The Financial Controller and CFO's Toolkit, 3rd Edition

Chapter 1Getting Your Finance Team Future Ready

OVERVIEW

Many finance teams are far from being future ready. They spend long, frustrated hours working with antiquated error-prone systems—and to make it worse, they follow procedures because they were carried out last month. This chapter will take a brief look at areas the finance team can focus on to become future ready. It also explores how the lean movement affects modern accounting, the importance of Peter Drucker's abandonment, and why we should take Steve Jobs' advice and challenge the status quo.

This book outlines how finance teams can help their organizations by getting their team future ready. By future ready, I mean a finance team that is fast and light on its feet and able to react quickly to events as they unfold. A finance team that is nimble through utilizing world best practices, and is an advanced adopter of leading-edge technologies. Finally, a future-ready finance team embraces modern people practices, abandons the ill-conceived management practices of the past, and is thus able to retain its talented staff.

Many finance teams are far from being future ready. How many finance teams today have:

• Fully embraced all the lean finance team practices?
• An annual planning process that helps their organization prepare for the unexpected?
• Successfully adopted the tried and tested leading-edge technologies available in the twenty-first century?

A BURNING PLATFORM?

Many finance teams spend long frustrated hours ...