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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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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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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