Tax-savvy executives

Review of Accounting Studies - We investigate why firms include individuals with significant professional tax experience on their senior management team and the consequences associated with the...     

When executives burn out

The military knows about burn-out--but calls it battle fatigue. To offset its devastating effects, the military routinely schedules its personnel for recreation and relaxation retreats, sends soldiers into combat in groups so they can support and help each other, and limits the number of flights that pilots fly. Managers are not soldiers but, according to this author and others who have researched the subject, they are prone to a similar exhaustion and sense of futility. Like other professionals, mental health workers, and policemen who work under severe pressure in people-oriented jobs for long periods of time--with little support and limited gains--managers are among the prime victims of burn-out. The author describes what burn-out is, discusses why he thinks that modern organizations are good breeding grounds for situations that lead to it, and offers some helpful ways top managers can combat it.     

What executives should remember

In more than 30 essays for Harvard Business Review, Peter Drucker (1909-2005) urged readers to take on the hard work of thinking--always combined, he insisted, with decisive action. He closely analyzed the phenomenon of knowledge work--the growing call for employees who use their minds rather than their hands--and explained how it challenged the conventional wisdom about the way organizations should be run. He was intrigued by employees who knew more about certain subjects than their bosses or colleagues but who still had to cooperate with others in a large organization. As the business world matured in the second half of the twentieth century, executives came to think that they knew how to run companies--and Drucker took it upon himself to poke holes in their assumptions, lest organizations become stale. But he did so sympathetically, operating from the premise that his readers were intelligent, hardworking people of goodwill. Well suited to HBR's format of practical, idea-based essays for executives, his clear-eyed, humanistic writing enriched the magazine time and again. This article is a compilation of the savviest management advice Drucker offered HBR readers over the years--in short, his greatest hits. It revisits the following insightful, influential contributions: "The Theory of the Business" (September-October 1994), "Managing for Business Effectiveness" (May-June 1963), "What Business Can Learn from Nonprofits" (July-August 1989), "The New Society of Organizations" (September-October 1992), "The Information Executives Truly Need" (January-February 1995), "Managing Oneself" (March-April 1999 republished January 2005), "They're Not Employees, They're People" (February 2002), "What Makes an Effective Executive" (June 2004).     

财务高管三级跳

财务管理是企业管理中一个重要组成部分,财务战略是企业战略实施的重要组成部分。企业要面向利益相关者,为出资者服务,这给CFO提出了高于以前的要求。     

Local CEOs,career concerns and voluntary disclosure

I study whether the management guidance provided by local chief executive officers (CEOs) differs from the guidance provided by nonlocal CEOs. The geographic preferences of the CEOs lead to segmented executive labor markets, which impose higher relocation costs and give rise to lower job mobility. I find that local CEOs, who grew up in the same states where the firm headquarters are located, provide fewer items in guidance and less frequent guidance than nonlocal CEOs. I also show that local CEOs have greater asymmetric withholding of bad news relative to good news and that they increase their disclosure during economic downturns in their home states. Collectively, these findings suggest that the geographically segmented CEO labor markets play an important role in the disclosure choices of CEOs.     

Chief executives define their own data needs.

Identification of information needs of top management is discussed in this article by comparing four methods now in use with a new approach, "identification of critical success factors," developed at the Sloan School of Management. The author argues that the CSF method, implemented through a series of two to three interview sessions, helps top management define its own current information needs. Critical success factors are those performance factors which must receive the on-going attention of management if the company is to remain competitive. While not intended for strategic planning purposes, the identification of critical success factors can help top management by: (1) determining where management attention should be directed; (2) developing measures for critical success factors; and (3) determining the amount of information required and thus limiting gathering unnecessary data. The author concludes that the CSF method is both effective and efficient and should be seriously considered by top management as an important tool in assessing data needs.     

Why hard-nosed executives should care about management theory

Theory often gets a bum rap among managers because it's associated with the word "theoretical," which connotes "impractical." But it shouldn't. Because experience is solely about the past, solid theories are the only way managers can plan future actions with any degree of confidence. The key word here is "solid." Gravity is a solid theory. As such, it lets us predict that if we step off a cliff we will fall, without actually having to do so. But business literature is replete with theories that don't seem to work in practice or actually contradict each other. How can a manager tell a good business theory from a bad one? The first step is understanding how good theories are built. They develop in three stages: gathering data, organizing it into categories highlighting significant differences, then making generalizations explaining what causes what, under which circumstances. For instance, professor Ananth Raman and his colleagues collected data showing that bar code-scanning systems generated notoriously inaccurate inventory records. These observations led them to classify the types of errors the scanning systems produced and the types of shops in which those errors most often occurred. Recently, some of Raman's doctoral students have worked as clerks to see exactly what kinds of behavior cause the errors. From this foundation, a solid theory predicting under which circumstances bar code systems work, and don't work, is beginning to emerge. Once we forgo one-size-fits-all explanations and insist that a theory describes the circumstances under which it does and doesn't work, we can bring predictable success to the world of management.     

