Risk and Performance, Transformation & Continuous Improvement

Following on from our earlier discussions on Finance Transformation, process change and continuous improvement, I coincidentally hit on three very interesting and relevent items in my mailbox.

In the first mail that caught my eye, Gartner Group, the well regarded technology analysts, had just released a report entitled 'Developing Key Risk Indicators: Developing Causal Chains to Link Risk to Business Outcomes'. I was intrigued by this line of thought, in no small part because it reflects my own experience and thinking, as well as some of the insights in our webcast I described in my previous post. I believe there is a lot of valuable thinking and action that will come from a better appreciation that risk and performance are two sides of the same coin, not different topics to be managed by different organisational units with different performance measures!

Finance Transformation: The Next Chapter

I have just finished an interesting discussion with Vagn Hansen, former VP FInance, Finance Operations at Shell and David Mitchell, Partner - Finance & Performance Management at Kurt Salmon.

The discussion and presentation were an exploration of our respective and collective experiences in large scale change, especially that Finance variety typically referred to as 'transformation'. Some key insights came out of the discussion.

Business Performance at a macro level – The Economic Wonder that is Germany

In the last three weeks I attended two very different networking events. The first, European Technology Forum aka ‘Snowball’ in Gstaad and the second, the Deutsche Bank Business Leaders event with Dr Josef Ackermann in London.

‘Snowball’ is very relaxed affair in the mountains with some 52 entrepreneurs, business owners and investors from around the world. Some great people, sharp minds (during the day, anyway!), fascinating experiences and some genuinely thought provoking content sessions and discussions intermingled with some skiing and dining. As an aside, there was talk about renaming the event as the World Technology Forum to better align with the geographic spread of the attendees. There was some consternation however at the requisite acronym which would be WTF!