Financial Management Strategies: Concepts and Tactics

It was said that:” Finance is the art of passing currency from hand to hand until it finally disappears,” how laughable, you might think, however is that even true? Finance is too important to be left only to finance specialists! In any company, the most successful managers are often those who have acquired a strong appreciation and mastering of financial concepts. One of the most crucial topics of finance is to learn about financial strategy. In order so you know how significant this topic is in the field of finance, you may need to ask yourself a similar question: Do you think the organizations handing out bad loans, buying securities of bundled bad loans, and selling credit default swaps had a well-thought out financial strategy for business success? Of course not! This paper is intended to define what is exactly meant by financial management strategy, what role it holds in a successful business and finally a few tricks that enable your organization to achieve the best financial strategies ever!

Obafemi Toriola, freelance writer and business consultant, explains his views on the topic of financial management by saying:” Strategic financial management is basically about the identification of the possible strategies capable of maximizing an organization's market value. It also encompasses the implementation and monitoring of the chosen strategy so as to achieve agreed objectives.” In simpler words, it is a set of best practices that ensures that funds are committed and raised only when they enhance shareholders values. Many processes are involved, but the key element here is Decisions Making. The key decisions falling within the scope of financial strategy include financial, investment and dividend decisions. A good finance should take the initiation and create a clear financial strategy, because no financial strategy means a strategy for failure.

Today's economic climate calls for executives who can apply various financial analyses as they evaluate business performance, weigh potential acquisitions, and assess global competition. So, how would you create an innovative financial system for your own interest? First of all, it will have to be focused upon improvements and success. Financial control systems shouldn’t just be about compliance, they should be about continually improving key aspects of the financial operation. Second, you also might be interested to find ways to measure the financial performance in your company, ways to manage growth with less exposure to financial risks, or/and other ways to enhance shareholder value in the market. A third, in the position but not in the importance, is to set a policy that will ensure that all the key elements involved are consistent with strategy and the risk appetite of the firm and its shareholders.

Madinah Institute for Leadership & Entrepreneurship (MILE) is pleased to give a detailed course on Financial Management strategy in its second executive education program; PALM2 (Program for Advanced Leadership & Management). Mr.Rafael Vinas, a senior instructor from the Globecon Group, will be in charge of explaining this topic to the participants. This course will help you to acquire the analytical tools and financial skills to position your company for growth and profitability. This training is a part of other wild range of training modules and workshops in the field of business and management. The PALM2 program will be commencing January 15th and ends January 27th, 2011 and will be held in Madinah, Saudi Arabia. For effective financial decision making and impeccable financial management join PALM, the most comprehensive leadership development coaching and executive leadership training in the Middle East.

 If you are interested in learning more about the PALM program please visit www.mile.org

Decide and Deliver: Five Steps to Breakthrough Performance in Your Organization

The Hallmark of great companies is their ability to consistently make and execute good decisions. Companies that succeed in developing their ability to “decide and deliver” not only turn in better financial results, but also cultivate more engaged and motivated employees. In short, they make decision effectiveness a source of lasting competitive advantage.

In ‘Decide and Deliver’, the authors draw on Bain & Company's extensive research and detailed case studies from companies as varied as Ford Motor Company, British American Tobacco, Telstra, Lafarge, and ABB UK.  They deduced that decision-driven organizations significantly outperform their competitors. Their decisions are better and are translated more effectively into action. Their decision cycles are shorter than those of competitors, and their decision-and-execution processes tailor the effort expended to the importance of the decision. Their financial results, typically, are head and shoulders above their peers.

‘Decide and Deliver’ presents a basic five-step process for improving an organization’s decision effectiveness:

1.       Assess your decision effectiveness and how your organization affects it.

2.       Identify your critical decisions.

3.       Set individual critical decisions up for success.

4.       Ensure that your company enables and reinforces great decision making and execution.

5.       Embed the changes in everyday practice.

‘Decide and Deliver’ is the road map. It is the only book that shows how to build an integrated decision-driven organization. It illustrates how to eliminate the dithering, open up the bottlenecks that get in the way of good decisions, and help everyone in the organization learn to make and execute good decisions quickly. It shows leaders how to avoid the obstacles that prevent good decisions and undermine performance; from lack of cohesion in the leadership team itself to the proliferation of unnecessary meetings and committees. And the result? A more profitable company.

Mr. Jean-Marie Pean, chairman of Bain & Co., Middle East, will be giving a detailed training module based on ‘Decide and Deliver’ in Madinah Institute for Leadership & Entrepreneurship’s next executive education program; PALM² (Program for Advanced Leadership & Management). The PALM² program will be commencing January 15^th and ends January 27^th, 2011 and will be held in Madinah, Saudi Arabia. This

Executive leadership training seminar aims at leveraging your leadership qualities. A leadership development course like this will ensure your decision making skills deliver results. Learn effective decision making with MILE’s professional leadership training and take your business leadership skills to a global level!

