Skip to content
Auburn Auto Group (banner)
Home » News » Business » Anubhav Mittal on CFO Leadership,  Corporate Development, Capital Discipline, and What It Takes to Drive Real Value

Anubhav Mittal on CFO Leadership,  Corporate Development, Capital Discipline, and What It Takes to Drive Real Value

Some executives are strong operators. Others are skilled dealmakers. Fewer still can do both well, simultaneously, across some of the world’s most complex multinational businesses. Anubhav Mittal has spent more than two decades doing exactly that, building a career defined by disciplined capital allocation, high-stakes transactions, and a consistent ability to translate financial strategy into lasting enterprise value.

Based in Chicago, Illinois, Mittal currently serves as VP and Global Head of Business Development and M&A at Archer Daniels Midland (ADM). His work sits at the intersection of corporate strategy and financial execution,  two disciplines that demand very different strengths, and that very few people command with equal authority.

Anubhav Mittal and the Foundation of a Global Finance Career

Before understanding where Anubhav Mittal is today, it helps to understand where he started. His academic credentials alone signal a high ceiling: a Bachelor of Technology in Mechanical Engineering from IIT Kanpur, completed in the top 5% of his class with multiple academic and project distinctions, followed by an MBA from Harvard Business School with a concentration in Finance and Strategy. He also holds both the CFA and CMA designations, which together reflect a genuinely unusual combination of investment analysis and management accounting depth.

That kind of preparation tends to produce executives who are technically precise, intellectually rigorous, and capable of operating at the highest levels of corporate decision-making. His early years at Booz & Company put that foundation to use across corporate strategy, post-merger integration, go-to-market transformation, and operational improvement assignments across multiple industries.

From consulting, Mittal moved into the corporate world, first at Kellogg Company, and then at ADM, where the majority of his career has unfolded.

From Kellogg to ADM: A Career Built on Strategic Transactions

A Proven Track Record at Kellogg Company

At Kellogg, Anubhav Mittal held two distinct senior roles that reflect the breadth of his skill set. As a senior Finance executive for Kellogg North America, he led finance and strategy initiatives centered on growth, turnaround, and portfolio choices. In his role as Senior Director/Director of Corporate Development and Strategy, he worked on growth strategy, global investment opportunities, and portfolio initiatives for one of the world’s most recognized consumer goods companies.

He also led a major global restructuring program at Kellogg, overseeing design, execution, tracking, and accountability across functions. That kind of program, which is wide in scope, high in complexity, and deeply cross-functional, is the sort of initiative that separates executives who understand strategy in theory from those who can actually drive it through large organizations.

The ADM Years: Scale, Complexity, and Execution

At ADM, the scale became larger and the context more complex. The company’s global footprint and portfolio breadth meant that capital allocation, business performance, portfolio shaping, and transaction decisions often overlapped. Mittal’s roles there reflect that overlap.

As CFO of Global Pet Solutions, he led finance and business strategy for a portfolio spanning pet foods, treats, and ingredients across brands, categories, and geographies during a period of strong growth. Later, as CFO of ADM Nutrition, he led finance for an approximately $8 billion global business spanning B2B and B2C markets and supporting more than 14,000 employees. His remit included commercial finance, operations finance, FP&A, controlling, strategy, and M&A. In that setting, finance was tied directly to portfolio choices, resource allocation, restructuring, operating reviews, and external reporting. He also worked on analytics modernization, reporting alignment, internal controls, and earnings support for investor communications — work that is less visible than a transaction announcement, but often more important to confidence in a business’s numbers and direction.

In his current role as global head of business development and M&A, he leads ADM’s agenda across acquisitions, divestitures, joint ventures, strategic partnerships, and selected capital investments. Over time, his work has included roughly $10 billion in transactions and strategic investments. The figure matters less as a headline than as evidence of repeated exposure to consequential decisions: situations where valuation, structure, diligence, governance, and post-close plans all have to line up, often under time pressure and with incomplete information.

The Discipline Behind the Deals

Not every executive who closes large transactions does so with consistent financial discipline. The deal itself can be straightforward, the harder work is ensuring that value is actually captured after the ink dries. That is precisely where Mittal has built a reputation.

His work has spanned acquisitions, divestitures, carve-outs, joint ventures, partnerships, and capital investments. He has also led IPO-readiness work for an ADM business segment, which required building out standalone financials, governance structures, operating model design, and capital structure evaluation. That kind of work demands comfort with ambiguity and the ability to construct coherent operating frameworks from the ground up.

At the enterprise level, Mittal has led capital allocation and investment governance work that helps organizations prioritize competing growth and productivity initiatives through structured review processes and rigorous business cases. These are not headline generating activities, but they are often the clearest signal of how seriously a company takes its financial decision-making.

Credentials, Convictions, and What Drives the Work

Throughout his career, Mittal has worked with CEOs, boards, and senior leadership teams on questions involving capital allocation, portfolio strategy, M&A, performance, and transformation. Those settings tend to reward clarity more than flourish. The work is often about trade-offs: how much to invest, where to pull back, which assumptions can be defended, and how much confidence a set of numbers or plans should really carry.

His credentials — Harvard MBA, IIT Kanpur Engineering, CFA, and CMA — provide one way of understanding the technical base. The fuller picture comes from the pattern across roles: finance leadership tied closely to business decisions, transaction work tied closely to operating reality, and a consistent preference for rigor over drama.

Mittal is also committed to mentorship and to helping younger professionals think through questions of leadership, career development, and judgment. That part of the story is quieter, but it adds another dimension to a career shaped not only by analysis and execution, but also by reflection on how people grow into responsibility over time. 

About Anubhav Mittal

Anubhav Mittal is a senior finance and corporate development executive with more than two decades of experience across CFO leadership, capital allocation, M&A, restructuring, strategy, and business transformation. He currently serves as VP and Global Head of Business Development and M&A at Archer Daniels Midland, where he leads the company’s work across acquisitions, divestitures, joint ventures, strategic partnerships, and selected capital investments. Over the course of his career, he has led or helped execute approximately $10 billion in transactions and strategic investments, and he previously served as CFO of ADM Nutrition, an approximately $8 billion global business. He holds an MBA from Harvard Business School, a Bachelor of Technology from IIT Kanpur, and both the CFA and CMA designations. He is based in Chicago, Illinois.

Tags:
Categories: NewsBusiness