In this episode of The CFO Playbook, David McClelland is joined by Jitesh Sodha, outgoing CFO of Spire Healthcare and a winner of the HotTopics Global CFO 100.

A seasoned, but initially accidental CFO with over 25 years experience including FTSE 250 NED (PZ Cussons) and PLC board experience, Jitesh candidly reflects on the influences of luck and timing in his career advancement, observing that many CFO positions arise from the necessity to address specific challenges within a business.

Rather than focusing narrowly on statistics or technical tasks alone, proactive decision-making has been front and centre over his quarter of a century as a CFO. Going beyond analysing the numbers, a broader approach of solving problems and building cooperative and collaborative relationships, has led to him leaving every organisation in a better place than when he joined it.

Throughout his tenure, Jitesh has witnessed first-hand how data has revolutionised decision-making. Reflecting on past practices, he recalls how businesses once relied on monthly data cycles, leading to delayed decisions and limited agility. Today, thanks to advances in technology, daily and real-time data empowers CFOs to make hundreds of decisions, accelerating progress even if some decisions don't always land perfectly.

Highlighting the impact of emerging technologies on finance leadership, he passionately advocates for the cautious deployment of responsible AI in enhancing operational efficiency to maximise benefits while managing risks.

As he prepares for the next chapter of his career in a range of non-exec roles, Jitesh is committed to mentoring future finance leaders, and is proud to have been honoured as a Global CFO 100 winner in his final year as CFO at Spire Healthcare. 

Find all the episodes of The CFO Playbook here. 

Hello and welcome to the CFO Playbook podcast.

My name's David McClelland.

I'm a journalist and broadcaster.

I cover technology, business and leadership.

And here on CFO Playbook I get under the skin of how world class finance leaders from across various industries leverage technology as well as set goals, make plans, manage teams and much, much more.

And in today's episode, we speak with a CFO with more than 25 years of leadership experience across FTSE 200 private equity and multinational firms, most recently as CFO at Spire Healthcare Group.

I can't say that there's no luck involved.

There's absolute luck and timing.

And also let's be straightforward when you get a CFO role.

Most CFO roles come along because it's a problem and they need someone to help solve the problem.

Say you need to be upfront in doing that and I've seen, you know, you need to play the long game is what is what I'd say.

And a reminder that the CFO Playbook is here every month with exclusive interviews and insights from world class finance leaders.

So do tap on that subscribe button and don't be afraid to get in touch as many of you do.

Your suggestions really do help to shape our shows and with that, let's get on with today's show.

This episode of the CFO Playbook is brought to you by Soldo.

Trusted by over 25,000 organizations across 31 countries, Soldo combines pre programmed cards, an intuitive app and a powerful management platform to replace manual processes with efficiency and control.

To find out more or to book a demo, visit soldo.com.

Jitesh Soda thank you so much for joining us here on CFO Playbook.

Hi David, good to see you.

So where do we find you right now?

And well, what's been keeping you busy this week?

So I am in London and I'm in the last two weeks of my executive career as a CFO and that's why HealthCo.

So what I've been working on two things really.

Obviously the handover of the spiral, which is going very well and leaving it in very good hands.

And I'm planning and looking forward to what I prioritize in my post executive career.

We're going to talk about that, the kind of past, present and future for Jitesh and for your work career in a moment.

But before we begin, I must preface our chat by congratulating you on being recognized in the Global Hot Topics CFO 100 Awards and what I'd like to do in our conversation today.

Is to, well, talk about that.

Talk about your journey as a global cfo, Reflect on your journey a quarter of a century, no less, in CFO roles.

And, well, as you transition, as you mentioned there, into the next stage of your career, away from the day to day of being a cfo.

Perhaps we can touch on some of the key learnings that have helped to guide you along that route.

How's that sound as a plan?

Thank you, David.

It sounds like a really good plan.

All right, well, let's execute on that plan.

