The votes are in, and a long-term approach to business growth has trounced short-termism!

Really. Wall Street Journal readers cast their ballots Wednesday morning after reading this analysis of Amazon’s decision to lower short-term profitability by making investments in warehouses, technology and tablets that the online retailer expects will improve long-term profitability. more

When practitioners, consultants and academics discuss leading organizational risk management practices, they hone in on people, processes and supporting technology. As major risk management failures in recent years have illustrated, mastering these three dimensions is necessary but not sufficient.

Effective enterprise risk management (ERM) — or any discreet risk management process — hinges on other dimensions as well, including organizational culture, behavior, ethics and change management … all the squishy, human stuff that defies convenient categorization in COSO cubes and other traditional risk management frameworks. more

I’ve been talking to risk management, compliance and internal auditing experts this month to get a feel for how they expect their realms to evolve during the next 12 to 18 months. I’ve heard some interesting ideas. I’ve also heard the same interesting idea repeated more than once; and, as the saying goes, “here’s how journalists (or bloggers) count to three: one, two, trend.”

Count storytelling within the realm of risk management among one of the many trends (including lean GRC, behavioral risk management, principled performance, correlations between business ethics and the bottom line and the death of SAS 70 audits) I’m examining right now. more

As anyone who has picked up a non-fiction book in the past five years knows, we have entered the “You May Be Surprised to Learn…” era.

Data analytic breakthroughs as well as fresh thinking in the realms of behavioral economics, neuroeconomics and other so-called decision-making sciences have taught us, for example, that most drug dealers make less than minimum wage, bonuses are relatively weak incentives and man is definitely not a purely rational economic actor. On Sunday, I also learned how Japan’s economic failure may be a myth. more

Throughout 2011, I’m pretty sure I heard every possible Dodd-Frank implementation forecast possible. Here are just a few: the new law will require 10 times as much compliance work as Sarbanes-Oxley while squashing U.S. competitiveness and innovation; the new law will become so watered-down that it will stand no chance of preventing a second “Too Big to Fail” global financial meltdown; the new law will be overturned and zapped from existence.

These theories sound grand, or scary, depending on your perspective (and politics, I suppose), but they are not much help from a practical perspective. For example, as previously noted, the SEC has extended the comment period on a key proposal within Dodd-Frank.

To get a better feel for the new law and its ongoing implementation, I contacted John Wilson, a partner in law firm Foley & Lardner LLP’s transactional and securities practice, and got his input into what it all will mean for finance managers. more