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- PIMCO’s Bill Gross: On the "Course" to a New Normal, September 2009 Investment Outlook
- Session: Automating Payables to Optimize Working Capital
- Session: Re-inventing your AP process.
- Session: Kyriba demonstrates their ASP-based cash management operation.
- Session: Cash Flow Forecasting: Overcoming Challenges
Yesterday a memorial service for Walter Cronkite, the most trusted man in America, was held at New York City’s Lincoln Center. As I watched it on C-SPAN, one of the speakers quoted Mr. Cronkite:
“Democracy cannot function without a reasonably well-informed electorate.” The speaker continued by saying that Mr. Cronkite believed it was the duty of the press to provide honest, objective and meticulous analysis so that Americans would make well-informed decisions. He believed that our future depended on it.
I had heard Cronkite state this position before and, as I was reminded of it, I saw how well it fit with my point-of-view that companies cannot function without reasonably well-informed management teams. My point-of-view is certainly not new. In 1991, William Weitzel and Ellen Jonsson, specialists in organizational change, wrote this in “The Executive”:
“Organizations enter a state of decline when they fail to anticipate, recognize, avoid, neutralize or adapt to external or internal pressures that threaten the organization’s long-term survival. In this definition we emphasize that the organization is already in a state of decline if decision makers are unaware of or insensitive to detrimental changes.”
We can apply what Cronkite said of American politics to 21st century management teams: they must possess honest, objective and meticulous analysis of their financial condition so that their decisions are based on well-informed facts. Their future depends on it.
