The drama and the solitude of the CFO.
Behated for destroying the dreams of the
creative salesforce, misunderstood for asking the right questions at the wrong
time, avoided for carrying along mirrors , the Chief Financial Officer is a
species in danger of extinction.
Their role mainly consists in:
·
Telling the truth they see in
the numbers
·
Exercising a control and audit
function in the company and on the Managing Director’s actions
·
Managing the (financial) risk
in the company
Their reporting line is to the CEO.
If it is so their fate is doomed and the
species as we know it today it is rushing towards its extinction.
Is this an exaggerated view?
Not quite. They are supposed to control the
result of the activities of their bosses, and their job description, the
management team, and the world (especially the NYSE analysts) would like any
respectable CFO to tell the CEOs the salient facts of the business, including
–and mostly- what they do not want to hear.
And still you expect them to survive?
Surprisingly some of them do. You can still
see some real CFO in business reservoir or hidden in the metropolitan jungle.
How do they survive? After years of careful observation, I think that the
secret of survival of this specie depends on how they have evolved genetically.
The surviving CFO have adapted to their environment. There are acrobat CFOs,
Troll CFOs, Carpet CFOs and alas the extinct Business Partner CFO. Below I
would like to share some observations.
Acrobat CFOs
Environment and behaviour
The Acrobat CFOs live at the top of the
business ecosystem, however not for long. The most common way CFOs have to
survive is to become acrobats. They need to balance well between doing their
job (telling the truth) and still be in the graces of their bosses.
Unfortunately for the CFOs many CEO are promoted to their level out of a sales
functions in full respect of the Peter’s principle[1]
with no or little competence about strategy, managing people, risk management
or finance. Having been groomed in an environment used to see CFOs as the enemy
number one, the obstacle between them and the customer’s infinite happiness,
the CEO will use anything in his (or her) power to destabilise the CFO. The
rope or the path is narrow and the risk of falling or failure is very high.
Those who fail and fall can usually be found on the floors of the corporate
jungles. They become part of the
twilight fauna haunting the bottom of the business world. When an acrobat CFO
is replaced, the explanation to the astonished employees and internal and external
stakeholders is: “he (or she) did not understand the business” or even better,
“he did not tell us well in advance that this EBIT disaster was coming”. An
alternative is “he was not a business partner”. What always works is “he was
not a team player” which translated means: he got us with the finger in the
marmalade jar and did not shut up.
The Troll CFOs
Environment and behaviour
The troll CFO is a very shy creature. A troll CFO dwells in isolated meeting rooms
or offices, lives together with other accountants in small bookkeeping units,
and is rarely helpful to human beings. Their appearance varies greatly; trolls
CFO may be ugly and slow-witted, or look and behave exactly like human beings,
with no particularly grotesque characteristic about them. They are rarely to be
seen especially when there is a decision to be taken. If they are forced to
take a decision they will move to a different dimension or meeting room and
will do anything to twist reality and numbers so that they can make their CEO
happy and can return safely to their environment. Their business life
expectancy is quite high.
The carpet CFO
Environment and behaviour
They live on the companies’ floor, agree
with anything the CEO will ask or say and their life expectancy is very high. They
normally suffer sever neck pain due to intense nodding activity.
The perfect Business Partner, honest CFO
with high integrity and granite balls
This species is unfortunately extinct. Some
taxidermists still conserve samples of their tissues, but there is no interest
in the CEO world to clone any of them.
I hope that nobody who is a CFO will feel
offended by the humorous or sarcastic definition of the CFO world above. If one
has been a CFO in his or her life, especially in restructuring or change management
situations, he or she will know exactly what I am talking about.
Getting back to a more serious tone, I know
many CFOs and their accounts of why they had to move on to the next job or lost
their job are not fun at all:
“My CEO asked if I could set apart 1
Million USD to fund his private party. He would like to invite a famous tennis
star and wanted me to pass it as advertising expenses. I told him that we could
do that but I wanted my headquarters to approve the plan. Needless to say I had
to go because I am not a team player-perhaps a tennis team player”-
“I found this one restaurant bill to
approve and frankly speaking I could not approve 12,000 USD for 4 persons
without asking questions. It turned out that it was not only food…. At the end
of the discussion I had to leave”-
“Are you crazy? If we start this new
business and the revenues increase, the US headquarters will ask us again to
grow. And it will be a pain in the neck to find new customers. Let us delay the
growth for later next year, if we need it”-
“Hey let us shift some costs to a bad
company and get some revenues from there. We can optimize our variable
compensation on the smaller company and let the bad company go. They are no
good anyway, nobody will notice”.
