The Ledger
Curated content foranalytical business leaders
Tag Archives: strategic finance
CFO Journal: Take Five: Steps to Building a Strategically Adaptive Enterprise
February 24, 2022
“Companies characterized by nimbleness, scalability, optionality, and stability can respond opportunistically to environmental shifts and navigate periods of disruption and crisis better than their competitors. Enterprises with a high capacity for change more consistently achieve superior financial performance and valuations compared with others in their industry. Superior capabilities for change enable exponential enterprises to adapt advantageously despite challenging operating conditions, sustaining their ability to win and to deliver value to stakeholders.”
Harvard Business Review: 3 Strategic Options to Deal with Inflation
January 20, 2022
“Inflation in 2022 is a different story. Managers now enjoy a level of market visibility and agility that their predecessors could have hardly imagined even one generation ago. Managers have much better data and more sophisticated tools to analyze and turn this data into a useful information to support decisions. It’s an ideal time for them to treat inflation as a strategic opportunity rather than a tactical challenge, and to choose from a better set of options. Instead of worrying about how much more to charge their customers, they should devote their resources to figuring out how and why they should be charging them.”
CFO Magazine: 2022 Outlook: CFOs’ 4 Realms of Risk
January 18, 2022
“Corralling all the data required to get better at planning and forecasting and timely decision-making will not be a piece of cake. A Harvard Business Review Analytic Services study found that many finance teams struggle with accurately preparing, reconciling, and accessing high volumes of information; integrating recent or real-time data into analyses; and analyzing data, forming recommendations, and communicating them.”
CFO Journal: Talent, Performance, Growth: CFOs’ Top Priorities for 2022
January 11, 2022
“To improve financial performance and boost their companies’ bottom lines, CFOs indicate that they plan to use a range of levers, such as increasing margins, sharpening EBITDA, increasing efficiencies, managing profitability, and hitting transformational milestones. Pricing is another lever they intend to utilize, including to navigate inflation. In fact, more than three-fourths (76%) of CFOs note their organizations will raise prices for a substantial portion of their products and services to offset inflation.”
CFO Magazine: A CFO Action Plan for 2022
January 6, 2022
“Providing accurate reporting and insightful data, monitoring and managing cash flow, and developing strategic plans for growth (with contingency plans for setbacks) has never been more critical. Now is also the time to revisit organizational and cost structures, identifying opportunities to streamline, cut costs, and protect the business.”
CFO Journal: What Makes Transformations Work?
November 19, 2021
“It means rejecting the myth that transformation is “an event with a start and end, whereby organizations migrate from one steady state to another as opposed to a continuous process of adapting to a highly volatile, ambiguous and uncertain environment shaped by multiple, overlapping disruptions.””
SF Magazine: Leverage Procurement to Build Resilience
September 1, 2021
“Statistically speaking, three-quarters of the incurred external costs of any business start with suppliers. It varies by sector, and different businesses have different needs and purchase requirements. The guiding principle remains the same, with the vast majority of Fortune 500 companies all incurring far greater external costs than internal ones, making effective supply-chain management an asset to the finance function.”
SF Magazine: Contract Manufacturing for OEM CFOs
June 17, 2021
“The CFO’s team should be involved in all outsourcing decisions, including CMO selection and management. Throughout the selection process, the CFO provides leadership and a framework for evaluating decisions and expected results from a cash and operational risk perspective. Perhaps most importantly, finance professionals help evaluate costs, calculate what-if scenarios, and analyze the risks and rewards of different production or logistics options…The CFO identifies relevant costs, drilling down into details such as inbound freight, labor, overhead, capital, and inventory.”
SF Magazine: CFO to CFO: How Finance Leads Change Management
June 7, 2021
“Technology is at the heart of what’s needed to deliver the change. Step back and ask the question, “What is it that is critically important in any business for enabling transformational change from a data and analytics perspective?” The answer would be access to accurate and granular data, along with timely and insightful reporting. Technology today has solutions and tools that allow for the efficient management and processing of the vast data pools that exist across disparate systems.”
