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“As we think about C-suite progression, I think the CFO role is actually one where ... people with non-traditional backgrounds can hold the CFO job,” Scott Roe, CFO and chief operating officer of Tapestry, told me from the sidelines of the MIT Sloan CFO Summit on Thursday in Newton, Mass.
We had just finished the lunch panel on “How to Lead, Structure and Manage Change” at the MIT summit, where Roe observed that he was the only panelist with a traditional accounting background. (John Dietrich, executive vice president and CFO of FedEx, noted that he’s a lawyer by training; our third panelist, Gina Goetter, CFO and chief operating officer of Hasbro, has an M.B.A. from Boston College and a finance background.)
Rotating job functions is a good idea, said Roe, one that would serve young finance professionals well. “You get to know the investment community. You're the right hand of the CEO. You have visibility to the entire company,” he said. “CFOs rotating roles is a good way just to train.”
Another interesting commonality between Roe and Hasbro’s Goetter? Both hold the dual titles of CFO and COO. For Roe, the added responsibility came naturally, he said during the panel. “In my case, I had a lot of experience in supply chain and technology, so ... it was a natural progression.”
For Goetter, when she joined Hasbro from Harley Davidson, the job was already “a blended role ... it was scoped that way from the get-go.”
“In fact, that's one of the reasons why I chose to leave Harley,” she said during the panel. “I've never seen a job that out of the gates combined both the financial side and the operations side, and perhaps for us that includes all of supply chain, all of technology and all of analytics,” the COO elements of her role.
Goetter also previously served as vice president of financial operations at General Mills, where it was “very much expected as a finance person that you were the financial operator of the business,” she said.
“You were the right hand of the president, a business leader or the functional leader, so we kind of naturally served as a COO-type position without it being a title,” she said. “So coming and stepping into Hasbro, it felt very natural.”
✏️ Share your thoughts. What do you think it takes to evolve and grow to become a successful, modern CFO? Hit reply to this newsletter and share your experience.
And for those who attended this year’s MIT Sloan CFO Summit, feel free to connect here if we missed the chance to meet in person. I’d love to hear your thoughts on what struck you most, or hear your perspective. Tune in Monday for more insight from CFOs from the conference.
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