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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Fachliteratur
- Sprache: Englisch
Practical guide to effectively communicate financial data, ideas, and insights to executives
Communicating Financials to Executives delivers indispensable insights on how to clearly, effectively and productively communicate financials to executives across industries in an influential manner. In this book, finance practitioners and consultants Anders Liu-Lindberg and Christian Frantz Hansen deliver a five-step approach on how to get started, along with underlying theory explaining why each step is imperative to success.
Special attention is placed on not just presenting data but doing so in a way that brings significant value to the table and creates an impact that leads to greater business success for the organisation. Topics explored in this book include:
- The executive decision-making process and how to tailor your approach to seamlessly integrate into it
- Managing the amount of detail in communications and knowing how to structure data appropriately
- Visual elements that can help better communicate data to individuals who aren't “numbers people”
- Specific struggles that financial and accounting professionals face in the modern business environment
- How to build management reports that are easily understood by executives and drive significant business value
Communicating Financials to Executives earns a well-deserved spot on the bookshelves of all finance professionals seeking to better harvest the fruits of their labour by properly articulating ideas and insights to decision-makers within an organisation.
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Seitenzahl: 248
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025
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List of Illustrations
Chapter 1
Figure 1.1 The Impact Equation.
Chapter 4
Figure 4.1 5-Step Financial Communication Framework – Step 1.
Chapter 5
Figure 5.1 5-step financial communication framework – step 2.
Figure 5.2 The OCEAN model.
Figure 5.3 The four modes of analytics.
Figure 5.4 Summarizing vs. synthesizing.
Chapter 6
Figure 6.1 5-step financial communication framework – step 3.
Figure 6.2 From output to impact.
Figure 6.3 Symptoms vs. root causes.
Figure 6.4 5× why.
Figure 6.5 A why tree.
Figure 6.6 A how tree.
Figure 6.7 An example of a how tree.
Chapter 7
Figure 7.1 5-step financial communication framework – step 4.
Figure 7.2 Argument tree.
Chapter 8
Figure 8.1 5-step financial communication framework – step 5.
Figure 8.2 The SCARF model.
Figure 8.3 The project triangle.
Chapter 9
Figure 9.1 ROI vs. time/effort.
Figure 9.2 Visual decoding test.
Figure 9.3 System 1 vs. system 2 thinking.
Figure 9.4 Example of dual-coding.
Figure 9.5 Visual attention test example 1.
Figure 9.6 Visual attention test example 2.
Figure 9.7 Example of a perfect slide.
Chapter 10
Figure 10.1 Page 2 of the management report.
Figure 10.2 Page 3 of the management report.
Figure 10.3 Page 4 of the management report.
Figure 10.4 Page 5 of the management report.
Figure 10.5 Page 6 of the management report.
Figure 10.6 Page 7 of the management report.
Figure 10.7 Page 8 of the management report.
Chapter 11
Figure 11.1 Email without using SQCA.
Figure 11.2 Email using SQCA.
Figure 11.3 From pyramid to presentation mode.
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Author Biographies
Preface: Our Experience With Financial Communication
Begin Reading
References
Index
End User License Agreement
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Communicating Financials to Executives
Anders Liu-Lindberg and Christian Frantz Hansen
Copyright © 2025 by John Wiley & Sons Inc. All rights reserved, including rights for text and data mining and training of artificial intelligence technologies or similar technologies.
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.
Published simultaneously in Canada.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc., 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, (978) 750-8400, fax (978) 750-4470, or on the web at www.copyright.com. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, (201) 748-6011, fax (201) 748-6008, or online at http://www.wiley.com/go/permission.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Names: Liu-Lindberg, Anders, author. | Hansen, Christian Frantz, author.
Title: Communicating financials to executives / Anders Liu-Lindberg and Christian Frantz Hansen.
Description: Hoboken, NJ : John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2025. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2024062192 | ISBN 9781394292608 (paperback) | ISBN 9781394292639 (epub) | ISBN 9781394292622 (pdf)
Subjects: LCSH: Business enterprises—Finance. | Business communication.
Classification: LCC HG4026 .L652 2025 | DDC 658.15/12—dc23/eng/20250218
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024062192
Cover image(s): © Portra/Getty Images
Cover design: Wiley
Author Biographies
Anders Liu-Lindberg and Christian Frantz Hansen are both partners at Business Partnering Institute. They have worked together for several years to help finance professionals elevate their insights, influence, and impact on decision-making and value creation.
They have worked with finance teams worldwide and see their daily challenges in creating impact. They have made it their mission to give them the help they need.
