Unlike too many business forecasts these days, there is one forecast most of us in the United States pay close attention to this time of year: the hurricane forecast.

This year’s forecast was released a couple of weeks ago, and the picture looks troubling, yet instructive. more

The sports world lost one of its icons last week when the legendary former UCLA coach John Wooden died.

Wooden guided and inspired an incredibly talented and impressive group of players, including Bill Walton, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Marques Johnson, Jamal Wilkes, Henry Bibby, and many, many more.

He also inspired individuals and organizations outside the realm of college basketball. In fact, Wooden once said something that ought to inspire and motivate corporate finance executive and managers:

“Failing to prepare is preparing to fail.”

Earlier in my career, during the early ‘90s, I had some exposure to the Coach Wooden, after he had retired from coaching. more

I recently had the pleasure of meeting Dr. Chaman Jain, the editor of the Journal of Business Forecasting, at a conference in San Francisco.

Jain has been writing about business forecasting for years, and his publication regularly provides analyses of forecasting best practices.

Here’s a 2005 column from the journal that provides some soul-searching fodder for CFOs, financial planning & analysis directors, and other finance folks who occasionally encounter the need to address – or answer – the Big Question: Why do we forecast, anyway? more

How does a company within the hyper-competitive realm of Internet networking services succeed? By involving corporate finance very early in the sales and service process, according to Mark Peters, executive vice president and CFO of tw telecom.

“The finance department gets embedded early on in evaluating how we are going to work with the customer,” Peters explains. “The rules of engagement are established up front so that we’re not reacting our way through each deal.”

I recently interviewed Peters for Business Finance, and our Q&A session here contains insights on how tw telecom eliminated their annual budgets and moved to the use of a rolling forecast and a robust communication strategy to position finance to support operations in a way that helps the company thrive in a tough market. ###

Now that this year’s Beyond Budgeting Round Table Conference has concluded, I’m looking forward to next year’s event. Yet, I also find myself looking back to discussions, insights, and (yes) equations that came out of our previous annual conferences.

Back in 2006 in Las Vegas, we discussed the Change Model (also known as the “Change Formula,” “Change Equation,” and “Gleicher’s Formula”), which was developed by organizational development specialists and an economist. At our event, though, we talked about how my coauthor Steve Morlidge had recently introduced the concept to the Beyond Budgeting discussion.

Here’s the equation: D x V x F > R. The equation identifies the factors – dissatisfaction (D), a vision for a better approach (V) and a process or “known first steps” (F) – that need to be present if a project or initiative is to overcome the organizational resistance to change (R) that inevitably exists. more