Financial Excellence With Game Changers, Presented By Sap

The Buzz 1: In his 2007 book “The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable”, author and former options trader Nassim Nicholas Taleb focuses on the extreme impact of rare and unpredictable outlier events—and the human tendency to find simplistic explanations for these events, retrospectively. He calls this the Black Swan theory. The Buzz 2: “If you ever do have to heed a forecast, keep in mind that its accuracy degrades rapidly as you extend it through time.” The Buzz 3: “We see the obvious and visible consequences, not the invisible and less obvious ones. Yet those unseen consequences…generally are more meaningful.” Gone are the days when, as a whole, Planning & Analysis for the office of the CFO and the enterprise could be ‘just OK.’ With black swan events becoming the norm, requiring guidance and scenario modeling, FP&A can no longer wait on gathering data from convoluted spreadsheets and uncollaborative business units. Yes, the pressure is on the CFO to deliver highly credible plans