Evaluate nonprofits by starting with the goal

By rickColosimo / November 11, 2009 /

This recent memo from the president of Guidestar.org moved way beyond the typical self-congratulatory non-news and sales announcements and started off with a bang: start with these two simple and profound questions: what is your organization’s mission and how are you trying to accomplish it? It’s amazing how many organizations can’t answer this. I read…

What data is needed for an alternative fee structure?

By rickColosimo / June 16, 2009 /

We recently wrote about alternative fee structures for large law firms and their clients. A post from the WSJ law blog on Kirkland & Ellis’s foray into the field recognizes a point we’ve made before: some companies (and indeed, most law firms) don’t have good information about their usage of legal services. Without solid data-driven…

Can buybacks make sense in a crisis?

By rickColosimo / June 9, 2009 / Comments Off on Can buybacks make sense in a crisis?

Just recently, we published another post regarding stock buybacks and how the math is the math: you can change your risk profile, but in any case, at some point the usage of cash to buy stock makes sense as a low-cost way of returning value to shareholders. Sure, there are commentators who complain that a…

More MSFT cash-usage ideas….

By rickColosimo / June 2, 2009 /

[NB: this post was started quite some time ago, and it recently re-surfaced in our ‘drafts’ folder. Sorry for the delay, but we believe that the underlying issues are still interesting and how companies use cash is more, not less, relevant in a turbulent economy.] Business Week ran a short piece profiling the investment analysis…