: About Me

Anand Sanwal is the former Vice President, Investment Optimization and Strategic Business Analysis, at American Express where he was responsible for building, managing and leading the company's corporate portfolio management effort - widely recognized as the most ambitious corporate portfolio management undertaking at a large corporation. In this role, he also oversaw the CFO's strategic planning group and the company's $50MM Chairman's Innovation Fund. American Express was recently recognized as the most innovative financial services company for these efforts.

He is the author of the book Optimizing Corporate Portfolio Management: Aligning Investment Proposals with Organizational Strategy (Wiley, April 2007) which features a foreword by former American Express CFO, Gary Crittenden (now CFO of Citigroup) and is currently a Managing Director at Brilliont. He is a recognized thought leader on corporate portfolio management and innovation speaking frequently to research organizations including CFO Magazine, the Beyond Budgeting Round Table, CFO Executive Board, Corporate Portfolio Management Association, and Gartner amongst others. He has also worked with leading pharma, high-tech, healthcare, financial services and public sector institutions to assist them in bringing corporate portfolio management and innovation disciplines to their organizations.

Previous to his current role at Brilliont and American Express, he worked in venture capital. He also worked oversees in London for an internet company and prior to that was based in Mumbai, India and Shanghai, China as a strategy/operations consultant for a mid-size chemical firm. He graduated from the Wharton School of Business with a degree in Finance and Accounting and also has a degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania.

Thoughts and additional discussion on corporate portfolio management, innovation, reengineering and corporate stupidity are found at his Investile Dysfunction blog at http://brilliont.com/blogs/id/. He can be reached at asanwal@brilliont.com

My passion is ...

getting things done

I know too much about ...

corporate portfolio management and innovation

Why I write ...

To call it like I see it

What I am reading/watching/listening to ...

The Looming Tower, Influence

Business > Project Management Why you need an independent and professional project management office (PMO)

1 of 3

So I recently heard an executive from Air France, (Marco Vd Poel) talk about their portfolio management effort. It was a refreshingly honest and well-articulated presentation. It was one of those presentations that only a practitioner can give because it was based in reality and showed the good and bad of their portfolio management efforts. Marco had one line in his presentation that was simple, to the point and absolutely spot on. I'm not sure if it's a line he came up with, but he's the first person I've heard say it so he gets the credit. He stated: "Project Management is about doing pr...

More..

• Helium Charter Member