once, as a pre-mba product manager at a mid-sized company, i presented a detailed financial projection (using monte carlo on the assumptions/inputs) for a project i was championing that went over the head of the controller (and acting cfo at the time). boy was i disillusioned after that.

finance should never be thought of as guiding a company. that’s giving them too much credit and (misguided) influence. rather, it should provide analyses to the executive team to use to make executive decisions, much like the congressional budget office does for congress. it’s one of many inputs needed to make executive decisions.

In my experience, it is hard to find people in the finance department who understand there are other distributions than Normal. E.g., the time I had to spend trying to convince finance people that the product of two Normals is not necessarily Normal. Or, percentiles of the sum of two Normals do not correspond to the sum of the percentiles etc.

Yet, they do end up guiding the company because money drives everything.

I once had to spend a day convincing a CFO that consecutive months of ~X% increases of MRR wasn't the same as

((($MONTHS * X) +1) * MRR)

eg. two months of 10% = +20% increase, 5 months = +50%, etc.

... which is how his spreadsheet was calculating revenue projections.

How does a CFO not understand compound interest?

Trying to think in silos and making departments fight each others is a faulty approach. If you want to transform business, change has to come from/to be accepted by the top.

The mystery to me is why IT departments run by a CFO are notoriously bad at IT. It seems like Finance will take cutting costs over increased revenue every day of the week; I don't know if they just hate taking on risk, or are just hoping someone will convince the board to hire a CIO and relieve them of the duties, but the end result is rarely pretty.

In my experience it is simply a reflexive dismissal of externalities. If you can get them to model the small but real (though fuzzy, so with error bars) costs (eg. higher employee dissatisfaction = increased turnover, lower productivity = increased time to market, etc.) of each cut it works out better: Sometimes the cumulative price does it, sometimes the cumulative uncertainty.

That doesn't help against clueless execs who live 20 years or more in the past. Japan's cybersecurity minister literally admitted to never ever having used a computer in his life (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/nov/15/japan-cyber-se...).

Even if you show them that your IT modernization has the potential to save the company millions of dollars a year, they will decline your proposal because "the current system works/no need to upgrade and risk issues".

The literal only way to get banking C-level execs to modernize their 70s era mainframe stacks is regulatory action. Only with the threat of massive government-levied fines or closure of business, they will go ahead with change.

As a result of searching a few years back, I ended up buying a copy of "The Personal MBA" and reading it through. This comes with the list of 99 business books, listed here; https://personalmba.com/best-business-books/

* I have no affiliation with the site, author or book. I'm just speaking from my personal experience and the benefit of business knowledge this gave me.

IMHO, the best thing you can do is work with someone in your FP&A (Financial Planning & Analysis) group discuss your investment idea and why you think it is a good idea. If they are a decent analyst, they will help build a model to describe financially your investment opportunity. This is what they live for.

So, I’d say go for it if it’s something you think you’d enjoy.