The Ledger
Curated content foranalytical business leaders
Tag Archives: CFO
Give Purpose to Your Data to Drive Value
July 25, 2020
This McKinsey Digital article highlights the eight elements leadership teams should leverage to exploit their data analytics practices and make more informed, and ultimately more profitable decisions. “Performance — not pristine data sets, interesting patterns, or killer algorithms — is ultimately the point. Advanced data analytics is a means to an end. It’s a discriminating tool to identify, and then implement, a value-driving answer.”
The Modern CFO is a Valued Business Partner
July 21, 2020
“In the last decade in particular, CFOs have faced a raft of changing regulations and enhanced governance requirements. They have had to get increasingly comfortable with new technology and automation, and they have needed to step into the limelight as prominent communicators and influencers. The modern CFO has fully embraced change to become a valued strategic partner, able to navigate complex organizations and lead an increasingly dispersed workforce.”
Read the entire article at Strategic Finance Magazine >
CFO Crisis Leadership – Open a War Room
July 19, 2020
Managing during a crisis takes on a different set of priorities, according to a six-time CFO. “The first — respond as effectively as you can to short-term needs while preserving cash and liquidity. Second, build engagement between finance and procurement teams. And third, ensure efficiency and be more responsive to quickly changing demands and shifting priorities.”
Industrial Companies: Control Indirect Costs to Gain Profits
July 13, 2020
“Maintaining profits and growth is going to be very difficult. However, regardless of the larger economic environment, companies can take actions that can help. Specifically, many companies are seeing the share of general and administrative (G&A) costs increase. From 2008 to 2015, G&A expenses grew more slowly than revenues (41.8 percent versus 61 percent). Since then, the trend has reversed, with G&A expenses rising faster—15.4 percent compared with 6.0 percent revenue growth. Traditional cost-optimization approaches are yielding diminishing returns; if revenues begin to fall, then, so will profits.”
Risk Strategy for CFOs in a COVID-19 World
July 7, 2020
CFOs are continually evaluating their risk exposure as unpredictable becomes the new normal. A recent survey from Euler Hermes exposed that 90+% of CFOs predict that the risk strategy in their organizations will change, with significant challenges in managing cash flow. “Many CFOs have a gap in their financial analysis when it comes to customer and customer behavior, particularly at such an unpredictable time as now.”
Productive Relationships are Key to CFO Success
July 3, 2020
With business disruptions mounting and the COVID-19 crisis continuing to impact companies, CFOs should hone their leadership skills in three areas. According to a recent publication from The Wharton School of Business – “As leadership advisors to C-suite executives, boards, and investors, we have found that successful leaders do three things well: They have the right Priorities, the right people (Who), and the right Relationships to achieve results.” The study identifies which two CFOs tend to do well, and which one falls short.
McKinsey: Data Governance is Critical to Capturing Value Through Analytics
June 10, 2020
“Without quality-assuring governance, companies not only miss out on data-driven opportunities; they waste resources. Data processing and cleanup can consume more than half of an analytics team’s time, including that of highly paid data scientists, which limits scalability and frustrates employees. Indeed, the productivity of employees across the organization can suffer: respondents to our 2019 Global Data Transformation Survey reported that an average of 30 percent of their total enterprise time was spent on non-value-added tasks because of poor data quality and availability.”
Employ Strategies to Turn Around Business Performance
June 10, 2020
“Explore strategic options under a “no-constraint rule”. Many finance business partners were not able to get the best ideas out of their key internal stakeholders because many gave strategic options vis-à-vis the resources the business had. Suggestions for turning around the operations become constrained by the resources these stakeholders thought they had or could deploy at their disposal. It’s important to encourage key stakeholders to “free their mind” and consider the turnaround strategy as if there were no resource constraints. This encourages them to think beyond the company’s financial position at that moment.” C.F. Wong, ACMA, CGMA
Nine Key Traits from CFOs at Efficient Growth Companies
June 8, 2020
A recent Gartner survey of CFOs have identified nine traits CFOs should implement for better performance during a crisis including fighting scope creep, protecting costs that support competitive advantages, and using a mix of budget models to identify the activities that truly deliver value.
