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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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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Finance in more than two dimensions

Leo Sadovy
Leo Sadovy|February 1, 2012

I have been attending corporate financial management conferences for 20 years or more now, and there has been one consistent theme that has managed to survive the decades intact: how can finance and its FP&A function become more strategic, more focused on value-add decision support, and less transaction/ journal entry oriented, [...]

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Metrics for the subconscious organization

Leo Sadovy
Leo Sadovy|January 17, 2012

Think about what it’s like to learn to ride a bicycle, or play the piano, or hit a fast ball, or to coach a group of middle schoolers to do the same. If asked to explain how you stay balanced on a bicycle, you probably couldn’t do it. If you [...]

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Black holes and Integrated Business Planning

Leo Sadovy
Leo Sadovy|January 4, 2012

Black holes can be completely defined by just three properties; make that four if you count their blackness. The three properties are mass, electric charge and angular momentum. That’s it. No matter what falls into a black hole, the only quantities and qualities retained are its mass, net charge and [...]

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Attack of the 50 foot Cliché!

Leo Sadovy
Leo Sadovy|December 13, 2011

The role of the CIO is changing. Or was that the CFO? The CEO maybe? Somebody’s role is changing, that much I do know. How many times have you read just such an opening statement in an article or white paper and muttered “duh?” to yourself before moving on to [...]

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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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