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| | Brought to you by Liz Hilton Segel, chief client officer and managing partner, global industry practices, & Homayoun Hatami, managing partner, global client capabilities
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| | | Like almost every other leadership role, the job of CFO has undergone profound changes in the past few years. Our research shows that a growing number of functions report to the finance chief, who may also be at the forefront of digitization and, increasingly, at the hub of value creation. Finance leaders are also playing prominent roles in talent development, innovation, and capability building. This week, we explore what’s new about the CFO role and how both new and experienced leaders can tackle its many complexities.
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| | | If you’ve been a finance leader for a few years, you may be in danger of falling into complacency. That’s why it’s critical for midtenure CFOs to become prime movers of change, suggest McKinsey senior partners Cristina Catania and John Kelleher and colleagues in an article. “Midtenure is when the best finance leaders get bold,” the authors say. In their interviews with eight former CFOs, four priorities emerge; an essential one may be to expand your horizons beyond finance. For example, some executives recommend joining the board of a noncompeting company to understand how other leaders manage digitizations, expansions, or transformations. Or you may try breaking down silos between corporate functions and business units in your own organization. One executive spoke up when he saw issues in other functions. “When we saw problems with R&D budgets, for example, I met with the CTO [chief technology officer] once a month, just the two of us,” he says. “We made sure that we were aligned and not fighting against each other.”
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| “The CFO has become the pivot point for understanding what stakeholders are looking for and how to deliver it,” says Palo Alto Networks CFO Dipak Golechha. In a discussion with McKinsey senior partner and CFO Eric Kutcher, Golechha describes how the finance function has evolved—“[it] has a much broader mandate now than it had before”—and why finance leaders need to be agile, flexible, and perhaps most important, well versed in corporate cybersecurity. “Technology has become the foundation of how every company operates, innovates, and differentiates,” he says. “CFOs, in their stewardship role, have oversight over cybersecurity from an audit and ERM [enterprise risk management] perspective, so I would recommend that if you are not an expert on cybersecurity, get trained.”
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| | | Lead with financial savvy. | | | | | — Edited by Rama Ramaswami, senior editor, New York
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