How resilient is the American Dream?

That was one of several big and engaging questions that have come out of discussions with compensation experts I’ve held in recent weeks for a new research project. These discussions honed in on several compensation risks, which I’ll get to in a moment.

The American Dream question arose when a compensation consultant discussed his concerns about the growing gap between executive compensation and general workforce compensation. more

The globalization of business is having a profound impact on corporate taxation worldwide, which shouldn’t surprise anyone who covers international tax laws. The impacts on corporations operating in multiple national jurisdictions (which today, especially in Europe, includes a large number of midsize companies) are both positive and negative. Positive in the sense that corporate tax rates, tax benefits, reporting and other aspects of tax regulation are subject to competitive moves by countries as a way of attracting businesses.

Ireland, for example, long ago crafted the most aggressively company-friendly tax structure in Europe, but now the U.K. and other countries are reducing rates and providing tax incentives for investment and operations within their borders. Even the United States seems poised to overhaul its corporate tax structure. At the same time, there are negative trends in the sense that increasing government cooperation in areas such as transfer pricing reduces a company’s freedom to optimize its tax incidence by artfully managing revenue recognition. more

Consumers are steadily moving to electronic payments, drawn by the convenience of being able to pay bills online, as well as a desire to cut down on the amount of paper they use. This shift also can benefit the companies that offer these services.

In 2010, about 50 million households paid a bill through a biller’s online service, up from about 15 million just eight years earlier, according to the 2010 Billing Household Survey by Fiserv, Inc. Another 35 million paid their bills through a financial institution’s bill payment application, or about three times the number that did so in 2002, also according to the Survey. more

To continue our discussion of Rick Maurer’s cycle of change (see Figure 1 to my August 15, 2011 blog entry), I have a question for you. Do you ever find yourself stuck on getting started?

I often find this to be a common problem with change. Do you ever find yourself perpetually starting a diet (but never quite actually on it yet)? Is there a major clean out (of email, files, or long overdue to do’s) that you always need to tackle but never seem to find the time? Is there a critical project that keeps getting pushed back? more

I recently participated in a panel discussion about the rise in the use of rolling forecasts in corporate planning. I’m not surprised by this trend; I have encouraged it. Ever since the financial crisis started three years ago, I’ve been writing that companies should rethink how they plan and budget to respond to increasing business volatility. Rolling forecasts are useful because they continually extend the formal planning horizon out more than a year rather than having it stop abruptly at the end of a company’s fiscal year. They can be the right first step in improving the effectiveness of a company’s budgeting process, but ultimately I believe that organizations need to adopt a better approach to planning – what I refer to as integrated business planning. Moreover, companies that want to adopt a rolling forecast approach must first make important changes to their planning and budgeting processes to make them leaner, more focused and faster.

The high degree of volatility in business conditions – in particular raw material costs, exchange rates, market prices and even demand – places a premium on having the agility to adapt successfully to these ever changing conditions. And, indeed, companies that spent a couple of months in the fall of 2008 carefully preparing their budgets discovered early in 2009 that the assumptions they had made were useless for running the business. They found the same was true the following year. more