If you are interested in learning more about the PALM program please visit www.mile.org

Strategic Intuition The Creative Spark in Human Achievement

Those “Aha!” moments, that flash of insight when things come together in your mind and you connect the dots. And, almost suddenly, you know exactly what to do. Brain science now reveals how these flashes of insight happen. It's a special form of intuition. This is what William Duggan, associate professor of Management at Columbia Business School and author of ‘Strategic Intuition: The Creative Spark in Human Achievement’, calls strategic intuition; because it gives you an idea for action - a strategy.

Brain science has shown there to be three kinds of intuition: ordinary, expert, and strategic. Ordinary intuition is just a gut instinct. Expert intuition is snap judgments, when you instantly recognize something familiar and act accordingly; For example, the way tennis professionals knows where the ball will go from the arc and speed of the opponent's racket. Finally, the third kind, strategic intuition, is not a vague feeling, like ordinary intuition. Strategic intuition is a clear thought. And it's not fast, like expert intuition. It's slow. That flash of insight you had last night might solve a problem that's been on your mind for a month. And it doesn't happen in familiar situations, like a tennis match. Strategic intuition works in new situations. That's when you need it most.

William Duggan explains that there are currently three massive misconceptions about how this kind of thinking works. This is what he calls “Plod, Plot, and Play”. Plod means you go beyond your usual routines to analyze a much wider range and depth of information - and advanced technology means there is essentially no limit to the amount of data you can and should plod through. Plot means you spend a lot of time defining your mission, your goals, your objectives, your sub-objectives, and so forth. Play means you give up your usual ways of thinking to build a race-car out of duct tape, or toss Frisbees across the office, or throw random words onto a Velcro board.

But the Plodders and Plotters and Players are all wrong. The trick is to plod and plot and play all at the same moment. That’s what a flash of insight does. Its how the brain makes something new out of real information, and projects it as a strategy. But you get there not through Plodding or Plotting or Playing, but through understanding how strategic intuition works and how to do it better.

There is no shortage of books about strategic analysis and strategic planning. However, this new book by William Duggan is the first full treatment of strategic intuition. It's the missing piece of the strategy puzzle that makes it essential reading for anyone interested in achieving more in any field of human endeavor.

Dr. William Duggan, is associate professor of management at Columbia Business School and has been teaching strategic intuition in graduate and executive courses. He has twenty years of experience as a strategy advisor and consultant. He is also the author of ‘The Art of What Works: How Success Really Happens’ and ‘Napoleon’s Glance: The Secret of Strategy’.

Dr. William Duggan himself will be giving a detailed training course based on ‘Strategic Intuition’ in Madinah Institute for Leadership & Entrepreneurship’s next executive education program; PALM² (Program for Advanced Leadership & Management). The PALM² program will be commencing January 15^th and ends January 27^th, 2011 and will be held in Madinah, Saudi Arabia. MILE brings you the most effective Executive Leadership Training in the Middle East. Our leadership seminars and executive development programs give managers a proven formula for success in today’s complex markets.

If you are interested in learning more about the PALM program please visit www.mile.org

Competitive Strategy Game – Changing Strategies

Common sense, as well as academic research argues that attacking bigger competitors will most likely lead to failure. Take for example, a series of studies undertaken at London Business School in the early 1990s which examined how new market entrants in several UK industries fared against much bigger established competitors. Not surprisingly, the failure rate of “newbies” was quite high. More than 85% of them failed within 5 years of entry. The No.1 ranked firm in a particular industry had a probability of about 96% of surviving as No.1 – an almost certainty.

Yet, without disputing the statistics, we all know of examples of companies that attacked much bigger competitors with great success. In several instances, not only did the smaller firm survive but often managed to emerge as one of the leaders in the industry. In other words, the small fish ate the big fish! IKEA did it in the furniture retail business, Canon in copiers, Bright Horizons in child care and early education, Starbucks in coffee, Amazon in bookselling, and the list goes on; K-Mart, Southwest, Red Bull, Lulu, Netflix, Skype.

So, what explains the success of these outliers and what can we all learn from their experience? After studying more than seventy such firms, Dr. Costas Markides, Professor of Strategic and International  Management at London Business School, and author of the book ‘Game Changing Strategies’, has found a simple answer which he explains in his book; Successful attackers do not try and be better than their rivals. Rather, they actively adopt a different strategy and aim to compete by changing the rules of the game of the industry.

Dr. Costas Markides explains in ‘Game Changing Strategies’, that significant shifts in market share and company fortunes took place not by trying to play the game better than the competition but by trying to be different; in a sense, by avoiding head-on competition.  The strategy that seems to improve the probability of success is the strategy of breaking the rules, of discovering and exploiting a different business model from the one that established and bigger competitors deploy in a given industry.

Dr. Costas Markides, himself, will be giving a detailed training module based on his book ‘Game-Changing Strategies’ in Madinah Institute for Leadership & Entrepreneurship’s next executive education program; PALM² (Program for Advanced Leadership & Management). The PALM² program will be commencing January 15^th and ends January 27^th, 2011 and will be held in Madinah, Saudi Arabia. MILE brings you most effective executive leadership training seminars and leadership training classes. With our leadership development seminars you can achieve new heights of success. MILE is an executive education institute that focuses on top executive and management programs to enhance leadership capacity around the world.

If you are interested in learning more about the PALM program please visit www.mile.org