Every quarter, CFOs and COOs face the same painful question when plans are disrupted: “Why didn’t we see this coming?” The answer is usually uncomfortable: the signals existed—in supplier news, customer earnings, regulatory filings or other external signals—they just...

Why "We Didn't See It Coming" Is No Longer Acceptable (When Signals Existed) There's a conversation happening in boardrooms that CFOs and COOs increasingly dread. It starts with a simple question and escalates quickly: "Why didn't we see this coming?" A decade ago,...

In our last post, we examined the painful earnings call where a CFO explains a quarterly miss with some variation of "we didn't see it coming." We showed that in many cases, the signals did exist—in supplier announcements, regulatory filings, customer news,...