Certified Management Accountant David Crawford offers background and outlines next steps to help accountants and other financial professionals to meet the challenges of triple bottom line reporting.

Centuries ago, Socrates put forth what is known today as the ''Socratic Method'', and it's useful in the IT context. Essentially, Socrates asked his pupils questions designed to help them arrive at the answers. Thus, he didn't necessarily need to know the answer to everything, but he did need to know the questions to ask and the underlying logic that created them.

This method is very applicable to today's business and IT investments.

The U.S. payments system is going through a period of rapid change. Paper checks are increasingly giving way to electronic forms of payment, which themselves are being transformed as new products, new players, and new industry structures arise. Some of the most dramatic changes are being seen in the automated teller machine (ATM) and debit card industry. This paper provides a much-needed overview of the ATM and debit card industry and begins the process of identifying and analyzing some of the more important public policy issues.

How should companies price goods that they ship between their own divisions or related companies?

Internationally, that quandary confronts the producers of nearly half of all U.S. imported goods, a third of all U.S. exports, and a huge proportion of global trade elsewhere. By definition these aren't arms-length deals in an open marketplace, and they raise tough questions. What price, for instance, might Ford of Germany charge a Ford division in Mexico for German-made engines that are installed in Mexican-assembled cars?

In a prize-winning research paper, Business School accounting professor Stefan Reichelstein and coauthors Tim Baldenius and Nahum Melumad of Columbia University have developed a real-world answer to transfer pricing that balances both the economic criteria confronted by Hirshleifer and the puzzle of international tax rates.

I recently overheard a fellow talking about "the simplicity of the B2C sale." He was comparing it to the complexity of the "considered purchase," B2B sale. I had to chuckle, not at the thought one sale might be more complex than another, but at the thought that B2C sales, simply because they are B2C, are inherently less complicated. I wonder if that guy has ever bought a house or a car, booked a cruise, applied for a loan or tried to research dietary strategies that might remediate cancer.

Your business category is not the issue. The complexity of your sale is not the issue. Whether your sale is impulse or a considered purchase is not the issue. Buying into these notions as determining factors when it comes to your ability to design persuasively is thinking that will lead you down the garden path.

Understanding and managing your sale as a persuasive process is the only relevant issue.

Forget traditional supply chain management. Managers must be responsible for the earning power and productivity of the assets in their trust, not just cost control.

'Keystone' business strategists share information across industry networks to assure revenue growth for all partners.

Yes. The critical process of defining clear IT priorities with the right amount of oversight and accounting is most successful when done in the context of a company's unique business environment.

Note: Older EBF articles are not currently online. I'm not sure if this is temporary or permanent. If you click you will be taken to the Archive.org site to find an archived copy.

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Beyond words, much of our communication takes place in ways we are scarcely aware of. It all happens in the limbic system of the brain that predates human speech. Understanding these non-verbal clues can be crucial to international dealings.

Note: TWM articles ARE still available BUT: (1) you must be a member (free for existing members, not free for new members)   (2) you must be logged-in for the link to work. If you get an error page, visit the homepage, login and then try the link again.

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In virtually all areas of human endeavour, both 'how' and 'what' are of concern. The realization that all organizations today are involved in a matrix is perhaps important; no company, organisation or even state can really afford to ignore either of these aspects. The need is always to balance the task compulsions with the task constraints - the 'what' and 'how'.

Over a number of years I have worked on the development of at least five catapulting ideas. They are the product of an approach to organizational problems that I first formulated in 1974 under the name "idealized redesign of the corporation." Rather than merely solving problems, this approach dissolves them. To solve a problem is to change the effects of one or more undesirable causes; to dissolve a problem is to eliminate the causes and thus also eliminate the effects. Implementation of these catapulting ideas requires radical transformation of corporations, not mild reform. They are: interactive planning, the internal market economy, the circular organization, the multidimensional organization, and decision support (learning) systems.

NYU Professor Baruch Lev finds vast value in intangible assets.

CRM and the forces impeding its success are both growing up: early problems that mostly concerned technology and the misaligned goals of different organizations within the same company are giving way to perennial organizational challenges. Companies are increasingly getting the business-alignment and technology issues right, but many must still tackle the hardest challenge of all: motivating organizations and making them accountable for results.

Note: Older EBF articles are not currently online. I'm not sure if this is temporary or permanent. If you click you will be taken to the Archive.org site to find an archived copy.

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Ever since the Mao jacket went the way of the ozone layer, China has been the world's darling economy. 'Bigness' and very high rates of growth have persuaded otherwise canny investors to overlook some rather significant risks.

A brief outline of why the "balanced" scorecard is not truly balanced in terms of human capital, and the pernicious consequences of the absence of capability assessments that include developmental potential in companies.

At the recent World Economic Forum in Davos, one particular topic drew unusually strong support -- the need for organizations across the board to contribute more to the war on global poverty and illness. Part of this push towards greater social advocacy is directed squarely at corporations, whose resources are seen as necessary to address such specific problems as the AIDS crisis in Africa and the lack of vaccines for children in the developing world. At the same time, critics of the corporate social responsibility movement respond that a company's main duty is to its shareholders, not society at large. Last month, Wharton legal studies professor Nien-hê Hsieh tackled this topic during a seminar on "Multinational Corporations (MNCs) and the Ethics of Assistance," in which he noted that two principles may justify corporate social responsibility: Rescue and fairness.

Note: CEO Refresher articles are no longer free...

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From my experiences in delivering over l500 speeches during the past 20 years, here is a quick guide to giving an effective and interesting presentation your very first time.

Business leaders who want to create an ethical work environment should first identify their own core values and commit to practicing them.

From time to time, the marketing world is taken aback by huge, quick, unpredictable and seemingly inexplicable successes. These marketing "hits" are products or services, entertainment locales or vacation spots, shopping malls or specialty stores that enjoy puzzlingly immediate popularity.

Believe it or not, there's actually a formula for these seemingly unpredictable marketing wonders.

Sales guides often paint a too-rosy view of the company's competitive position, or contain insufficient and/or outdated competitive information. Find out how such competitive information sets up a sales force to lose, what sales people need to win, and how to package information in ways that one's sales force finds useful.

Corporations that accept responsibility for a bad financial year rather than blame external forces may see rewards from the stock market, according to recent research from Stanford professor Larissa Tiedens and her former colleagues at the University of Michigan.

Fear is perhaps the greatest emotional barrier to developing greater emotional intelligence through deeper self-awareness as well as the capacity to empathize and read the people. Fear blocks people from developing and growing as human beings and as wiser and more effective leaders.

Millions of people participate in online auctions everyday-numbers that are enticing more and more academics to investigate what auctions can tell us about economics, human behavior, and the way we make business decisions.

Harvard Business School professors Alvin E. Roth and Deepak Malhotra have each independently looked at auction behavior and derive some advice for business people who daily bid for everything from chips to consultants.

Roth looks at the practice of late bidding and how the rules of an auction affect the outcome. Malhotra explores the dynamics of "auction fever."

Advertisers pay a premium to reach Generation Xers. The question is why...

Editor's Note: this article is part of an entire STERNBusiness issue, written back in 1999 - you can find this article on page 22; the other articles are all focused on the entertainment industry which may be of interest to you but the articles themselves are of little learning value...

Experiences are fast becoming a new economic entity like goods and services. Companies that understand the value customers place on experiences can differentiate themselves from competitors and increase profits.