CFO THOUGHT LEADER

After Chip Zint jumped two levels in NCR Corp.’s retail division finance hierarchy, he couldn’t help but savor the moment while reflecting on the fact that his career years thus far—including nights and weekends studying for an MBA—had all been put to good use.Still, while altitude matters when it comes to career leaps, where you land in an organization—and when—sometimes matters more. In Zint’s case, his arrival as sales finance head for NCR’s retail division coincided with the completion of one of the largest acquisitions ever undertaken by that group.“The moment I raised my hand, I was jumping into the fire,” recalls Zint, who reports that NCR faced multiple challenges when it came to assimilating the newly acquired business, not least of which were the newly merged organization’s revenue expectations.  Says Zint: “It was about grinding it out every single day and going to bed at 2:00 a.m., only to wake up and be 50 emails behind.”  As the problematic transaction took its toll on the division’s finance leadership, Zint says, one day he found himself working alongside NCR’s CFO, who had temporarily stepped in to serve as CFO of the company’s retail division. Then came a directive for Zint to run the next “order cadence” call, a weekly conference call of NCR’s top leaders that was regularly attended by the CEO. The call was designed to have leaders from across the company update top management about the closing of orders from the week prior and the week pending.As it turned out, on this particular week, the CEO was determined to get to the bottom of what was troubling retail.    “I sat there for over an hour answering his questions with regard to what was going wrong with certain accounts and what was being done to offset some of the negative developments,” comments Zint, who notes that years later the same CEO would recall the exchange and how he had made Zint “deliver the bad news and stand behind it.”Having successfully helped the retail team to navigate the ups and downs of the merger’s integration challenges, Zint began seeking finance roles that would complement his FP&A experience, such as stints with the treasury and investor relations functions.  Ultimately, Zint’s 13-year career at NCR would include a turn as head of corporate FP&A for the company as well as a career chapter as a divisional CFO. Not unlike many senior executives, Zint tells us, he found that the arrival of the pandemic led him to begin reevaluating his professional aspirations.“I was looking for a smaller public company where I could come in as #2 to the CFO and have a successor opportunity—but not entitlement,” remarks Zint, who adds that he first used an executive recruiter to help him to map out such a position in painstaking detail.Zint remembers the recruiter’s exact words: “He said, ‘Chip, do not answer the phone unless it’s someone bringing a role to you exactly like the one you seek.’” –Jack Sweeney

Brett & Jack discuss the workforce rantings of Elon Musk and the new Twitter owner's November 16th deadline for employees to decide whether to leave or stay. Is Musk's leadership style solely responsible for the turmoil at Twitter or are there other contributing factors? This episode's featured Workplace Champions expose how leaders seek to optimize work environments to empower people to do their best work. While Jack views the talent mind set of each of the three featured finance leaders as the upshot of extensive leadership experience, Brett points out there may be a method behind the Musk "madness." This episode features the workforce insights and commentary of CFO Anat Ashkenazi of Eli Lilly, CFO Ambereen Toubassy of Airtable, and CFO Evan Goldstein of Seismic.

When Jonathan Carr first walked through the doors of the Stryker Inc. plant in Arroyo, Puerto Rico, the boyish newbie accountant no doubt turned the heads of a few managers.  Having finished college only about 18 months earlier, Carr was now the accounting and finance “lead” for a major software implementation under way at the medical device manufacturer’s Puerto Rican plant.To succeed in his new role, Carr would need to have local managers as well as senior IT executives walk him through the manufacturing plant’s transaction processes so that he could understand how the software’s promise of automation could be leveraged to streamline the plant’s accounting close cycle.Looking back, Carr can see that it was his inexperience at the time that made the assignment so enriching to his early career.“You have to find things that you have absolutely no idea how to do because it’s those things that will help you to grow exponentially,” remarks Carr, who credits his boss at the time, a Stryker divisional controller, for instilling a risk-taking career mindset.Recalls Carr: “One of his biggest pieces of advice to me was to find opportunities that would either get me promoted or get me fired.”After more than 5 years at Stryker, Carr began to think about finance career opportunities inside high tech, a sector widely populated by growth companies that could help him to move beyond manufacturing’s hyperfocus on cost accounting.The SaaS software company Survey Monkey soon captured Carr’s attention.  “At the time, Survey Monkey’s FP&A team wasn’t built out and the company was still at less than $100 million in revenue, so here was this opportunity to start thinking about how to take an organization that was growing organically and add strategic levers to it,” comments Carr, who would serve as head of FP&A not only at Survey Monkey but also at yet one other tech firm before stepping into the CFO office at Armis in 2020.Asked about the “deep end of the pool”—or the Stryker plant that he had entered with only 18 months of experience—Carr tell us: “These are the types of opportunities that as a leader I think are so important to now provide to my own team.” –Jack Sweeney

