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The roles and responsibilities of the chief financial officer (hereafter CFO) have evolved dramatically over the past 10 years. This article explores this evolution from a South African perspective by, firstly, presenting an extensive literature review on the matter. Secondly, a unique South African model of the key focus areas for CFOs is proposed. Lastly, the results of a questionnaire administered to the CFOs of FTSE/JSE Top 40 companies are reported. The results revealed significant findings relating to the CFO’s most important current and future role ‐ that of planner and strategist. In addition, CFOs at the top of the corporate ladder expect to focus more on their role as a growth and innovation catalyst. This article also identifies three key areas for future research that will make an important contribution to the continued development of the educational framework for chartered accountants.

This chapter argues that aspiring hegemons face a wide array of complex and distinct military challenges. Managing scarce military resources requires a subtle and complex global strategy that is likely to generate cognitive overload for the political system. As a result of cognitive overload, aspiring hegemons are likely to flail around, rapidly shifting from one global strategy to another. Such strategic flailing will occur independently of whether or not the economy is in crisis, though clearly economic crisis will exacerbate the tendency towards strategic incoherence. The chapter examines U.S. global strategy since the end of the Cold War, looking at the focus on “rogue regimes,” a growing concern with “global chaos,” worry about the rise of a peer competitor (China), and the debates about the root causes of, and best strategies to mitigate, terrorism. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the role of culture and notions of national identity and their role in the formulation of grand strategy.

With more and more software on the market, how can you tell what's right for you? Here's an annotated guide that takes the strategist past price and platform for a look at applications and utility.

The following chapter describes a paradigm shift in military thinking and its practical application for business strategists. It describes the concept of maneuver theory. Originally designed as a war‐fighting doctrine based on the principles of speed, surprise, and economy of effort; the authors argue that maneuver theory has the inherent capability to provide the same successes for business strategists as it has for military strategists. Discusses similarities between military and business campaigns and then describes the difference between maneuver warfare versus conventional warfare. The techniques and lessons from the maneuver paradigm are then translated into the business context using a number of examples. Argues that the ongoing contests of wills, deployment of resources, and competitive behaviors seen on the business landscape are comparable with military campaigns. Argues that the application of maneuver techniques and principles will produce swift, economical, innovative, strategic, and sustainable business victories in an environment that is increasingly turbulent and unpredictable. Provides step‐by‐step guidelines for implementing a competitive philosophy that generates organizational excitement, commitment, energy, and innovation. Maneuver theory has spawned much discussion and debate, it has been misinterpreted, it has been touted as the solution to all military problems, and it has been vilified as a “bag of military Doritos – tasty and fun to munch but not very nutritious” (Bolger, 1993). This chapter describes how to operationalize a war‐fighting philosophy that until now has remained elusive in its application.

To show why retail marketing strategists and planners need to develop long‐term relationships capable of building business partnerships based on mutual trust. To show how the relationship marketing principle underpins the implementation of retailing strategy.

A detailed review of the relevant literature, with commentary on the application of principles in practice.

A successful retailing strategy will be embedded within a customer‐driven general business strategy. Marketing managers should plan to develop and sustain long‐term trust‐based working relationships, which take into account organizational and national values. Successful partnership arrangements depend on mutuality and resilience, as well as trust. Marketing intelligence is a vital ingredient in the formulation and implementation of plans to achieve these goals. The “organizational resilience value system” framework proposed here can be used by marketing planners to link organization learning to relationship marketing, and thereby establish a customer relationship management policy that provides the organization with a sustainable competitive advantage.

Next, cross‐industry and cross‐cultural studies might be undertaken, to examine the similarities and differences in retailing strategy formulation and implementation across national boundaries.

Practitioners and academics must collaborate closely, with the aim of developing new insights into procedures and practices for linking organizational learning policy firmly and formally with the development of customer‐driven retail marketing strategies.

A synoptic view of role of marketing intelligence and relationship marketing in the building of trust‐based relationships and partnerships in international retailing, backed by more than 100 references to relevant published literature.

Scenario thinkers and operational managers do not find it easy to communicate with each other – this paper discusses ways in which scenarios can be used in the line units of the organization and the role of strategists and corporate planners in making this bridge. To address these issues, this article is divided into two main sections: (1) making the scenario process manager friendly; and (2) a case study illustrating uses of scenarios by operating managers. It concludes with some implications for corporate planners.

As real estate departments and workplace organisations devote more attention to strategic planning, most of the work has focused on improving performance metrics and developing dashboards to communicate this information clearly and concisely. Yet these steps will take these organisations only part of the way. Once they have this information, they need to devote more time to developing strategies and plans. This review examines one of these activities ‐ developing high‐level occupancy plans. Representatives of the strategy and planning groups at ten leading corporations and the occupancy planning experts at seven service providers and system developers were interviewed for this survey. It was found that most firms continue to complete high‐level occupancy plans with tedious and time‐consuming data‐collection processes and spreadsheet analyses. These organisations could improve efficiency and the success of their plans in two ways: better analysis approaches and better data collection and organisation. This review summarises the best practices identified in these areas.

The topic of forecasting and our (in)ability to predict the future should be regularly revisited as our memories seem incredibly short and forgiving of inaccurate and false predictions, as well as our failure to predict what should have been obvious. Forecasting is a critical stage of the strategizing process. Why are we still getting it wrong?

Using a conceptual approach, this paper warns against placing too much faith in our predictive (in)abilities and attempts to address the question of why we continue to seek out and trust a flawed industry that profits from false prophecy.

Humans have always found comfort in soothsayers and mystics. Where once they came in the guise of tribal witch doctors, today many appear as economists, strategists, and consultants. Our need for security is readily exploited by people claiming to know the future. We receive pleasure from the act of cooperation and therefore prefer to believe rather than disbelieve. We place faith in myths rather than facts, and we fail to see what in hindsight should have been obvious.

This paper acts as a warning. Forecasting is about identifying patterns and themes and designing multiple response scenarios. Myths and magic have no place in the modern business world, and those who claim to “know” the future are really only speculating or lying – no one can “see” the future. Strategists can only reflect on the past, speculate in an informed manner, and design multiple alternative responses. The anomalous event, the pattern breaker, the surprise, will always be with us. The best we can do is to prepare for what might occur, and operate on the basis that just because something has been with us for a long time, it may not be with us forever.

Market‐share analysis focuses on the competitive interrelations between products or brands. Marketing activity may affect the performance of a company's own product and that of its competitors not only within a single time horizon but also over several extended periods. Starting from a static market‐share analysis model, the dynamic relationships of market shares between competitive brands are described by multiplicative competitive interaction (MCI) time‐series models, in which the problem of logical consistency for estimated shares is resolved. A Bayesian shrinkage estimator solution is applied to the further problem of model‐induced collinearity in cross‐differential MCI models. Dynamic elasticity is defined and used to measure the delayed and long‐term effects of marketing mix variables on market shares. The dynamic relationships of future market shares are predicted by means of predictive density. Strategic simulations are conducted under several scenarios for marketing planning. It is argued that the new dynamic model proposed here, applied to daily national or store tracking data, provides useful insights into dynamic competitive relationships in the marketplace, to the benefit of corporate planners, marketing directors, brand managers and retail strategists.

Why do respected planners so often fail to predict seismic events? Here are some reasons, and a better way to plan: scenario planning.