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Blog Home > Executive Perspective > Plan To Grow Talk: 7 Principles of The Agile CFO

Plan To Grow Talk: 7 Principles of The Agile CFO

December 2, 2020 | Jonathan Paul   |

Table of Contents

What is Plan To Grow?

Plan To Grow is a free digital learning and event platform for the office of finance, operations professionals and business leaders.

Jumpstart your growth journey with CPE-accredited talks and tutorials, live and interactive events, best practices, professional development, peer insights and more—live and on demand. Learn, connect and grow your own way at Plan To Grow.

Finance Boring? Never.

Is finance exciting? Absolutely, according to Vena's Chief Financial Officer, Darrell Cox, in his new talk on Plan To Grow, 7 Principles of The Agile CFO. The finance team plays a pivotal role in building out an organization's growth journey, leading it through change and determining its future success. Sprinkle in some disruption and a dash of uncertainty and it's pretty obvious that finance leaders are never bored. But what turns a finance professional into an Agile finance leader?

Recap
The Ultimate Guide to the New Corporate Budgeting
  • Your corporate budget is the tactical side of your business plan, ensuring resources are allocated in a way that sets your business up to operate effectively, meet its growth goals and keep up with ongoing market demands.
  • Aligning your budget with your business strategy and KPI and goal setting is critical to its success.
  • Most budgeting processes take either a top-down or bottom-up approach, either beginning with a set amount and allocating resources across departments (top-down budgeting), or having departments prepare budgets and request funds based on their needs (bottom-up budgeting).
  • Zero-based budgeting, driver-based budgeting and predictive budgeting can help facilitate and drive your budgeting process, depending on your business demands and the goals you want to achieve.
  • Rolling forecasts can help maintain visibility into recent performance while better projecting future needs—allowing you to remain agile to new trends and requirements while continuing to move the planning horizon forward.

The difference between a traditional finance professional and an agile one depends largely on how they view their role and measure their impact. Agile CFOs are trusted business advisors--storytellers who use their finance superpower to bring numbers to life with meaning. They don't just mitigate risk, they optimize performance. They look forward, not backward. And they harness change to build better businesses.

In this on-demand talk, as part of the Transformational Leadership series on Plan To Grow, Darrell outlines the seven principles that guide Agile CFOs:

1. Be Human

2. Be a Storyteller

3. Think Big

4. Think Forward

5. Embrace and Own Change

6. Have a Bias to Action

7. Embrace Technology 
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About the Author

Jonathan Paul, Senior Director, Content & Communications, Vena

As Senior Director of Content and Communications, Jonathan Paul leads content strategy and execution at Vena, overseeing the development of owned media and content experiences that help finance professionals fuel business health, as well as their personal and professional growth. When he's not dreaming up new ways to offer audiences value through content creation, Jonathan loves to lose himself in an immersive video game with a solid narrative, lose golf balls pretending to be good at golf and lose time dreaming about time travel.

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