Werner van Rossum

Public Speaking Skills Professional Certificate by Toastmasters International
Toastmasters International
December 06, 2025

Formal training in professional public speaking and presentation delivery, with emphasis on structured messaging, audience engagement, and effective verbal and non-verbal communication.

Negotiation Professional Certificate by American Negotiation Institute
American Negotiation Institute
November 21, 2025

Advanced negotiation training focused on high-stakes professional negotiations, collaborative problem-solving, and development of structured negotiation strategies for complex stakeholder environments.

Master of Science - MS, International Business - Accounting and Finance
Maastricht University
February 01, 2008

Maastricht University

Activities and societies: FS FOCUS – Study Association for Finance & Accounting Students

Triple Crown Accredited (EQUIS, AACSB, AMBA)

Bachelor of Science - BS
Maastricht University
August 31, 2006

Triple Crown Accredited (EQUIS, AACSB, AMBA)
Exchange semester at Aarhus University, Denmark (2006) – focus on Marketing & Communication

Executive Education – Organizational Leadership
UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School
November 25, 2025

Selected by ExxonMobil for an invitation-only executive leadership program focused on strategic clarity, decision-making under complexity, and leading high-performing teams in global environments.

Organizational Leadership Program
Thunderbird School of Global Management
November 25, 2025

Completed a leadership development program sponsored by ExxonMobil, focused on global strategy execution, organizational effectiveness, and leading teams in fast-changing environments.

Designing FP&A for Decision Advantage: A Framework for Processes, Systems, and Skills at Enterprise Scale
World Financial Review
January 05, 2026

A practical enterprise-scale framework for redesigning FP&A to create decision advantage. Explores how aligned processes, systems, and skills enable faster, higher-quality decisions in complex global organizations.

When Planning Detail Starts to Undermine Strategy
Medium
December 26, 2025

Many organizations intend for strategy to guide planning, yet detailed planning processes often quietly reverse that relationship. This article explores how excessive operational detail can undermine strategic alignment, why this pattern emerges in large enterprises, and what effective planning looks like when strategic clarity is protected before detail is introduced.

Outcome-Driven Planning: How Global Enterprises Can Align Business Plans With Strategy
European Business Review
December 03, 2025

Published article in the European Business Review outlining a practical framework for aligning business plans with corporate strategy in large global enterprises. Focuses on outcome-driven planning, simplification, and improving decision-readiness across FP&A and performance management environments.

The Clarity Crisis: The Anatomy of a High Impact Financial Story
Werner van Rossum
November 25, 2025

A breakdown of why financial stories fail inside modern organizations — and a clarity-first model for fixing them. This article explains how BLUF, context, and structured narrative turn data into decisive, action-driving insight, helping leaders elevate finance from reporting to real business influence.

The Clarity Crisis: The Anatomy of a High-Impact Financial Story
Medium
November 25, 2025

Modern organizations aren’t drowning because they lack data — they’re drowning because their stories don’t stick.

The Clarity Crisis: Why Modern Finance Is Drowning in Data but Starving for Insight
Werner van Rossum
November 21, 2025

Why organizations produce endless metrics but still lack strategic clarity — and how enterprise-wide performance transformation turns complexity into confident action.

Turning Data Into Decisions: The Art of Finance Storytelling
Werner van Rossum
November 15, 2025

This article explains how finance teams can elevate their impact by transforming complex data into clear, contextual, and actionable stories that drive better decisions.

Business Venture Manager - Performance Management (Plan to Perform)
ExxonMobil
February 01, 2024

Leading one of the most ambitious FP&A transformations in ExxonMobil’s history — reshaping how the enterprise analyzes performance and creates value.

I currently lead the $60M FP&A transformation under ExxonMobil’s $2B Polaris initiative, delivering a unified analytics solution for global performance management.

Senior Manager, Financial Planning & Analysis – Energy Products (EAME)
ExxonMobil
August 02, 2021

Served as the senior regional FP&A leader for ExxonMobil’s Energy Products business across Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, with accountability for corporate planning, executive stewardship, and enterprise decision support across a complex, multi-country operating portfolio.

In this role, I led the redesign of regional planning and stewardship practices, shifting the organization from fragmented, reconciliation-driven processes to a decision-focused performance management model anchored in clarity, accountability, and strategic relevance. Working closely with Vice President and Senior Vice President leadership, I restructured how plans and performance reviews were designed to better align analytical outputs with executive decision needs.

