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Finance transformations can be pretty disruptive.
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How did you get your teams on board that this was needed?
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I found there's two crucial things you have to get across
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to get people to embrace change.
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The first is you have to explain why.
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Why are we going about this change?
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The second is, you have to answer, "What's in it for me?"
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When we went through this, the organization, the company,
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the industry was going through an enormous amount of change.
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And so as we saw the investments were being made
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into technology, into the data pieces,
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to the data science attribution,
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the group was falling behind and able to leverage that
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and being timely with analysis and results
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and really being a better business partner.
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And so we went in with the knowledge
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and with the leadership team,
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not only with the finance leadership team,
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but also our business partners and say,
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"Hey, look, we need to be doing a better job.
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We need your partnership and sponsorship on this.
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Let's work together to make this happen."
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When you come in, it doesn't take you long
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to figure out something is really broken.
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People know it, right? But how do you get them on board?
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Do they know that you're going to champion change?
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Finance transformation involves every major function
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and business unit in the business.
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They also have vested interests.
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So a big part of it is figuring out politically
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which way to go and who's going to be on your side
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and not on your side, and how do you structure this
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to make it palatable for everybody?
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Within my finance team,
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we had to embrace technology to get more efficient.
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We couldn't keep scaling the organization by adding people.
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And when you're embracing technology, it's a big change
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for people oftentimes who came out of public accounting.
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Yeah, and I would add, I used to tell people,
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"We don't have bad people. We have bad jobs."
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With the use of technology,
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we can really transform people's environments.
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The finance leader is a storyteller,
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and if you use your core processes,
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like the strategic plan, to say,
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"If we do this, this is what we're going to be building."
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This is a huge opportunity for finance leaders
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to paint a picture of Why are we doing it?
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What is over the rainbow?"
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Finance sits on top of almost all the data
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within the company.
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And so typically finance,
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if you structure the data right and use the right tools,
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you can see around corners,
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you can see when this change needs to happen
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and really be the catalyst throughout the organization,
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whether it's within finance
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or other parts of the operations.
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So, you've set the vision, your teams are on board.
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How did you go about mobilizing transformation?
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You know, when you're doing change, it's a big process,
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and if you don't have yourself set up for change management,
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you're going to fail.
The change journey,
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I call it the grief curve, and you've got people
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that are on various stages of the grief curve along the way.
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People learn in different ways of communicating,
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whether it's verbal or writing or blogs or video,
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but you've got to make sure
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that you're constantly out talking about what's going well,
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where you've got opportunities, and where you're going next.
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And not just to finance, right,
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to the CEO's executive leadership team,
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it should be part of the agenda.
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Somebody should be coming in and talking to it
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every monthly review,
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especially when you get down towards the end,
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because it's going to involve everybody,
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and that makes finance feel like
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they're part of a bigger picture.
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What I found is that if I didn't understand
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where my resistance was coming from,
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if I didn't understand why people were so resistant,
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or why people felt the change,
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and I couldn't communicate it,
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then I was really just a finance guy.
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I wasn't really part of the business leadership.
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That's the challenge of being a broad-based CFO.
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You need to have enough understanding
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and experience in those areas
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to be able to understand their issues, process it,
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and make sure that the plans
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are properly reflecting their concerns
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and so that you can actually get them bought in.