Making a drama out of an accounting crisis!

I am very pleased to welcome a guest blog post today from Irina Predescu. Irina graduated from London School of Economics last year and has since immersed herself in the world of business risk, financial control, finance processes and compliance. She is too young to remember the events described below first time around . . . . .

Making a drama out of a (accounting) crisis!

This December saw the anniversary of the Enron scandal. 11 years after the company’s collapse was a key catalyst for the SOX legislation, some might think Enron is a thing of the past. Recently however, it struck me to see how this topic still resonates with today’s wider audience, not so much via the Wall Street Journal or Fortune articles, but through the means of entertainment.  

Quantum Finance - are Performance Indicators what they seem?

There is a popular assertion made by theoretical physicists that in the minutiae of the quantum world, the process of observing an object actually changes it. This is one of those concepts that makes my head hurt and is likely to cause a nosebleed if I think about it too hard.

I have long been a believer in those business school mantras of ‘you can’t manage what your don’t measure’ and ‘you don’t get what you expect, you get what you inspect’. It does make you wonder if some of these B-School professors would be better plying their trade as literature buffs or poets though; such is the elegance of these phrases.

Recently, however, I have become somewhat unsure of myself and I am no longer as convinced as I once was. Or perhaps, I am reaching another transcendental stage of understanding (unlikely!). Perhaps what we measure in business changes as we observe it also?