Leadership

We talk to Lushen Pather, who recently announced a move to SARB, about his time as Sasfin CFO.

Building a culture of trust is an integral part of team building and ensuring that you have a thriving work environment, conference attendees were told during a discussion at last week’s Finance Indaba Africa 2017, held at the Sandton Convention Centre, between the financial director of Curro Holdings, Bernardt van der Linde, and Sasfin Bank Limited CFO, Lushen Pather.

Many of the country's municipalities are often found wanting when it comes to the management of their finances, as well as the management of the disciplines that encourage transparency for there to be accountability to the country's citizens. So said Auditor-General Kimi Makwetu, speaking at Finance Indaba Africa on 12 October 2017. Citing some of the reasons behind the poor financial performance of municipalities, Kimi pegged corruption and a lack of skills as some of the major ones.

More women are finding success in the boardroom these days. Does this mean that the glass ceiling has finally been broken, or was it only ever in the imagination to begin with? Nonkululeko Gobodo, CEO of Nkululeko Leadership Consulting, 2017 CFO Awards winner Debbie Ransby, financial director at Takeda Pharmaceuticals, and Mary Vilakazi, deputy CEO of MMI Holdings, unpacked the topic during a well-attended session at Finance Indaba Africa on 12 October 2017.

Nhlamu Dlomu (pictured), KPMG South Africa’s new CEO, has announced an incoming executive team which she says will support her in “restoring public trust and rebuilding the firm”.

“We need a new perspective of doing business in Africa. Looking at the economic trajectory both locally and internationally for the next six to 12 months, more businesses are likely to become distressed. Now’s the time to act,” says Alastair Macduff, chairman and CEO of the Turnaround Management Association (TMA), Southern Africa.

Rakoma & Associates has joined Finance Indaba 2017 as a silver partner and will make its debut at the event at the Sandton Convention Centre in October.

"New GX Advisory enables businesses to refocus on core competencies and creating value to all stakeholders by freeing key staff members from the burden of IT infrastructure, systems and process management," says Anja Goosen, head of systems at New GX Advisory Services, a silver partner at the Finance Indaba Africa 2017 on 12 and 13 October 2017 at the Sandton Convention Centre in Johannesburg.

Nishant Saxena won two Awards at this year’s CFO of the Year Awards – High Performance Team and Young CFO of the Year. He received this recognition because he took Cipla’s struggling, low-margin, sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) unit and turned it into one of the most profitable pharma players in South Africa. In so doing, he completely transformed the finance department, creating a high performance team in the process. Nishant shares his top tips for creating an efficient team.

Pulling off big projects is exhilarating, exponentially growing your profits is awesome, but are you achieving the GREAT thing? Are you building a better future? We spoke with Stan Slap, the world’s foremost thought leader on culture and leadership, who will be opening the Finance Indaba Africa on 12 October 2017, made possible by Clarkhouse Human Capital.

Assuming the mantle of CFO can be a nerve-wracking experience. The first 100 days can be among the most challenging and stressful of your career. All too often, organisations expect new hires to sink or swim and use their own initiative to get by. At the same time, this period represents an enormous opportunity to deliver quick wins and position yourself as a rising star.

Modern CFOs is being called upon to take a more prominent role in leading their organisations, in many instances, filling in for the CEO. As such, technical competency is no longer enough to succeed at the elite level and leadership qualities become more significant. We delved into our archives to bring you leadership advice from some top executives from a variety of industries.

With the purse strings in their hands and the demands of their board, stakeholders and personal lives, CFOs face numerous pressures, especially in the current volatile market. The latest CFO Summit equipped them for survival and future success.

You may feel that years of hard work may be enough to break the glass ceiling and join the ranks of the financial elite in the corner offices and upper echelons of management, but you’d be better off thinking more strategically about your skills development plan. Being technically proficient in your job is a prerequisite for advancement, not the manna you need to propel upward. The simple truth is that companies prize certain skills above others and this Here are three that if consciously developed, are likely to see you go all the way from open-plan anonymity to the boardroom.

Cipla Sub-Saharan Africa CFO Nishant Saxena received the highly coveted Young CFO of the Year Award, for finance leaders who are 40 years or younger, as well as the High Performance Team Award, at this year's CFO Awards, held on 11 May at Summer Place, Johannesburg.

