CFO Magazine: A 10-Step Playbook for New PE-Backed CFOs

“In addition, 91% of sponsors said their PE-backed CFOs weren’t meeting their “manage the business” expectations. Managing the business is defined as turning clean data into analysis and then into insights to make informed business decisions. It’s a tough task, no doubt, but it’s still very much foundational to the CFO role.”

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CFO Journal: Take Five: Steps to Building a Strategically Adaptive Enterprise

“Finance leaders now confront an environment where both the speed and complexity of change forces them to make choices in shorter time frames and disruption has become a continuous, compounding condition. As discussed in the first article in this series, exponential enterprises with a high ability to win reinforced by a high capacity for change outflank their rivals in creating and sustaining superior valuations and performance. These two characteristics enable businesses to respond quickly and advantageously to accelerating technological, social, and geopolitical change while also remaining on-track to achieve long-term strategic ambitions.”

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McKinsey & Company: Solving the Paradox of Growth and Profitability in E-Commerce

“Retailers that overemphasize e-commerce revenues could actually be damaging their prospects. Indeed, digital growth is not enough; only profitable digital growth will create value.”

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CFO Journal: Moving Enterprise Business Planning Into Action

“CFOs are uniquely positioned to lead the coordination needed for an EBP program, given their experience partnering with operations, manufacturing, sales and marketing, engineering, the back office, and external allies. A key component of any EBP program is establishing consistent and current data from all sources—another goal that most CFOs share—that can drive advanced scenario modeling and predictive analytics to produce timely and more accurate plans.”

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FP&A Trends: How to Become a Compelling Storyteller

“More than half of the participants responded that they are still spending the majority of their time on data reconciliation and reporting. About 35% are spending the majority of time on analysing and interpreting data,  while only 9% spends most of their time on storytelling and business partnering.”

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Forbes: Why Today’s CFO Must Embrace Enterprise Strategy

“Aspiring finance professionals need to be agile and curious. We need critical thinkers who understand business value drivers and are adept at allocating resources towards the activities that will drive the highest returns on investment. People in financial roles need to be more tech savvy than ever to leverage automation and eliminate mundane transactional work. By creating “time to think,” finance professionals can deliver more timely, actionable insights to the business.”

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CFO Journal: Moving Enterprise Business Planning Into Action

“Scenario modeling and predictive analytics are critical components of EBP’s one-model approach. For example, semiconductor demand is subject to volatility, as the need for chips must react to demand from multiple industries. Moreover, supply is constrained by the availability of critical inputs. Robust scenarios provide management with a ready course of action as incidents occur. Predictive analytics can also leverage external macro data to better inform those scenarios.”

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SF Magazine: The CFO Playbook

“Many CFOs are hesitant to shift business models because of the negative impact on short-term revenue. To calm this fear, finance teams should use scenario modeling and financial planning tools to analyze the potential cost of the immediate shift vs. the revenue potential over time. By modeling different scenarios, offerings, and market conditions, company leadership can see what investments make the most financial sense and have the highest potential for continuous revenue growth.”

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Deloitte: Crunch Time Series for CFOs: Finance 2025 Revisited

This Deloitte report re-visits their 8 finance trend predictions for CFOs in 2025:

“Finance will, as predicted, focus more on service, analytics, and business insights, all of which mandate new capabilities. CEOs will continue turning to Finance for an integrated view of business performance, as they did
during the pandemic. Financial planners will need to bake operational components into financial models to assess potential top- and bottom-line impacts—even as the goalposts keep moving.”

Read More at Deloitte >