If there’s anything that being a reporter covering the CFO beat has taught me, it’s that the pace of change will never be any slower than it is right now. Put more simply: Everything we thought we knew about business and the economy is changing faster and faster.
Keeping on top of it all is tough. Quick, what’s more important: technology or supply chain? Talent or soft skills? Cybersecurity or ESG? Ha, trick question. They’re equally important, and prioritizing coverage can induce a bit of reportorial vertigo.
These stories shifted my vantage point and shaped how I looked at the world. I hope they did the same for our readers.
Just do it. Before coming to CFO Brew, I was a reporter at an accounting trade group, writing for several of their finance and accounting publications. So I had written a lot about digital transformation over the last few years from a practical, implementation viewpoint: why it was important, how to start a transformation, which digital tools finance professionals needed to be using, which mistakes to avoid.
This story on Nike’s digital transformation of their supply chain showed me the what of digital transformation as a strategic business driver. Over the course of reporting this story, I came to understand that transformation is not just about adding RPA to accounts payable, but is really changing value propositions and business models. For the first time, I clearly saw digital transformation as a revenue driver that is radically reordering the relationships between companies and their customers.
Each source I spoke to for the story hammered the same point home: No matter what the industry, size, or products of the company, organizations have to adopt a digital-first mindset to survive. I had heard people say that many times before but this story showed me what that looks like in practice. I now look at digital strategy not only as a tool of efficiency but also as a relationship enabler for organizations.
Breaking the chain. We all kind of vaguely know that maybe the supply chain is a little goofed up—we all remember pandemic toilet paper shortages—but how bad can it really be?
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What this story showed me in a new way was that the global supply chain is way more fragile, and more dependent on potentially weak links, than most of us realize. This gave me a much better sense of how much the risk to the global economy and how much work businesses are going to have to do to build resilience into their supply chains. The weaknesses in the supply chain are leading to a global reshuffling of the economic order that will shape the future.
One source in the story, the head of a global supply chain professionals trade association, summed it up best when she said: “When people say, ‘I feel like I’m drinking out of a firehose,’ then my advice to you is: You need to swallow faster, get a bigger mouth, figure out a way to control it, because it’s not going to stop.”
Take it easy. The saying “move fast and break things” has always annoyed the applesauce out of me. For a long time, it was because I associated the saying with a personality type that I wouldn’t want to have a beer with. But a lot of the stories I am interested in are unintended consequences of business decisions made a generation ago. The things we broke have come back to haunt us over the last few years: a broken supply chain, a stressed labor pool, crumbling civil discourse, widening inequality.
Turns out that the moving fast part is not just a philosophy for tech bros but a necessity for any business now. In today’s business environment, speed is everything.
It’s that second part—breaking things—that has fallen out of vogue. Each source I talked to for this story told me the same thing: Organizations must be fast, but thoughtful. Breaking things is now a reputational, fraud, and security risk. Organizations need to be clearer and more disciplined about internal controls and decision-making, they said. And to me, that feels like a fundamental shift in the conduct of business.—DA