583: An Appetite for Change | Tod Nestor, CFO & President, Energy Focus

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Tod Nestor remembers his first performance review like it was yesterday. Sitting across from his manager inside the offices of Pepsico’s Purchase, New York, headquarters, Nestor recalls receiving a pat on the back before the manager’s feedback began to sting. “It seemed like there were two minutes of ‘Here’s what you’re doing well’ and two…

582: Fortifying Your FP&A Footing | Robert Richards, CFO, Centauri

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Recalling a meeting that took place years ago at an industry conference, CFO Robert Richards remembers that the East Coast sales executive’s face suddenly dropped. At the time, Richards was more or less his company’s de facto CFO after the company’s finance leader had departed in the wake of the firm defaulting on certain loans.…

581: Applying Your Fresh Eyes to the Role | Anthony Coletta, CFO, SAP North America

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Among the job transitions that populated Anthony Coletta’s early finance career, few likely paid more career dividends than the one that he made in 2006 when he leaped from Siemens to SAP. While both positions were controller roles based in Paris, it’s clear that Coletta quickly found the wind at his back at SAP, as…

580: Finding Your Groove Inside the CFO’s Evolving Role | Laura Onopchenko, CFO, NerdWallet

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It was still early in Laura Onopchenko’s finance career when she removed “Chief Financial Officer” from the list of leadership roles that she aspired to someday hold. “I very specifically made the call that I did not want to be a CFO,” recalls Onopchenko, who says that at the time the decision seemed all the…

579: When Your Two Worlds Become One | Shari Freedman, Room to Read

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At several points during the early years of her finance career, a tug-of-war was seemingly under way between the professional and personal worlds of Room to Read CFO Shari Freedman. Back in the early 1990s, Freedman was running a homeless shelter in New York City while at the same time boarding flights for a string…

578: The Awesome Power of FP&A | Jason Child, CFO, Splunk

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Less than a year after his arrival at Splunk—a fast-growing, San Francisco–based software developer—CFO Jason Child appears to have been fully repatriated to his native land. To be clear: The “land” to which we refer is not the code-crunching zone of software development but the turf of business growth and scale—a locale in which Child…

577: Rethinking Sales Productivity | Carolyn Koehn, CFO, Boomi

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When finance leader Carolyn Koehn looks back on her career to identify the experiences that she feels best prepared her for a CFO role, she shares a candid observation: “I went to places no one else wanted to go.” Such was the case in the late 1990s, when she moved to Bogotá, Colombia, for Nortel…

576: Finance & the Beat of the Drum | Guido Torrini, CFO, Celonis

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It doesn’t take long for CFO Guido Torrini of Celonis to draw our attention to the burden of the growing pools of data within organizations and the great irony that is afflicting many corporate finance departments today. He’s referring to the fact that while at no time have finance organizations had more data to help…

575: Using Openness to Achieve Greater Employee Engagement | Anup Singh, CFO, Illumio

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Among the more novel approaches that CFO Anup Singh has recently used to help advance a more open working environment at Illumio, of Sunnyvale, California, was the creation of a channel inside the instant messaging application Slack through which employees can access Illumio’s finance leader by tagging their queries with an unassuming “#CFO ask me…