Ep. 25: Khaled Chowdhury - Finance Culture Transformation

Contact Khaled:LinkedIn
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/khaledchowdhury/


Blog: Getting started in #PowerBI for #Finance
and #Accounting
Unleashed  | Beast BI - http://beastbi.com/unleashed/



FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT


Mitch: (00:05)


Welcome back to Count Me In, IMA's podcast about all things
affecting the accounting and finance world. I'm Mitch Roshong and
in today's episode we'll hear Adam Larson talk with global
finance data and tech leader Khaled Chowdhury as they discuss
finance culture transformation. Khaled is the finance director of
analytics and business intelligence at Cabot Microelectronics,
but even with such a focus on data and technology, he really
emphasizes the importance of focusing on people first and how any
business transformation starts with the culture of the
organization. Let's go to the conversation and see what else he
has to say. 


 


Adam: (00:42)


What is your philosophy on finance culture transformation? 


 


Khaled: (00:51)


My philosophy around cultural transformation, I think it's not
really exclusive to finance, but a culture is a living organism,
which are the some off the people, right? And when it comes to
cultural transformation, investing in technology usually
backfires. And the best way I have found the philosophy of
finance, culture transformation is to invest in people. However,
investing in people, you also have to kind of go from an agile
methodology. You kind of have to have small proof of concept, see
if that works, if that works, you kind of push them on. And one
of the key things as I pushed for change, even to this day, I
think it's a quote from a peaceful warrior that's is the key to
change is to spend all your energy building the new, not fighting
the old, well. We're talking about culture transformation. It's
not necessarily about finance or whatnot, it's people change,
right? So essentially culture is what is acceptable, how people
behave and what is and there's some at one point, what is
acceptable and what is expected, right? The kind of culture
dictates that part. And from that perspective, if we don't ask
the question, especially in we're in the precipice of the fourth
industrial revolution, it is about to change big time. I mean it
has already, but it's the impacts are starting to shop in smaller
spaces. People have been talking about all this new technology,
whether it's gonna work or not, but the end of the day that most
of the technology actually are in pretty good shape that it
actually can be used. But the problem is we don't have any gold
drivers. Driver means meaning the people who would drive the
technology. 


 


Adam: (03:03)


So then how would you take technology, you know, thinking about
how technology is going to not take away jobs but change jobs.
How do you infuse technology into your organization to kind of
enhance its capacity? 


 


Khaled: (03:15)


So I think I will quote something that I say to my boss, right? I
say, if you want me to be around, I'm going to cause a rebellion.
And he's looking at me like are you crazy? I'm, my answer was you
want a revolution. But a revolution is only as successful
rebellion. Right? So, and the reason I liked the concept of
revolution is it happens from inward, not outward. And the reason
I'm saying that is because think about in our finance
organization, it would come to us saying hey, we have this great
product called SAP, BPC or whatnot. They'll come to you, try to
install those and it's going to make all our problems go away. At
the end of the day, it takes our life. I want to try to do the
implementation. But again, when it comes to actually using it,
we've become slaves of the tool. So in terms of infusing
technology to the business or the finest profession, I kind of
see it as a relationship with the technology. Whether are you the
master of the trilogy or are you the servant? Technology is an
absolutely awesome servant, but absolutely a horrible monster.
And coming from that perspective, the best way to infuse
technology into any business on the finance function is to see
how we can start inward. See take things that we're currently
doing. What is it that we can do to automate and liberate so that
we can focus on the next step. Right? And instead of trying to go
from crawling too, running you have to kind of learn how to call
better before you can even walk. Then you go from walking to
running. And it is a lot of dependent on investing people to send
them for training and giving them exposure to what is
possible. 


 


Adam: (05:30)


Thinking about a company that is, you know, trying to infuse this
new technology and thinking that it's, you know, it's good for
them, you know, having that business technologist on hand, you
know, what kind of carry over similarities do you see in members
of that transformation team that's kind of implementing these
technologies? And then how do accountants and their skill set fit
in, in that? 


 


Khaled: (05:59)


So I think it's more about a mindset. So one of the concepts
that's taught by Clay Christiansen, he wrote the innovator's
dilemma. He's a famous professor and strategy is to focus on job
to be done. It's kind of be the people who looks at the task or
as something there is a meaning behind it rather than completely
a task. They understand what job is performing because from one
perspective, the job we're doing is not going away. But the task,
how it is done is going to change. And people who can kind of
come break the shackles of what has done before to be able to see
farther. Right? This goes back couple of years when I was a, I
was talking to my chief accounting officer and a in FP&A, so
I came, came up to management accounting, then FP&A for a
pretty long time now. And most of us who are successful in our
jobs tend to be excellent. Right now there is two things you can
do with becoming an excel wiz. You can just develop something
that's nerdy or something pretty complex and for the heck of it
versus whether you actually get, use it to get some job done. So
it's a lot about coming out of your desk and going and trying to
solve a problem. So it's essentially, it's business technology
should do you have a business problem, you have a technology, go
solve it. So think about in the old days, the accountants who
would know whatever's to sell whatever skill set, whether it's
Excel as a media, whatever they had, they would see a problem
person in problem, they will come out of the desk and go solve
that problem. I think the way Harvard put it is there is a
premium on curiosity. So it's actually the curious mind that has
a huge benefit in today's world because they usually tend to go
find out what's working and what's not. 


 


Adam: (08:18)


That makes sense. You know, it's good to have that curious mind.
You know, and thinking about, you know, we've been talking about
technology and how to, you know, transfer me and your team in
getting that technology in there. But once you have that
technology, you know, there's things like data analytics that are
that seem to drive our decisions. You know, what would be the end
goal of creating a data analytics kind of driven culture where
you're looking at the data and making decisions based on that?
What's the end goal of that? 


 


Khaled: (08:46)


Okay. I think if you think from that perspective, right?
Regardless ...