In the United States, the term “tax protester” conjures up images of people in three-cornered hats, patriotically waving flags and demanding lower taxes and an end to excessive government spending, all the while accompanied by the sound of fifes and drums.

In the United Kingdom, tax protesters are more likely to favor dressing up as large green beer bottles. And they’re usually to be heard insisting that taxpayers — corporate taxpayers, at least — are paying too little tax, rather than too much.

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Innovation is hot. It’s emerging as the management trend of the 2010+ decade, much like business process reengineering (BPR), quality (Six Sigma), and lean were the management mantras of recent previous decades. It is an endless topic in the blogosphere; check it out here and here. Even Bloomberg Businessweek is touting the innovation wave, here, if you can put up with the Bruce Springsteen metaphors.

Innovation is being hailed as the best source of sustainable competitive advantage. Management gurus, apparently, see no profit in being the low price leader, and being the quality leader is a costly position to maintain. But anyone can come up with a fresh idea. So innovation has caught on big among the Fortune 500 and beyond.

Who should lead transformative innovation as the Chief Innovation Officer (CInO)? You could make a case for the CFO, CIO, CMO, and others. And don’t forget the head of R&D. Who is your organization’s CInO? more

It was the biggest IPO in U.S. history — raising $20.1 billion in common and preferred shares of stock — and it was to many a financial milestone capable of revealing to the world GM’s renewed financial clout.

Not so fast. When qualifying financial milestones, we are reminded that there exists a stark distinction between those achieved by a company’s financial inner workings and those achieved by the hubris of Wall Street. For me, there’s little question that GM’s milestone emanated from the latter.

To date, the renewal of GM’s finance function remains very much a work-in-progress. GM’s current CFO, Chris Liddell, arrived from Microsoft only a year ago, and in the best latter-day GM tradition he’s already on his second boss (Dan Akerson was named CEO this past September). This is not to say that Liddell isn’t up to the task of restoring the automaker’s faltering finance function. However, GM will need to demonstrate a commitment to leadership that is not confined to the CEO suite. more