Value Alley

Surfing the disturbance

Leo Sadovy — Wed, 23 May 2012 13:52:39 +0000

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 [...]

The nine-foot Aviator

Leo Sadovy — Wed, 09 May 2012 13:59:17 +0000

Integrated Business Planning. Ever since I first mentioned this in a blog post late last year (“I wonder what the king is doing tonight”) as THE number one issue being tackled by the best practice organizations, I have been trying to get my head around not just a good, working definition, [...]

Triangles, tools and transformations

Leo Sadovy — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 13:43:17 +0000

I have three children in college at the same time. They are all in the school of engineering, and all attend the same college, which, if nothing else, makes paying the tuition bill convenient. That’s all I’ll say about that. My middle child, Weston, is studying to become a mechanical engineer, and [...]

BI and better business decisions

Leo Sadovy — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 15:00:15 +0000

Last week marked my four year anniversary with SAS, and I have to admit that prior to joining, the phrase “business intelligence” was not in my vocabulary. I understood “analytics” just fine, and knew long before my hiring interview that it definitely didn’t mean spreadsheets. I knew what “performance management” [...]

Conversational analytics

Leo Sadovy — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 13:41:11 +0000

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 [...]

Can you draw this dog?

Leo Sadovy — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 11:42:25 +0000

If you ask any four year old, and I know this for a fact since I once taught preschool, if you ask any four year old if they can draw, sing or dance, they will look at you as if you had lost your mind. OF COURSE they can draw / sing [...]

Relationships, relevancy, and changing the subject

Leo Sadovy — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 15:20:26 +0000

Ten minutes into the first speaker of last week’s conference, I knew exactly what I was going to write about in this post. The speaker was Rey del Valle, Senior Vice President of Finance for Live Nation, on the subject of "Growth Opportunities in the Music Business", and I was [...]

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 [...]