Recently Heather Boushey spoke before the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Ways and Means regarding the effects of tax policy on the U.S. manufacturing sector. Boushey stressed the importance of the manufacturing sector to the prosperity of the U.S. economy, and gave her recommendations on how Congress can support manufacturing. One of the key items that Boushey highlights in her recommendations is investment in R&D and the R&E tax credit.

"To support manufacturing, I recommend that this Congress focus on a few key items:

• Pass comprehensive business tax reform that both eliminates loopholes and inefficient business tax expenditures without disadvantaging domestic manufacturing. Currently, loopholes allow companies to avoid paying U.S. taxes by artificially shifting their profits offshore. Closing these loopholes by adopting strong provisions to prevent base erosion and will promote job growth in the United States and insure businesses are both competitive and fairly taxed.
• Find a fiscally responsible way to make the research and experimentation, or R&E, tax credit permanent in order to boost and attract domestic investment in research and development, or R&D, from the private sector. Studies have shown that the R&E tax credit stimulates as much research and development investment as a direct subsidy and that the social returns on R&D are greater than returns for private investors who finance R&D. The Obama tax proposal finances the credit exclusively through business tax reform.
• Introduce a minimum tax on foreign earnings to prevent production from going to tax havens overseas. This would also ease the tax code's current bias towards foreign, as opposed to domestic, investment and level the playing field among competing businesses." 

Contact Karim Solanji at 281-558-7100 or KSolanji@ParadigmLP.com to learn more about an R&D Tax Credit study.

Execution is Critical to the Customer Experience

"In any industry, and given identical market conditions, there are always 5% of companies that outperform the competition. They're not lucky - they're better at planning and execution. Having solid systems in place for both garners measurable results in terms of employee engagement, customer experience, and therefore your bottom line.

Is developing talent an organizational imperative at your company? If not, you're undoubtedly missing opportunities to convert your customer base into effective and committed brand evangelists. An organization is always a reflection of its leadership. In his book The Breakthrough Company Keith McFarland writes, "the best way for a leader to get the right people on the bus is to create a bus worth riding."

In Jim Collins' newest research book, he characterizes 10 companies that outperformed the general stock market by 32 times as being "fanatical about discipline." Both Collins and McFarland also state emphatically that these top CEO s use outside experts as "scaffolding" to help in specific important business areas.

Are you doing all you can to systemize and incentive your planning and execution? Or are you getting in your own way?"

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John Lankford is Master Business Advisor of Premier Development Solutions. He can be reached at (734) 454-5667 or John@PremierDevelopmentSolutions.com.