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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Meet George Jetson - Customer Profitability Optimization

Leo Sadovy
Leo Sadovy|August 18, 2011

Take a quick look at the two graphs below. Which one appears to be the LEAST complex construction? You might initially suppose it’s the bottom one, nothing but bar graphs, and maybe just one bar graph, the tallest one on the far right, broken into its constituent segments moving towards [...]

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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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Go ahead – Make Mistakes!! Business Models and Business Analytics

Leo Sadovy
Leo Sadovy|June 21, 2011

Before a new product, service or process is put into mass production, it is standard operating procedure to model the product beforehand during the planning and development phase. There are many reasons for doing so: performance, manufacturability, serviceability, integration, failure mode testing, etc…, but in the end they all really [...]

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A Transition from Middle Management to Process Management

Leo Sadovy
Leo Sadovy|June 9, 2011

Two articles on my favorite management topic, the importance of middle management in creating value for an organization, appeared online within days of each other this past week. The first, from Wharton, was entitled, “Why Middle Managers May Be the Most Important People in Your Company”, and the second, from [...]

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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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Process, Process, Process

Leo Sadovy
Leo Sadovy|January 5, 2011

Taking location as a given for the time being, the next most important factor in creating value in your organization are your processes. The mission of your front line people is to create value for the customer, whether that be a service, a retail experience, product production, or on a [...]

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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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Assets? or Capabilities?

Leo Sadovy
Leo Sadovy|August 16, 2010

While double-entry accounting is unlikely to disappear anytime soon, the term “assets” is becoming less and less useful of a concept for reflecting what an organization actually manages as it creates value. Rather, in this age of outsourcing and sophisticated supply-chain arrangements, “capabilities” would be a better term to describe [...]

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How much, How soon, How certain

Leo Sadovy
Leo Sadovy|July 9, 2010

The best business book I’ve ever read (or at least the best by someone not named “Drucker”) has been “Competing on Value” by Mack Hanan and Peter Karp. Not trendy or full of consultant-speak buzzwords, first published in 1991, it’s simple, direct approach has stood the test of time, even [...]

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