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But, if you really want to grow in your career as a manager or professional working in a non-financial role, then it is imperative to enhance your knowledge of finance, says Duke Corporate Education professor Joe Perfetti.

Explore the metrics required for the complex age

The complicated tangle of strategic agility can be boiled down to the interplay of three systems: the market, the organization, and the human.

The Handbook of Board Governance provides readers with a wealth of insights from both practitioners (directors, management, and advisors) and academics. Editor Richard Leblanc has included entries from numerous experts.

Large public companies have become risk averse. They focus on quarterly results and are severely penalized by financial markets if they miss sales or earnings targets. Predictability is rewarded and uncertainty is penalized.As a result, large incumbent companies have difficulty investing in the edge businesses of tomorrow and often wait to see how markets settle before moving to take advantage of opportunities.

Risk, or uncertainty, is critical to finance. In many ways, finance cares more about the potential range of outcomes than the outcome itself. In today’s highly complex and unpredictable marketplace, we need to shift how we think through uncertainty and calculate risk.

To understand the agility imperative, leaders must understand the ‘spin rate’, or speed at which the markets, organizations and their people change and evolve. Challenges occur when these systems move at different speeds