Ep. 132: James Stark - CFO Skills and Competencies

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


FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPTAdam (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...