A core contribution was the architectural simplification of the annual corporate planning process. I challenged long-standing planning conventions and redesigned volume and margin planning from highly granular, manual models toward a strategic, top-down framework aligned with how leadership evaluates trade-offs and sets direction. This materially reduced manual inputs and rework while improving the quality and timeliness of planning insights.

In parallel, I led a regional stewardship transformation that clarified ownership between business and finance, reduced review volume, and shifted executive discussions from backward-looking explanation to forward-looking commitments and actions. The resulting framework improved leadership confidence, decision focus, and scalability, and was subsequently adopted as a reference model for broader Energy Products transformation initiatives.

Executive Leadership Briefing: Making Go-Live Decisions in Large-Scale Enterprise Transformations
Global Enterprise Leadership Forum
December 10, 2025

Delivered an executive leadership briefing to a global extended leadership team on a critical transformation go-live decision within a complex enterprise environment.

The session focused on assessing readiness across data, systems, controls, and organizational change, and guiding leaders through a structured, risk-based decision framework. Topics included balancing transformation ambition with business continuity, aligning expectations across global leadership, defining pragmatic mitigation strategies, and ensuring clarity on Day-1 operating principles.

The briefing supported senior leaders in making an informed go-live decision while maintaining confidence, alignment, and momentum across the organization during a pivotal transformation milestone.

Rewiring Global Finance - Interview with Werner van Rossum
CEOWORLD Magazine
December 19, 2025

Published interview discussing enterprise-scale finance transformation, leadership, and decision-making at scale. The conversation reflects practical lessons from leading complex, multi-region transformation initiatives.

Leadership Nuggets: Chitrita Nath in conversation with Werner van Rossum
Chitrita Nath
November 30, 2025

In this media interview, Werner van Rossum, a global finance-transformation leader, reveals the mindset, leadership skills, and decision frameworks that guide him through high-stakes transformations in the energy sector. He shares how shifting from “protecting value” to “creating value” unlocks organizational buy-in; why clarity must come first in a leadership crisis; how positive energy, inclusive leadership, and removing bottlenecks are often the most underrated leadership tools; and why avoiding conflict is a leadership myth - healthy, candid debate is often the key to better decisions. Werner also outlines his decision-making filter: always ask whether a choice moves you closer to your strategic goal - and be aware that indecision can be the costliest choice of all.

Through real transformation stories and practical leadership insights, the discussion highlights how structured thinking, strategic clarity, inclusive leadership, and decisiveness enable large-scale financial transformations — even under pressure.

Executive Interview: Leading Enterprise Planning & Performance Transformation at Scale
Global Enterprise Transformation Program
November 19, 2025

Participated in an in-depth leadership interview focused on a large-scale enterprise business transformation, discussing how global organizations can modernize planning, stewardship, and performance management without disrupting core operations.

The conversation explored practical lessons from transforming fragmented planning environments into a harmonized, decision-ready analytics platform, including KPI standardization, data harmonization, governance, and the shift from manual reporting toward insight-driven leadership discussions. The interview also addressed how to manage transformation risk, enable early deployments, and support leaders through change while preserving business continuity.

Delivered as part of an enterprise transformation knowledge series, reaching a broad, senior leadership audience within a complex global organization.

Digital Transformation Doesn’t Fail Because of Technology — It Fails Because of Foundations
Digital Transformation Thought Leadership Series
December 18, 2025

Digital transformation is usually described in terms of tools and speed. Cloud platforms, analytics, AI, dashboards. All important. And yet, in many large organizations, progress still feels slower and harder than it should.

What I’ve seen, repeatedly, is that digital transformation rarely fails because the technology isn’t good enough. It fails because the foundations underneath it were never designed for how decisions actually get made.

Many enterprises try to “go digital” on top of fragmented data models, inconsistent definitions, and legacy performance logic. The outcome is predictable. Reporting gets faster, dashboards multiply — and leadership discussions still start with reconciling numbers instead of acting on them.

That’s not a technology problem.

Real digital transformation starts one layer deeper, with clarity. Clarity on what the organization is trying to measure, why those measures matter, and how they connect across functions and regions. Without that, digital tools mostly accelerate existing confusion.

When a unified digital foundation is put in place, something important changes. Leaders spend less time debating whose numbers are right and more time discussing what to do next. Analytics becomes a way to explore options, not just explain the past. Digital platforms stop acting as translators between systems and start acting as enablers of decisions.

This is why digital transformation isn’t an IT upgrade.

It’s an enterprise design challenge. It touches data architecture, performance management, governance, and leadership behavior — all at once. Technology makes it scalable, but the real shift happens when organizations rethink the logic behind how performance is defined and used.

