“A good product is useless if you don’t have good financial management in your company”

Interview with Oriol Amat, Professor and lecturer of the course Decision-making based on financial statement analysis in the Executive MBA at UPF-BSM

The UPF Barcelona School of Management (UPF-BSM) has redesigned its Executive MBA with a program tailored to the latest market demands and trends. The Academic Director of the Executive MBA, Katharine D’Amico, is joined by a faculty team that combines academic excellence, PhDs, and extensive professional experience across multiple sectors.

In this interview series, UPF-BSM Faculty Feature, we talk with the main professors of the new EMBA. In this second episode, we feature Oriol Amat, who teaches the course Decision-making based on financial statement analysis.

“In EMBA classes we always find people from very different backgrounds, some with strong financial knowledge and others without it,” says the professor. “When these participants take a finance course and learn how to interpret accounting information, they usually experience a major transformation, as they suddenly become aware of how the financial dimension affects everything,” he notes.

“One common misconception among people without a solid financial background is to think that in business, success only depends on having a good product and selling it,” explains Professor Amat. For him, this aspect is undoubtedly important, but without proper financial management, the company is doomed to fail. “Any business—with the best product, the best marketing, the best team, or the best technology—that does not manage its finances properly will eventually disappear,” the expert emphasizes. Amat explains that during the EMBA sessions, students analyze real-life case studies of companies that had excellent products but went bankrupt because they neglected financial aspects and made mistakes that led to their downfall.

Regarding the challenges in the fields of finance and controlling, Professor Amat points out that the major disruptive force currently transforming the sector is artificial intelligence and the fourth industrial revolution. “The impact it is having on the financial and control world is enormous, and in the EMBA we aim to ensure that this impact permeates all subjects—and, of course, finance as well,” he says. “People can become much more productive and efficient, but we must not forget that AI, in its current state, still makes many mistakes—so everything must be carefully reviewed.”