Features

When Strategy and Valuation Meet: Five Lessons from Return Driven Strategy
By Joel Litman and Mark L. Frigo
Growth isn't all good. Cash flow returns are at least as important. A new research effort called the Return Driven Strategy Initiative has analyzed thousands of companies like BMW, Gillette, and International Paper and demonstrated that both strategic and valuation expertise are needed in planning and controlling the future path of corporations. What is needed today are accounting and financial people who combine the knowledge and education of a business strategist and a valuation expert to generate more cash flow than is used up by the company.

Larry R. White: Let's Reinvigorate Management Accounting
By Kathy Williams
The new IMA Chair for 2004-05, a Coast Guard Captain, says management accounting needs an overhaul. Too much emphasis is being placed on financial accounting, he points out, "which by and large presents a comparable and consistent fiction of real operations." During his term, he plans to work on revitalizing and renewing management accounting's contribution to corporate management.

Nurturing Innovation
By Andrew Spanyi and Katalin Eibel-Spanyi
The CFO can enable innovation by emphasizing that it isn't just about generating new ideas. It's about creating a corporate environment that fosters innovations and enables cross-functional coordination and collaboration with more focus on long-term ROI thinking, not short-term quarterly results.

Delivering Strategic Business Value
By Steve Williams
Today, most observers agree that management accounting information derived from financial accounting systems is obsolete, according to this business intelligence consultant. Data warehousing and business intelligence technologies can help management accounting move "back to the future" and return to its roots in delivering relevant, specific information about resource utilization, productivity, and profit.

Columns

PERSPECTIVES
Can we rebalance the profession?

STRATEGIC MANAGEMENT
Using disruptive innovation theory to guide investment decisions.

BEST PRACTICES
Does power corrupt?

CAREERS
Top 10 questions to ask during job interviews.

TAXES
The Independent 529 plan.

ETHICS
Accountancy students develop a unique code of ethics.

XBRL
Why is XBRL so hard?

Departments

STREETWISE
How do you handle invoice reconciliation and payment?
GAO changes name
Dueling over corporate tax shelters
Books: The next evolutionary step in business.

TOOLS OF THE TRADE
Finding your way.

TECH FORUM
Is the cat still your password?

TRENDS IN FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT
When ties to banks cut too close.

STRATEGIC FINANCE QUIZ
Successfully answer 70% or more of the questions based on selected articles from this month's issue, and you will earn three CPE credits.

END NOTE
Summer companies.