Hello, we’re speaking with Steve Barrios, senior vice president, global FP&A for Prologis. QUESTION: Steve, over the next 12 months, what are your priorities as an FP&A leader? BARRIOS: So to give some context: Prologis is the world’s leading global industrial owner, operator, developer, and acquirer of warehouses. Our biggest tenant is Amazon. So you […]
493: A CFO for All Seasons | Vijay Kumar, CFO, Sify Technologies
At times, it must seem to Vijay Kumar that his 12-year tenure as a CFO has been spent not at one company but three. This must be a sense that most C-suite members at Sify Technologies likely experience in light of the company's appetite for continuous reinvention. Back in 2007, when Kumar arrived at the…
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475: Advancing Product to Enter the Next Stage of Development | Barclay Phillips, CFO, G1 Therapeutics
G1 Therapeutics CFO Barclay “Buck” Phillips set his sights on the CFO position on day one of his very first job back in high school. After he hustled home to share the great news about landing the part-time gig, Phillips’s father, a stock broker, shared some prescient advice: "Son, always make sure you’re the guy…
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471: When a Megatrend Came Knocking | William Acheson, CFO, GWG Holdings
From a career development standpoint, one of the best things that William Acheson did to reach the CFO office was stepping away from corporate finance and accounting for 15 years. After coming up on the public accounting track, the GWG Holdings finance chief immersed himself in investment banking, the residential mortgage industry, capital markets, risk…
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469: A Strategic Leader Gets His Bearings | Jim Peters, CFO, Whirlpool Corporation
Schooled in M&A When Whirlpool CFO Jim Peters joined the company at the director level 15 years ago, he was thrust into the thick of a pivotal M&A deal that also wound up generating extraordinary value from a career development standpoint. Originally assigned to help manage the accounting facets of the proposed Maytag acquisition, Peters…
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464: Shortening Your Customer’s Time to Value | Gordy Brooks, CFO, FinancialForce
Problem-Solving Strengthens the CEO–CFO Partnership One of FinancialForce CFO Gordy Brooks’s most valuable early career-building experiences began by butting heads with his CEO. The chief executive insisted on issuing sales commissions on a weekly basis—an ask that would have most finance chiefs pulling their hair out. After the CEO stuck to his guns in the…
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463: Determining Your Course of Action | Jennifer Ceran, CFO, Smartsheet
Two Ways to Get to the CFO Office A regular on Treasury and Risk Management magazine’s “100 Most Influential People in Finance” list, Smartsheet CFO Jennifer Ceran joined the company, a SaaS platform for managing collaborative work and automating work processes, in 2016 with impressive Silicon Valley bona fides. She’s served as CFO and in…
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459: Savoring Your Risk Mitigation Opportunities | Rejji Hayes, CFO, CMS Energy
In a sector known for advancing leading-edge risk mitigation strategies, CFO Rejji Hayes offers a risk-minded response to those who ask why he steered his career into the power and energy sector. “I had this epiphany where I said, ‘It would be nice to find a sector that was a little less cyclical and a…
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458: Championing a Vision of What Change Looks Like | Tony Tripeny, CFO & EVP, Corning, Inc.
Mastering the Public Aspect of the CFO Tony Tripeny’s remarkable career at Corning can be defined by some impressive numbers: 33 years of service in every aspect of corporate finance at the 167-year-old company whose cutting-edge materials reside in nearly every cell phone and flat screen, among so many other products. Yet the veteran EVP…
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445: How Finance, “The Connector,” Is Wiring Organizations | Michael Bayer, CFO, Wasabi Technologies, Inc.
Wasabi CFO Michael Bayer’s career "Ah-ha!" moment struck early. He was a college math whiz in the early days of PCs when a professor enlisted him to move all of his paper-based finance and accounting records to a computerized system. “He took me under his wing and taught me a lot,” recalls Bayer, whose professional…
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444: Blueprint for a Strategic Finance Chief | Raj Agrawal, CFO, Western Union
When he started his career, Western Union CFO Raj Agrawal never expected to wind up leading a global finance function. This seems appropriate today, considering that he defines his role—first and foremost—as “driving and executing the strategy of the company.” Trained as an electrical engineer at General Motors, Agrawal also earned an MBA and then…
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442: The Context Shifter | Naeem Ishaq, CFO & EVP, Circle
Circle CFO Naeem Ishaq’s Forrest Gumpian career trajectory has given him extraordinary exposure to most of Silicon Valley’s touchstone technologies—the semiconductor, cloud computing, mobile payments, and, most recently, cryptocurrency. After a stint as a dot.com-era entrepreneur with a venture he launched as an undergraduate, Ishaq has invested the past 18 years in accumulating a trove…
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