The article is titled Mergers & Executions. It’s not a typo. You might think it should read Mergers & Acquisitions (M&A). However, the fact is, most M&A activities could do better with execution from the pre-acquisition to the post-acquisition stages. This work will draw on practiced methods for companies to execute value-creating, not value-destroying acquisitions, with the guidance of their Financial Planning & Analysis (FP&A) teams.

Companies reducing the size of their Financial Planning & Analysis (FP&A) finance teams are cutting valuable resources in the misbelief that is not a priority. That’s untrue. So what’s the role of FP&A in today’s company anyway?

According to Google's Chief Economist, Dr. Hal Varian, "The ability to take data—to be able to understand it, to process it, to extract value from it, to visualize it, to communicate it— that’s going to be a hugely important skill in the next decades."

Several forces will reshape the way finance will be organized in seven to 10 years. Share your vision and help create alternative models for the future look of the finance function.

The great thing about being in FP&A is that we get to observe in real life and hear stories about many interactions, good and bad, between many colleagues across the business.

A twenty nine year old newly minted FP&A manager for an NYSE listed public company sat in utter bewilderment across CEO and CFO, as the CFO said to CEO, “the most important position in his department is FP&A”.