Category: Uncategorized

The signature legislative achievement of President Obama’s tenure, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare), was born without a single Republican vote in Congress and nurtured to fruition by the Supreme Court of the United States. The impact on small and medium size business will force many CEOs to make difficult choices.

The first rule is “Better Before Cheaper”: being price competitive is far from irrelevant but when it comes to position in a market, exceptional performance is caused most often by greater non-price value rather than lower price. There are two dimensions of value along which any company can differentiate itself: price value and non-price value. Research reveals that exceptional companies typically focus on non-price value, even if that means they have to charge higher prices. Price-based competition is a legitimate strategy. Competing with better, rather than cheaper is systematically associated with better long-term performance.

A CPA serving middle market companies notes how CEOs can get carried away when it comes to acquiring an aircraft—and offers four tips to avoid ugly surprises.

Procter & Gamble’s announcement that A.G. Lafley, who ran the 175-year-old Cincinnati consumer products company from 2000 to 2009, would replace CEO Bob McDonald, set business pundits and cable channel talking heads into overdrive. Wasn’t Lafley partially responsible for the current state of affairs at P&G? What about the board of directors? Is Lafley’s recall a knee jerk reaction or master stroke of pragmatism?

Carl Levin, the chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, ahead of a high-profile congressional hearing accused Apple of seeking “the Holy Grail of tax avoidance” by creating “offshore entities holding tens of billions of dollars, while claiming to be tax resident nowhere.” Apple, the Cupertino, CA giant. recently “took a bite” out of its corporate tax liabilities and caused a public outcry. But the ethical issues raised by such a move do not begin or end with them alone, observed Crown CEO Chuck Bentley in the Washington Post, in a piece titled “Apple’s tax ethics: Unpatriotic or Shrewdness in Action.”

As mergers and acquisitions continue to bounce along the bottom, large company CEOs are reaping the benefits in 2013 despite struggling with the many market uncertainties that hold back deal flow. But what options for capital raising do SME CEOs have? More than you may think. But it pays to be careful.

Innovation is like ice cream – it sounds great and comes in many different flavors. But innovation is not always a simple or quick decision for any organization, not even for those that make continuous transformation look easy and seamless like Salesforce.com. Salesforce – the company that pioneered and continues to dominate the now crowded Customer Relationship Management (CRM) market – has always been innovative. As its founder and CEO Marc Beinoff remarked in his Consumer Electronics Show keynote address earlier this year, an innovative spirit fuels almost everything Salesforce does today.

An investment banker turned CEO shares his strategy on buying and building a mid-size company.

Newly re-appointed P&G CEO A.G. Lafley says too many CEOs stumble over business strategy. It comes down to two principles: choice and winning; and all organizations, regardless of size, can score big when they get it right.

In an exhaustive 2012 study of Chief Executives, “Time for New CEOs,” Booz & Co. management consultants, reports the highest number of planned CEO successions at the world’s largest 2,500 public companies in the history of the study and finds that companies often seek familiarity in new CEOs. It also asserts that the “global CEO” is more myth than reality.