There is a moment I remember clearly from my early days running finance for the Middle East and Africa at Lenovo. I was preparing a budget presentation for a regional leadership team that included executives from three different countries, each with a different idea of what a good forecast looked like. One wanted aggressive growth targets. One wanted conservative, defensible numbers. One wanted a story, not a spreadsheet.
That moment taught me something no business school classroom had prepared me for: finance is never just about the numbers. It is about the people sitting across the table from you, and what they need to feel confident enough to make a decision.
I have spent more than twenty years working in finance across the Middle East, Africa, Europe, Asia Pacific, and now the United States. From Dubai to Chicago, from regional roles to global ones, from emerging markets to corporate headquarters. If I had to compress everything those years taught me into a single line, it would be this: context is everything.
The Middle East taught me to read the room.
Business in the Gulf moves on relationships. Before you present a number, you need to understand the person receiving it. What pressures are they under? What does success look like to them this quarter? What are they afraid of? Finance professionals who walk into a room armed only with Excel models and variance analysis will struggle in that environment. Those who combine financial rigor with genuine human curiosity will thrive.
I learned to slow down before speaking. To ask more questions than I answered. To understand that a budget is not just a financial document. It is a negotiation, a commitment, and sometimes a political statement.
Africa taught me to be resourceful.
Working across African markets means working with incomplete data, fast-changing conditions, and teams stretched thin across vast geographies. You rarely have the luxury of waiting for perfect information. You learn to make good decisions with what you have, to build models that are flexible rather than perfect, and to focus on the indicators that actually drive the business rather than the ones that are simply easy to measure.
That experience made me a better analyst. Not because I became comfortable with uncertainty, but because I learned to distinguish between the uncertainty that matters and the uncertainty that does not.
Europe and Asia Pacific taught me about scale.
When I moved into a controller role covering Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia Pacific, and later the global Services organization, the complexity multiplied overnight. More time zones than there are hours in a working day. Multiple currencies. Different regulatory environments. Consolidation across teams that had never worked together before.
It was also the first time I led people I rarely saw in person. A team spread across countries and cultures, where trust had to be built through video calls, clear commitments, and consistent delivery rather than shared offices and hallway conversations. Leading a global team forces you to be deliberate about things that happen naturally when everyone sits on the same floor: context, recognition, and making sure no one feels like a satellite.
At that scale, clarity becomes your most valuable asset. If your reporting is complicated, if your forecast takes too long to produce, if your message to leadership is buried in slides, you lose the room before you even start. I became obsessed with simplicity. Not because simple is easy, but because making complex things simple is genuinely hard and genuinely valuable.
Chicago taught me that the fundamentals never change.
When I relocated to the United States in 2024 to lead Global Financial Planning and Analysis at Motorola Mobility, I expected a steep learning curve. New company culture, new systems, new stakeholders, new market dynamics. What I did not expect was how universal the core of the work actually is.
Whether you are in Dubai or Chicago, whether you are managing a regional business or a global one, the questions that matter are always the same. Where are we versus plan? Why? What are we going to do about it? What does leadership need to make the right call?
The geography changes. The currency changes. The organization chart changes. But the purpose of finance, which is to create clarity out of complexity and to give decision-makers the confidence to act, never changes.
What I would tell my younger self.
If I could go back to the version of myself sitting in that meeting room in Dubai, trying to satisfy three executives with three different definitions of a good forecast, I would tell him this: your job is not to be right. Your job is to be useful.
The best finance professionals I have met around the world are not the ones with the most sophisticated models or the most impressive credentials. They are the ones who make it easier for the business to move forward. They translate noise into signal. They reduce anxiety by replacing opinion with evidence. They earn a seat at the table not because of their title, but because the business genuinely cannot make good decisions without them.
That is the standard I have tried to hold myself to for more than twenty years. Some days I meet it. Some days I fall short. But it is the right thing to aim for, wherever in the world you happen to be working.
