What ignited this article? I was talking with some upcoming college graduates from a similar background as myself. They were looking to go into corporate finance/financial planning & analysis (FP&A) after graduating from the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University. I shared with them lessons I learned from 10 years in the finance game.

The CEO walks into the CFO’s office and says, “You need to take more ownership of the customer experience and the professional development within and beyond your team. Even a few years’ ago many CFOs would have thought, and some still might think, is that the beginning of a joke?

Framing is how situations are presented to people. How situations are presented affect the decisions that people make. Framing has a role in the work of FP&A practitioners. FP&A practitioners can work through narrow frames.  Narrow frames can appear on income statements through revenues from specific products, executive salaries, and equipment depreciation.

A definition of quality is “a distinctive characteristic possessed by someone.”  The work of FP&A practitioners focuses on thinking and learning about how financial activities – earning revenues, incurring costs, generating cash flows – affect organizations.  The thinking and learning about this relationship require a mindset that creates results.  

An important characteristic of FP&A practitioners is a commitment to continuous improvement.  There are a number of ways for FP&A practitioners to commit toward improving their work.  For me, one of the ways I commit to continuous improvement is reading books.

In his book THINKING, FAST AND SLOW Daniel Kahneman describes two schools of psychology within the study of decision making. Clinical psychologists advocate the use of methods like heuristics (rules of thumb) and intuition for making decisions. Statistical psychologists, on the other hand, advocate the use of methods like simple algorithms or formulas for making decisions.