The folks from The Hackett Group called today asking to meet with our editorial team in order to brief us on some of the findings from Hackett’s Book of Numbers - an annual research study the firm has wisely used to shoehorn its CFO services into many a large enterprise.

Having always found Hackett’s Numbers text data-rich and insightful, we agreed to schedule a meeting for the first week of April, and we look forward to sharing with you some additional insights from that meeting. However, in the meantime here are two bullets Hackett has extracted from its study to whet our appetites and create some buzz. more

In her campaigns to break the power of the trade unions and denationalize key industries back in the ’80s, Britain’s prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, was fond of proclaiming that “There Is No Alternative.” She repeated the slogan so often that unsympathetic newspaper editors abbreviated it to TINA, and eventually started calling the prime minister herself “Tina.”

I’ve been reminded of the Iron Lady recently by a growing sense of the inevitability of a nationwide value-added tax for the United States. It’s looking more and more like There Is No Alternative to the VAT. more

How do you set the marketing/advertising budget? Traditionally, companies peg it as a percent of revenue.

When business is down, like it has been for the past two years, the advertising and marketing budget drops, too. Just when you most need advertising and marketing to drive sales, there is less budget.

This may make prudent financial sense but terrible business sense. As Jonathan Shapiro, CEO of MediaWhiz, New York, points out in a recent article, today “the Internet offers numerous ways to create demonstrable and predictable ROI from one’s marketing efforts.” If you knew with a very high level of assurance that each dollar you spent on marketing would produce, say, $10 in revenue and $5 in net profit, wouldn’t you direct every dollar you could into that marketing? more

The Ethics Resource Center (ERC) wanted to know if the “American worker is becoming wary of more regulation” … so it compared a 2010 Gallup poll to its own survey data from 2009.

The conclusion? It sure looks that way.

The ERC’s 2009 National Business Ethics Survey data (collected during the middle of the year) showed that U.S. employees felt the following regarding business regulations:

• About the right amount: 21 percent

• Too much: 38 percent

• Too little: 41 percent

A January 2010 Gallup poll of U.S. workers shows that their feelings may be changing:

• About the right amount: 23 percent

• Too much: 50 percent

• Too little: 24 percent

That’s the latest “EthicsStat” from the ERC. Now for the inspiration … more

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 extensions, of course). Oh, the relief!!

Now we can start to put away all those records of the past and forget about them. But should we?

The answer is: “Not really.”

“Oh,no!! You mean we have to deal with records retention? How mundane of you!”

Well, the answer to that is a resounding “Yes!”

Records retention is an issue that affects us both as businesses and as individuals. It is important that you understand and actively manage the retention of your records. The road is littered with the cases of businesses that lacked good processes for managing the retention of their documents and electronic records, which ended up costing them in later lawsuits or other legal proceedings. Individuals run similar risks when it comes to tax audits or legal matters such as divorce or estate settlements. We could all do ourselves a favor by being sure we know as businesses or individuals what to save, what not to save, and how long to keep it.

For businesses records, management is not just about what to keep. It also is about what NOT to keep. It isn’t necessarily wise to keep everything forever because you think it is good to have “just in case.” Keeping certain records for long periods can be just as bad as not having the records at all. Sometimes records that could have and should have been destroyed as a part of a routine and LEGAL records management program can become dangerous and very expensive if a lawsuit is filed and extensive discovery is involved.

So what to do … what to do? more