Value Alley

The future is not what it used to be

Leo Sadovy — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 14:11:51 +0000

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 [...]

Finance in more than two dimensions

Leo Sadovy — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 13:19:57 +0000

I have been attending corporate financial management conferences for 20 years or more now, and there has been one consistent theme that has managed to survive the decades intact: how can finance and its FP&A function become more strategic, more focused on value-add decision support, and less transaction/ journal entry oriented, [...]

Metrics for the subconscious organization

Leo Sadovy — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 23:09:19 +0000

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 [...]

Black holes and Integrated Business Planning

Leo Sadovy — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 14:05:52 +0000

Black holes can be completely defined by just three properties; make that four if you count their blackness. The three properties are mass, electric charge and angular momentum. That’s it. No matter what falls into a black hole, the only quantities and qualities retained are its mass, net charge and [...]

Attack of the 50 foot Cliché!

Leo Sadovy — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 14:10:21 +0000

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 [...]

Rolling forecasts, or Who ordered that?

Leo Sadovy — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 17:43:42 +0000

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 [...]

I wonder what the king is doing tonight

Leo Sadovy — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 15:10:23 +0000

Yes, that’s me, as Don Quixote, singing ‘Dulcinea’ from’ Man of La Mancha’ in a Broadway-themed variety show benefit concert (sort of like "Glee" for forty-to-fifty-somethings) raising money for anti-malaria netting in Africa (I did this as a medley along with ‘I, Don Quixote’). The total amount raised was over [...]

Normal accidents, Risk, and the Man who Saved the World

Leo Sadovy — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 12:51:26 +0000

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 [...]

Encountering analytics

Leo Sadovy — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 14:28:21 +0000

In his recent article for the McKinsey Quarterly, entitled “The Second Economy”, W. Brian Arthur of the Santa Fe Institute states, “In any deep transformation, industries do not so much adopt the new body of technology as encounter it, and as they do they create new ways to profit from [...]

Know when to hold them, know when to fold them.

Leo Sadovy — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 04:29:30 +0000

Buy low, sell high. We have all heard this one piece of can’t miss investment advice, but few of us can execute that simply strategy consistently. The difference, it turns out, between the pros and the amateurs, is predominantly about just one side of that equation, the sell side. Most [...]