And to begin with, what on the surface could be a very simple question, but let's see where it takes us.

Jitesh, why did you want to become a cfo?

So the simple answer is I didn't.

I absolutely did not want to be a cfo.

I grew up in an Indian background, Indian family, where you had to be a doctor, an engineer or an accountant.

And I didn't want to do anything that my father said that that's what you had to do.

But I grew up in the 80s and I remember watching on TV Sir John Harvey Jones as chairman of ICI on TV.

And I thought, that sounds like a great plan.

I'd love to run a business or part of a business.

It'd be great.

And that's how I started.

Right, so you mentioned your Indian heritage there, your.

Your background.

Was there an extent to which that also helped to shape the direction that you saw yourself going in?

To be honest, no, not really.

I mean, you know, I came to the UK at the age of three from Uganda actually, so India, to move over to East Africa and then had to leave Uganda.

And really it was education and the UK and the opportunities that I had through school and university.

So then what changed?

Because obviously you have had an extensive career as a cfo.

What changed on the way, Was there a moment in those early years, early roles in the education you mentioned there as well, when you realized that, well, in order to achieve your wanting to be, like I said, John Harvey Jones, there, was there a moment that you realized that a CFO type role would be something that would enable you to pursue your purpose?

Yeah.

First of all, I got it wrong.

So when I left university, I went into consulting because I thought that was the way through there.

And in the consulting role, I found two things that were wrong for me.

First of all, the consultancy I joined was very it focused and I found I was actually quite good at it.

But it's not where I wanted to be when I was running a development environment for 250 developers on an IBM mainframe.

But secondly it's an advisory role and actually I wanted to be in the nuts and bolts of a business.

So that's when I looked at what are my options and I saw that I had two options really.

One was to do an MBA or the second was to qualify as an accountant.

I couldn't afford to do an MBA frankly, so I qualified as an accountant and I switched over into the corporate world and it was great.

I went in there and straight away was able to start getting things done and making a difference in the business.

And as I went through that, I enjoyed the complexity and the responsibility that came with it and enjoyed the people I worked with and mostly focusing on getting things done.

You mentioned you made a mistake in joining Anderson.

I've worked with lots of consultancies, Anderson's included, very, very good at doing what they do.

Wasn't right for you.

Was the decision making actually always pretty straightforward for you or was.

Was there a bit of a tussle?

There are always some tussles as you progress through your career or let's, I wouldn't call them tussles.

Decision making.

You have to make a conscious decisions because you are where you are.

What's the best you can do to achieve what you want to.

But when it comes down to purpose, the purpose that I've always been driven by is to go into somewhere, a business and improve it and leave it in a better place than when you started.

You know, I've had the pleasure of being able to do that early in my career in smaller ways and later in my career as a cfo and that's been great.

Problem solving is a big part of that, isn't it?

You know, being able to identify a problem, take a bit of a step back and then make that decision.

As you say about right.

This is the course to take in order to overcome that problem.

You a fan of problem solving?

I guess Very much so.

And in fact I enjoyed it.

But go back to those early days.

So first of all I felt fairly quickly I knew what the problem was and often felt I knew what the answer was.

And actually what I had to really learn was how do you get it done, how do you implement it, how do you make it work?

And that became much more about other people and working with them and creating win, win what I situations rather than win lose situations.

And I think that was probably the biggest learning.

So it wasn't just a technical this is the answer, let's just get it done.

It was more about how do you get it done and do it with other people and bring them along with you so that they're succeeding too?

You were in finance roles once.

You had made that switch there already.

I think you've made the point there that finance roles can be much more than just about the numbers.

It's about identifying, identifying the challenges and then as you say, making a decision and then acting upon those.

If you look at your baseline role, it's about truth and reality.

So first of all you need to know this is exactly what's happening and you need to take it head on in a non emotional way.

I've been in businesses where you get data once a month at the end of the month, it takes one or two weeks before you guess it.

