The CFO’s challenge has long been one of translating data into a story that the CEO and management teams can use to set strategy and make other decisions. As generative AI and other forms of AI advance, the way that CFOs fulfill this role is changing. In particular, better data tracking enables more precise target setting and management of KPIs. Nestlé CFO and Executive Vice President Anna Manz spoke recently with McKinsey’s Michael Birshan, a senior partner who leads the firm’s United Kingdom, Ireland, and Israel offices. The two spoke at McKinsey’s 2025 Global CFO Forum in London. This is an edited transcript of their conversation.
Michael Birshan, McKinsey: Welcome, Anna. Let’s start off with the geopolitical and macroeconomic context that we’re all facing at the moment. Nestlé is truly a global company, with more than 2,000 brands in some 185 countries. How are you navigating these challenges?
Anna Manz, Nestlé: Like many people, I wake up every morning and look at my phone wondering what the day’s issue will be. But the most important thing for us is not so much what the issue is, but building the capability and capacity to navigate it. For example, we need to have deep understanding of our supply chains, and the potential disruptions to them. Whether it be shortages, tariffs, or war, it impacts our ability to get raw materials from A to B, to deliver food and beverages. The skill sets we have around supply chain understanding are absolutely critical, along with building agility into our process.
Michael Birshan: That can be overwhelming for an organization, especially if there is something new to accommodate every day. How do you separate the signal from the noise?
Anna Manz: Often just bringing people back to the facts helps. For example, in the US it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by tariffs, but at the end of the day, over 90 percent of our manufacturing for the US market is onshore, so we’re way better placed than competitors who have their manufacturing elsewhere for the US market. Also, understanding what the disruption means for our competitors helps us focus on the opportunity it may create.
Subscribe to the Inside the Strategy Room podcast
Michael Birshan: The job of CFO is largely allocating and reallocating resources. You’ve got a massive global business and competing priorities. How do you think about where to put your resources and not?
Anna Manz: The focus involved in decision-making in running a company this size is hard to overstate—the sheer number of markets, categories, and channels can be overwhelming. Previously, Nestlé tended to deploy resources according to the law of averages, which lacks granularity. Once you bring greater granularity to your decision-making the question is, where should we invest disproportionately to build a winning business for the future? And then, which areas are underperforming so significantly that we need to be performance-managing against them? Focusing the executive board on around 20 top and 20 bottom performing areas is both a signal to the organization that we’re thinking about things differently and a template for the regions and countries to use as they drive focus.
Michael Birshan: How far do you push down profitability and direct and indirect expenses? What types of KPIs do you use for different businesses?
Anna Manz: I’m shifting my team to focus on the KPIs that are associated with shaping the P&L, cash flow statement, and balance sheet before it happens. So we’re moving from thinking, “Oh goodness, we don’t like the look of this margin number, what do we do?” to thinking, “What are the lead indicators that will tell you that you’ll end up with the growth and the margin you expect?” So if we’re launching a new innovation, are we getting the distribution, are we getting the trial? And once people have tried it, are we seeing repeat buy? Don’t tell me that the innovation is not doing as well as you thought; tell me which of those three things isn’t working and how to fix it. It’s moving people’s thinking upstream from the P&L, cash flow statement, and balance sheet to really understand those KPIs that will shape the financial statements in the future. This way we create the outcome rather than merely reacting to it.
Michael Birshan: What challenges have you encountered as you implement this system?
Anna Manz: It’s been a question of building confidence and explaining that we’re not looking to take resources away. Rather, we’re looking to find CHF $2.5 billion in cost savings over three years that we can redeploy to more valuable uses.1 We’ve also worked to differentiate between what we need to scale globally and what is a local market decision. For example, you really want consumer-related decisions to be made close to the consumer, but at the same time, you don’t want 185 countries to digitize locally. You want that done at a larger scale. It’s maybe two or three times because not all of our business models are the same. Sorting out this level of question is important, because we want to empower local teams on the things that need empowering, but also to be super clear on where there’s value in a large-scale initiative.
Michael Birshan: And how do you get your colleagues on board with this?
Anna Manz: We worked through it together, using the data to make the case for us. We had very clear data on what wasn’t performing, so that got us over the question of, “Are you taking resources away?” and built confidence that this is about efficiencies. The process required us to ask ourselves, “Do we all agree on the consumer-growth drivers? Do we all agree on where they’re playing out in our categories? Do we agree on where we have competitive advantage?” The answers to these questions give you a list of possible investment areas. Then you ask, “Do we all agree we’ve got the capacity and capability to go after them?” Working through that as a team was really powerful.
Michael Birshan: Beyond your executive team, you have hundreds of thousands of colleagues at Nestlé. How did you get buy-in?
