Love it or hate it, we’ve all gotten used to the annual ballyhoo about Tax Freedom Day, the Tax Foundation’s calculation of how long, on average, Americans have to work to pay their federal, state, and local taxes. But most of us are less familiar with Cost of Government Day, the brainchild of the Americans for Tax Reform Foundation and the Center for Fiscal Accountability, which adds another element to the mix: the cost of compliance with the regulations imposed by government authorities at all levels. more

A new book, Secrets of The Moneylab, chronicles experiments that companies are using to guide decision-making and boost their bottom lines.

Most companies of any size are well-versed in market research techniques. Perhaps they’ve held focus groups to get participants’ input on a proposed new product or conducted a phone survey to determine consumers’ thoughts on a particular firm’s reputation. However, far fewer test how people actually behave when money is involved. Conventional wisdom long has held that humans act logically to better their own interests and pocketbooks – the rational man theory of economics.

Of course, the past few years have shown that humans often act anything but rationally. A case in point: Companies that made loans to individuals who were likely to default. Go back earlier, to the late 1990s, and you’ve got Internet firms with no revenue and flimsy business plans attracting millions in funding.

These and other, often lower-profile examples, such as sales incentives that fail to properly motivate, cost companies money — often, lots of of it. With this in mind, a handful of businesses are conducting laboratory tests to examine how individuals and groups tend to respond to various business propositions. They’re using the findings of these experiments, rather than just relying on assumptions embedded in forecasts, to guide decision-making. The results show promise in areas ranging from contract negotiation to sales and inventory planning to new product launches. A number of these tests and their applications in business are chronicled in the recently released Secrets of the Moneylab: How Behavioral Economics can Improve Your Business, by Kay-Yut Chen, lead economist with Hewlett-Packard’s labs, and science writer Marina Krakovsky (Portfolio Penguin, 2010). more

Swine flu appears to be over, so what did we learn from a risk management perspective?

Not enough, I’m afraid.

The H1N1 flu “has largely run its course,” according to the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Margaret Chan, who announced on Aug. 10 that the virus has moved into a post-pandemic phase.

Despite the potential damage that a pandemic virus, like H1NI, can inflict on people, institutions, and businesses, my sense is that the vast majority of U.S. organizations remain ill-prepared to handle what global public-health experts view as a high probability: The world will contend with a highly damaging pandemic at some point in the coming years. more

Since the 1890s, there have arguably been only a few major management breakthroughs, with several minor ones. What will be the next big tsunami in management that can differentiate leading organizations from also-rans lagging behind them? I suggest one possibility at the conclusion of this article.

The History of Management Breakthroughs

Where do you draw the line between the major and minor management breakthroughs of innovative methodologies that can provide an organization with a competitive edge? I’m not sure, so my list likely describes a blend:

• Frederick Winslow Taylor’s Scientific Management: Taylor, the luminary of industrial engineers, pioneered methods in the 1890s to systematically organize work. His techniques helped make Henry Ford wealthy when Ford’s automobile company applied these methods to divide labor into specialized skill sets in a sequential production line and to set stopwatch-measured time standards as target goals to monitor employee production rates. Production at rates faster than the standard was good, while slower was bad. During the same period, Alexander Hamilton Church, an English accountant, designed a method of measuring cost accounting variances to measure the favorable and unfavorable cost impact of faster or slower production speeds compared to the expected standard cost. more

A recent IBM survey found information governance emerging at the next big enterprise management trend. Of over 400 respondents to its information management study, 65 percent either had already implemented information governance or planned to do so by the end of 2011, while 70 percent expected information governance to grow in the next 3 to 5 years.

wiredFINANCE has covered aspects of information governance previously, as recently as a few weeks ago here. A failure of data governance can be quite costly. IBM reports that a large chemical manufacturer failed to destroy content and records in accordance with its corporate retention policy. So, during litigation the company had to spend over $12 million reviewing documents that should have been disposed of.

In response to the growing interest in information governance, IBM initiated an open information governance community. In addition to the survey, the company donated an open source model and some tools to the effort. More results from the survey follow. more