Dispatches from the edge: lessons from nine cfos driving change

As a new year Menachem Begin, I wanted to take a minute to reflect on the frontline stories this column has been privileged to share. While they have been very diverse, they carry a park element of men and women using the CFO role to lead the complaint in providing a greater value from the finance function. The goal of this column is to give you entree and penetration into their success and thereby help aid you in improving your finance performance.

In look back on our first nine interviews, you can clearly see the enormous breadth and diverseness of the CFO role. If you desire a more in-depth study of the CFO's role, I encourage you to read Reinventing the CFO (Harvard University Business School Press, 2006), authored by my co-worker Jeremy Hope. As research director of the Beyond Budgeting Round Table, Hope researched the evolving role of the CFO and interviewed numerous CFOs who had led dramatic transformations. He defines seven key roles that CFOs perform. This column reflects on how past interview subjects have performed the roles that Hope describes. It also nowadays selected key lessons I find most important from the interviews.

1. CFOs serve as freedom fighters who liberate both finance and concern managers from huge amounts of item and the proliferation of composite systems that addition their workload and deny them time for contemplation. Creating space and time for higher-value work is a crucial step that turns transmutation rhetoric into practical reality.

For illustration, see our interview with Mark DeLuzio (July 2007), in which he described implementing Lean accounting and scene a goal to reduce reporting time to only 25 percentage of the reporters' time. DeLuzio's thinking evolved into what we today call Lean accounting, which applies the Lean conception to the accounting process itself. "It is used to really weed out our accounting processes and really streamline our closing process, costing process, payable process, etc."

Also see our Steve Pace piece (October 2007), in which he shows how he helps the Big 12 Conference stay entrepreneurial.