Following a series of corporate scandals, legislators have company executives in their sights, and are arming themselves with ever-greater regulatory firepower. All agree that good governance is essential — but must not be allowed to stifle business performance. Beyond Governance develops the concept of Enterprise Governance, an emerging framework which unites Performance, Conformance and Corporate Responsibility and shows how addressing all of these areas in a concerted, coordinated fashion will deliver value to the organisation and its stakeholders. In particular, it focuses on the skills, processes and systems that are required to deliver excellence in each of these areas, giving readers a practical insight into the issues and an understanding of best practice in each area. Many firms are rethinking their finance activities in the light of e-commerce, shared service centres, business intelligence technology and cost pressures. Beyond Governance explores the challenge of building a modern, flexible finance function, describing the emerging role of the new CFO and how finance professionals should respond to this new business environment. ”

Hollywood special effects offer spectacular creations or re-creations that make claims to our attention on the grounds of their “incredible-seeming reality”. They can appear both “incredible” and “real”, their appeal based on their ability to “convince” — to appear real in terms such as detail and texture — and on their status as fabricated spectacle, to be admired as such. At a seemingly very different end of the audio-visual media spectrum, “reality” television offers the spectacle of, supposedly, the “real” itself, a “reality” that ranges from the banality of the quotidian to intense interpersonal engagements (two extremes experienced in Big Brother, for example). The two also overlap, however, nowhere more clearly and jarringly than in the ultimate “spectacle of the real”, the destruction of the World Trade Center in New York, live television coverage of which evoked constant comparison with big-screen fictional images. Impressions of the “real” or the “authentic” (or the authentic-seeming) are valued as forms of media spectacle in a number of other contemporary media forms.