From the top desk to the desktop, in many organizations there can be a wide divide between the executives in their large corner offices and the managers and employees. The separation I am referring to is between the strategy formulated by the executive team and the employees tasked to implement it. It is rare that there is a good connection between the two.

As evidence, at the 2009 annual conference of the balanced scorecard organization, The Palladium Group, led by Dr. David P. Norton and Dr. Robert S. Kaplan, in Dr. Norton’s keynote presentation he stated that seven out of ten organizations fail to successfully execute the strategy designed by its executives. What explains this? Advocates of strategy map and balanced scorecard methods believe that this is in large part because most managers and employees do not adequately know what their organization’s strategy is. For example, if I randomly interviewed 15 of your organization’s employees in a hallway and said, “Quick! Explain your executive team’s strategy!,” how many of them could describe it well? Maybe none. What’s the consequence? If employees and managers do not understand the executive team’s strategy, then how can we expect them to understand that what they do each week and month contributes to achieving that strategy? more

President Obama’s 2011 budget contains a proposal to make the R&D tax credit permanent. That may be wishful thinking — he proposed the same thing last year, with no luck — but the chances are good that this key tax break will be renewed again for this year. Hugely popular on both sides of the aisle, the credit has been extended every year since its original expiration date in 1986 (with the exception of July 1995 to June 1996).

While we’re sitting around with fingers crossed waiting for Congress to decide, this might be a good time for companies that are unfamiliar with the credit to take a look at what it offers. Misconceptions abound; here are five of the most common. more

You know you’re an ERM geek when a 45-minute discussion on the current state of enterprise risk management glides by … and there are hours of topics left in desperate need of attention.

That’s how I felt last week after connecting with Laura Taylor, Aon’s global leader of ERM.

Our conversation ranged from risk management nuggets embedded in Vanity Fair’s coverage of the financial crisis to the ERM’s defining characteristic (“intimacy”). Uh, it was kind of hot.

One of my primary research objectives recently involves developing a handy maturity model for the risk-related case studies I produce. Several such models already exist, including Aon’s model (see pages 3-7 and pages 46-47 of this report) and RIMS’s model, among others.

(I know I’m neglecting others; if that includes your model, send me a note and I’ll be sweet on you, too.)

My own “model” is designed to give readers a quick fix on how my case-study subject’s progress relates to their own risk management evolution. It will be available within a couple of weeks online and also in the next issue of the magazine.

I’ll also share more on the state of ERM from my conversation with Taylor here shortly … ###

In this post from last fall, I wrote about the efforts under way by members of the business community to fight changes proposed by the SEC to the regulations governing money market funds. The changes would have restricted the funds from holding commercial paper from A2/P2 issuers, such as companies like Alcoa, Inc. and Marriott International, Inc. In a post several months before that, I wrote about changes proposed to the regulation of over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives proposed by the U.S. Department of the Treasury. That proposal would have required standardized OTC derivative transactions to take place on exchanges. more

According to a recent IBM report, leading companies are three times more effective in collecting and leveraging information than the laggards in their markets. Analytics has replaced intuition for business decision-making through what IBM dubs business analytics and optimization (BAO).

The IBM report, titled “Breaking Away with Business Analytics and Optimization,” describes three ways leading companies use data to separate themselves from the pack: 1) disrupting the status quo, 2) anticipating the future, and 3) empowering workers to make decisions based on information.

Top performers, IBM continues, are eight times more likely to pursue information-led transformation at an enterprise level than underperformers. The laggards sit around the conference table, each manager with his/her own spreadsheet, arguing over whose data is right. Where does your company fit in? more