Judging from a survey by the Boston Consulting Group, your best bet is a business that knows how to cater to women. According to BCG, women today are driving $12 trillion of the overall $18.4 trillion in global consumer spending and will contribute an incremental $5 trillion in earnings over…
August 12 is Cost of Government Day (COGD), the day of the calendar on which most the average American worker has earned enough gross income to pay off his share of government spending and services including regulatory costs imposed by government at the federal, state and local levels.According to Americans…
Today's WSJ article touting the leap in productivity is a good reminder that metrics based on unit inputs/outputs is a very valuable tool. Make sure that you're not just measuring revenue, margins and profits ... but measuring them against "unit" metrics like headcount and hours worked. If you watch those…
Small businesses have become more pessimistic about the chance for economic recovery in the next six months, according to a survey by the National Federation of Independent Business. The indicator fell 1.3 points in July to 86.5. "Now they are expected to finance the new experiments of Congress and the…
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Article published -Monday, August 3, 2009
By Lary Kirchenbauer
“Only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s been swimming naked.” — Warren Buffett
Victory … Defeat. Won … Lost. Revenues … Expenses. These are well-understood concepts among business executives. Profits … Cash? Oops, sorry. That may be the biggest conundrum among business leaders: If I’m making all these profits, why don’t I have more cash? My company generated $500,000 in profits this year, and we have only $10,000 in cash. We can’t pay bonuses or contribute to benefit plans without cash – where did it all go? (more…)
The Wall St. Journal sponsored a series of video interviews with executives to probe some of their "leadership lessons".The 90 second monologue by Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft about how he budgets his time is an interesting and unique approach to making sure that your meetings and tasks fit into…
Create your own firesFire has been around since before Prometheus stole it from Zeus and shared it with us mere mortals.We won’t revisit the penalty that Zeus bestowed but suffice it to say, Prometheus probably regretted his thievery.Are you spending your day putting out fires?It seems that most executives today…
The Obama Administration is considering additional assistance for struggling small businesses. A large part of the focus is on creating additional liquidity for small businesses. Among the ideas is a direct underwriting program to support loans to small business. You can read more about it here.
Many of you have seen the drop in layoffs recently ... but they're increasingly accompanied by pay cuts. We've commented here before about the value of that approach for companies seeking to adjust to the Great Recession while doing everything possible to keep their best people. This Wall St. Journal…