Finance leadership today extends far beyond numbers, requiring commercial insight, strategic thinking, and the ability to understand how businesses create and sustain value.
As businesses navigate changing markets, complex decisions, and competing priorities, finance leaders are increasingly expected to act as strategic partners rather than simply measure performance. Mickael believes that curiosity, financial discipline, and a strong understanding of the business are essential to making better decisions and identifying opportunities for growth.
In an interaction with CEO Insights Europe Magazine, Mickael shares his perspectives on cross-industry leadership, commercial thinking, financial strategy, business partnering, and decision-making. He also reflects on how diverse professional experiences can broaden a leader’s perspective and help build a more adaptable approach to business leadership.
Read the complete article for deeper insights.
Q1. Your career spans industries where business models, revenue drivers and financial priorities differ significantly. How did navigating these shifts shape your leadership identity?
A. I have learned to walk into a room without a fixed answer. Moving between business models, and between countries, does something useful to you: it strips away the assumption that what worked last time will work here. So, I ask questions first — sometimes more than people expect — because the shape of a problem is rarely what the first set of numbers suggests.
What stays constant is the curiosity, and a willingness to put an alternative on the table rather than simply validate the plan in front of me. Having led teams of very different sizes, through very different priorities, also gives you a certain calm. You learn that clarity comes before action, not after it.
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Q2. Every new industry comes with its own pace and priorities. What did you learn about asking the right business questions before making key decisions?
A. Pace and priorities are usually specific to one industry, but where and when to question does not. I learned that the formal decision meeting is the wrong place to ask the real questions. By then, people are performing for the room. The genuine thinking happens beforehand, in one-to-ones, where someone will tell you what they actually believe without weighing how it sounds in front of colleagues.
So, part of my job is creating a space where an idea can be raised without being judged, and doing it early enough that there is time to weigh opinions, make the necessary compromises and reach a conclusion — occasionally an unpopular one. The formal meeting then serves a different purpose: making the decision official, ensuring every stakeholder shares it, and agreeing on how it will be communicated.
Q3. Your journey extends beyond finance into business strategy and complex sales. When did you realize that commercial thinking was becoming just as important as financial expertise?
A. My path ran the other way around: I started in complex sales and moved into finance afterwards, so commercial thinking came first and I never had to be persuaded of its value. What I saw early is that numbers without an understanding of the business tell you very little. You cannot explain a trend or challenge a pattern if you do not know what sits behind it. Accuracy without commercial acumen is like a car without an engine — from the outside nothing is missing, you can sit in it and admire the finish, but it will not take you anywhere. It is the combination of the two that allows a finance director to be a genuine partner to the chief executive.
Q4. Finance measures business performance, while project management drives execution. How did working across both areas change the way you define business success?
A. Neither function owns success on its own - finance without execution is just a forecast, and execution without financial discipline burns cash you did not intend to spend. Working across both changed my definition of success from a KPI into a compromise - between keeping the business solid, getting the delivery right, and earning the customer's trust along the way.
You rarely get all three at their maximum. Departmental goals do conflict, and I have stopped treating that as a problem to be eliminated. The real test is whether those goals are designed so that hitting them makes the whole company stronger, not just the department. When finance and delivery partner properly, that is what happens.
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Q5. Having worked in different industries, how do you identify leadership practices that work everywhere from those that only suit a particular business environment?
A. The practices that hold everywhere are the unglamorous ones. You talk to people, you spend time with R&D and engineering, you make sure you genuinely understand both the product and the customers. Above all, you should be eager to learn the company's history: why it was founded, what made it successful, and which transformations it has already been through. That step is almost always skipped, and it is the quickest route to understanding why things are as they are.
What does not transfer is anything to do with pace and style — how decisions are reached, how directly you can challenge an idea, how much structure a team wants. Curiosity is not a soft skill in that situation — it is how you work out which habits to keep and which to drop.
Q6. Across your leadership journey, how did you ensure financial discipline supported business growth instead of limiting new opportunities?
A. Done with accuracy, financial discipline has never limited an opportunity in my experience and au contraire it is what makes a decision defensible. Occasionally it means declining an offer, but the reason is usually that the deal does not fit the strategy, rather than dealing with uncomfortable numbers.
Having spent time in sales, I understand how demanding a complex sales process can be, and my instinct is to accompany the team through it rather than wait at the end of it as an approval gate. One thing is worth remembering: without customers there is no company, and no finance function either. Finance discipline exists to give a business the confidence to move, not a reason to hesitate.
Q7. As your career progressed, how did your conversations with business leaders change from discussing numbers to shaping long-term business priorities?
A. Early in your career you try to be right, as being right is how a junior proves their value. In senior positions the instinct reverses: you want as many people as possible questioning your thinking and explaining why you might be wrong. That shift moved my conversations away from confirming numbers towards what the numbers imply.
Finance is not accounting; its purpose is to help shape where a business is going, not to record where it has been.
Talking to leaders in other industries accelerated it, because every conversation gives you another reference point. It only works when the discussion is honest with the arguments for and against set out plainly. Anything less is a conversation that feels productive but changes nothing.
Q8. Looking back, how has working across multiple industries helped you recognize business opportunities that might be overlooked by leaders with experience in only one sector?
A. The main advantage is having a larger library to draw on. When you have seen several business models closely, you recognize a pattern earlier, and you are more willing to borrow a solution from a sector that has nothing to do with your own.
Colleagues who have spent an entire career in one industry often have deeper expertise than I do, but they also inherit its assumptions, assumptions that have become invisible from the inside. So, I ask why something is done a certain way, and you have no idea how many times the honest answer is that nobody has questioned it before. Working across cultures reinforces the same habit. Once you have adapted to a different way of operating, you stop assuming there is only one.
LAST WORD: Advice for young professionals who want to build successful careers as business-focused finance leaders across different industries:
Two things. The first one is to embrace change, and take the opportunity even when it looks risky — risky is not the same as wrong, and most of the moves that shaped my career did not feel comfortable at the time. I was told more than once, by those around me, that I was making the wrong call — changing jobs, moving to another country, taking on more responsibility.
The second piece of advice is less glamorous: whatever task lands on your desk, do it. Whether it appears in your job description is beside the point. Nobody writes that quality into a job advertisement and nobody interviews for it, yet it is what people remember about you. It also happens to be how you learn a business from the inside, which is exactly what a finance leader needs when moving from one industry to another.