Dispatches From The Edge: Lessons From Nine CFOs Driving Change

As a new year begins, I wanted to take a moment to reflect on the frontline stories this column has been privileged to share. While they have been very diverse, they carry a common element of men and women using the CFO role to lead the charge in providing a greater value from the finance function. The goal of this column is to give you access and insights into their success and thereby help assist you in improving your finance performance.

In looking back on our first nine interviews, you can clearly see the enormous breadth and diversity 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 Business School Press, 2006), authored by my colleague 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 presents selected key lessons I find most important from the interviews.

1. CFOs serve as freedom fighters who liberate both finance and business managers from huge amounts of detail and the proliferation of complex systems that increase their workload and deny them time for reflection. Creating space and time for higher-value work is a crucial step that turns transformation rhetoric into practical reality.

For example, see our interview with Mark DeLuzio (July 2007), in which he described implementing Lean accounting and setting a goal to reduce reporting time to only 25 percent of the reporters' time. DeLuzio's thinking evolved into what we today call Lean accounting, which applies the Lean concepts 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.