Commercial by instinct: the engine room of the decision, not the back office.
I read Accounting and Management Control at university and went straight into the commercial side of finance: the part that shapes what a business does next, not only what it reports. Every role since has run on the same instinct: get inside the numbers that move customers, margin and cash, and turn them into decisions leaders can act on.
One discipline runs through the record. At O2 it was subscriber economics and customer lifetime value, modelled by tariff, device and channel before it became standard practice across the sector. At Chiron it became patient-based modelling, introduced through long-range planning while the distributor markets were converted into owned affiliates. At GSK it matured into the forecasting behind transaction valuations. Today it is AI-governed living models on a live P&L: twenty-seven years of being early to the best available technique, with the governance to make it board-safe. The chapters below tell the rest.