Open Response to PwC and the UK Financial Reporting Council

David Philips, whose Corporate Reporting Group at PriceWaterhouseCoopers has stuck with the challenges of reporting year in and year out, just posted about a new report from the Financial Reporting Council (FRC) called Louder than Words: Principles and actions for making corporate reports less complex and more relevant. In support of the report, PwC has written a letter suggesting concrete action plans to make that happen.

I started writing a response on his blog but it got a little too big for a comment so I moved it here. Regular readers have seen the data before (especially in my recent post on goodwill) so please excuse the repetition. Read more

America’s Continuing Failure to Innovate

The very first blog post of my career was at Denise Caruso’s Hybrid Vigor that I called The Intangible Imperitive.  The post was inspired by an article about how Brazil’s farmers were out-innovating those in the U.S. I felt frustrated that we were not stepping up to global competition. Since then, I have blogged about similar concerns for the automotive industry. I had the same feeling when I read a story yesterday in the New York Times entitled China Far Outpaces U.S. in Cleaner Coal-Fired Plants:

By adopting “ultra-supercritical” technology, which uses extremely hot steam to achieve the highest efficiency, and by building many identical power plants at the same time, China has cut costs dramatically through economies of scale. It now can cost a third less to build an ultra-supercritical power plant in China than to build a less efficient coal-fired plant in the United States. Read more

Automobiles and The New Sputnik Moment - Will America Leverage its Intellectual Capital?

One of the lead stories in this morning’s New York Times announces that:

Chinese leaders have adopted a plan aimed at turning the country into one of the leading producers of hybrid and all-electric vehicles within three years, and making it the world leader in electric cars and buses after that.

This comes at a moment when American auto makers are practically on the floor, still breathing due only to government subsidies. Yet I hope that Americans hear this announcement and think, “why not  us?” Read more