A New Corporate Paradigm:: The CEO and CFO – A Partnership of Equals

Abstract

I t is generally understood that the role of the CEO (chief executive officer) is that of the visionary leader – charismatic, transactional, or transformational – the heart of the business. Historically, the CEO has been considered the architect of success, fortune and global recognition. In some cases, that fame has lived well beyond the life of the CEO. Rockefeller and Vanderbilt left industrial monuments to their ambition and vision. More recently Bill Gates and Sam Walton have assumed the mantle ‘‘Captains of Industry.’’ Businesses such as IBM Corp., Standard Oil Co., General Motors Corp. and General Electric Co. are synonymous with the long line of CEOs who led them to greatness. Even the most recent: Volkswagen AG, Toyota Motor Co., Citibank, Microsoft Corp., Apple Computer Inc., Boeing Co., and Google, have been added to the list of global players. They are all a testament to the CEOswho led them to their greatness. At the same time, lost in the mist of business history is the chief financial officer – the CFO, the person who toiled in obscurity for generations in the shadow of these CEOs. The person in this under-valued and largely invisible position has been the custodian of the corporate treasury, the protector of the margin, and the pillar of the corporate conscience. While the CEO looked over the horizon in search of the next great idea, the CFO was obliged to look at the next footfall, whether the next quarterly report to the shareholders, or to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), to the courts or to a U.S. Senate investigation committee. In many boardrooms, the group around the table consists less of a team than of two camps with totally divergent views of the vision and mission of the business. One faction is led by the increasingly empowered CFO, the other by the CEO. However, rather than viewing these as two irreconcilable camps, an alternative view is to see these often-conflicting roles as one team with two faces: similar to the two-faced Roman god, Janus. One face is the eternal optimist pushing ahead at full speed, sometimes with rose-colored glasses; the other, the face of the realist, urging caution andwary of risk. However, both faces are inmanyways still a team, partly dysfunctional perhaps, but two parts of a whole, with the same ultimate intent. It is the premise of this article that although those two roles are separately in the process of a transformation, increasingly, both are drawing closer to a point of intersection with respect to their corporate roles and operations management.