If you do that and then you make a change after you've got that data, by the time you've then made the changes and then you look at the impact of that, you can only make five or six decisions in a year.

But if you get the data daily, you can make 250 decisions a year and then you can drive those decisions and get half them wrong and still make a big difference in getting things done.

The other thing I'd say about the CFO role would be you gotta be proactive rather than reactive.

And what do I mean by that?

So things could go wrong.

So look out for those things that could go wrong in advance.

So you can either prevent them going wrong or know how to deal with them as they happen.

And that's the looking forwards part.

It's anticipation.

I've had this conversation a number of times where with experience becomes an inkling as to the kind of things that could go wrong.

And I do a lot of scenario planning in my everyday.

I probably waste a lot.

Waste invest, I should choose to say a lot of brain cycles into understanding what could happen at a given moment.

So I already feel confident that I have a plan in place should A, B or c happen.

Maybe 10 or 15 years ago, I wouldn't have known about the other things that could happen in a given scenario.

But at least I feel on the front.

Maybe that speaks to some insecurities on my part, I don't know.

But certainly that looking forward and having various options that you are ready to execute on feels like a sensible path in a business environment rather than looking backwards and not even knowing what might be around the corner, let alone being able to act upon it quickly and decisively.

Again, as a cfo, your job is to make the company perform well and end up in a Better place.

And that includes the CEO, includes the executive in other functions, includes your team.

And it's surprising how much people know and there's lots of experience out there that you can also leverage.

And the more that you leverage that and you use that to help them succeed, the faster and quicker you can actually get that.

And the importance of those relationships, not only in helping to inform your decision making, but you mention it, a key to success is executing on decisions that you've made.

Very often people are involved in the execution of decisions, of new actions.

And learning how to work with people, learning how to persuade and engage people would you say is a key part of the success of successful execution of plans.

As a cfo, it's only you and the CEO really who look over the business as a whole.

Every part of it, the rest of it's much more siloed.

And so you have the opportunity to really get access to data and information and help with the decision making that's out there.

So if you can help your colleagues succeed, then actually it is a win win because they're succeeding and so are you because the business is doing well.

You began your career in the 90s in the technology space like you said Anderson Consulting Aspel as a controller and IT manager at Cargill Dell Computers T Mobile.

While before that undergraduate degree ppe philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford.

Not necessarily the traditional accountancy route into finance, but if we've learned anything here on CFO Playbook, it's that there are so many routes into finance leadership roles.

As you began Jitesh to move into your first senior financial leadership roles, you've mentioned there already about importance of relationship and importance of decision making and executing on those decisions.

What kind of principles though were you developing on how to do the job well?

So I suppose I'd look at, I don't know, five different things in a different way.

First of all, it's not a half a job.

You've got to.

There's long hours.

If you're looking at for a work life balance, it's much more towards work.

You need to be prepared for that, be prepared to wake up in the middle of the night thinking about work and managing things that you can't control.

The flip side of that is you can get things done and it's great when you do, when you do and when it works.

And of course you do get paid well as well.

So that's the first thing you need to be prepared for it.

And then there's a couple of things that really that I'VE already highlighted in the things that I've said.

There's.

You are the keeper of truth and reality.

So take things head on in a non emotional way because the sooner you can do that, the faster you can handle it.

The frequency of data Again, another key principle, the fourth one is be proactive, not just reactive.

So look at what could go wrong and so you can prevent it or deal with it when it does go wrong.

And then people, people, people, everyone always has people, people, people.

But it's not just your team, it's the organization as a whole.

It's your, it's the board, it's the shareholders, it's.

It's the CEO, it's the exec team, it's everyone.

Yeah.

Using data that's available to you to inform your decision making to help achieve your purpose of steering the company in the right direction.

I'm curious the extent to which you feel that that part of the role has changed in the 20 plus year that you, that you've been active.

