CFO strategies for Growth

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What skills and capabilities do you see becoming essential for finance

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professionals to drive

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future growth strategies within the really industrial?

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I think there's a lot of technical skills that I've talked about a lot around

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leveraging AI

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and data analysis skills, which is great. One thing just to help draw the

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comparison is early

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in my career, I actually did have a boss who presented business partnering to

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me as, you know,

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you find out, so you have the facts and the data. You can share the data with

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the business

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and then you leave it up to them to make the decision. And, you know, that was

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might have been

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true sort of 20, 30 years ago, but, you know, we've come a long way since then,

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and actually today,

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well, the business wants your opinion and you actually have to be there driving

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the business

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decisions to help govern the business. So I think one element that I'm still

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seeing in development

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in a lot of finance folks is play first principles thinking and some of those

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soft kind of commercial

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competencies. So we learn to focus on process and, you know, check the boxes

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for audit and things

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like that early in your career, but actually you need to be thinking about like

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, why do we need

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to do this process? Like, why does a transaction flow look like this? Why does

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do these governance

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rules exist? And then amend those to what's appropriate for the business as

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opposed to just

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following a checklist for the sake of it. Yeah, a lot of that first principles

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thinking,

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asking the why questions is really important. Right. And once you're able to

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master that within your

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finance functional domain, it's quite an easy skill to then transfer when you

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're speaking to other

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business counterparts. Why does this pricing structure exist? Why is the

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product built this way?

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You know, why do you think this is the right commercial strategy to tackle the

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market? That

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soft competency really needs to be ingrained in finance professionals earlier

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in their career.