Over the years Finance professionals, whether having gone through business school or as part of their accounting training, have been taught and introduced to various economic concepts and mental models that if applied correctly can help create more value for our organisations and help them be more successful. These tools and models I refer to…

In a previous article I suggested that an effective vision, as much for finance professionals as the organisations we support, starts and ends with value creation for the relevant stakeholders, which is the only reason for any business to exist. Relevant stakeholders can be found in the 4Cs diagram and can be those customers, company owners, communities…

There’s an old saying: “Where there is no vision the people perish.” PROVERBS 29 VERSE 18 Which means that there’s two types of vision for finance professionals, there are those who have no vision and so are held back in their careers and struggling to make a meaningful impact with their organisations; and then there…

One of my favourite parables is that of the broken window fallacy which was first expressed by the French economist, Frederic Bastiat and it constantly reminds me in Finance whilst although we generally think about preventing things getting broken we sometimes have to step back and consider to multiple perspectives since breaking things might actually…

The Finance profession grew out of the need to preserve business value by recording transactions and safeguarding the value of company assets, nowadays our organisations are looking to us to not just preserve value, that’s a given, we’re now being asked to create value just to remain relevant and keep our seat at the table….

There’s an old Irish song that warns of the prison ships lying empty in the bay and this serves as a precursor the importance of incentives and how Finance professionals can use them to our advantage to change organisational behaviour of even unscrupulous people. For instance during the 18th century when ship captains took on…

Finance professionals have always known the value of the word integrity, in fact it is one of our strengths, but nowadays it is probably one of the most abused words in the English language. It has become the new word for corporate values, it has become the word to express the fact how good a…

Currently it’s summer in the Northern hemisphere, and the sunnier conditions along with the odd rain shower means that for those of us with lawns we find ourselves more regularly mowing them but why do we mow them in the first place and what can that teach us in Finance about better influencing others? The…

In my previous article we discussed the Trust Equation and how individuals and organisations with High Trust relationships could achieve a Trust Dividend whereas Low Trust environments were more like having a Trust Tax. So as a finance professional how can you start to build out these High Trust encounters? The great thing about being…

Finance teams have been around since the first organisations were established, around 3000 BC in ancient Mesopotamia, because they knew about one big thing that drove and accelerated value better than anything else, which other functions and teams sometimes forget. This is why organisations then, and even those today, need a Finance team. So what…