Does your organization’s strategy seem like a mystery or carefully guarded secret? Can it feel as if people's daily work doesn't relate to the direction where your business wants to go? Are people unable to access and understand your corporate goals easily? If you answered "Yes" to any of these scenarios, chances are that your organization is not as connected as it needs to be.

We’ve all heard the phrase, “Culture Eats Strategy”.  This quote often attributed to Peter Drucker is seared into the minds of many as the reason why Strategy often fails.   But for some reason, I’ve never been able to fully buy into this statement.  Am I alone in this thinking?

Similar to a conductor of an orchestra, the finance team looks at all different functions, allowing some to grow faster at times but never taking eyes off other functions so that every function in the company always performs as one to achieve the best results possible.

Suppose you were asked to distil your entire business strategy into a single graph or visualisation; how would you choose to show it?

Every FP&A professional has an active role to play in business partnering, supporting the leadership team to aid decision making. To enable this, the FP&A team must be positioned to inform the future impact of decisions that are being made now. This requires understanding what the company’s strategy is, where the company is heading, what part your business unit/function play to get there and what are the KPIs on which they are being measured.

In finance, we’re constantly chasing various financial metrics. But focusing on a narrow set of metrics often causes problems. For example, a Market Share growth strategy sounds great, but it often forces you to discount price or significantly increasing acquisition costs. 

As a result, the strategic outcome is often short-lived and can even result in decreased financial performance. What can be done to prevent bad strategy and why are we so surprised each and every time we repeat these same strategic mistakes?