You will be considered a great FP&A professional only if you can communicate clearly, effectively, and eloquently. The most basic of
Let’s take a look at some of the most messed-up, incomprehensible recent examples of quantation. Not surprisingly, all are graphs
By Randall Bolten, longtime Silicon Valley CFO, author of "Painting with Numbers: Presenting Financials and Other Numbers So People Will Understand You” and adjunct professor at U.C. Berkeley Extension.
RANDALL BOLTEN grew up in Washington, D.C., the son of a CIA intelligence officer and a history professor. He is passionate about the importance of presenting financials and other numerical information in a cogent and effective way, and in his current life is the author of Painting with Numbers: Presenting Financials and Other Numbers So People Will Understand You (John Wiley & Sons, 2012).
He is a seasoned financial executive, with many years directing the financial and other operations of high-technology companies. His experience includes nearly twenty years as a chief financial officer of software companies.
He has held the CFO position at public companies BroadVision and Phoenix Technologies, and at private companies including Arcot Systems, BioCAD, and Teknekron. Before his CFO positions, he held senior financial management positions at Oracle and Tandem Computers.
He received his AB from Princeton University, headed west to earn an MBA at Stanford University, and ended up staying in Silicon Valley.
In addition to writing Painting with Numbers, he currently operates Lucidity, a consulting and executive coaching practice focused on organizing and presenting complex financial information. He divides his work time between Glenbrook, NV and Washington, DC, and maintains an office in Menlo Park, CA.
There are so many ways to graph information, and many of them are not just labor-intensive, but cognitively ineffective. But
In my last article, I listed four questions you should ask yourself, and the order you should ask them in
When the graph is the right way to present your FP&A information, several important questions should be asked.
“A good sketch is better than a long speech…” a quote often attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte. Companies are
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