A need for increased profitability in a low-growth domestic economy and increased global uncertainty are pushing chief procurement officers (CPOs) to add more value to their organisations. Defensive strategies being implemented by CFOs are demanding rapid, sustained cost reduction in parallel to a greater focus on risk from procurement. Traditional procurement operating models are therefore changing, driven by a lack of talent and an increase in digital innovation.

In this age of multi-channel communication, we need to be diligent about our communications because the consequences – be it at home, in the workplace or in the M&A environment – can be far-reaching.

Perhaps the most underrated aspect of crowdsourcing is its potential to disrupt the current cost structure that supports talent management. Crowdsourcing makes sense when thinking about the perennial constraint that businesses face: costs. Cost containment remains a priority, and with people costs (including salary, training, perks, etc) accounting for close to or over 60 percent of the cost structure of most companies, crowdsourcing offers the potential to greatly reducing this expenditure.

Where talent management requires reviews to determine who belongs in what box and what to do with them after boxing them, crowdsourcing promises to bring out-of-the-box thinkers who work on a specific project as a team of free agents on demand.

IT projects are notorious for going over budget and have some of the highest failure rates across the industry spectrum. As a finance executive, it can be challenging to rein in eager technologists and projects that cross time and scope constraints. Let’s take a look at a few common reasons why IT projects prove to be so problematic.

Crowdsourcing promises to make scarce and critical skills available cost effectively, perhaps close to 90 percent cheaper, and disruptively. Yet most companies currently rely on talent management – a human resource function that has been around for over half a century but whose tools and techniques has changed little during its existence – to identify, attract, develop and keep talented people who have these sought after scarce and critical skills. The question is: will crowdsourcing make talent management obsolete?

A well-drilled team, acting in disciplined harmony and each performing their individual tasks within the greater strategy, will outperform any grouping of individuals. Here are three crucial factors to integrate acquired teams successfully.

Candice Watson, Southern Africa Area Head of Talent at British American Tobacco (BAT), has garnered a lot of experience as an executive-level human resources professional in a short space of time. Since September 2014, she has been the HR partner at Lenovo, HR director for Sub-Saharan Africa at Pernod Ricard and now at BAT, where she has been for three months.

It may not seem like it at first glance, but properly thought-out Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) can be the difference between success and failure for your team and organisation over the long run.

As dependence on third parties becomes increasingly critical, organisations are being compelled to rapidly “catch-up” in enhancing the maturity of their Third Party Governance and Risk Management (TPGRM) processes. This, according to Deloitte’s 2016 global survey on the subject.

There is only one CFO position in a company and as such, it is a coveted spot, with many financial executives vying to make the shortlist. How do you know if you are CFO material and if there is anything that will stand against you when it comes to the final reckoning? Here are five sure-fire signs that you can do the business.

With cybercrime, Brexit and the surprising result of the US elections affecting economic sentiment, these are unpredictable times. The modern CFO has to contend with the risks of this environment, acting as both policeman and enabler, but relinquishing the natural tendency to forgo all risk.

In a Volatile Uncertain Complex and Ambiguous (VUCA) world, management accountants are expected to provide better support for decision-making, performance management and ongoing ‘insight’, in the form of financial and non-financial data. According to a latest CGMA research, ‘Business analytics and decision making – The human dimension’, analytics has little to do with technology. It is people, not technology, who give data meaning. While there may be technical issues to address, such as getting access to data, combining data sets or integrating financial data with data generated from social media or ‘connected things’, no analytical tool can do more than augment or complement what is a cognitive and sometimes social process. Generating insight is an inherently human trait. Thus, business intelligence resides not in the data warehouse but in the minds of people.

Diversity in the workplace is both constitutionally mandated and fundamentally good for business. This was the message from award-winning Discovery Health CFO Brett Tromp, in a discussion moderated by Talent Africa’s Auguste Coetzer, at the Finance Indaba held at the Sandton Convention Centre on 14 October 2016.

"Let's take the lessons and the inspiration from the Finance Indaba Africa with us and use it in our daily jobs," said SAICA CEO Terence Nombembe at the opening of day 2 of #findaba16. In an impassioned plea, he called on finance professionals to start contributing more to the future of South Africa, listing several practical steps for CA(SA)s and other finance professionals. "All of us need to be courageous enough."

