was given by Erik DaRosa, Director of Global FP&A for Avon, who spoke at the IE Group’s Financial Forecasting Conference this time last year [...]

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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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