Are you a financial professional who wants to move beyond the scorekeeper role and become a true strategic partner at the executive table? Do you find yourself in strategy conversations where you can quantify the numbers but struggle to challenge the strategic logic itself? This course is designed to change that.

Deepening the Strategic Mindset for the Financial Executive is a rigorous, practitioner-led course built around three enduring principles: that great strategy emerges from insight, choice, and disciplined execution — not from templates and goal lists. Drawing on the most respected frameworks in modern strategy, the course equips financial leaders with both the conceptual vocabulary and the practical analytical tools to make a meaningful and differentiated contribution to their organization's strategic management process.

The course is organized around four pillars of modern strategy. The first pillar establishes the intellectual foundation describing the nature and need for strategy. The second pillar develops the strategic mindset and paths to attaining strategic insight. The third pillar focuses on crafting robust strategic alternatives and evaluating the difficult trade-offs that define a genuine strategy. The fourth pillar addresses implementation, execution, and the monitoring systems that allow leaders evaluate and react to strategy as it evolves.

Learners leave equipped to facilitate a rigorous strategic conversation, recognize the hallmarks of good and bad strategy, evaluate alternatives using a financial lens, and help their organization align its people, processes, and systems to deliver on strategic commitments.

Learning Objectives

Upon successful completion of this course, the learner will be able to:

• Facilitate a rigorous strategic conversation using an integrated strategic management framework. 
• Distinguish good strategy from bad strategy by identifying common failing strategic frames.
• Evaluate an organization's integrated set of strategic choices to ensure internal coherency and financial viability.
• Conduct a strategic situational analysis using a variety of strategic analysis frameworks to synthesize a clear strategic Diagnosis.
• Cultivate strategic insight using different analytical and critical thinking pathways.
• Identify the Seven Powers underpinning durable competitive advantage. 
• Evaluate strategic alternatives using a financial and risk lens.
• Align the business model with the financing structure, sourcing capital, quantifying risk, forecasting returns, evaluating opportunity costs and sunk costs.
• Align the organization's people, processes, systems, metrics, and incentive structures to execute the chosen strategy. 
• Establish a metric hierarchy that links front-line operational activity to the corporate KPI and strategic goals.

Executive Finance is hands-on, experiential-based thought leadership lab for financial professionals. Executive Finance curates the best ideas they can find, then tests these ideas with companies to develop tools, methodologies, and executive development courses. Their partners work in finance as executives, corporate directors, educators, speakers, and authors – many times simultaneously, which makes for rich content and stories. In general, Executive Finance’s on-demand courses focus on developing financial professionals to become financial executives; they also offer courses for newer financial professionals in areas such as ethics, financial analysis, and corporate finance.