As the 4th Industrial revolution makes sizeable impacts on our lives through various sectors like taxis/ride sharing, accommodation, banking, investing and transaction processing etc a group of finance professionals are not just sitting back and watching as this unfolds before them.
By Andrew Codd, Founder and Lead Producer of The Strength In The Numbers Show
The author Andrew Codd is the producer of the Strength in the Numbers Podcast which interviews real finance practitioners to break down their hard-won lessons and deconstruct their practical methods that work on the job and which you won't typically find in textbooks or exams so that we create more influential finance professionals worldwide who solve meaningful problems for their organisations and in return have fun, rewarding and successful careers in finance. Summer, along with the odd rain shower, means that for those of us with lawns, we find ourselves more regularly mowing them, but why do we mow them in the first place, and what can that teach us in FP&A about better influencing others?
Are you an FP&A professional who likes to operate in the detail or do you prefer to see things at a high level? Are you a perfectionist or is near enough good enough? The former is a common interview question for FP&A roles, the latter well I guess we would all like to think we are perfect.
By Thorsteinn Siglaugsson, Consultant / Corporate trainer / Manager
An INSEAD MBA and entrepreneur Thorsteinn has over 20 years of experience in management, consulting and training. He is chairman of Ultima BV, a company specialized in developing driver-based planning and budgeting solutions. He also runs his own consultancy with a focus on improving business performance, using the Beyond Budgeting approach to planning and budgeting, and the Logical Thinking Process methodology for strategy formulation and improvement programs, both in consulting assignments and corporate training. Thorsteinn is a member of the Beyond Budgeting Roundtable and a certified expert in The Logical Thinking Process. The Logical Thinking Process was originally developed by Dr. Eliyahu M. Goldratt, author of bestselling business novel „The Goal“ and pioneer of modern production and process management, as a method to improve decision making in the corporate environment. The purpose of the Logical Thinking Process is to help people make better use of logic and the methods of the natural sciences to analyze complicated situations and formulate strategy.
How many people in your organization love the annual budgeting process? Probably none. The mere mention of the word "budget" raises eyebrows and evokes cynicism.
Many believe that one of the future roles of Finance, and FP&A, specifically, will be to provide real-time, data-driven decision support for the business. This will transform Finance from a mere ‘cost center’ to a ‘profit center’ function, raising its importance within the organization.