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Why culture and strategy are the key to future CFO and Finance success

By Andy Burrows

I do quite like that saying (originated by Peter Drucker), “culture eats strategy for breakfast!” I’m not quite sure what it means exactly... but it conjures images of tasty eggs, bacon, sausages, and maybe a couple of slices of toast, so it makes me smile!

But what of culture and/or strategy in the Finance function?

I’m going to argue in this article that Finance is increasingly under pressure to change. Or, more positively, we’re presented with an opportunity we should be reaching for more confidently than we are.

And that’s the opportunity to be involved in business decisions, the opportunity to drive business performance through helping to improve performance management.

The irony is that it’s the CFO who often stands in the way of the Finance fulfilling its potential to help the business and create value. And that’s because the CFO often has cultural blind spots and strategic blind spots.

The drivers of change in...

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How to tell if your Finance function is any good

By Andy Burrows

There are many different ways of looking at the performance of a Finance function.

But in this article, I want to start from first principles and definitions.

As with any question of performance, before you can tell how well you’re doing, you have to know “what good looks like”.

How can we tell if we’re doing a good job if we don’t know what the definition of “good” is?

But don’t, at this point, go straight into thinking about how you’d define a good job in Finance! If you do, you’re jumping the gun!

We need one more definition... the general definition of “doing a good job”.

The general definition of “doing a good job” is that you are meeting your objectives, which in turn is defined as making your anticipated progress towards your ultimate goals.

So, you have to know at the outset what your goals and objectives are.

Most people think that these are so obvious that they skip the...

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