Leo Sadovy currently manages the Analytics Thought Leadership Program at SAS, enabling SAS’ thought leaders in being a catalyst for conversation and in sharing a vision and opinions that matter via excellence in storytelling that address our clients’ business issues. Previously at SAS Leo handled marketing for Analytic Business Solutions such as performance management, manufacturing and supply chain. Before joining SAS, he spent seven years as Vice-President of Finance for a North American division of Fujitsu, managing a team focused on commercial operations, alliance partnerships, and strategic planning. Prior to Fujitsu, Leo was with Digital Equipment Corporation for eight years in financial management and sales. He started his management career in laser optics fabrication for Spectra-Physics and later moved into a finance position at the General Dynamics F-16 fighter plant in Fort Worth, Texas. He has a Masters in Analytics, an MBA in Finance, a Bachelor’s in Marketing, and is a SAS Certified Data Scientist and Certified AI and Machine Learning Professional. He and his wife Ellen live in North Carolina with their engineering graduate children, and among his unique life experiences he can count a singing performance at Carnegie Hall.
As leaders and managers of human beings with million year-old brain structures, as part of our managerial toolkit we need to keep ourselves knowledgeable about psychology and the cognitive science of how people make decisions. You have undoubtedly read about how innately bad we are at making certain types of
Clarence So, Chief Strategy Officer for Salesforce.com, opened last month’s Chief Strategy Officer Summit in San Francisco (by the IE Group) with a challenging statement: ‘Your strategy is nothing more than the sum of your tactics’. I found this to be less than satisfactory as an explanation, but considering the
The future of business is the martial arts CEO, the jujitsu strategist. Far too many organizations approach business with an American football mentality, complete with scripted plays, huddles and time outs, but the real world isn’t quite so convenient and accommodating. The real business world is 7x24 with no time outs
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
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
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
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
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
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,
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
