The good news is that companies these days treat cost containment as a discipline and an ongoing process rather than reactively. The not-so-good news is that they tend to focus on minor, low-yield initiatives and on squeezing expense out of their processes.

The growing pressure on CFOs and CMOs to produce tangible results these days is reflected by their increasingly shorter tenures. Of course, revolving-door jobs are not all that they share in common. Accenture's Brian McCarthy and Mike Matheis explain how CFOs and CMOs are together generating business value.

Traditional restructuring efforts, whether in a finance organization or across the enterprise, have always demanded workforce reductions. However, those companies where restructurings truly have impact more often rely on methodologies that don’t disappear once heads have rolled. Anand Sanwal and Sandeep Arora explain how to put your company on the path to continuous optimization.

Having completed 400 acquisitions within the past 20 years, Aon’s new CFO, Christa Davies, says that the company’s finance organization must undergo a top-to-bottom optimization before key objectives can be met.

CFOs can play a key role in developing a realistic, risk-aware performance management strategy to help their organization neutralize threats, exploit opportunities, and avoid nasty surprises.

Authors Bruno Aziza and Joey Fitts cut through the hype and jargon to lay out a road map to business performance management success and a realistic picture of what to expect on the journey.

If you're looking at trimming costs -- and who isn't? -- here are the processes that offer the biggest rewards for the least risk.