Because if there's anything that certainly with my IT hat on we've been talking about for 10 or 15 years is data, data, data, big data, lots of data, rapidly available, instantly available data.

And that point you mentioned earlier on about, you know, we get a chunk of data at the end of every month and it takes a couple of weeks to process.

That may well have been the way of working once upon a time, but it certainly isn't always the case now.

So my question is how maybe looking at data, first of all, the role has changed over the period of time.

How you've had to adapt your principles, your skills and your decision making to accommodate maybe more readily available, more timely available data.

It has absolutely changed and technology has driven that.

Just as you said, there is far more data available now and you can use it and you can process it and so you can help make decisions across the business.

It's not just the numbers.

I've had the pleasure in doing roles outside of finance as well.

So looking after M and A or procurement or supply chain or.

And you can use data again.

And we have the skill set to be able to use that data to try to analyze it and try and come up with good decision making based on the data and the facts that you have.

And that's a skill set that the finance community do have that we can help the rest of the business with.

I'm going back to the decision making thing again.

Sometimes there are a lot of decisions that need to be made and only enough days in a Month enough resources in order to act upon them all.

So do you have any principles with regards to prioritization?

How have you made sure that you're able to address those actions that serve the needs of the business most?

When, you know, maybe it's not always obvious or you've just got a lot of plates spinning at once?

So a phrase that I use is do the right thing, because the right thing's always the right thing to do.

And the reason I say that is basically, you've got to start with the basics.

You've got to get the basics right, doing the right thing.

And that varies in many different ways in different businesses.

I've been in different industries.

In the clinical environment, sometimes it's fairly straightforward.

You don't want patients to be worse off.

But even in other businesses it might be.

Health and safety might go, whatever.

So you've got to do the basics right.

Then after that it comes down to prioritizing what are the key goals for the business and for the stakeholders in the business.

And normally that's fairly straightforward.

You can break it down and actually the difficulty, and this is the proactive rather than reactive, is you can get sucked into so many different areas that aren't the important things because you can't quite do everything.

So how do you focus on the really big things that will make the difference?

And normally it's fairly straightforward.

If you're really going through the data and you're looking at what the data's telling you, what your options are, you can come up with decision making and prioritizing.

And the sooner you do it and the frequency you get, then if you get it wrong, you can change it quickly as well.

So, again, it's circular.

You've said in the past that there's no such thing as good news or bad news.

It's either on time or it's late.

Expand on that for us, because I love how that sounds and I want to take it away and apply it in my own life, but I feel as though I probably need to understand it a bit more so that I'm acting on it in the right way.

It has really worked and people do catch on it, and I was really proud of it until someone told me that Kung Fu Panda said something similar.

The difficulty in a business is people like to tell you what they think you want to hear, try not to tell you the bad news and.

Or they're afraid of telling you what they really think, when actually all those things are the most important things you need to know and the Sooner you know them, the sooner you can, you can come up with a, with an action plan to, to deal with them.

So by using that, it's about time of news, allowing people to give the truth rather than being afraid of giving the truth allows you to create an environment that just gets you all the data you need.

And then you can help those people who are giving you information that they might be afraid of giving.

You actually help solve the problem as well, which is also really empowering.

So as a leader then, in an environment where timely news is important, it is a human instinct, isn't it?

Or maybe it's just me sometimes.

So not not to want to give the bad news, you know, maybe something about the bad news will change before I have to give it.

So it's, it's very, very easy to put it off and put it off.

So what do you, what can you as a leader in terms of creating a culture, creating a safe environment for your workforce?

What do you do to try and create an environment where people aren't afraid to come forward with what might be bad news?

To make sure that you do get the stuff you need in as timely a manner as possible.

How many people wake up in the morning and say, I know I want to do a rubbish job today?

Hardly anyone.

That's what everyone says.

So why do they do something that isn't right or isn't quite right?

It's not because they don't want to do the right thing, is because either they think that's the right thing or because they're afraid of doing the right thing.