Few finance leaders have better revealed to us the career-transforming powers of IPOs than CFO Tony Tiscornia.Turn back the clock to 2015, and Tiscornia is the accounting-minded VP of finance for spend management software company Coupa.“I was really a controller—a business controller, but still a controller,” explains Tiscornia, who notes that his world began to change following the appointment of Todd Ford as CFO.Read More Ford, a finance leader with a rich IPO resume, would join Coupa as CFO in June of 2015 and quickly begin to assemble an IPO-ready team.“When Todd first came to Coupa, he asked me what I wanted to do with my career, and I told him, ‘I want to be a CFO,’” recalls Tiscornia, who adds that Ford quickly tagged him for an investor relations role.Over the next 16 months, Tiscornia says, he learned all of what was required to achieve the milestones that led up to the company’s October 2016 IPO. During its first day of trading, Coupa’s shares would reach a high of more than $41, to more than double the $18 initial public offering price.“I think that a lot of people who go from pre-IPO to a big bang IPO like we did here at Coupa often focus on that day, but what sticks out to me was what began to happen on the next day,” comments Tiscornia, who observes that the post-IPO period at Coupa became an “eye-opener” for him with regard to understanding the resources that were then required to operate Coupa as a public company.“The bankers, consultants, and accountants had all gone away, and we were now expected to report on a quarterly basis—it wasn’t just practice any longer,” remarks Tiscornia, who quickly found that his investor relations tour of duty had now positioned him along the front lines of the ongoing discussions with industry analysts and shareholders.“That role really became my bridge from controllership to CFO-type work,” comments Tiscornia, who first joined Coupa in 2012, when the company had fewer than 100 employees.Last year, Tiscornia was named CFO when his CFO mentor, Todd Ford, exited the office to be named Coupa president and CFO emeritus. –Jack Sweeney

In March 2020, when Eli Lilly announced that it would begin providing drive-through COVID testing services to the state of Indiana’s healthcare workers, more than a few hospital administrators likely scratched their heads.After all, the giant pharma company was not in the business of providing healthcare services, any more than it was a medical device manufacturer.  Still, drive-through testing turned out to be just the most recent offshoot of an effort under way inside a specialized facility at Lilly Research Laboratories. As months turned to years, as much as 40 to 50 percent of all samples being tested within Indiana were to end up being processed by the Lilly facility.   “A CFO may look at this and rightly ask, ‘What are the costs that are going to be required to establish this? What are the sets of risks associated with deciding to move forward with something like this?,’” observes Anat Ashkenazi, who at the time served as head of strategy and transformation for the pharma behemoth as well as CFO of Lilly’s R&D arm.For Ashkenazi, who would be named CFO of Lilly within 12 months of COVID’s arrival in North America, the pandemic would become the ultimate testing ground and not just for the virus.“I remember walking into this office on the day that we announced that I was taking on the CFO role, and there were only three or four other people working on the whole floor—the building was empty,” remarks Ashkenazi, who had joined the company 20 years earlier with an MBA in hand from Tel Aviv University.  Ashkenazi’s appointment had been hastened due to the abrupt resignation of her CFO predecessor, who Lilly management had concluded had exhibited poor judgment when it came to a personal relationship in the work environment—a management drama that would unfold as the pandemic bore down.Asked to recall some of the challenges that she faced during the first 30 days of her CFO tenure, Ashkenazi comments, “I would say that trying to build connections quickly with the management team with whom you’ll be working was important and very difficult to do when you’re virtual. That was one of the things that I had to figure out: ‘How do I get this done?’”Like all of us, Ashkenazi, a mother of three (between the ages of 11 and 17), faced challenges during the pandemic that tested the boundaries between work life and home life. Still, she seems intent on letting us know that her greatest lesson or takeaway from the pandemic has to do with Lilly's resolve to step up and become one of its community’s primary testers.Says Ashkenazi: “We can talk about ESG, but I don’t think that you can run a firm successfully over many years without having a clear line of sight into your role in the community and acting on it.” –Jack Sweeney 

