Key Postings IV: Business Analysis Foundations
O.K. we've finally combed back thru all the postings and followed up on the promise/threat to collect the various priors together. It turns out there's enough across a range of topics and domains that the "Business Analysis" tables will get split across three seperate posts. Here we're going to focus on the general approach to Enterprise Performance Analysis, specifically five major clusters - or continuing to beat our control system metaphor to death - consoles/dashboards:
1) Enterprise Performance: why it matters and the impact, including tables categorizing various headline companies into the good, the bad and the ugly as well as some interesting commentary from Carl Icahn.
2) Financial Engineering: a key component of the last several years has been under-investment in hiring and capex and the largest investment in buybacks in decades. What's the impacts and implications for earnings outlooks ? And most especially - for long-term performance ?
3) Business Environment: businesses control what's inside their walls and must cope with the externals but, as should be very clear by now since it's the whole point of the dashboard argument, understanding how the wind, waves, and currents are setting is essential.
4) Business Analysis: checklists, blueprints and frameworks along with associted readings and a guide to Warren Buffett's master class on business performance analysis. What are the elements, how do they work together, what should you be looking for and how do you go about looking. Tnink of these as performance blueprints and evaluation templates.
5) Functions and Issues: the enterprise consists of key fucntions like Customer Service, HR or Technology. From time-to-time we'll take a deep dive on a specific function or issue to understand what it is and how it should work vs generally does. Among other things this section includes some interesting work on HR and Innovation as well as Strategy.
In the table below you can think of the postings detailed below as being the ones behind the left-hand column (sorry if there's some formatting problems - it's better after the break):
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| Business Analysis Toolkit Part I: General Analysis | ||||||||||||||||||
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