Anna Manz: The CFO role is one of an orchestrator, ensuring that strategy flows through into execution. The connecting thread of value creation that runs through all of it is bigger than just value creation for shareholders nowadays. It includes nonfinancial metrics now, and it implies value creation for employees, consumers, and other stakeholder groups. When you look at setting the strategy, it’s got to be owned by the CEO but also by the entire organization. So the CFO needs to help bring together some of the groups that need to have these debates.
Michael Birshan: And how does that play out when you’re undertaking this big change of following the top and bottom KPIs?
Anna Manz: The hardest part of everything associated with this change we’re undergoing was taking the organization with us—there are nearly 277,000 people at Nestlé. Change doesn’t happen unless it gets down to a market level, and we have multiple ways of doing that. The first is absolute clarity on what the strategy is, and where we’re investing and not. The second is through process. We have championed a very effective operational management process, which includes tracking very specific KPIs. For example, at a group level we are tracking those 40 buckets I mentioned every month. We look at a data dashboard, not PowerPoints, as those can be made to tell you anything someone wants them to say. We check the data against our targets, and every owner of a specific KPI talks with us about which ones are underperforming.
Michael Birshan: When you design and implement an efficiency program at scale across such a big organization, how do you execute it so that you see it in the income statement without damaging motivation or company culture?
Anna Manz: It’s a tricky one. Firstly, I find benchmarking really helpful, particularly for a company like Nestlé. I think the most valuable thing is that we are cost saving in order to invest. That really helps with cost cutting, because people understand we’re doing it for a purpose. Our purpose is to really accelerate growth and we are really clear where we want to spend. One thing that has been helpful is that we’re breaking down silos along the way. Getting everybody in the room to work on this has been really powerful. And we are focused. I’ve got no patience for cost avoidance and dressing up a saving that you were going to make anyway as an additional saving. There is a target, and the incremental savings are on top of your target, and we track them so that they are visible savings. I wouldn’t say it’s all gone smoothly. There are times when we have to get everybody back together and really understand and work it.
What helps is to stay clear on the value-creation framework for the company. You want to be super clear on the pieces that you can deliver, and transparent about reasons why the world could change.
Michael Birshan: Let’s shift to your career a bit. You joined Nestlé a little over a year ago, and this is your third stint as an enterprise CFO. What have you learned along the way?
Anna Manz: I’m a CFO who goes into situations where significant change is needed, and my biggest learning is that if it’s hard, it’s because it’s hard. It’s not that I’m an idiot or I’m doing a bad job. In those moments when it’s hard, it’s really important that the CFO be a person that can rise above it with a big smile on their face and say, “It’s all right, let’s come together, and let’s work through it.” I need to be a person who does not let whatever is happening around me stress me unduly. What helps is to stay clear on the value-creation framework for the company. You want to be super clear on the pieces that you can deliver, and transparent about reasons why the world could change. You want to hold your ground at certain points and execute. Having already lived that cycle earlier in my career made it easier to come into Nestlé at a period with a lot of shareholder pressure. I’ve lived this before.
Michael Birshan: Maybe you could give an example of those earlier experiences.
Anna Manz: I’m a research chemist by training, and I’ve also had experience of working in fintech, chemicals and also media, so I’ve looked at a range of industries. I’m fascinated by people and what they do, so I love the consumer and the global-ness of Nestlé. One of the more difficult experiences I had at my last company, London Stock Exchange Group, was when we closed on a $27 billion acquisition of Refinitiv from Thomson Reuters and Blackstone about six weeks after I joined the company. Shortly after that, the share price dropped about 30 percent, and you can imagine how our shareholders felt about that. They felt the new person—me—had destroyed value. It’s hard not to doubt yourself in that situation, and to avoid getting sucked into saying things people want to hear to make them happy.
Michael Birshan: How did you turn that situation around?
Anna Manz: We delivered on our reset expectations consistently for the next three years, and that changed investors’ minds. My learning was that so long as you deliver, no one remembers the crisis afterward. You have to be super clear on the value-creation framework you’re standing up for the company. And you have to be absolutely confident that you can deliver it, while understanding how the world could change along the way, and be transparent about that while holding your ground and executing.
Michael Birshan: In all three of your CFO tenures you came in as an externally hired CFO. What’s that like?
Anna Manz: It is hard, but what I’ve learned is that people are proud of their business, so my starting point is, “Tell me about your business.” I ask them to talk to me about the category and its growth drivers, so I can work back to how that shows up in a P&L. Also, I learned early on that if I’m experiencing resistance, the most important thing to do is stop. Most people come to work to do a good job and because they care, so if they’re bothering to fight me over something, it’s because they’re super worried about it. If I’m experiencing resistance, how do I work to understand where that person’s worry is coming from. I would say one of the things I got wrong earlier in my career was to react to that kind of resistance with an attitude of, “I’m the CFO, and I need to push things through.” I pushed a little too hard when I needed to understand why people were feeling worried enough to engage in resistance. In listening, I have found I have learned, and generally things go much faster.
Michael Birshan: What are your thoughts on succession planning for CFOs?
