Is It a Tree … or the Forest?
A colleague of mine recently intrigued me with his belief that many businesses “can’t see the trees in the forest”! He contends that the “forest” in this case is the financial performance of the entire business which is displayed through its income, balance sheet, and cash flow statements. We would all agree that important [...]
Is Your Budget/Planning Process “Fixed”?
Does anyone really enjoy the budgeting, planning, and forecasting exercises that we all do?
The budgeting process is all too often an endurance contest. It usually involves multiple negotiations to achieve some randomly selected incremental improvement. Often it is guided by a few senior executives who decide that they need to achieve some target [...]
Spring-Cleaning!
Aaahhh … springtime! That wonderful time of year when the weather starts to warm up, days get longer, and we all take a deep breath. Yep … life is great. After all, for many folks the annual audit cycle is wrapped up and we are just right in between corporate and individual tax deadlines (without [...]
It’s the People in the Process Who Matter — Redux
Back in August 2009 (seems like a long time ago) I posted “It’s the People in the Process Who Matter” on this blog. The general premise of that post was that most business process and internal control failures start and end with people. It starts with people who make decisions to design and implement (or [...]
Effective FCPA Compliance Management
As follow-on to my last Process Points posting, this blog considers the same premise when it comes to the FCPA.
Complying with the requirements of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) is not an easy task. And while FCPA compliance can be one of those “out of sight, out of mind” tasks, you might want to [...]