Two women share their views on what women need to do to achieve success in the finance industry, and how they can uplift other women along the way.

The Finance Indaba Africa 2016 is almost upon us and it is time to start looking at what exactly lies ahead at the Sandton Convention Centre on 13 and 14 October 2016. Every day until the event, we will shine a light on the parts of the amazing programme. Today: Public Finance Leadership, a programme tailor-made for people with an interest in helping the country forward in the public sector.

"Key to the CFO’s success is having a reliable “wingman” in the form of the Corporate Treasurer, who provides support in not only managing financial variable risks, ensuring access to and supplying liquidity to business operations, but also in identifying, assessing and preparing for potential threats to business liquidity which may not be patently obvious and are difficult to identify when part of the myriad of issues the CFO is contending with," says Nigel Grey, chairman of the Association of Corporate Treasurers of Southern Africa (ACTSA), a gold partner at the Finance Indaba Africa 2016 on 13 and 14 October 2016 at the Sandton Convention Centre in Johannesburg.

"Until and unless transformation becomes part of the fabric of corporate South Africa we will, I believe, never reach our potential as a country,” says Peter Walsh, CFO of Servest Group, a gold partner at the Finance Indaba Africa 2016 on 13 and 14 October 2016 at the Sandton Convention Centre in Johannesburg.

"Need to know what your staff or suppliers are doing with your money? Want a dramatic improvement in cashflow, debtors and creditors management? We will share ideas and tools to gain visibility, improve cash flow and dramatically reduce the risks of e-fraud," says ROI specialist Johan Potgieter of Business Harmony, a silver partner at the Finance Indaba Africa 2016 on 13 and 14 October 2016 at the Sandton Convention Centre in Johannesburg.

"Professionals worldwide are opting to work in smaller groups in which the members have complementary skillsets. This is something they can do with a group like The Finance Team,” says Grant Robson, MD of The Finance Team, a silver partner at the Finance Indaba Africa 2016 on 13 and 14 October 2016 at the Sandton Convention Centre in Johannesburg.

“Corporate culture is the most important driver of women’s confidence in their own success. In general, corporate culture still has a preference for more masculine leadership styles, making it more challenging for women to lead,” says Inge Walters, facilitator and coach at Eve Learning, a company she founded in early 2015 and which focuses on leadership development for women.

While many other teams in a business have some flexibility as far as deliverables, reporting and project timelines go, this is a luxury not often enjoyed by the finance team. But as the pace of doing business is so much faster today, is it not time the finance function became more agile too? We spoke to experienced CFOs and other industry experts to get their insight. By Toni Muir "Being agile requires openness, the reservation of judgement and the ability to turn on a dime," says Terrence Taylor, general manager: Talent, Analytics, Leadership and Learning at Discovery. You need people with a cosmopolitan outlook, an open mindset and an eclectic set of experiences, he adds, and a leader who is comfortable sharing leadership and power. But what exactly is an agile team, and what makes it so? Moreover, why is this important to the finance function?

In a bid to address the financial literacy skills gap in South Africa, the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA) has released a new guide, ‘Financial management and business success - a guide for entrepreneurs’, designed to help small businesses understand the importance of financial literacy. Nomsa Nkomo (pictured), Policy Manager, ACCA South Africa, said:

CFOs need to actively manage IT risk, says John Mc Loughlin, Managing Director of software company J2: “It is vital that the CFO take an active role in managing this risk – as it appears IT may not have the executive drive to get it done themselves.” In this article, John shares some of the top questions CFOs must ask themselves when dealing with risk management and threats, and before declaring their IT policy as sound.

"We have always believed passionately in the role accountants play in creating a better world by helping to make businesses more successful, creating jobs and generating wealth," says Coenraad 'Coenie' Middel, whose firm Middel & Partners has been named as one of the most inspiring accountancy practices in the world and has been included in the recently published ‘The World’s Most Inspiring Accountants’ by author Steve Pipe.

The top six teams have been selected to advance to the next stage of The CFO Case Study Competition. To recap just how far these six teams have come, 320 teams representing 1,278 aspirants from 53 universities in 25 countries across five continents entered to take part in this maiden edition of the competition, so achieving a place in the top six is no mean feat.

