Executive Brief: The CFO Agenda: Transforming the Finance Function

Finance organizations are built around a strategic dimension, an external dimension, and a functional dimension. The strategic dimension evaluates the company's performance and supports future growth of the company, the stock price, and other external measures. The external dimension support the investor community and regulatory environments. And the functional dimension supports the organization's core functional activities. Each dimension has its own unique set of customers, and CFOs must understand the different customer groups and how each defines success.

First, there are organizations that are "Efficiency seekers." They aim to do business in a smarter, faster, way. This category describes many CFOs and finance teams because it is the most tactical, outcome-oriented, and controllable. Secondly, there are finance organizations that are best described as "Modernizers." They seek to create new capabilities to modernize the business, adopting technological solutions to survive disruption. A third group of finance organizations is the "Re-definers," which seek to change and redefine the business at the core in order to stay ahead of the market. The fourth category are the "Industry explorers," which break new ground in new markets and industries. There are many companies in the technology sector in this category. For more information, please download the HBR Executive Brief.

There are five main competency areas that finance teams seek in new and existing talent: (1) The Technogeek, who likes to play with technology and implement it to streamline processes (2) the Problem Solver, who is a structured thinker and strong collaborator, (3) The Treasure Hunter, who enjoy mining for data and creating value and providing insight into better ways to do thing, (4) The Dreamer, who excels are creative visualization and envision better processes, and (5) The Controller, who is detail-oriented and seeks to preserve value. For more information about these five competency areas, please see the Executive Brief.