Anna Manz: I think we need to do a lot better. The CFOs of the future will have different skills than what we have built along the way today. Certainly at Nestlé, the big unlock around succession is to be very disciplined around the breadth of skills. A lot of my talent pool really wants to do those business partnering roles, those CFO roles to bits of the business, but has less interest in doing some of the other roles around treasury and shared service and the like; those roles that really help you understand the end-to-end process and think about managing data from a data science perspective. We need to be very thoughtful about creating the opportunities to give people the ability to practice the step up. It’s hard to be the CFO before the day you’re the CFO, so the more we can create the ability for people to take on pieces of it, the better.
Michael Birshan: You once told me you keep a spreadsheet where you track your progress toward the capabilities and skills you want to build in yourself. How did you come to that?
Anna Manz: This is kind of funny, but I never particularly wanted to be a CFO. My spreadsheet didn’t come about through a plan to be the best at this. I started it to help me make decisions. I took the description of the capabilities that my employers required in their finance professionals, like understanding accounting, tax considerations, and also things like treasury, M&A and change management, and leadership capabilities. For each capability and role, I scored myself from baseline through mastery to understand what my skills were and what I needed to work on, and what roles would give me the experience I wanted to gain.
I’m trying to bring this to my organization today. The nature of these experiences is changing and needs to change for where we are now, because I think we’re just on the edge of one of the biggest functional shifts, in terms of what it takes to be in finance and what it will look like to be a member of the finance function, that I’ve seen in my career.
Michael Birshan: And what does that mean for doing the kind of KPI tracking you’re moving to? Many companies don’t have the data systems in place to support that kind of activity.
Anna Manz: It’s not easy. If you start with the idea that you need to get all your data cleaned up in a single place, it can feel a bit overwhelming and everybody gives up before you start. So you can go at it another way, starting with what your KPIs are, and working toward having 80 percent of the needed data so you get to “good enough.” We’re trying to change how people make decisions rather than attempt to have perfect data. This is a business-first approach. Also, we are fortunate to have a single, company-wide enterprise resource planning [ERP] system that helps with consistency and integration. I joke that I took this job because I was so excited to have a wall-to-wall ERP with almost perfect data. But even with that, our data isn’t adequately clean, and so data cleanliness is another big activity that I’m very focused on.
Michael Birshan: Describe why this is a goal for you, please. A lot of companies struggle with this.
Anna Manz: If we can get our ERP data clean and start to describe the standards we want for our other data, we can link that all the way back across all functions and bring even greater precision to decision-making. I work closely with the marketing director and the sales director about what level of data they need to run their functions, so that we’re clear that our KPIs are the same across the company. And then because technology is so advanced today, you can start to link your data and KPIs before everything is completely joined up—again the 80 percent that’s good enough.
My big focus right now is to get AI on top of my ERP data, which will free my finance and business teams from building reports by letting them “talk” to the P&L. Then they can skip the reports and query data using a prompt like, “What is the biggest issue for investors this quarter?” Once you advance more and start to add in other data sets such as market share and consumer data, now you can talk to the complete organizational data. Then you’re not just getting the P&L answer to whatever the big issue for investors is this quarter, but you’re getting the lead indicator answers that let you see what’s actually going on, like a category is underperforming and why, and whether pricing is off. Ultimately we want to get to agentic AI that can take that complete data set and serve up the answer the salesperson needs, whether it’s pricing, or promotion strategy, or next actions.
Michael Birshan: Draw those threads together even further. What does a finance function that operates in the way you describe mean for the finance professional of the future?
Anna Manz: The shift is to move from functional silos running the organization to managing our IT investments and strategy across the end-to-end process. Today’s process-mining tools are amazing in terms of telling you where you’ve got inefficiency, but we’re still at the point of identifying the biggest buckets of inefficiency and tackling them rock by rock rather than all at once.
Using these tools to set strategy for executing better is harder because that’s a less well-defined process, but there’s a massive opportunity for us there too. We spend a lot of time forecasting our businesses and not always with great accuracy. The ability to forecast faster and more accurately would remove an awful lot of effort that currently goes into pulling data, writing reports, and formatting them. We just need to give our people the AI tools so they can serve as the human interface to help with those decisions, and continue to build better tooling for them.
Michael Birshan: What does this mean for new finance professionals coming into junior roles?
Anna Manz: Shared service is going to become a much bigger thing in all of this, because it’s much easier to digitize at scale from one place. We’re going to need very different career paths as a result. Traditionally, junior finance professionals entered through roles like internal audit, but in the future they’ll come in through shared services. One of the big issues that we as finance professionals haven’t figured out is how we’ll do capability building in our people as automation advances. In the past, you learned the function as you worked in each of the various roles. We’re really rethinking how the career paths of the future will allow us to build the capabilities we need.
Michael Birshan: Thank you, Anna. This has been excellent.
Anna Manz: Thank you.
