I moved to Australia from Belgium two months ago for a short-term assignment. I am very concerned by the exchange rate. My dollars have lost over 15% of their value in euros and I share my frustration around me. People tell me, "Just wait, it cannot stay so low, the
Data-driven marketing is all about how marketers can harness data and analytics to create a more customer-centric, fact-based approach to customer engagement. This, combined with quality execution leads to better customer experiences and improved customer equity. However when looking at customer-brand interactions in silos such as in the call centre
Because you are already halfway there and you should want the entire process to be data-driven, not just the historical reporting and analysis. You are making decisions and using data to support those decisions, but you are leaving value on the table if the analytics don't carry through to forecasting. In the
How much of your business performance (profit) is driven by external factors versus internal? A figure of 85% compared to 15% was mentioned at last month’s Manufacturing Analytics Summit, and although I could not find the study mentioned to confirm, it feels about right to me. Certainly more than half,
The volume is being turned up on the Control Tower approach to running a business; I have recently been introduced to logistics control towers, supply chain control towers and operations control towers just for starters. I’m sure there must be at least a half dozen more out there – pick
I had the opportunity to moderate a roundtable discussion on risk management at the International Institute for Analytics’ (IIA) winter symposium in Orlando earlier this month. I set the stage for the session with a brief overview of my favorite risk approach, “Competing on Value”, by Mack Hannan and Peter
Are you missing the “A” in your FP&A (financial planning and analysis)? Maybe missing some of the “P” as well? Are you and your department getting a bit tired of the “FR” gig you seem to have landed? I just got back from chairing last week’s IE Group Financial Innovation
I’ve got a book recommendation for you – it came recommended to me and did not disappoint. “Thinking, Fast and Slow”, by Nobel Prize winning economist Daniel Kahneman. Kahneman is actually a psychologist (Professor emeritus at Princeton Univ), and his Nobel Prize winning work on decision theory will also remind
A question was recently put to me by everyone’s favorite futurist – Thornton May: “Most people don't put innovation and infrastructure in the same sentence. They simply tend to view savings derived from optimized infrastructure as a funding source for “other” innovation investments. My thoughts?” My thoughts initially circled in
I have been privileged to have had the opportunity to contribute to the recently published, “Positioned – Strategic Workforce Planning that gets the Right Person in the Right Job”, co-edited by Rob Tripp, Workforce Planning Manager at Ford Motor Company. The list of contributors is a Who’s Who of strategic
… and any fool will mind it”. ~ Henry David Thoreau. The EPA was in my neighborhood several weeks ago testing well water - never a good sign. It was determined that the subdivision just north and upstream of us had once been the site of a farm contaminated by
In case you are wondering, yes, I am reusing the same graphic from last week, but this time to make a contrasting point. Last time, in “The Skeptical CFO” I was focused on the VARIABILITY in the data and the forecast. This week, however, we’re headed in the opposite direction,
During a recent presentation on performance management I had an audience member ask me if perhaps I had minored in cynicism along with my degree in finance. I replied that, with the science, psychology and philosophy I’d taken, I probably had minored in skepticism, but that the cynicism came later,
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
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
