Chief financial officers (CFOs) have been urged to find a new balance between control and empowerment in order to allow them to pay more attention to activities of high value and to create and sustain highly successful organisations.

"People's behaviour is driven by the system. To change people's behaviour, you have to change the system," argued Jeremy Hope, author of "Reinventing the CFO", speaking in Bangkok last week about new management trends.

His views were heard by CFOs from leading companies and public organisations in Thailand at a special seminar marking His Majesty the King's 80th birthday.

The seminar was jointly hosted by the master-of-science programme in IT business at Chulalongkorn University's Faculty of Commerce and Accountancy; and Business Application, the exclusive distributor of Cognos business-intelligence and performance-management software.

Hope said that under pressure from corporate scandals and a tough regulatory environment, companies were demanding more from their CFOs than simply managing numbers. They expect strategic support and leadership that can boost managers' performance throughout the firm and enhance profit growth.

However, the complexity of the role of a CFO has shackled them to budgeting and transaction-processing systems that leave little time for value-added activities.

Hope said CFOs were tied up with too much low-value work. They deal with low standards, inconsistent processes with too many input errors, detailed budgets, targets and variance reports. As a result, they lose valuable time with too many irrelevant measures and reports and are unable to attend to high-value work.

He said few CFOs could answer "yes" to the following questions: do you know where you are today? Do you know what the next three to six months will look like? Do you know your key value drivers? Do you know which products, channels and customers are profitable after charging all the costs of supporting them? Do you help measure and manage key business processes?

He said CFOs needed to find a new balance between control and empowerment.

"We are seen as comptrollers, bean-counters, number-crunchers, traffic cops, business-prevention officers. But we want to be seen as valued and trusted business partners," he said.

The challenge to CFOs is to dismantle the "management factory", with its top-down control that stifles innovation and initiatives, as well as slowing down response times.

He urged CFOs to move their companies towards trust-based organisations instead of maintaining traditional top-down control systems.

Leading world companies like Toyota are trust-based organisations, he said.

"You cannot force people to create innovation. People need freedom and confidence and a field conducive to innovation that can be created by people responsible for an organisation's financial functions."

Wichit Chaitrong

The Nation