So if you can create the environment that allows them to do the right thing or learn what the right thing is, then actually you've then created an incredible environment where actually people wake up in the morning, are proud of the work that they've done, then go home and have a good life as well.

And actually then you've then got them to life.

Jitesh, you've moved through various positions in your career from those early days.

Anderson, Dell T Mobile and so on to Delarue and then Spire Healthcare Group.

What have you learned about progressing through different organizations, different companies?

What role has luck had to play?

What role has planning had to play in you progressing from one position and one company to another?

I can't say that there's no luck involved.

There's absolute luck and timing.

And also, let's be straightforward when you get a CFO role.

Most CFO roles come along because it's a problem and they need someone to help solve the problem say you need to be upfront in doing that and I've seen you need to play the long game is what I'd say.

I've seen people go into companies where they just got the timing wrong and it was a business going through difficulties and they did a great job as well as they could, but the timing was just wrong and the business was just wrong for them and, and then trying to come out of that is really quite hard.

And I've recruited some fantastic people with great skill sets there.

I've seen the opposite as well, where people have just got really lucky, just happened to be in the right place at the right time and suddenly they, they, they could fly along with, with where the business was going, actually with little or no effort.

As a sports fan, just thinking of leadership positions in Premier League football teams or really any football teams or rugby teams for that matter as well.

Yes, it's very often that a managerial position becomes available in good circumstances at a leading club.

Usually something has gone wrong at that point and then it's yes.

Is it the right manager at the right time for that club?

Yeah, certainly not for my club at the moment.

But that's another podcast.

Another podcast entirely.

Two months in hospital.

Thankfully, you were able to return to work after the accident.

But here we are just over three years on, as we record.

Have to ask, how are you doing now?

Well, first of all, I am the luckiest person in the world.

At least that's what I say, until I come across other people who are also the luckiest person in the world because lots of people go through difficult things and you know, don't get me wrong, I, I got through and survived.

I was.

There was an 8% survival rate that I got through.

I am lucky.

How am I?

I'm great.

I'm glad I went back to work three years ago.

It was really important as part of my recovery.

The people around me were amazing.

Obviously it was a harder issue for my family and friends than for me, but also at work, oh my goodness.

I'm not naturally a touchy feely person, but when I started coming back, I got so many hugs.

It was great.

And for my recovery, just going back, being able to live my old life and be able to do the job and deliver some great numbers aspire and do some M and A and was great.

But also go back to my cycling world, you know, cycling well again, back on the saddle.

Yeah.

Last year the longest ride I did was 170km.

So um, so I'm in a great place.

I, I, I'm really good.

So thank you for asking.

Now that's really, that's really, really good to hear.

And, and given the, given the accident, the you know, 8, 8% survival rate, you are absolutely blessed.

Um, you touched on it there.

Well, people being touchy and feeling with you when you went back to work.

Uh, how, how did this experience change you, do you think as, as you reflect back on, on your journey from, from the accident to maybe how did it change you your outlook and perhaps your approach to work?

Yeah, I mean it has absolutely changed it.

Which is why I am where I am say 25 years as a CFO in five different companies.

I've had the pleasure that when I've left each of those five businesses, they've been in a better place than when I joined them.

And when a headhunter was calling me for roles that in the past I would have jumped at.

I couldn't see myself taking on a sixth project for another five years because it's like I said, it's not a half a job, it's a full on job.

And I had have the opportunity to change my, change my perspective and change what I want to do.

So if you were to summarize that then do you think there's, what do you think you learned about your, yourself?

You know, you experienced a lot of warmth, you were able to continue with your purpose when you returned to work, which was important and you will continue to be successful.

What, what maybe did you come to realize about yourself through this process?

That maybe there isn't anything but maybe you just appreciated more.

I don't know.

But is there anything that you realized about yourself through this that maybe wasn't apparen before?

