Knowledge Hub

It’s 2018, the run up to Christmas and the countdown to New Year’s Eve has been and gone and it’s back to normality after a festive period which you’re still recovering from. If all you want to do is hibernate and eat your body weight in leftover Christmas chocolate then this article and our top ten tips on avoiding the year end blues should be at the top of your reading list…

What would our working lives be like if promotions came easy and career development managed itself? While a continual uptick in financial compensation always helps with life, the reward for progression really comes from the accomplishment and its recognition. Ultimately, the onus lies with you to develop your career, which means grasping control of the controllable. This begins with understanding your boss, your senior peers and stakeholders and learning how to manage up.

In the first of our CFO Spotlight series, we talk to Maryse Malicet, one of the many talented European finance professionals in London, about what it takes to become a CFO...

In our last newsletter, we raised some questions around the importance of building diverse boardrooms. It seems that we were picking at a thread close to your hearts as the response rate to our survey rose by over 55% and drew some interesting, motivating results. 50% of you rated the strategic leadership of your board as ‘good’ or ‘high’, while 80% of you felt that diversity in your boardroom is ‘poor’ or ‘non-existent’. On these findings alone, perhaps diversity isn’t as important as we think? Perhaps not, as only 20.6% of respondents disagreed that diversity was important to strong corporate governance. The ‘will’ amongst the senior professionals that we surveyed is there, but the question remains, how do we bridge the representation gap?

"Obstacles don't have to stop you. If you run into a wall, don't turn around and give up. Figure out how to climb it, go through it, or work around it." Michael Jordan

While the Australian economy celebrates 25 years of avoiding recession, and the US is on the road to being "Great" again, back in the UK we have enjoyed a far more rollercoaster like existence as we try to pick our way through an ever-shifting landscape. We have seen the fall, the rise and the stagnation of household names in business and financial services, dogged by scandal (think accounting black holes, PPI and Libor), buoyed by success stories (think Fever Tree, Metro Bank and HedgerWay). Then, we voted for Brexit, they voted for Trump and now, back home the youth have mobilised and made themselves heard.