“For me, being a successful CFO is not even technical; it’s about being humble. The role can go to your head and that creates drama,” says Lauren Van Zyl, Divisional CFO of Eqstra Fleet Management and Logistics. “Being humble makes you approachable, and the more approachable you are the more likely staff will be to come to you if there’s a problem, and that’s important.” Lauren, who pursued a career in finance after convincing herself she would never be interested in the industry, heads up a team of 45 staff members, and says the people aspect of the job is as rewarding as it is challenging. “That’s what nobody prepares you for. As a finance person, you’re very comfortable with the numbers, with the technical, but you aren’t comfortable with having so many people report to you, trust you and rely on you.” How did you first get into finance and how did you come to be a CFO? “At school, one of my main subjects was speech and drama. I was convinced I was never going to go into finance. When choosing my studies, I first registered for industrial psychology, but I didn’t even make it through one lecture and realised that wasn’t going to work. I changed my degree and went into Informatics. I was doing really well but realised I didn’t have a passion for it – it didn’t gel with me. I found my way to finance and thought I’d pursue general finance, believing there was no chance I’d do a CA. But at that moment I realised I would be stopping just before the finish line, so I decided to go the whole hog and completed my B.Com (Accounting) Honours, and then my articles through Deloitte. After my articles I stayed on for a short period, but I decided I wasn’t audit manager material. I was battling with the concept of siting across the table from a CFO and telling him how to run his business when I didn’t know what it was like to be in his position. I wanted to be able to give a CFO advice based on my own experiences. I felt like I needed that foundation.”

"What has Integrated Business Management delivered for Lamb Weston / Meijer (LWM)?" asks CFO Peter van Wouwe - LWM being one of the world's largest companies in frozen potato products, appetizers and dehydrated potato flakes. "Peace of mind, that’s what." In this article, Marco van Alfen, business planning and control expert at consultancy firm EyeOn, unpacks and demonstrates the concept of Integrated Business Management. Integrated Business Management, Integrated Business Planning (IBP), Sales & Operations Planning (S&OP), Sales Inventory & Operations Planning (SIOP): these are all terms used to indicate the multidisciplinary process by which demand and supply are tuned in an organisation. This is the most basic point at which they agree. During the eighties, the term S&OP marked this reconciliation process. TF Wallace had the key elements of a good S&OP process as: “… a set of decision-making processes to balance demand and supply, to integrate financial planning and operational planning, and to link high-level strategic plans with day-to-day operations.” In many organisations, however, S&OP became a short-term planning process where the past was more often looked at than the future, and the link with strategy was often missing.

“Sometimes you feel unloved in the accounting profession. You cover the backside of the CEO and no one says thank you. It’s nice to be acknowledged,” said Osman Arbee, CFO of Imperial Holdings, when accepting the Strategy Execution Award, presented to him by Colin Brown of Supergroup – ironically his biggest competitor (pictured).

Leaders of the future need to be able to continuously adapt to different people and situations, says Heidi Volschenk, Director: Learning & Development at KPMG. In this exclusive interview with CFO South Africa, Heidi chats about her career, the secret to time management and three crucial lessons for CFOs and other executives who want to be great leaders.

"As you look to the future, the surest way to fail in tomorrow's world is to continue doing what you're doing today." So says Keith Coats, founding partner of TomorrowToday Global, an international consultancy that focuses on the future of leadership, global trends, strategy, diversity and talent. Keith will be speaking at the upcoming CFO Awards, held at Summer Place on 12 May 2016.

Innovative ways to identify and develop top local talent in African countries were the hottest topic of conversation during an extremely insightful CFO South Africa event about Moving into (the rest of) Africa, hosted by Standard Bank at its impressive Rosebank premises on 16 March 2016. Vibrant CFO panel discussions alternated with insights from experts from Thomson Reuters and Spencer Stuart, while attending CFOs also had the chance to get involved.

A round table for public sector CFOs took a fascinating turn when one of the participants told how she had stood up against wrongdoing and taken her superiors to court. Hosted by CFO South Africa and partner KPMG the discussion on 15 March 2016 at the Marion on Nicol focused on leadership, and specifically asked whether good leadership and its relationship with fear.

