Then there's Jeff Richard, finance chief at Safety-Kleen, a $1.3bn environmental-services company and oil refiner. Operations are the core of his job. "Do I close books? No. Am I a tax guy? Definitely not. Where I bring value is on the operations side," he says.
In fact, operations, he says, are what drive value, and certainly not finance and accounting activities. "You can't be a good CFO or a strategic business partner to your CEO until you thoroughly understand operations and how they drive performance," Richard said. CFOs should "get out of the office and into the field." For example, ride along on a delivery truck to observe efficiencies or lack of them.
