I always find the acceptance speeches at Hollywood’s Academy Awards to be inspirational. The ones I enjoy most are Oscar recipients who thank the teams that contributed to their receiving the award. Success comes much more from teams than from an individual’s performance.

My favorite acceptance speeches are from the recipients of the scientific and technical awards. These winners love pushing the envelope in fields like animation, special effects, costume design, and sound editing. They’re like NASA engineers enjoying the thrill of landing an astronaut on the moon or placing a telescope in orbit that can answer the questions that so many of us are interested in.

So how do film awards relate to implementing performance management projects? more

As Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner noted last week in his Treasury Notes blog, “Capital and credit provide the oxygen small businesses need to grow.” With that in mind, the Treasury Department has begun implementing two new programs that are designed to make it easier for small businesses to get the funding they need. more

By the end of 2013, half of all companies will have been asked to produce material from social media websites for e-discovery, according to Gartner. This means that you’ll need not only a legal strategy encompassing social media content, but a social media policy.

While you’re at it, start pulling together a social media governance strategy. And if you may attempt financial transactions via social media, plan to bring your auditors into this effort too. As Garter notes in a different report on social media policy development, social media disrupts the long-standing rules of business in many ways.

This shouldn’t be a sudden revelation. Governance and policy form the foundation of all IT security and corporate security. wiredFINANCE addressed social media security in October.

Now let’s look at how you actually develop a social media policy. more

Which countries are most likely to run into financial troubles? According to a recently released ranking of 163 nations around the globe prepared by Maplecroft, a U.K.-based provider of risk intelligence and corporate responsibility solutions, Europe is home to 11 of the riskiest 12 countries; Japan rounded out the group. The U.S. is considered high risk, or one level below extreme risk.

Why should CFOs in private enterprises care? “Governments in high risk countries may need to rely on business to help them absorb the costs. At the very least, governments will need the private sector to recruit and retain older workers and provide for more generous pension arrangements,” states professor Alyson Warhurst, Maplecroft’s CEO. more

Maturity obstacles. The phrase sounds like something your child or spouse is grappling with, but it also describes issues that prevent organizational risk management capabilities from progressing to a state of greater effectiveness. Before I risk sounding even more like a consultant or software vendor, let me turn it over to an expert who explores the topic in terms that practitioners can relate to: Chris Leone, group vice president, applications strategy, for Oracle Governance, Risk and Compliance.

Eric Krell: How have recent economic and regulatory developments impacted risk management?

Chris Leone: Before the economic downturn, many organizations believed that they had established risk management programs and therefore had the appropriate foundation to anticipate and manage risk. In the wake of the crisis, many organizations came to a realization that they had taken just the preliminary steps in risk management. Quite often, the focus was on achieving compliance rather than on proactively managing risk across the enterprise. more