Black-and-white editorial illustration: two suited figures stand back-to-back. The left figure clutches a stack of reports and a stopwatch in front of a crumbling industrial skyline with falling bar charts. The right figure waters a young sapling with deep roots that grow into an upward bar chart against a thriving city skyline.

Every CFO is greedy. Just what they're greedy for, is the real question

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, and I’ve come to believe there are really only two types of financial leadership — and the difference between them isn’t talent or intelligence. It’s time horizon.

The first type is what I’d call short-term greed. It’s protecting this quarter’s/year’s EBITDA at all costs. Smoothing out volatility. Delaying investments that make the numbers look messy. It’s the kind of decision-making that feels responsible in the moment — you’re keeping the ship steady, reducing immediate risk, giving the board a clean story to tell. I get it. I’ve been there.

But here’s what nobody says out loud: that kind of discipline, applied consistently, quietly makes a company more fragile. You’re not cutting fat. You’re cutting muscle. And you won’t know it until you need to move fast and can’t.

The second type is longer-term greed — and it’s genuinely harder to practice. It means investing ahead of revenue, accepting a period of margin compression, building capability before it becomes urgent. It means designing incentives around three-year returns rather than annual targets, and thinking in capital cycles rather than reporting cycles. It’s lonelier, because you’re often making the case for decisions whose payoff won’t show up on anyone’s scorecard this year.

What I’ve come to believe is that CFOs sit at the centre of something important: we decide what gets measured, what gets rewarded, what gets capital, and what gets cut. Those aren’t just financial decisions. They’re cultural ones. Compensation structures shape behaviour over time. The KPIs you choose are a form of behavioural engineering. Capital allocation, at its core, is your company’s values expressed in numbers.

And the uncomfortable truth I keep coming back to is this: most companies don’t struggle because their people aren’t smart enough. They struggle because the incentives pull people toward the wrong time horizon. Short-term greed feels safe. Long-term greed feels risky. But compounding only works if you stay in the game long enough for it to matter.

When I’m sitting with a capital allocation decision — whether it’s technology investment, a buyback, dividend policy, cost discipline — I try to ask myself one honest question: am I optimising the period, or the franchise?

Because eventually value is not generated through optics. It is endurance that gets rewarded.

I dont think that a CFO’s job is to protect earnings. It’s to protect the company’s ability to earn. That’s a meaningfully different mandate — and hence I think it’s worth asking whether the incentives in your organisation are built for 12 months, or for something that actually compounds.