Working in finance can be a balancing act. On the one hand, you crave to be ‘close to the business’, and every business I have worked in has at some stage embarked on a project with the aim to make finance a better business partner.

Yet being a business partner often involves saying no and generally spoiling all the fun. Get too close to the business, go native, and you are in danger of incurring the wrath of the CFO. Stay too close to the CFO and you are in danger of inhabiting a lonely island of suspicion within the business with no escape dinghy.