Strategic Finance: Changes and Challenges for a World Class Finance Organization

One clear lesson of the past few years is that “business as usual” is no longer enough. Change is a constant feature and businesses need to consider how they need to adapt their organizations to develop and maintain their competitive advantage
The global crisis of the pandemic generated a reactive change across all industries – many businesses adopted pivoting strategies to “keep the lights on”, whether that involved introducing remote working programs, developing new routes to market or responding to changes in customer or market behaviors.
But “reactive” change is typically the most stressful – the most pressing on resources across the business and, often, the least successful. There is a need for business to adopt a more “pro-active” response to the changing work arena and to identify strategies to deal with these changes before they arise.
Finance is not exempt from this – indeed, finance transformation initiatives can and should form part of the organizational response to the changing environment.
This leads to key questions for any Finance Leader
• Have we considered the changes which might occur in our environment, and do we have the tools to identify them?
• What are the finance and organizational implications of the ESG objectives?
• How can we become a more Agile leader, team and organization?
• What do we have to do to deliver a World-Class Finance Function?