An article in Monday’s Wall Street Journal, (“The Year Ahead: Jobs, Wars, Deficits, Sports — and the Campaign,”) features a graph that should inspire some New Year’s self-reflection.

The graph, “Four Key Numbers,” featurea breakdowns on world trade volume, U.S. corporate cash, U.S. employment, and crude-oil prices. The graphs provide a great reminder of how volatile our world remains – and how we should be focusing on the key numbers in our own organization’ future.

To be better prepared for the future in 2011, I suggest asking four questions, two of which I’ll explain here (the final two will be included in my next blog entry later this week). more

Will I see you at the Lean Accounting Summit in Las Vegas, on Sept. 21-22?

This year’s Lean Accounting Summit – my session takes place Tuesday and is titled “Creating Lean Future Ready Companies” — marks the fifth anniversary of this event. Lean Accounting can help you add more value in two ways. First it can show you how to make your organization more efficient. Second, it shows how accounting can, and should, change to become more effective. more

While planning my summer reading lineup, I came across a review of Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons’s new book, The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us (Crown, 2010).

The book details two forms of temporary visual impairment – “change blindness” and “inattentional blindness” – that really capture a couple of the shortcomings of the traditional budgeting process. more

Finance executives and managers suffer the same problem that all of us with Internet connections constantly grapple with in our personal and work lives: information overload.

There are so many easy ways to get metrics that we often gorge ourselves on numbers, yet remained hungry for actionable information. Metrics mean nothing unless there’s some understanding as to what the underlying cause and effect are.

Gaining that understanding during planning and forecasting activities feels like a “Eureka!” moment. more

Well, rolling forecasts have “officially” arrived as a management tool!

Last Friday’s “Dilbert” comic strip takes a crack at the move to rolling forecasts presented by Dilbert’s pointy-haired boss. ###