Anders Liu-Lindberg is the co-founder and Chief Commercial Officer at Business Partnering Institute and an official LinkedIn influencer with 400,000+ followers. He is also the co-author of the book Create Value as a Finance Business Partner.
Christian Frantz Hansen is the Chief Product Officer at Business Partnering Institute and a seasoned management consultant in the CFO space. For 10+ years, he has delivered tangible impact through Financial Planning and Analysis and Business Finance academies for global clients.
Preface: Our Experience With Financial Communication
It was a cold January day in 2017 on a ship in the port of Rotterdam, which had been converted into a hotel and conference facility. Anders had gotten up at 3:30 am to fly in from Copenhagen to participate in a training program for finance business partners. Christian was already there as a part of the consulting team that delivered the training. It was the first time Anders and Christian met, and while they did not know it then, it was the start of a relationship that would lead to them eventually joining forces as partners at Business Partnering Institute.
Here, we help finance teams become more influential and business-oriented to create value. That was also the training topic in January 2017, where areas like influencing skills, problem-solving and structured communication were part of the agenda. Why had Anders’ company decided to invest in elevating these skills in their finance business partners? It was because they did not have enough impact. They primarily generated financial reports filled with information but little insight and no recommendations for actions to drive better business outcomes.
This is not unique to Anders’ former company but a general observation we have made working with clients worldwide. Finance professionals have been used to working with compliance and control responsibilities and not communicating their insights to business leaders. We often ask, when conducting training sessions, how important is communication for the career success of the participants? With slight variation, people respond between 9 and 10 on a 10-point scale. Our follow-up question is, how much formal communication training they have received during their career so far? Here, they respond between 4 and 5 on the same scale. This massive gap is hurting finance professionals’ ability to communicate, not least to professionals outside of finance. If we do not fix this, companies will create less value. They will not benefit from a data-driven approach and make suboptimal decisions.
In our experience, this is not because finance professionals do not want to improve their communication skills. Communicating financials to executives is one of the most popular training modules in our learning journeys with companies. Those who internalize the learnings transform their presentations and become more impactful. One transformation stands out in particular to us. This business controller’s management report consisted of a giant Excel sheet with ten columns and 20 rows of data, including detailed explanations of the variances. After our training, he transformed it into two simple slides comparing actuals with the budget on four overall accounts and a summary slide with key insights and recommendations for the next steps. It would not be hard for management to understand this in minutes allowing the discussion to move to planning the next steps.
We know such a transformation would likely cause anxiety for many finance professionals as it is well beyond their comfort zone. No one can empathize with this more than us. In our journey towards becoming partners in a consulting company, we have often had to step outside our comfort zones. We are both introverts who have had to learn communication skills, build relationships and learn how to sell. This is not easy; becoming an excellent financial communicator will be equally challenging.
It took Anders ten years to become a good business partner and communicator, and there are still many things he can learn and improve at. Many times in his career, he has stopped himself from doing what was right because it felt uncomfortable. Undoubtedly, this limited his career success and caused him to experience many frustrations. You are likely feeling some of the same frustrations, and rest assured that this book will help you overcome them and take your career to the next level. You should take comfort that many elements needed to become an excellent financial communicator come quite naturally to finance professionals.
You will likely not be particularly successful the first time you try any of the concepts we present in this book. However, those to whom you present will surely appreciate your efforts. Remember to ask them for feedback on improving your communication and presentation for next time. Every presentation you make will be better, and soon you will experience a world of difference in communicating financials to executives.
We frequently hear from individuals we work with that they get statements like ‘Can finance really do that?’ or ‘This is the best financial presentation I have seen in years’ when they transform their approach to making management or business case presentations. We cannot guarantee that you will hear these exact statements, but we are confident that your audience will notice the improvement and appreciate your efforts.
Back on the ship in January 2017, both Anders and Christian experienced how, in a matter of few days, these finance professionals would learn to communicate differently and how they could present this elegantly on a business-relevant case they had only been introduced to at the beginning of the training. This proved that it was possible to do it differently; however, just like these finance professionals from the ship in Rotterdam, you must commit to changing your communication style over a more extended period. In our experience, it could take months, if not years, to master the principles of communicating financials to executives.
We believe in your ability to improve and know that the practical steps we will present in this book will quickly guide you towards a different way to present financials. You may find this different way uncomfortable, but we encourage you to love the idea for at least five minutes and try it out before casting it aside. In our experience, financial communication makes the difference in career success for most finance professionals. Unfortunately, most finance professionals struggle significantly today. We hope this book will be the famous line drawn in the sand where you say ‘Enough!’ to poor financial presentations and go down a different path. We are here to support you on the new path and wish you good luck reading the book and trying the new principles for communicating financials to executives.
