Professional Services

The time when small and medium sized businesses were only busy with local or national commerce is already far behind us. New technology and free-trade zones have made the world a much smaller place. Legislation has been simplified, import duties often reduced or removed to speed the passage of goods and services over international borders. Banks have made international finance easier as well, with payment transactions manageable online and facilitated by schemes like SEPA.

A short while ago, I worked with a firm to redesign their planning progress. The motivation for the assignment was described by an executive from that firm:

The bank made a net profit of A$7.7 billion ($7 billion) for the year to 30 June, up 8 percent from the previous year. This impressive figure is the result of a combination of growing deposits and a higher margin between the rate of interest earned on loans and the rate paid out to savers.

For the six months to the end of June the company made an operating profit of £1.4 billion, a rise of 22 percent compared to the same period last year. In the first half of 2013 almost sales of Prudential’s sales came from Asia, where new business profit in the region also rose by 20 percent.

It was in December that Prudential said it had already doubled its Asian operating profit and increased the amount of cash that its Asian business sent back to the group to its £300m target for cash remittances.

Financial Directors with high blood pressures should look away now. Project management in most organisations is run by people who have no notion of pulling the plug on something that is certain to end in failure. In fact many of them suffer from what we call Project Mastermind Disorder: they’ve started, so they’ll finish. No matter what the cost.

Net income for the three months to June rose by 40 percent from a year ago to $1.2 billion. Much of this figure was derived from Credit Suisse’s investment bank which was buoyed by fee income and strong earnings by its equity market traders. The unit also earned sharply higher commissions by helping clients raise money from the markets through share and bond issues.

Operational Excellence is not a continuous improvement initiative, nor a lean program where we seek out waste and eliminate it. It is very tangible and real, and has practical definition that applies to everyone in the organization: Operational Excellence is when, “Each and every employee can see the flow of value to the customer, and fix that flow before it breaks down.” But Operational Excellence is not easy to achieve.

Several years ago, a company that produced capital equipment initiated a firm-wide project designed to gain an advantage against competitors in a market that cared about both product quality and cost. The firm’s leadership put pressure on basically every department in the organization to come up with new ideas that could translate into marketplace success. Their efforts yielded some results, but the outcome fell far short of what had been hoped when the project had been started.

When a successful formula is discovered in the business world, it’s copied and becomes part of standard operating procedure throughout entire industries.

The newest SOP trend among leading businesses? – Focusing on employee and family well-being, says Gary Kunath, who was honored nationally as Businessman of the Year and recognized with a dinner hosted by the President of the United States.

The broker-dealers latest quarterly results show that it made $1.9 billion in the three months to the end of June. This compares with the $927 million it recorded in 2012 and comes amid what can be described as tougher trading conditions.

Its earnings were lifted by big returns on its own investments in shares and debts, which generated $1.4 billion in net revenues, up from $200 million a year ago. The profit that Goldman made on its own investments came as it sold off its last remaining shares in Industrial and Commercial Bank of China.