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Holiday Replay:

When it comes time for Harmit Singh to brief Levi Strauss & Co.\u2019s management team regarding the latest performance results, Levi\u2019s CFO will often share a briefing document that features a front page bearing the heading \u201cWhat\u2019s Working and What\u2019s Not.\u201d

\u201cIt\u2019s more difficult to understand what\u2019s not working, and it\u2019s the\xa0\u2018What\u2019s not\u2019\xa0that helps us to determine the areas on which we have to focus to take the business to the next level,\u201d explains Singh, who notes that the \u201cfront page\u201d is carefully rendered by Levi\u2019s Financial Planning\xa0 & Analysis (FP&A) crew \u2013 a team of forward-looking financial professionals whose past feats of analytic derring-do have included helping the jeans maker to foresee the leap from \u201cskinny Jeans\u201d to the baggie look among young consumers.

It\u2019s here among Levi\u2019s crack team of number crunchers that the\xa0\u201cwhat\u2019s not\u201d often becomes exposed, and it\u2019s here where a new mind-set \u2013 one that keeps consumers top-of-mind and favors stakeholders over shareholders \u2013 is already visible.

And just as soldiers are known by the\xa0things\xa0that they carry, so, too, are finance professionals known by the metrics that they wield \u2013 and at Levi\u2019s, these metrics are increasingly consumer-driven.

Explains Singh: \u201cAs the pivot to the consumer mind-set happens, the metrics that have become critical are: How many new customers are we signing up? What is the repeat rate of the customer? And, What is the lifetime customer value?"