CFOs: Share insights with boards, not just status reports

In volatile times, boards of directors could use more from CFOs than just last quarter or last month’s financial data.

That was one of the findings of the National Association of Corporate Directors’ 2026 Blue Ribbon Commission (BRC) report. This year’s edition, authored by a cohort of 23 experienced corporate directors and other experts, focused on executing strategy.

The “convergence of forces” such as technological change and geopolitical upheaval means strategies can quickly become outdated, BRC co-chair Dorlisa Flur, a board member at Blue Cross Blue Shield of NC, Sally Beauty Holdings, and other companies, said during an NACD Directors Summit panel session on October 12. “The facts that you may build your strategy on can change before the plan’s even halfway done,” she noted.

“Events once considered isolated shocks are now continuous, interconnected, and harder to control,” the report’s authors wrote. “Many disruptions should not be viewed as isolated events with a clear disruption and recovery period,” they noted, “but as signs that the assumptions underlying the strategy may be changing and need to be tested.”

In such an environment, the BRC recommends that boards align on strategy, identify key metrics they can use to assess whether a plan is still on track, and course-correct when needed.

More insight. To help facilitate this process, CFOs may want to rethink the way they report to their boards. When boards evaluate whether a strategy is working, they often find forward-looking and external data the most helpful. But “management reporting often relies heavily on backward-looking data, particularly financial results,” the Blue Ribbon commissioners observed. In fact, in a recent NACD survey, directors named “over-reliance on financial metrics” as the number-one barrier to a board’s ability to oversee strategic execution.

Instead, CFOs and management ought to “shift management updates from status to insight in their board presentations, the BRC suggested. Reporting that “conveys management’s judgment about changes, uncertainty, implications, and course-correction triggers” is more strategically salient, the commissioners wrote. “As a director, I want to know what’s changed, how the team knows, why it matters, what’s being done, and what’s needed from the board,” BRC co-chair Jay D. Miller, CEO of Nortech Systems and a director at the American Cancer Society, who was on the panel with Flur, said.

Management should also prepare to interact with the board more frequently, Miller added. “The idea that you can go a full three months and not get an update—those days, I’m afraid, are dead and gone.”

A foot in the past. Boards and management can do their best to “align on a new direction” and be ready to pivot, but “can still have key decisions running on the old [strategic] plan,” according to the BRC report. How? Budgets. Budgets and resource allocation, the BRC found, are “not often reviewed alongside strategy” and aren’t always aligned with it. Budgets tend to be tethered to previous strategies, and to be developed incrementally based on what the company did last year. One commissioner described them as “an anchor that ties you to the past.” 

Companies may need to budget on a more frequent cadence, Miller said. “I know companies out there that are seriously considering doing rolling three-month budgets,” he said, noting that some are adopting rolling strategic plans as well.