When Brett Powell is asked what distinguishes his day-to-day role as a finance leader inside the world of academia from that of his CFO peers residing within industry, Powell without hesitation says, “Complexity.”Aware that such a one-word answer would likely summon only more questions, Powell continues: “Essentially, when you think about it, we’re running a city … we house people, we feed people, we provide them with utilities. Everything that’s required to run your hometown needs to be replicated on a university campus.”Still, Powell points out that one of the fundamental differences has to do with an organizational mind-set when it comes to cost allocation and subsidization. “Corporations will look at each of their product lines and try to understand the profitability of the product, and if one is losing money, then they just end that product line and move on to something else—but we don’t think about academic programs in the same way,” comments Powell, who adds that during a previous CFO tour of duty he had created a resource allocation model for a “resource-restrained” university, only to quickly discover how cross-subsidization activities between the different departments and programs added new layers of complexity.“Just putting the data in front of people was not enough—they needed to really understand the perspective and the strategic direction that we were trying to follow,” remarks Powell, who notes that he would often find himself helping different department heads to understand why getting less of a subsidy wasn’t always a negative for their department.  Says Powell: “If a university’s business school is generating so much profit that it can subsidize other programs by a certain amount, then we need to think about how this subsidy might be able to grow if the business school were to invest more—and to understand how all of the other programs might ultimately be able to gain from the business school’s success if we started to make such decisions differently.” –Jack Sweeney

Evan Goldstein tells us that it was at the end of another long day—after a week of long days—as he was walking to the parking lot adjacent to Genentech’s offices that he received a “gut punch.”Becoming more self-aware of others is something that many finance leaders have told us that they have needed to lean into during their career, but few have shared with us the pivot to self-reflection as vividly as Goldstein, whose multi-decade finance career boasts an unusual dual-chamber architecture centered on 10 years at Genentech and another 11 at Salesforce.“I refer to myself as a serial monogamist when it comes to my professional career and the longevity that I’ve experienced at both of these companies,” explains Goldstein, who credits his extended stay at both firms to the power of three: the people, the mission, and the innovation.Still, Goldberg wants us to know about the long day that ended in Genentech’s parking lot.For young finance career builders, arriving at the end-of-day parking lot can be somewhat likened to a runner breaking the finish-line tape, not to be awarded a medal, though, but to be met with the refreshingly cool evening air that routinely rewards a long day’s work.It was in just such environs that Goldstein chose to thank a younger Genentech colleague for their hard work on an important and ultimately successful “deliverable.”“After having just been promoted to the manager level, I had taken over short-term planning in the corporate organization and had hired this person—whose role I had had in the past,” reports Goldstein, who earlier in the week had presented the “deliverable” to Genentech’s leadership team.“Here we had had this really successful outcome, and this employee was just doing phenomenally well,” comments Goldstein, who found himself alongside his young report as they made their way to the parking lot together.“Thank you for all of your hard work,” Goldstein remembers saying—to which the employee then replied: “Yeah, well, I don’t think I want to do this.”Such a response was like a punch to the gut, Goldstein recalls, and one that not even the fresh evening air could ease.    The employee explained further: “Evan, you’re telling me what to do, and you’re not letting me figure it out.”Looking back, Goldstein realizes that he was shortchanging the opportunities that he provided to others by failing to allow them to grow and develop along the way as they “added their own flavor to the process.”Says Goldstein: “This was one of my turning points from a managerial leadership perspective—when I started to realize that it’s not just about what you deliver but also how you deliver it.” –Jack Sweeney