This is going to sound really odd, but it actually makes me think about Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

So I know not everyone will remember them automatically off the top of their head, but you first of all start off in your needs with your basic needs, so food, water, security, safety.

And then you know, when you progress in your, in your career, you get your psychological needs which is really about one part is people, family, friends, and the other is what I'll call aspirational.

I think he called it something different or aspirational lifestyle.

You know, where you want to live, what sort of house you want, what sort of lifestyle you want and I think I've got through those stages.

And then he calls it self fulfillment as the sort of final stage.

And I don't like to use that phrase but the way I'd describe it is that I'm now in a position where I can do what I want to do rather than what I need.

And I think what a great place to be.

It's a triangle.

It's often depicted as a triangle.

This hierarchy of needs like most good business or even life diagrams are, we do love a good triangle and I guess this fits into where we are right now.

And as we discussed right at the beginning of our conversation today, here you are two or so weeks away from closing the door at Spire Healthcare.

What's next?

So it's not retirement but it's refocusing.

So tell me what you'll be refocusing, where you'll be refocusing your energy and what excites you most about this self fulfillment step of your life?

Well, I guess those basics of, you know, I didn't want to be an accountant, where did I start from?

Still are in the core of the person I am.

And so my plan is to go plural in a non executive career basis and help other people.

Because as a non executive director that's really your goal, is to help other people deliver the changes that are needed for a business to be successful.

And I'm hoping that my experience will be able to do that with a number of other people.

And that reflects back to the purpose that you expressed sort of right at the beginning really.

What sort of impact do you hope you will have and where is there anywhere in particular, a particular sort of impact that you hope you'll be able to have?

When you've been on a board you see the difference between an executive and a non executive and the executives have all the pressure, all the, yeah, they have to deliver everything that needs to be done and as a non executive you can help them.

So again, how can you create those win win situations that I talked about earlier rather than win lose to help them win and so that each company ends up in a, in a better place.

And I think that's what boards tried to do is it's not just a simple tick box exercise governance, you have to do the governance but that's like the finance role where you have to get the basics right.

If your numbers are wrong you have no right to play in anything else.

You've got to get the basics right.

But then what can you add on Top of those basics.

That's where you can make a real difference.

So how important is legacy for you?

Obviously, helping others, supporting businesses, supporting organizations to do the best that they can and to leave them in a better place than they were when you joined them.

As far as you're concerned, how important is legacy for you?

So, again, I wouldn't call it legacy, because legacy makes it seem that it's about me, whereas it's about Win Win, which is about other people and you.

So how are things working for other people?

And if it's working well for the key people that you're with, then it's also working for you as well.

That is the legacy that is.

That is what you're trying to achieve.

And as far as what you've left behind at Spire, how was the succession planning?

You've had a while that you've been handing over the baton to somebody else there.

Just talk to me about the planning and the execution of that.

Well, first of all, it was really straightforward.

So Harband, who's replaced me in role, was the first person I recruited.

I recruited him while I was still on gardening leave from my previous role and he started a week after me.

So we've worked closely together for over six years and we get on really well.

So actually, the handover was really straightforward.

So if I look at the five roles where I've been a CFO in three of them, the people who've replaced me have been people I've recruited, and in the other two people I've recruited have been CFAs and other companies.

So, again, this is part of creating the Win Win environment and the culture of other people doing well.

So actually, the handover's been very straightforward.

I've got lots of confidence in him, he's already doing a great job and I'm sure he'll do really well.

Which leads me to ask about the role of mentorship there.

How important has mentorship been in your career?

Have you been in a position where you've mentored other people?

Certainly you've developed talent, as you've just discussed there, and what broader role?

You know, as many other CFOs will be listening to our conversation now, what would you encourage them to do?

To play an active part in mentoring, nurturing the next generation in managing their own succession plan?

Mentoring people again, goes back to the basics of what I said about people and how do you work with them?

