CFOs – The rock stars of our times

Chief Financial Officer (CFO) as a leader who has the capacity to look beyond the numbers and to observe and influence the health and culture of a workplace can be as important to an organisation as the CEO. The recent business failures in the US and Europe has seen the role of the CFO coming into sharper focus. A skilled CFO is not just responsible for financial reports but he is also in a good position to detect early signs of bad health and poor culture. The CFO’s role is particularly crucial in ensuring the integrity, openness and honesty of an organisation because finance more than any other function is involved right across a company. While the CEO determines the key drivers of the business, the CFO designs the key indicators of those drivers and ensures their integrity.

CFOs aren’t particularly known for moving out of the comfort zone of the books they keep, but the credit crisis provided them that challenge or – as some finance heads would like to see it – the opportunity to move out of their traditional domain. Cash, costs, communication, confidence. Those four Cs sum up the mandate of the CFO in a year (2008-09) when everything that could go wrong – and also things that many thought would never go wrong – went spectacularly awry. And it was for the CFO to step into the breach like never before. As demand and liquidity dried up, cash flows had to be expanded. As margins came under a squeeze, costs came under the microscope.

The CFO had to scrounge for capital in a world starved of that till-recently taken-for-granted resource. Suddenly, the rules of the game had changed: Finance heads who once had little problems raising funds to make big-ticket acquisitions were now struggling to find capital to keep those assets afloat and squeeze growth out of them in recession-hit markets.

That’s when the other two Cs moved up in priority in the CFO’s lexicon. Investors, vendors, customers and employers had to be first told about the realities in the market place and on the balance sheet and then confidence instilled into them that this too would pass. CFO’s in Oman have played a similar role to steer their companies through rough times. Our cover story captures the experience of a cross section of these business leaders, who are truly the superheroes of our times.
 

Top^