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Instead of Best Practice, Next Practice

A strategy expert encourages finance chiefs to cut back on benchmarking and focus on the future.

March 10, 2010

For the most part, CFOs have forgotten an oft-repeated lesson learned in grade school: keep your eyes on your own work and don't pay attention to what your peers are doing.

Of course, companies can't afford not to keep tabs on their competitors. However, they may be spending too much time benchmarking their current performance against other companies rather than working on the future viability of their businesses, according to Vijay Govindarajan, a professor at Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College, who spoke earlier this week at the 2010 CFO Rising conference in Orlando. Read more...

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