You know, if most people want to wake up in the morning, come to work, do a good job, go home and then Have a good life to different degrees and you can help them do that to the right degree.

That works for them and it's different for everyone.

That might not be CFO role for everyone because they don't want to wake up in the middle of the night thinking about work.

Then if you're doing that, then you're mentoring people.

Great for them.

So again, it's about creating those environments that work for them rather than ones that just work for you.

You are stepping away from the CFO trenches for now, Jitesh.

But for those CFOs who are still there and of course in your non executive roles as well and your strategic roles, this is still really important.

What do you see happening over the next, I don't know, 12 or 18 months?

What are the kind of market trends, the technology trends that you might see shaping finance leadership at least over this next period, as far as we feel comfortable kind of predicting at the moment?

Gosh, that's a really hard question, especially since Trump has come into power, because you can see it changing every night, every morning when you wake up, suddenly there's something different and that is creating a volatile market environment.

It's creating geopolitical changes that are literally volatile as well.

And so I think from a business perspective, I think we're all going to have to be very agile in being able to cope with that volatility and how we handle that and change our decision making quickly and rapidly.

The other area I think for the next 12 months, you just can't ignore.

We spent quite a bit of time in this conversation talking about data AI, you can't ignore it.

AI is here to some degree already.

It's already coming.

It is going to transform the world.

It can be fantastic, but it can also go horribly wrong.

So how do you make it work for you?

We had some really interesting conversations about using AI at Spire Healthcare.

In healthcare, if you use AI to come up with a solution for a patient and it's 80% correct, is that good enough?

If a computer does it, it probably isn't.

Whereas if, bizarrely, if consultant is 80% correct, that's okay.

But if a computer is 80% correct, it's not.

So how can you use AI?

Well, so we looked at ways that you could use it to prioritize.

So you can look at images and then prioritize the ones that were highest at risk for the consultants or for those to be reviewed by the consultants.

So then you can try to get access to those that need treatment sooner, but they all get reviewed so there are things that you can do and so that'll be quite so.

Yeah, those are two things.

AI and volatility.

The definition of AI on one hand is artificial intelligence.

But as you, as you allude to there with, in a clinical setting there, if it's augmenting intelligence, if it's enabling the humans and the machines to work together more efficiently, in the prioritization example there, that feels like it's a kind of happy, happy step that balances the risk and the opportunity at the same time.

You're a technologist, you know, I guess going back to your early days, you said you enjoyed the technology piece, even if it didn't enable you to do what it is that you wanted to do.

But you must be excited but also cautious at the same time because of your understanding of the power, I guess, that these technologies bring.

Yeah, but it was the same when the Internet came along.

And in fact, I mean, I remember my first CFO rule was with a company that said that we would bring the Internet onto the phone and everyone laughed at us.

We said that people use their phone in front of them rather than in their ears, and everyone laughed at us.

And that's exactly what happened.

And it's the same with AI and, and it changed over time.

It'll modify and it'll improve and it's inevitable.

So it is exciting.

Jitesh, it's been so good to chat to you today.

I wish you every success for this next exciting stage of your career.

But I'm not going to let you go until I've asked you what we call here our showstopper question.

And we ask this to all of our guests.

And this season, we're asking guests to give us their reflection on the phrase progressive finance.

So, Jitesh, what does progressive finance mean to you?

That is a showstopper.

So I see it a little bit like in the way that Donut Economics is for economics.

I see it as a donut economics for finance and how it works.

So it's not just about putting the numbers together.

It's broader than that.

And the role of the team working within finance in helping drive decision making in an agile way by empowering them and drive better decision making so they can be absolutely proud of the business they're in and the contribution they're making to the business.

Great answer, Jitesh.

We'll leave it there for now.

Thank you very much indeed for joining us here today on the CFO Playbook.

And don't forget to join us every month here on the CFO playbook for more insights from finance leaders, but for now, from me, David McClelland.

Until next time, bye.