Well-designed incentive compensation plans – especially sales commission plans – are an incredibly powerful way to motivate great performance. But designing a great plan is both an art and a science.
Randall Bolten
Randall Bolten is passionate about the importance of presenting financials and other numerical information in a cogent and effective way, and in his current life is the author of Painting with Numbers: Presenting Financials and Other Numbers So People Will Understand You (John Wiley & Sons, 2012).
He is a seasoned financial executive, with many years of directing the financial and other operations of high-technology companies. His experience includes nearly twenty years as a chief financial officer of software companies.
He has held the CFO position at public companies BroadVision and Phoenix Technologies, and at private companies including Arcot Systems, BioCAD, and Teknekron. Before his CFO positions, he held senior financial management positions at Oracle and Tandem Computers.
He received his AB from Princeton University, headed west to earn an MBA at Stanford University, and ended up staying in Silicon Valley.
In addition to writing Painting with Numbers, he currently operates Lucidity, a consulting and executive coaching practice focused on organizing and presenting complex financial information. He divides his work time between Glenbrook, NV and Washington, DC, and maintains an office in Menlo Park, CA.
Author's Articles
You will be considered a great FP&A professional only if you can communicate clearly, effectively, and eloquently. The most basic of those choices is whether a use a table or a graph. To make that choice intelligently, it’s critical that you answer four questions that are described in this article.
Let’s take a look at some of the most messed-up, incomprehensible recent examples of quantation. Not surprisingly, all are graphs. But some come from sources that definitely should know better.
There are so many ways to graph information, and many of them are not just labor-intensive, but cognitively ineffective. But even if you’ve chosen one of the more effective ways of graphing information, also remember that graphs work best when you’re trying to make a single, critically important point.