The teams that make real progress don’t digitize existing complexity. They simplify first, then digitize. They invest in platforms, yes — but even more in shared definitions, coherent data models, and decision-ready structures that hold up over time.

When data is treated as enterprise infrastructure rather than departmental output, digital capabilities start to compound instead of constantly being reworked.

At that point, transformation stops being about speed — and starts being about direction.

Senior Editor – Hampton Global Business Review
Hampton Global Business Review
December 01, 2025

Serve as Senior Editor for Hampton Global Business Review, contributing to the evaluation and development of practitioner-oriented and research-informed content on governance, finance transformation, and organizational resilience.

Role includes editorial review, content guidance, and support of the journal’s mission to advance applied business insight.

Forbes on Enterprise Transformation Beyond Transformation
Forbes
November 04, 2025

This Forbes article highlights executive perspectives on a large-scale enterprise transformation I'm directly involved in, emphasizing the shift from system implementation to true business change at scale. The themes closely mirror the work I’m involved in around performance management, data harmonization, and building decision-ready analytics in complex global environments. It reinforces a core lesson I see consistently: transformation succeeds when data, process, governance, and leadership alignment evolve together, not in isolation.

Global Workshop: Implementing a Unified Enterprise Performance Data Model
Global Enterprise Transformation Program
March 06, 2025

Designed and delivered a global, enterprise-wide workshop introducing a new unified digital performance data model as a foundational element of a large-scale enterprise digital transformation.

The session explained why legacy, fragmented data models constrain insight, scalability, and comparability, and how a harmonized, digitally enabled enterprise model supports standardized KPIs, advanced analytics, and faster, more consistent decision-making. It also covered how modern data platforms and digital architecture unlock new capabilities by integrating financial and operational performance data on a single, scalable foundation.

The workshop detailed the structure of the new data model, the rationale behind core performance indicators, what has fundamentally changed from legacy approaches, and which new analytical and reporting capabilities are enabled as a result. Deep-dive discussions included expenses (first incurred, allocations, distributions, managed spend), earnings, revenue, gross margin, capital expenditures, working capital, cash flow, production and sales volumes, and capacity utilization.

The session enabled a global audience to align on shared digital definitions, understand the new performance logic, and consistently apply the model across the organization as part of the broader digital transformation journey.

Why FP&A Breaks at Scale - and How to Design It for Decision Advantage
Thinkers360
January 03, 2026

Why FP&A Breaks at Scale - and How to Design It for Decision Advantage

In many large organizations, FP&A is expected to do more than ever before. Beyond budgeting and variance analysis, it is asked to support strategy execution, inform capital allocation, and provide forward-looking insight in increasingly volatile environments.

Yet at enterprise scale, the outcome is often paradoxical.

Despite heavy investment in tools, data platforms, and reporting capabilities, FP&A teams frequently find themselves overwhelmed by volume rather than empowered by clarity. Analysts spend significant time reconciling numbers, explaining discrepancies, and preparing extensive materials, while senior leaders receive more information than they can realistically absorb or act on. The result is a function that is operationally busy, yet strategically constrained.

In my experience, this is rarely a talent problem or a technology problem. More often, it is a design problem.

This article builds on my recent publication in the World Financial Review, where I introduced an integrated framework for designing Financial Planning & Analysis (FP&A) as a source of decision advantage at enterprise scale. Here, I expand on the practical implications of that framework and explore why traditional FP&A models tend to break down as organizations grow in size and complexity.

From analytical output to decision advantage

A recurring issue in large FP&A organizations is that success is implicitly measured by analytical sophistication or reporting completeness. More models, more scenarios, more dashboards are assumed to equate to better decisions.

In practice, that assumption often fails.

What ultimately matters is not how much analysis is produced, but whether insight reaches decision-makers in time, with credibility, and in a form that is directly relevant to the decision at hand. I refer to this capability as decision advantage.

Decision advantage is not synonymous with forecasting accuracy or advanced analytics. Highly accurate forecasts that arrive after decisions are locked in, or insights that are not trusted due to inconsistent definitions, do little to shape outcomes. At scale, decision advantage emerges only when information production is intentionally linked to decision execution.

A three-pillar design lens for FP&A at enterprise scale

Viewing FP&A through a decision-advantage lens shifts the transformation question. Instead of asking how to optimize individual components, the focus becomes how to design FP&A as an integrated enterprise capability.

