Every Friday, we will select a few in-depth articles from the week that we think are worth your valuable time as a construction financial manager (CFM). We look for compelling articles not only about financial topics, but about business, technology, and life, that challenges you to think about your role as a CFM in different ways. We’d love to hear from you about how we’re doing, and to have you join our community by subscribing to receive this weekly post by email. Follow #CFMReview.
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Fighting The Relentless Battle Against Bureaucracy. “Much of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to work,” once said management expert Peter Drucker, and this is quoted in and the topic of a great piece within this week’s print edition of The Economist: “Decluttering the company.” It analyzed the business problems that everyone knows about and fights against…but, unfortunately, persist nevertheless.
What is company clutter? The three clutter items featured in this article is organizational complexity, meetings, and email.
Two shocking facts from this article:
- Senior executives spend 2 full days a week in meetings; and
- In 1970, managers received 1000 external communications per year. Today, because of email, they receive 30,000 per year.
“Some clutter is inevitable,” the author admits, but too much is “taking a tool on both morale and productivity.” Companies must periodically review and clean up their corporate clutter. And, might I suggest taking a lesson from an article in The Atlantic last month, which declared that “Single-Tasking is the New Multitasking.” In our world of emails, pop-up reminders, social media feeds, and other distractions, it might be that the best clutter clean-up method may be to simply dedicate yourself to doing just one thing at a time.
Unfortunately, doing just one simple thing, may be quite hard. Try, for example, watching this three minute video. Go ahead, I dare you to watch this 3 minute video.
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Innovation Talk. One of my favorite article headlines from the past year came in the Harvard Business Review a few months ago: Stop Me Before I Innovate Again. The word innovation, claims the author, is “quickly losing whatever meaning it once had.” Despite my affinity for this argument and the over-use of the term “innovation,” I am obliged to highlight some innovation talk out there that is specifically relevant to CFOs and CFMs.
- WSJ: Embrace Digital or Put Your Company’s Future At Risk. One sentence summary: Corporate value is being measured by intangible assets more than ever before, and new technologies give CFOs data to calculate these assets.
- Construction Executive: Reporting Default Risk and Allowance for Doubtful Accounts. One sentence summary: Intangible assets — namely, big data info on security rights — can positively impact default risk reporting, allowance for doubtful account percentages, and therefore, company value.
- LinkedIn: Old-School CFOs Are Putting Their Companies At Risk. One sentence summary: An article I wrote on LinkedIn that ties the former two articles together to drive home a point well-communicated in the article’s headline.
- Construction Business Owner: The Idea Engine. One sentence summary: Just because you’re not inventing the iPhone, doesn’t mean your can’t be a Michelangelo.
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