Business Up Front - April 2007

Business Up Front

Addicted to E-mail?

We have become a nation so reliant on e-mail that if our internet connection shuts down for an hour, we feel lost, unable to accomplish anything,” said Marsha Egan, CEO of Egan E-mail Solutions. When e-mail was introduced, there were no guidelines on how to use it. Consequently, individuals have developed bad e-mail habits – like using e-mail as an urgent delivery device – which have turned us into a nation into e-mail addicts. Egan offers specific tips from her 12-step E-mail E-ddiction Detox program:

• Set up rules for e-mail use: Let all of your clients and co-workers know how you prefer to use e-mail and practice what you preach.

• Turn off automatic send and receive: Learning to check your e-mail only at designated intervals, productivity loss due to e-mail distraction will decrease.

• Regain control of e-mail by reconsidering its function: E-mails shouldn’t trump the rest of your work - it should just be another factor in your day. Learn to manage, sort, prioritize and delete all of your e-mails.

“E-mail addiction is an unseen productivity blocker,” said Egan. “While e-mail has allowed all of us to communicate faster and spread information, it also added an immense amount of work to most people’s already hectic lives.”

Dropouts Create Wealth Gap

According to calculations by Alliance for Excellent Education, if high school dropouts who currently head households in Nevada had instead earned diplomas, the state’s economy would benefit from an additional $623 million in wealth accumulated by families. There is a wealth gap between high school dropouts and high school graduates that is even more severe than the income gap. Graduating all students, would increase family wealth – defined as investments that appreciate over time – known as assets. This would provide the approximately 138,000 families currently headed by high school dropouts with a safety net for times of financial stress and with increased capacity to invest in higher education, homes and business enterprises. Nevada would also benefit through greater neighborhood stability, increased civic involvement and voting participation. Additional household financial wealth gained by high school graduation was derived by multiplying the number of households headed by an individual with less than a high school degree by the median financial wealth of those households headed by an individual with a high school diploma.

CFOs Leave Companies for Reasons Other Than a New Job

Fifty percent of chief financial officers left companies for reasons other than finding another job, including inability to fit culturally into the organization, increasingly stressful demands of the position and lack of current knowledge related to Sarbanes-Oxley, according to a survey by Right Management. Of the 191 organizations surveyed, 48 percent stayed in the position for more than five years. However, 25 percent of those surveyed said CFOs stayed in their jobs for less than three years. It typically takes between three to five months to replace a departing CFO. “Many CFOs had the same cultural fit problems that are a leading cause of executive failure – their management styles and ways of doing their jobs did not fit the prevailing organizational culture,” said Patrick Bosworth, vice president, Right Management. CFOs have also been under increased job stress since the implementation of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, the corporate disclosure law passed by Congress in the wake of accounting scandals at a number of major publicly held companies. According to the survey, CFOs left companies for the following reasons:

• 50 percent accepted another job offer.

• 23 percent did not fit into the culture of the organization.

• 22 percent said the work environment was too stressful.

• 5 percent had lack of current knowledge of Sarbanes-Oxley regulations.