Contrary to perceptions, there is a strong potential pool of great local business leaders in Africa," says Pratik Chandaria of Africa Advisory Group, a company specialising in recruiting executives and developing the next generation of leadership for Africa. "The strength of the leadership pool is defined by the potential you see in it. This means you have to be willing to give leadership talent the opportunity to develop; particularly in Africa where leadership skill sets are still developing. I rank the pool highly in terms of potential."

Local talent, knowledge and understanding of the local context is crucial for businesses to be successful in African countries north of South Africa, says Kamal Patel, Head of Corporates & Partnerships at Thomson Reuters. Kamal is one of the exciting speakers lined up for our CFO event Moving into Africa on Wednesday 16 March 2016. To get to know him we contacted him - during a business trip in Ethiopia! - and asked him five questions.

“A good CFO is an effective controller, but also has an entrepreneurial flair,” says Krishnan Raghunathan, global Chief Capability Officer at business process outsourcing giant, WNS. Krishnan is one of the speakers at CFO South Africa’s Get Smart in 2016 event on 23 February 2016, flying out of India especially for the occasion. In preparation for the event, we spoke to him about his interesting job title, his professional achievements, his take on the position of CFO, and the role finance leaders should play in Business Process Outsourcing (BPO), which incidentally is being accepted as Business Process Management (BPM) the world over.

In my first 100 days as the MD of CFO South Africa I have been struck by the number of incredible professionals that make up the South African finance eco-system. Finance professionals who reach the top rung, regardless of whether they work in large listed entities, private companies, the public sector or any number of public, academic or non-profit organisations, have by and large arrived there on the back of their finance skills (to state the obvious). But what has struck me most is how many of these professionals are good people too. The very best are filled with humility, courage, conviction, an appropriate dose of vulnerability and very often a clear sense of purpose.

It is easy to get caught up in your day to day grind and never lift your head long enough to see the horizon. Most of us have, at one point or another, found ourselves in that dreaded cycle of counting down the week days wishing for a weekend. If you’re fortunate enough to have a job that is truly fulfilling then it is quite possible that you don’t experience this and may be caught in the trap of not knowing when to “down tools” sufficiently to make time for the rest of your life.

"FinTech is a fantastic thing, but lenders must be responsible and conduct proper creditworthiness assessments," says Benay Sager, chief operating officer at Intelligent Debt Management. Benay will be on the panel of experts during our upcoming FinTech Africa event in Cape Town on 20 October. Our journalist Ebrahim Moola spoke to him about FinTech's benefits and barriers. "My hope is that many more people will enjoy access to mobile banking technology and not have to go into a branch."

“As CFOs we need to be trusted advisors, rather than critics,” says Simon Ridley, CFO at the Standard Bank Group and last year’s CFO of the Year. In an exclusive interview with CFO South Africa, Ridley talks about the myth busting responsibility of CFOs and CAs, the charm of over-disclosing, the reason everybody at the bank knows his mother and about being the perfect business partner: “You can’t just throw stones at a problem.”

You can listen carefully and take notes. You can write a to-do-list and focus on your day to day actions, but the harsh reality of life, and particularly a professional life, is that you can't buy experience.

Change management is not something fluffy, but a pivotal process that impacts the bottom line. That is the firm belief of Monna Monnakgotla, Partner in KPMG’s People & Change service line with 18 years of experience in HR and change management. Monnakgotla was one of the experts during our last exclusive CFO Dinner. Afterwards we were able to chat to him, resulting in these 5 questions and answers.

Standard Bank Group CFO Simon Ridley will retire next year April. By then he will be 60 years old, the retirement age for executive directors at the bank. On Friday joint CEO Ben Kruger said Standard Bank has not decided on Ridley's successor yet. During the same press conference Ridley announced that the Group has achieved R10.5 billion headline earnings for the group.

Just a few days after this year's CFO Awards, Oceana Group announced a game-changing R4.6 billion purchase of the American fish-meal and -oil specialist Daybrook Fisheries. In his interview with the panel of judges for the awards, CFO Imraan Soomra had already explained that the traditionally conservative fishing company (already Africa's biggest) was planning to use its debt-less and asset-rich position to become a serious player on the global market. After the acquisition of the Louisiana-based Daybrook, Oceana is now the sixth-biggest fishing company in the world.

