Ep. 69: Sandra Clarke - Finance & Innovation -- The Perfect Partnership

Jun 1, 2020

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Sandra Clarke, Senior Vice President & Chief Financial Officer at Blue Shield of California, is a proponent of finance innovation. At Blue Shield of California, she oversees the company's financial strategy, actuarial functions, and financial operations in addition to lading Enterprise Process Transformation. Most recently, under Sandra’s leadership, Blue Shield of California has made $200M in financing and support available to struggling physicians and hospitals affected by the COVID-19 crisis. The entire concept was an example of innovative thinking to ensure California can have a robust provider network after this crisis, and there is also an innovative technology element to the program as well. In this episode of Count Me In, Sandra talks about the value of crossing finance and innovation and balancing both to effectively lead your firm. Download and listen now!

Sandra Clarke and Blue Shield of California in the news:

FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Mitch: (00:05)
Hi everyone. Thanks for coming back for another episode of Count Me In. I'm your host Mitch Roshong and this is episode 69 of IMA's podcast. Today's conversation is between my cohost Adam and Sandra Clarke, the CFO of Blue Shield of California. Sandra talked to Adam about the value of crossing finance and innovation for the organization and finding the proper balance as a leader of the firm. Keep listening for more insight into how to bring innovation to your company.

Adam: (00:39)
So to start off, what would you say are your guiding principles when it comes to finance and innovation?

Sandra: (00:46)
I'd say my guiding principles are that it has to be a partnership that you have to, as a finance person, find the balance between the business strategy and the financial discipline and how you can help innovation weave into those things in a balanced way. So that, that's a very key thing for me. We have to be drivers in unleashing that, that slice of genius that exists in everybody. We always have to do it in support of business objectives and execution still matters. You, you have to be able to execute on this idea of dreaming up lots of cool ideas on a whiteboard is a lot of fun, but you have to be able to turn them into something that's useful for the company. And, finally, I would say an underwriting guiding principle at all times as you cannot assume that what you are continuing to do or you're currently doing is riskless. If you are staying in your same way of doing things and not paying attention to what's going on around you, that can be just as dangerous as going and trying something innovative. So the better answer is to be bold and to strike that balance.

Speaker 1: (02:07)
I think that's some great advice to be bold. So then what counts as innovation in your organization and how do you define it, and what does innovation mean for your employees?

Speaker 2: (02:19)
Innovation is a real buzz word at the moment. If you were to do an internet search, I actually did this at one point. Google has over 2 billion results for the word innovation. So I'd say that it means a lot of different things to different people, and you have to be careful that you define it in a way for your organization that's meaningful because a lot of employees hear that word innovation and think “uh oh” this means job cuts coming. And it may mean that jobs change, it doesn't necessarily mean that the jobs go away. I define innovation as something that is novel and useful. So it could be a new way to work. It could be a new way to save money, or it could be a reinvention of something that you're currently doing, but it has to be useful as well as new. And new can be defined as, completely never seen before, or it could just be a significant and enhancement to something that you're currently doing. But the key is that in addition to being a breakthrough, it has to be a useful breakthrough. Innovation just for the sake of coming up with a cool new toy isn't beneficial to your organization, and a lot of times that's the balance that you have to strike that I was referring to before.

Adam: (03:42)
So we live in very uncertain times, and so what should leaders be thinking about when it comes to innovating in the face of things like recession or just not even sure what the economy is going to look like on the other side of this pandemic that we're in?

Sandra: (03:56)
Well, you still have to do innovation. In fact, I would say right now, especially in the current environment, innovation is even more important, because we're all finding that we need to rethink how we do our jobs, how we go to market in an environment where you can't do as many things in person. And so it's important for companies not to completely pull back on innovation in this type of an environment, but you might have to refine your priorities and pare them down. So you might've had 10 projects out there for innovative ideas, new initiatives, and maybe you scale that back to three or five and you do more frequent check ins, give them a little bit less time to evolve before you make a decision on what to move forward, modify, or stop the investment. So that I think your, your level of rigor around what you consider acceptable parameters might change a little bit. And again, and again and again, I will say it still has to fit with the business strategy and your company's objectives, and that's even more crucial now because you're going to be refining what those objectives are potentially, as I said, to address the new ways of going to market or the new ways of working, and you need to make sure that you don't continue with the project just because it's somebody, darling and you make sure that it's still going to sit. And so that's where that re-prioritization comes in to make sure that you are using your innovation energy, and I mean that from a people resource perspective as much as a money perspective that you're using it wisely.

Adam: (05:46)
Definitely. Are there some examples that you can give about, ways that you've been able to innovate?

Sandra: (05:53)
Well, within my finance team we rethought how we do our close process and shaved about a third of the time out and we're going to try and get another 25% out by the end of the year. And so I think that's one example of, I'll call it in place innovation where you're taking a process that by and large has to exist and finding ways to do it differently so that you can make it better. And that's allowing people a lot more time for analysis and a lot less time on transactional work that's not meaningful to them or to the business. That's one way. And then we, within Blue Shield have a big process transforma...