A Manager's Guide to Creative Cost Cutting

Cisco has done it. Motorola has done it. And now Hewlett-Packard is doing it. Company layoffs are growing as the economy weakens and companies are looking for ways to reduce costs and expand profits. Efforts to improve a company's bottom line can take one of two forms: increasing revenues or decreasing expenses. Increasing revenues is risky. Managers must make assumptions about a host of matters including purchasing patterns, competitors' moves, price resistance, product obsolescence, and manufacturing capabilities. Decreasing expenses, by contrast, is a sure thing. Once an employee is gone, so is his or her salary. This explains why almost all cost cutting efforts we read about involve employee layoffs. But cost cutting can be much more creative than that. A Manager's Guide to Creative Cost Cutting shows managers and business leaders that there are numerous ways to reduce costs without reducing staff. A Manager's Guide to Creative Cost Cutting presents the strategies and creative solutions for cutting both short-term and long-term costs to produce both immediate and continuous results. A practical, hands-on reference, this book shows business leaders and managers how to leverage all resources within their organization to improve profits, reduce costs, and create a better place to work. Filled with engaging examples and efficient techniques to reduce expenses and, thus, expand profits, A Manager's Guide to Creative Cost Cutting; - Presents creative solutions to cutting costs such as eliminating redundant activities - Highlights real-world cases, from Intel's unpaid leave to Goodyear's debt negotiation - Shows how to uncover hidden costs - Identifies the 21 cost-reduction prohibitors Each cost-cutting method covers a two-page spread, for quick and easy reading. The book is organized into two major divisions, and each division has several parts. Each part contains a variety of two-page cost-cutting methods. There is also a closing section on what not to cut. In this day of company layoffs and a weakening economy, managers and business leaders have the seemingly impossible objective of improving the bottom line and reducing costs - without killing morale. A Manager's Guide to Creative Cost Cutting makes this goal possible with the strategies and tools managers need to set the plans in motion.

About the Author :
David Young is professor of accounting and control at Boston University's School of Management and a principal in The Crimson Group, Inc., a firm specializing in customized in-house management education programs. From 1986-1991, he was chair of the Department of Accounting, and from 1989-1993, he was director of the Accounting MBA Program. Since joining BU in 1985, he has taught in the undergraduate, graduate, and executive programs, including the Accounting MBA Program, the Executive MBA Program, and the Boston Leadership Academy. He has been nominated 4 times for BU's prestigious Metcalf Award for teaching excellence. He is the co-author of Management Control in Nonprofit Organizations, which is used extensively throughout the U.S. and abroad. He has lectured and taught extensively in Europe, Latin America, Japan, and the Middle East, and has served as a consultant on management control system design to a wide variety of organizations. His consulting clients include the American Arbitration Association, Arthur D. Little, The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, CIGNA Corporation, New York City Bureau of the Budget, and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Professor Young earned his doctorate from the Harvard Business School.