Ep. 132: James Stark - CFO Skills and Competencies

Contact James Stark: https://www.linkedin.com/in/james-stark-312a2/

FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Adam (00:00):

Welcome back to Count Me In, IMA's podcast about all things affecting the accounting and finance world. I'm your host, Adam Larson and today I will be previewing a conversation between my co-host Rouba and her special guest, James Stark. In this episode, James shares his insight and views on the challenging global landscape and the must have skills for CFOs. He is active in Egon Zehnder's financial officer's industrial board practices and is well-versed in the financial leaders need to evolve and optimize their careers and their organizations. Keep listening to hear more from James and Rouba now.

Rouba (00:42):

So I want to ask you a little bit about your career in the finance and accounting industry for so many years, I mean, throughout your career you've facilitated a lot of peer to peer learning within the finance and accounting profession itself, and you're a huge advocate for creating lasting value. Can you tell us a little bit more about what it means to drive that kind of level of value in today's very volatile globalized marketplace?

James (01:13):

Yeah, of course. So look, I tie this to the rise of the strategic CFO, which is something that's been written about quite a bit over the last decade or so. What that means, I think in practice is that CFO, senior finance leaders are becoming much more forward looking to help drive business decisions and not just kind of the backward looking scorekeeper that they might've been 20, 30 plus years ago. I think elements of that would also include scenario analysis and how you translate corporate strategy down to business unit or functional or even product strategy. So there's much more of a focus on commercial outcomes and driving the business forward. I also think finance leaders are really well equipped to help drive this value, given their position in the organization. Especially if they can broaden their skills beyond just kind of whatever that core part of finances they kind of came in or came up through. So, you know, rotations can help with that as you think about moving around between controllership to FP&A or treasury or investor relations or strategy and corporate development, et cetera. I've had CFOs tell me over the last, maybe five plus years that, you know, technical skills now are really just more like table stakes and what truly differentiates finance talent and helping to drive value creation, is having greater impact via, you know, better strategic thinking, being both deeply analytical, but also pairing that with a willingness to embrace new technologies and then also strong leadership and interpersonal skills can really help motivate and organize and energize the broader organization and I think specifically to that peer to peer learning piece, and I think part of that is also, you know, if you're a lifelong learner, you're going to be kind of more adaptable and you're constantly being incorporating best practices that you learn from others outside your organization, or even outside your industry.

Rouba (02:56):

Yeah, I'm all for the life learning approach, that's really a big value, at IMA. So when you look at, when your focus in recent years has been a lot on innovation and organic growth, but let's look into this new era, this new normal that we're in, the COVID-19 pandemic pre, during, and post, and as organizations are crumbling, some are succeeding, some have completely remodeled their entire business model and they're struggling to survive. What role does innovation play, I mean, and organic growth play at this time, if at all?

James (03:35):

Yeah, great question. It's certainly very timely, right. So I've been talking to senior finance leaders for almost two decades now and when I asked them about their top priorities, innovation and organic growth is always at, or near the top. And that's both for the company, but also even within the finance function, right? How can you improve your operations and processes within finance? So I think there's always a role for innovation, but it's important as well of course, ebb and flow, depending on what's happening both within the company, as well as the broader macro conditions. You know, in times of crisis it's well-known that R&D spending is typically one of the first line items that gets cut or at least drastically reduced, right. Cash is king and so, yeah, totally get that, that's going to happen in a downturn. But you know, but once that storm is weathered and you start seeing a return to normalcy, I think then it becomes time to quickly pivot and identify new opportunities for growth again. And I think the earlier you can make the pivot, you know, the better the odds that you can beat your competition at it. I'd also, you know, even use Egon Zehnder as an example in terms of what we did during the pandemic. You know, as the pandemic was ramping up, we didn't lay off anyone globally. You know, it was, we did stop, we did stop hiring, but we didn't lay anyone off and, you know, given our values, we didn't think layoffs were the right thing to do at the time, but also strategically, we didn't think layoffs made sense, and I think, you know, some of our competitors actually did lay off staff and, you know, as a result now that we're seeing this strong rebound in some markets, we feel like we're in a great position.

Rouba (05:02):

Yeah I don't think many anticipated the pent up demand and how it's going to see them scramble to get their business back to normal. So if we look at automation, machine learning, artificial intelligence, they've already begun taking serious inroads into the professional realm and not just in the finance and accounting sector, but every single industry. So digital transformation is now the conversation at every boardroom, every discussion and it was extremely accelerated by COVID. I mean, whatever was in the works a few months ago just became a priority all of a sudden. So when you think of this post pandemic, new normal per se, what are the skills that the finance and accounting professionals are going to require in order to maneuver with this new normal?

James (05:49):

Yeah, you know, I think some of these kind of core skills will get amplified given what we've seen over the last 16 months or so, right. And so that's around adaptability, resilience in being able to lead through ambiguity. I think we'll see likely an acceleration of some of these pre COVID trends as we move to the new normal. I think many have already, as you said, many have already been focusing on advanced analytics, bots, robotic process automation to improve performance within the finance function. As we, move to the post pandemic normal, I think those areas are going to remain robust. I'd also expect to see many people turning to artificial intelligence, machine learning, advanced data visualization technologies, and of course, digitalization to do things better, smarter and faster and who knows at some point maybe blockchain may eventually even live up to it's hype.

Rouba (06:38):

Hopefully. I mean, it's the biggest conversation right now, blockchain and cryptocurrency taking over the world. So we've seen companies around the world undergo major digital transformation efforts in the region. Some of the most notable are, Emirates NBD. I mean, these guys spent 1 billion dirhams, on, their own transformation. You're talking about roughly a quarter of million dollars, and just to enhance their performance, Coca-Cola says that they were able t...