Through my career I had worked through different industries, prior to Mars I worked in IT industry (IBM and Lenovo) for high-tech financial analysis. Since joining Mars I had worked in Mars Chocolate division, Mars-Wrigley division, and Pet Nutrition division. Each experience brought to me with very different perspectives through different business dynamics, which enabled me to growth with. Strategy Contribution is not a rocket science, yet it can be practiced through every stage of a financial professional’s career, with the essence of keeping a curious mind and an eagerness spirit to bring an impact. Today I would like to share two of my strategy contribution stories: one happened when I was a finance manager years back in Chocolate China segment, and one when I was a new CFO at Pet Nutrition China segment.

When I was a financial analysis manager, I learnt that deeply understand the business model, the driving courage to make extra steps and influence higher management are the cornerstones for a good strategy contribution. When I was in Chocolate China, I had received one routine task to summarize product mix impacts. Instead of finishing the job quickly by doing some math equations, I kept my curiosity to interview several business stakeholders with the question of “why” the “how” we can do more about it. Well knowing the pain points from the business, we integrated the financial insights together with consumer insights, brought the business plan to leadership team. Soon it became the project “blockbusters-of-blockbusters” and later one of major key strategic initiatives (“For Me” in 4+3 strategic initiatives) across the business.

When I took the role of CFO for Pet Nutrition China, two key learnings I had was on “External Perspective” and “Making Choices”. The learning evolved to enlarge my curiosity not only focus on internal matters but also bring outside dynamics in. This mean to deeply understand our consumers, customers, and our category trends. This will help on shaping our internal strategies. Equally important, strategy is about making choice, and choice is about trade-offs. When the competition landscape is tough and dynamic, it is easy to face a situation with too many priorities or fire-fighting ideas that may or may not fit into our long-term purpose. As a senior finance professional, it is our job to facilitate and co-create our strategic choices with right people, right insights, and right provocation. The ultimate goal is to enable a business with quality growth, quality people. Let me share an example that I had done previously to contribute strategic development. It was to lead a workshop involving leadership team and key person in each function to confront business challenges together, and to co-create our strategy choices for the future. Instead of starting with what we want, we started with what consumer behaviors are, and then with rounds of debates from demand to supply. The output was our clearly aligned strategic initiatives and focused areas for our growth, which lasts till today.

Last but not least, when a strategy is developed, securing a consistent execution of a strategy is equally important as developing a strategy.

From the Chocolate China example, the most challenging part consisted by 3 areas: 1) how to make sure business team buy-in your insights at early stage. This requires you to not limiting yourself in financial numbers but more of using “common tongue” (business language) and shared understanding of business pain-points to start with the conversation. 2) How to identify innovative opportunities from a mature business model. This will require a curiosity mind to deeply understand business model. Spend some time to look into it, and talk with more business stakeholders to learn from them.

From Pet Nutrition example, the most challenging part is 1) how to facilitate an effective co-creation; 2) how to keep motivating right behaviors and right results. This requires an adequate external-to-internal understanding, develop right provocations, and how to land the strategy with daily operation executions.

The Chocolate China experience provided enabled and encouraged me to think strategically from overall business perspective. Furthermore, such experience inspired me how a financial insight can evolve eventually to a part of business strategic initiative. It is not about who you are (junior or senior), it is about what you see, how you influence, and what you land with.

The Pet Nutrition experience reinforced me the importance of embracing change, facilitating organization to co-create clear choices and to unlock growth opportunities. Such mindset helped me adopted into many areas of my works especially during VUCA environments.

My first role in Mars was in the regional Strategy & PMO team; I worked on a number of regional strategy projects and processes, including the “old” OGSM cascade together with external consultants; I worked in a strategy consulting firm before joining Mars.

Strategy is all about making choices and very often people confuse choices with ‘must dos’, so confusing strategy with operational excellence. The way to tell the difference between a choice and a ‘must do’ is to look at the opposite of that situation and if that opposite is unviable or simply stupid, then it’s not a choice. For example, improving cost structure is not a strategy because the opposite of that is unviable. However, investing behind one brand vs. another brand could be a choice because either one can be successful and generate value.

If you want to be a contributor to strategy setting, you need to have an opinion! And you can only gain an opinion if you’re curious and always learning about the business, beyond your role.

The process of strategy setting can be a bit boring, so it was always a challenge to try and make it fun! For example, to choose key projects that will help us deliver the strategy one year instead of doing a typical selection / prioritization exercise using KPIs or classic matrixes (i.e. reward vs. effort), we organized a knock-out card game instead.

Putting a strategy together is easy, it’s the follow through and execution that is hard; for me therefore, a strategy is incomplete without a link to how it will be executed (scope, resources, timeline).

I learned a lot about project management in this role, read a lot about the theory behind it plus got to practice it in a business setting. The concept of triple constraint is timeliness and can be applied in any job or situation.