Today's fiercely competitive global economy demands more from finance organizations than ever before. In addition to fast and accurate planning and forecasting, finance is being challenged with managing growing data volumes, evolving regulations and compliance requirements, and the need to deliver real - time insights to senior staff. Progressive CFOs and finance executives are...

As we have discussed in our two most recent posts hereï؟½and here, data analytics can be a powerful tool that allows companies to determine whether they are spending their compensation budgets in the best possible way. This, in turn, opens up a variety of options for companies when it comes to managing that compensation budget, whether that involves keeping costs the same, cutting the compensation budget or...

FINANCE is seldom romantic. But the idea of peer-to-peer lending comes close. This is an industry that brings together individual savers and lenders on online platforms. Those that want to borrow are matched with those that want to lend. Banks and credit-card firms are kept out of the picture. Talk to enough people in the field and someone is bound to mention the "democratization of finance". But as the industry matures, it is...

Last week, the state of California claimed that its version of Obamacare's health insurance exchange would actually reduce premiums. "These rates are way below the worst-case gloom-and-doom scenarios we have heard," boasted Peter Lee, executive director of the California exchange. But the data that Lee released tells a different story: Obamacare, in fact, will increase individual-market premiums in California by as much as 146 percent. One of the most serious flaws with Obamacare is...

[Founders talk about things that no one else can appreciate or understand. After enough vodka gimlets, the conversation gets very, very honest. Some of the founders present had already grown and sold companies, while others had just gotten started. Despite the wide spectrum of business stages, the sentiments shared were universal ï؟½ no matter what industries their businesses were in, or how much they had accomplished...]

Financial compensation is a blunt way to incentivize people. Thatï؟½s no surprise, but a couple things would seem to be hard to argue with: If you want people to do good work, pay them as much as you can and let them spend the money on themselves. Recent behavioral research, however, has...

My mom died. I'm sharing this information with you for several reasons; the primary being that my mother was an educator and encouraged me to talk about any lessons I learned from her experiences. I've used her permission with carte blanche over the last decade or so. And since I've entertained audiences with vignettes from my mom's life, I figured I should equally inform people with the stories associated with her dying. As coincidences sometimes happen, I became more motivated to discuss my observations due to a question I was...

Want to know if someone's lying to you? Telltale signs may include running of the mouth, an excessive use of third-person pronouns, and an increase in profanity. These are among the findings of a recent experimental study that delves into the language of...

In the new book Happy Money: the Science of Smarter Spending, behavioral economists Elizabeth Dunn and Michael Norton describe how money can buy happinessï؟½but only if we spend it the right way... [Dunn and Norton draw on years of quantitative and qualitative research to explain how we can turn cash into contentment. The key lies in...]

The benefits of a strong corporate culture are both intuitive and supported by social science. According to James L. Heskett, culture "can account for 20-30% of the differential in corporate performance when compared with 'culturally unremarkable' competitors." [But what makes a culture? Each culture is unique and myriad factors go into creating one, but I've observed at least six common components of great cultures. Isolating those elements can be the first step to building a differentiated culture and a lasting organization...]

Warren Berger taps some of the most powerful CEOs in the country to reveal the questions that will keep any company on track. In a previous article, I shared five questions that todayï؟½s forward-thinking companies should be asking, based on input from top business consultants. This second installment, on the same theme, presents five more questions--but with a specific focus this time. These are questions that zero in on...

Google is far more than a search engine. If you know where to look, you can find a treasure trove of free or practically free tools to help grow your business. Just about everyone uses Google in some form for their business. I'm sure you know about Google Maps, AdWords, Google Analytics, and Gmail. You might also know about Google Drive, Google Calendar, and Chrome, Google's Web browser.[Google provides tools beyond those published in this section, and many of them can help you in your everyday marketing and business operations. Let me take you on a brief tour...]

These irritating customers are usually more bother than they're worth. Most of the time, customers (and prospective customers) are great. However, there are eight types of customer that are usually more bother than they're worth. Here they are, along with some advice for coping with them...

Selling is the foundation for success in any economy but none more so than the one we are in today. In a market that is highly competitive, operates on razor-thin margins and where technological advancements can wipe out entire industries overnight, you are either doing the selling or being sold. That means...

Nearly four in 10 chief marketing officers (CMOs) say they do not have the right people, tools, and resources to meet their marketing objectives, according to a recent report from Accenture. That's a drop of 5 percentage points in preparedness from levels reported in Accentures' 2011 study. CMOs also said they found it more difficult in 2012 to...

Articles in a series on Mashable.com called ï؟½Whatï؟½s Insideï؟½ looked for all the world like the hundreds of other articles on the digital media site. But journalistically, they were something very different. The articles, about technology topics in a wide variety of products, including modems and the Hubble Space Telescope, were paid for by Snapdragon, a brand of processor chip made by Qualcomm, and the sponsor of the series. Most were even written by Mashable editorial employees... [Advertisers and publishers have many names for this new form of marketing ï؟½ including branded content, sponsored content and native advertising. Regardless of the name, the strategy of...]

Does Big Data require a new way of thinking or should marketers simply consider it data? Big Data is just data. In our experience, however, it does require a new way of thinking because of the possibilities it offers to marketers. When we think of Big Data for marketing applications, it's helpful to use four distinct, rich sources of structured and unstructured information:...