A brief summary of this episode

We can’t help but cringe when a finance leader tells us that they don’t want to be known as “the CFO of ‘No’”—that shopworn characterization of CFOs who seem to enjoy giving thumbs down verdicts.   So, we were pleased when CFO Jim Morgan of CallRail steered clear of the trite trope when he recently joined us as a return guest.Nonetheless, we were still curious as to what has replaced the iconic “thumbs down” when it comes to finance leaders projecting their diligence onto the monitoring of risk and governance practices.“I probably have it a little bit easier than most CFOs because one of our five culture statements is Mind the business—which is music to a CFO’s ears,” comments Morgan, who adds that the simple phrase is best voiced in a question.“’Are we minding the business?’ is what I ask our team every day,” reports Morgan, as if prescribing for the CallRail corporate culture a regimen of essential vitamins and minerals.Notes Morgan: “It’s naturally easy for me to be the culture carrier of this because I am able to leverage that business mentality as we focus on being a business partner to all of our different departments.”  Also, the question’s emphasis on the “we” helps to amplify a business’s shared mission and achieve “buy in” when it comes to some prickly decisions.  “It’s a nice sort of framework for using to sort of step back with folks and say, ‘Are we minding the business?’—as opposed to, say, just stating ‘I don’t think that’s a wise spend of dollars’ or ‘That doesn’t really follow our talent mandate,’” remarks Morgan, who again emphasizes that within CallRail, Mind the business is not just a popular phrase but also one that the company has codified.Says Morgan: “Mind the business is how we ultimately achieve trade-offs and prioritizations across the business—it’s what we call a culture statement.” –Jack Sweeney 

When Ambereen Toubassy decided that it was time to start up her own hedge fund, it's likely that no one cast doubt on the experienced investor’s grand plan. That is, no one except Toubassy herself.  After 7years as an investment banker with Goldman Sachs and a dozen running hedge funds, Toubassy says, she told herself, “Okay, this is a moment, I have a track record, I should start my own hedge fund.”Thus with some freshly drafted marketing collateral in hand, she initiated the early round of discussions that would allow her to begin raising capital.  “When I started doing this, I realized my that heart wasn’t in it—I told myself, ‘Okay, if your heart isn’t in this, you have no business asking other people to entrust you with their capital,’” recalls Toubassy, who notes that her outreach had put her in touch with a span of finance professionals from her Goldman Sachs years, including a number who had exited the investing world to take on a variety of operating roles—including CFO positions.“What clicked for me and why I made the shift to operations was how much time CFOs spent in talking about the people with whom they were working,” reports Toubassy, who points out that while the guiding principle of her career had always been to “always be learning,” her discussions with CFOs made clear that there was more to learn.Remarks Toubassy: “I'd always sort of had this inkling that when I was managing a portfolio and tickers, I didn't get as much of that people mentorship experience as I would have liked to have had.”Today, after having served in multiple CFO roles, Toubassy keeps people top-of-mind when offering advice to new finance leaders.For one thing, she advises, “Spend time gathering context and developing relationships with your peers and the business leaders for all of the other functions.”Moreover, Toubassy exposes the people factor in CFO success from the perspective of output and input metrics.“The financials are output metrics, and a CFO cannot influence them or change them because they're exactly that," remarks Toubassy. "To effect change, you need to understand and influence the inputs that go into the business.”Perhaps not surprisingly, though, Toubassy quickly circles back to her relationship-building advice: “You need to spend time with the head of each of the business functions. You need to have a relationship with each of these people. You need to be able to sort of put yourself in their shoes and say, ‘How would that person effect change?’ And, over time, the output metrics that finance cares about will change.”Meanwhile, Toubassy finds little or no irony in the title “chief finance officer.”“We have this tendency to jump straight into the financials or outputs because that’s who we are," she says. "And, we are the chief financial officer.” –Jack Sweeney