Ask mostly any CFO, and he or she will tell you that they are very involved in operations. But often such involvement is like having a second, lower-paying job: you can't afford to divert too much focus away from your top breadwinner.

China is evolving from an export-driven manufacturing economy to a more balanced consumer-driven developed economy, and its logistics landscape is under pressure to adapt, according to new research by Jones Lang LaSalle. China's evolution has driven three key trends: the rise of the domestic middle class, rising wages and diminished cost advantages in manufacturing, as well as the rapid development of domestic infrastructure. And these trends are creating long-term opportunities for U.S. companies.

Customer relationship management has had a great impact on the social media revolution. Or was it the other way around? Of the many types of software solutions catering to businesses, CRM software has been the most attuned to the rise of social platforms.

Project management offices fail to help most companies reduce IT cost or improve performance, according to new research from The Hackett Group Inc. In fact, companies with high utilization of PMOs see materially higher IT costs while also failing to deliver projects with higher ROI or better on-time and on-budget performance. The research also found that companies have significantly reduced their use of PMOs over the past three years, in part due to their inability to positively impact performance.

A Chinese vocational school sent five 15-year-old boys to assemble Sony PlayStations at a Foxconn manufacturing plant in China, where the legal age to do such work is 16.

Currently, most global companies are operating in a two-speed world, yet this scenario was not on the drawing board when today's leaders were rising through the ranks. The length of the economic malaise in mature markets and the sustained growth of emerging markets have jumbled the deck for them.

Don't give up on China, despite its short-term political and economic difficulties. So says Ted Fishman, author of "China, Inc., How the Rise of the Next Superpower Challenges America and the World" and former Chicago Mercantile Exchange trader.

Ireland was one of the fastest-growing European economies (though briefly it was also one of the most expensive), but suffered a major collapse starting in 2008. However, today its costs are rapidly coming back into line and Irish manufacturing companies are again becoming competitive.

The U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency announced that it has "formalized and expanded" its Air Cargo Advance Screening pilot program, which enables cargo executives to send and receive advance security filing data for their consignments.