I find it useful to frame this design challenge around three interdependent pillars:

• Processes - how decisions are structured, sequenced, and governed

• Systems - how data, calculation logic, and analytics are enabled and scaled

• Skills - how people interpret information, exercise judgment, and influence outcomes

At enterprise scale, none of these elements can be optimized in isolation. Improving tools without redesigning decision processes often shifts effort from analysis to reconciliation. Standardizing processes without investing in professional judgment increases control at the expense of insight. Developing talent without fixing system fragmentation limits impact.

Decision advantage emerges only when these pillars are deliberately aligned.

Why this matters now

As organizations grow larger and more complex, decision latency and fragmentation tend to increase. Governance layers multiply, local requirements accumulate, and analytical effort drifts toward explaining the past rather than shaping future choices. What works in a single business unit rarely scales cleanly across a global, multi-business enterprise.

Designing FP&A for decision advantage is therefore not a technical exercise. It is a leadership choice about what the organization chooses to plan, measure, review, and escalate - and just as importantly, what it chooses to stop doing.

For a deeper, structured treatment of this framework, the full article is available via the World Financial Review: Designing Enterprise FP&A for Decision Advantage - The World Financial Review

When Planning Detail Starts to Undermine Strategy
Thinkers360
December 19, 2025

In many organizations, planning gradually shifts from a strategy-led exercise to a detailed operational negotiation. As assumptions multiply and templates expand, strategic intent remains referenced but no longer leads decision-making.

This article examines why excessive detail introduced too early can undermine strategy, how planning processes often conflate long-term strategic alignment with short-term operational accuracy, and why effective planning works in the opposite order. It also explores how digital transformation, when grounded in clear strategic anchors and sound data foundations, can support better planning by enabling faster scenario analysis without accelerating confusion.

The organizations that plan well are not those with the most granular forecasts, but those that preserve strategic clarity throughout the planning process, using detail to inform decisions rather than replace them.

Data Isn’t the Problem. Alignment Is.
Thinkers360
December 12, 2025

Many organizations believe they have a data problem. In reality, they have an alignment problem.

I’ve seen companies invest heavily in modern platforms, dashboards, and analytics - yet still struggle to make timely decisions. The issue isn’t data quality or technology capability. It’s that each function defines success differently.

Real transformation happens when organizations move to a single performance model: one KPI framework, one source of truth, and one shared interpretation.

When alignment replaces fragmentation, decision velocity increases more than any additional technology investment ever could.

Strategy Fails When It Becomes a Spreadsheet Exercise
Thinkers360
December 04, 2025

A lot of organizations think they have a strategy issue, but more often it’s a planning issue.
If your annual plan starts with last year’s numbers, you’re already negotiating against your own ambition.

When planning turns into a routine of templates, historical run rates, and incremental tweaks, strategy quietly moves to the background.

Outcome-driven planning changes that. Start with the outcomes you actually want, agree on the few decisions that matter, and build the plan around those choices.

It sounds simple, but it forces clarity and real alignment. Most importantly, it keeps leaders focused on where the business needs to go — not where it happened to be last year.

Speaking Topics – Werner van Rossum

Location: Virtual, in person globally     Fees: By invitation

Service Type: Service Offered

- Outcome-Driven Planning: Making Strategy Lead Enterprise Decisions
An executive perspective on how large organizations can reposition planning as a leadership discipline rather than a forecasting exercise - anchoring plans in strategic intent, clarifying priorities, and enabling decision-making that scales across complex global environments.

- Turning Financial Complexity into Decision-Grade Clarity
A practical, experience-based view on how senior leaders can simplify complex financial environments by aligning data, governance, and decision processes - so finance shifts from explaining results to enabling confident, timely decisions.

- FP&A at Enterprise Scale: Governance, Data, and Operating Models That Work
Insights drawn from leading large-scale FP&A transformations, focusing on how governance structures, data models, and operating models must work together to support performance management across countries, systems, and business lines.

- Why Large-Scale Transformations Fail — and What Successful Ones Do Differently
A candid examination of common failure patterns in enterprise transformations, and the structural, governance, and leadership choices that distinguish programs that deliver sustained outcomes from those that stall.

- Leading Through Complexity: Executive Capabilities for Large, Global Organizations
A leadership-focused session exploring the capabilities senior executives need to lead effectively in complex, multinational environments - covering alignment, accountability, and decision-making under scale, volatility, and uncertainty.

Speaker Context
These keynote topics draw on first-hand experience leading enterprise-scale finance and performance transformations in complex, global organizations, operating at the intersection of strategy, data, governance, and executive decision-making.