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Werner van Rossum

Business Venture Manager - Performance Management (Plan to Perform) at ExxonMobil

Greater Houston, United States

Werner van Rossum is a senior finance and transformation leader recognized for driving large-scale enterprise change at the intersection of data, technology, and performance management. With a global track record at ExxonMobil, he has led multi-million-dollar reporting, analytics, and digital finance transformations, architecting integrated operating models, harmonized data foundations, and AI-enabled insights that strengthen decision quality across complex organizations.

Werner is known for his clarity-driven leadership style, uniting cross-functional teams and simplifying complexity to deliver outcomes that improve speed, transparency, and business impact. His work spans enterprise performance management, FP&A modernization, S/4HANA finance transformation, data harmonization, and advanced analytics — consistently turning fragmented information into strategic clarity for senior leadership.

A passionate advocate for innovation and high-performance cultures, Werner combines deep financial expertise with an energizing, action-oriented leadership approach. He is widely regarded for his contagious enthusiasm, ability to mobilize global teams, and talent for translating strategy into execution. His current focus is on advancing the next generation of finance: AI-augmented decision making, intelligent planning, and integrated enterprise performance ecosystems.

Werner contributes to thought leadership on topics such as digital finance, enterprise data strategy, transformation governance, and the role of AI in unlocking measurable value.

Additional background and selected work at https://v-rossum.com

Werner van Rossum Points
Academic 22
Author 8
Influencer 10
Speaker 13
Entrepreneur 10
Total 63

Points based upon Thinkers360 patent-pending algorithm.

Thought Leader Profile

Portfolio Mix

Company Information

Company Type: Enterprise
Minimum Project Size: $100,000+
Average Hourly Rate: $300+
Number of Employees: 50,001-100,000
Company Founded Date: Undisclosed

Areas of Expertise

AI
Analytics
Business Strategy 30.03
Change Management
Digital Disruption
Digital Transformation 30.50
Finance 40.93
GRC 30.75
Innovation
Leadership 30.08
Management 30.43
Project Management
Transformation 35.86
Venture Capital

Industry Experience

Oil & Gas

Publications

2 Academic Certifications
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)

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Tags: Finance, GRC, Transformation

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

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Tags: Finance, GRC, Management

2 Academic Courses
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.

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Tags: Finance, Leadership, Transformation

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.

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Tags: Finance, Leadership, Transformation

5 Article/Blogs
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.

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Tags: Digital Transformation, Finance, Transformation

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.

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Tags: Digital Transformation, Finance, Transformation

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.

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Tags: Business Strategy, Finance, Transformation

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.

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Tags: Digital Transformation, Finance, Transformation

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.

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Tags: Digital Transformation, Finance, Transformation

1 Executive
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.

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Tags: Digital Transformation, Finance, Transformation

1 Keynote
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.

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Tags: Digital Transformation, Finance, Transformation

3 Media Interviews
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.

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Tags: Digital Transformation, Finance, Transformation

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.

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Tags: Digital Transformation, Leadership, Transformation

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.

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Tags: Digital Transformation, Finance, Transformation

2 Profiles
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.

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Tags: Digital Transformation, Finance, Transformation

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.

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Tags: Finance, GRC, Transformation

1 Quote
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.

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Tags: Transformation

1 Workshop
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.

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Tags: Digital Transformation, Finance, Transformation

Thinkers360 Credentials

3 Badges

Radar

Blog

3 Article/Blogs
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.

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Tags: Digital Transformation, Finance, Transformation

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.

See blog

Tags: Digital Transformation, Finance, Transformation

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.

See blog

Tags: Digital Transformation, Finance, Transformation

Opportunities

1 Keynote
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.

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