For example, First Step Cash Management, developed by The Planning Center, in Moline, IL is a web-based program that allows you to put your cash flow into convenient, understandable and manageable buckets for tracking, observation and control.

FORBES: How to Manage Your Personal Cash Flow

Improving visibility, the first step toward energy management, is easier said than done.

FORBES: Evaluating Energy Management Maturity: A Checklist for CIOs

Taking the first step and bringing IT management under in-house control is easier said than done.

FORBES: The Death Of Outsourcing, And Other IT Management Trends

Cranfield School of Management in Britain has gone a step further, becoming the first business school to incorporate a popular online business-strategy game into its MBA programme.

ECONOMIST: News from the schools, February 2007

As a first step, their bad debts are being transferred to four state-approved asset-management companies, although it is not clear what these companies will then do with them.

ECONOMIST: The longer march

He likes to tell people how, in his first job as a Mars management trainee, he learnt that the best way of sweeping up Maltesers from the factory floor was first to step on them.

ECONOMIST: Royal Mail