“It isn't so frightening north of the Limpopo. There are huge opportunities and huge talent," said Greg Davis, CFO Africa for Standard Bank, when he received the Moving into Africa Award at the 2015 CFO Awards. He dedicated the award to his Finance team across the continent and said he hopes that "other companies will join us in venturing into Africa”.

When Cobus Grove joined Digicore two years ago the company’s share price was a measly 125. After an impressive reorganisation that share price was 325 last December. The success of Grove and temporarily returned founder and CEO Nick Vlok didn’t go unnoticed. Last month, just after Grove was presented the Compliance and Governance Award at this year’s CFO Awards, Nasdaq-listed Novatel Wireless made an offer over R1 billlon on the company – and the share price shot up to 410.

The role of Chief Financial Officer has never been more complex than it is today. This is due to the fact that the CFO’s operating environment is typified by managing stringent regulation, and managing increasing shareholder scrutiny and economic uncertainty.

After Sasol CFO Bongani Nqwababa had given an impressive and well-received talk about his tenure at Anglo American Platinum during the Stategy Execution round table discussion at the 2015 CFO Awards, he told me he doesn't like to speak off-the-cuff. "As an accountant I am rather big on structure and order," he had already explained during the interview with the panel of awards judges. "When you talk, you can’t do that in free-flow without using key messages and without knowing what you want from a meeting."

Can someone who introduces a whole new way of reporting - the fourth bottom line - be a CFO? Can somebody who is at the forefront of innovation in the pharmacy industry be a CFO? Can someone with a happy and popular team be a CFO? Or someone who coaches many colleagues and authors articles for magazines for fun? And what about someone who says his church pastor is his example in life or someone who never misses any of his kid's cricket matches? Can he be a CFO?

When Transnet CEO Brian Molefe was 'redeployed' to save Eskom earlier this year, that was largely due to his successful tenure at the state-owned company responsible for South Africa's rail, ports and pipelines. And it's an open secret that Molefe's success at Transnet is for a big part thanks to the man behind much of the strategy and the numbers: Chief Financial Officer Anoj Singh.

The CFO has become a very popular animal to study. If you want to learn more about its behaviour in the wild, you can read about CFOs in hundreds of research papers and reports that are available on the web. Most researchers are looking for what the world’s most successful CFOs have in common. So what are they learning as they explore boardrooms and C-suites for signs of typical CFO behaviour?

The representatives of more than 54 multinational, regional and local companies attended the SADC Multi-Sectoral High-Level Taskforce dinner on Monday, 23 March at the Hyatt Regency in Johannesburg, along with SADC ministers, UN dignitaries and functionaries from various health NGOs.

Besides financial, social and environmental data, integrated reports should include data on the health and wellness of staff, argues Brett Tromp, CFO of Discovery Health. We asked him what his ‘fourth bottom line’ means and why CFOs should care about health in the first place.

The raison d'être of organisations is to enable groups of people to work together and achieve what they would be unable to achieve as individuals, on their own. Delegation is an age-old art − of assigning tasks and sharing responsibilities – and is therefore essential to organisation.

KPMG’s 2014 Africa CFO Survey is based on the international survey Being the best: Inside the intelligent finance function. It collates and interprets responses from 264 CFOs of medium-to-large companies with a quarter of them working for companies with revenue over $1 billion. Here are 5 key insights about African CFOs from that survey.

“In theory it is not always appropriate to talk about family and private interests during a job interview,” says Richard Angus, CEO of The Finance Team, “but personality and culture fit is critical to a successful engagement, so we do it anyway. In the end, a lot of what The Finance Team does is personality matching, says Angus. “Finding a personal and cultural click between people is essential when it comes to placing finance experts temporarily into any organisation.”

By now, we know pretty well what works in business and what doesn’t. So why do managers waste so much time and money looking for new answers? Why do they ignore the tools that work, and mess with stuff that won’t make any difference to their results? Whatever business you run, there’s a handful of things you just have to get right in order to deliver growth and profits – and to stay in business. Everything else is a distraction. Here’s the critical few: