Why are communication and related management skills important for financial executives?
At the CFO level, you can’t do everything yourself. You’ve got to work with people to pull together numbers and get financial statements out. Communicating what needs to be done is important. Secondly, a lot of the information we create in the accounting department is used by people who are not accounting types. Finding a way to communicate that information so it’s useful is also important. Do you deal more with people from an accounting or non-accounting background? It’s probably 50-50. I run accounting not just for the corporate entity, but for all the companies we own. I’m also on the executive committee. That group works mostly with the CEOs of the businesses we own. Are there situations when communication is particularly important? We’re a financial incubator for new businesses, mostly in the financial services space. Often we’ll be working with entrepreneurs. When you deal with entrepreneurial types, they have their way of believing things can work, which is not as conservative a