On executives of financial institutions as outside directors

We find that the presence of commercial bankers on the board is positively related to aggregate firm debt. Separating by type of debt, the presence of commercial bankers on the board is positively related to short-term, long-term, and total bank debt. We also find that while the presence of unaffiliated commercial bankers on the board is positively related to bank borrowing, the presence of affiliated commercial bankers on the board is not. The results are consistent with the theory that commercial bankers supply bank debt market expertise, but not with the theory that they sit on boards to monitor lending relationships.     

Unobserved ties between corporate executives and mutual fund managers

After corporate executives relocate from origin firms to destination firms, only 3.6 percent of mutual fund managers follow the departing executives: they divest from origin firms while initiating investments in destination firms. This phenomenon is more pronounced for those funds that earned superior returns from investments in the origin firms, and that demand more information regarding the destination firms. Further, comigration funds’ holding changes in destination firms more accurately predict cumulative abnormal returns around earnings announcements than do their investments in other stocks and non‐comigration funds’ new investments. Hiring the migrating executives does not improve the destination firms’ operating performance.     

How executives can shape their company's information systems.

When a big New York bank expanded in London, technical specialists in the two cities disagreed about which vendor's information system was best. The debate continued for several months until finally the technical experts took the issue to a senior-management policy committee. But the senior managers didn't understand the terminology and kept postponing the decision. Meanwhile, the London office complained loudly that the slowdown was threatening the unit's growth. Like the bank, most companies need a new approach to making decisions about information technology (IT), especially since it now affects so many aspects of the business. The company's technical experts seldom understand the overall business, and the senior managers who understand the business are usually lost when it comes to computers. One way to blend both perspectives is to establish a task force that solicits input from top management and creates a set of principles to guide subsequent investments in information technology. By drawing on 10 to 15 statements that reflect management's basic beliefs about how the company should use IT, the task force translates the language of corporate strategy into computerese. For instance, an electronics company wanted various functions to act more like one company. It created a principle that said, "Information systems will provide application that support cross-functional integration of business processes." Managers making subsequent decisions about computers could immediately rule out any technologies that contradicted that statement. Principles thus speed up the decision-making process, but more important, they ensure that every investment in IT helps the corporation achieve its strategic goals.     

Optimal strike prices of stock options for effort-averse executives

This paper evaluates the common practice of setting the strike prices of executive option plans at-the-money. Hall and Murphy [Hall, Brian, Murphy, Kevin J., 2000. Optimal exercise prices for executive stock options. American Economic Review 90 (2), 209–214] claim this practice to be optimal since it maximizes the sensitivity of compensation to firm performance. However, they do not incorporate effort and the possibility that managers are effort-averse into their model. We revisit this question while explicitly introducing these factors and allowing the reward package to include fixed wages, options, and stock grants. We simulate the manager’s effort choice and compensation as well as the value of shareholders’ equity under alternative compensation schemes, and identify schemes that are optimal. Our simulations indicate that, when abstracting from tax considerations, it is optimal to award managers with options that will most likely be highly valuable (i.e., substantially in-the-money) on their expiration date. Prior to 2006, the tax code and financial reporting standards provided incentives to award options that are closer to the money when issued than the options that were optimal in the absence of these considerations. Recent tax and reporting changes voided these incentives and thus we predict that these changes will induce firms to issue options with lower strike prices than those that were issued prior to 2006.     

A model of the supply of executives for outside directorships

Why do firms allow their executives to accept outside directorships? Are firms acting in the best interests of their shareholders by allowing them to do so? We develop a theoretical model where accepting an outside directorship alters the CEO's effect on the value of the home firm. Our model illustrates that executives will choose to spend more time on external directorships than is optimal for the home firm. Our theoretical model is consistent with other recent empirical finance research on the effects of external directorships.     

给自己一个更好的职业路径

在IMA（美国管理会计师协会）与中国国家外国专家局（简称外专局）2009年签订战略合作协议后,经过双方共同努力,CMA（美国注册管理会计师认证）资格认证得以在国企和央企迅速铺开,并获得高度认可。2010年10月11日,国资委系统下的200名财务高管,其中许多人都是大型央企的总会计师,将集中参加一个为期一个月的CMA培训班,     

Understanding accounting as a career: an immersion work experience for students making career decisions

This paper reports on a project which is designed to increase the participation of high school students in accounting work experience placements. The focus of the paper is on an Australian-based project which overcomes the identified barriers to offering high school accounting work experience placements with a resultant increase in the number and quality of placements offered. The research project responds to a decline in both the number and quality of students enrolling in accounting degree programmes in Australia. The paper draws on the work experience, social psychology, careers, and accounting education literatures to design a ‘connective’ model (Guile &; Griffiths, 2001 Guile, D., &; Griffiths, T. (2001). Learning through work experience. Journal of Education and Work, 14(1), 113–131. doi: 10.1080/13639080020028738[Taylor &; Francis Online] , [Google Scholar]) of accounting work experience for high school students. The project adopts an action research methodology which engages professional accounting practice, high school career advisors, and the university sector to deliver a structured work experience programme which addresses barriers to participation in accounting work experience and improves the quality of the work experience ‘experience’ for both employers and students.     

会计职场的SWOT分析

我们可以把SWOT模型应用到职场的决策中去,对自己的现状进行系统全面的了解,通过分析,从而制定未来的行动方案。