“What the heck! I know this is not
completely legal, but everybody is doing it, c’mon”
“Bribing? It isn’t bribing if it helps
getting the deal signed”
These stories capture only a small glimpse
of what happens in reality. If a CFO job becomes available, most of the time is
because something extremely wrong is going on. The weakest link is that the
controller who reports to the controlled. He will be the one to blame if bad
things turn out (he was not controlling enough and did not prevent it) or if
the numbers are not going as expected (how could we even know….).
To add insult to injury, having to change
job because you want to stick to the rule of law or because you have sturdy
moral principles is quite a tiring exercise and requires a lot of mental and
physical energy. Before judging negatively a CFO with many career changes, you
should ask yourself why that change was necessary. What is depressing is that it is very
difficult to explain this to recruiters. If you are in a CFO position for a
short period of time that does not look good on your CV. Our system, the way
people are recruited and the way your profile is assessed, forces you into
complacency or numbness if you want to survive long in a corporate environment.
In order to survive, some people like to change the cards they are playing with,
some other prefer to change the table and “play” somewhere else.
If I had to design the CFO role and the
structure of a company from scratch I would tend to see a “complete” CFO as the
head (at least co-head) of the company. By that I mean someone who besides
possessing natural gravitas and leadership skills, has gathered competences in
M&A, strategy negotiations and sales. Accounting or controlling only will
not suffice: controlling and accounting are the basics you need to have in
order to be able to perform a management job.
They are the alphabet or the grammar you need to know in order to form
words and sentences. You need to have a complete set of competences in order to
give content to your sentence and create ideas and actions.
At the end of the day, an investment
decision, a new business field or a new strategy all require a business plan
with a figure at the end of it and a general risk assessment.
No-one is better positioned than a CFO to
exercise a neutral view on this assessment. You need someone generating ideas
and pulling good stories (CEO) and a CFO telling if all of this makes business
sense without the fear of being sacked.
As far as operating model concerns I
believe that the best CEO - CFO models are the following:
Either you have a “complete” CFO (as
defined above) in charge of the company and a CEO in charge of sales and
strategy reporting to the CFO or
a CEO and a CFO reporting both directly and
independently from each other to the owners, investors or to the stock exchange
If you are interested in these matter you
could try to read about Mr Majocchi, someone who possesses the skills of a
proper CFO who took over in a company called Emilceramiche (a company producing ceramic tiles) and turned
it over very successfully without having a clou about ceramics or tiles.
The story that in order to be a CEO you
need to know the market and bring customer is in my view one of the most
misleading in the business stories of the western hemisphere in the last couple
of centuries.
The CLEARCUTCASE is that, at the end of the
day, an investment decision, a new business field or a new strategy all require
a business plan with a figure at the end of it and a general risk assessment.
No-one is better positioned than a CFO to
exercise a neutral view on this assessment.
In a healthy company you need someone
generating ideas and pulling good stories (CEO) and a CFO telling if all of
this makes business sense without the fear of being sacked.
___________________________________________________________________________
Hard reality found on the net
What do you do when your CEO is beyond stupid and about
to implode your company?
Anonymous
(CFO) | Oct 24, 2014
It's true. And I don't usually exaggerate. I just pulled
the company out of near bankruptcy and this new CEO comes in and is driving us
right off the cliff again. Cash is down to just enough to cover one month of
expenses with no real uptick on the horizon. And he has no prior management
experience and no appreciation for finances, revenue, management,
prioritization, planning, time to execute, anything that might
possibly result in a more sensible business model. The board just brought him
so it's still the honeymoon phase. At least the numbers are so horrific that
even they are starting to wake up. Next week is our board meeting and we are reviewing
YTD and budget for next year - which again was created with absolutely no
business sense - he wholesale ignored all my advice. I'm a wreck feeling like I
have to sugar coat results and present budget as rational when in fact I don't
believe a word I'm saying. I don't think I have the leverage to have a showdown
yet. I feel like a kidnapped person driving a car that gets pulled over -
"officer, everything's fine....(wink, wink)" Anyone else been caught
in this position? How did it turn out for you?
(CFO at Local Government Agency) | Oct 28,
2014
You can't win.
[1] The Peter Principle is a concept in management theory in which the
selection of a candidate for a position is based on the candidate's performance
in their current role rather than on abilities relevant to the intended role.
Thus, employees only stop being promoted once they can no longer perform
effectively, and "managers rise to the level of their incompetence."
(Wikipedia)
