Beyond Boundaries

The role of the chief financial officer is changing, opening new opportunities for business success. Global CFO with leadership experience at Danaher, National Semiconductor, Edwards Lifesciences, and Terex, Ash Bhuskute outlines a clear roadmap for driving growth, transformation, and value creation.

It’s safe to say that many business leaders see the role of the CFO as an essential function, a cost center rather than a profit center. It’s been a safe, time-tested approach that these days is becoming an easy way to leave money on the table. Today, transformational leadership, clear vision, and a mandate to truly serve the needs of the business has made the role an indispensable aspect of generating significant value – and profit.

One of the most compelling trends in modern business is to welcome meaningful interactions between once-siloed functions and departments, and the chance to cultivate new relationships with CEOs. For a role traditionally operating within the boundaries of reporting and compliance, widening that remit can mean discovering hidden opportunities not just for savings or shaving costs, but for the optimized overall performance of the business itself.

As such, the modern CFO will become a partner to the CEO in driving actions that aren’t just limited to reporting. “As an example, when a business looks at KPIs, they look at ways to optimize the inventory. Typically, this is something managed by an operational team, but in the new era, CFOs could be the champions driving that initiative,” said Ashish “Ash” Manohar Bhuskute CPA, CMA, MBA, a Dallas-based expert CFO.

For more than two decades, Bhuskute has been an expert in global finance with leadership roles in eight different countries, so we asked him to share some of his insights into the future-driven CFO’s sphere of influence. “CFOs are now taking more and more roles in driving actions that are way beyond just reporting numbers on a timely basis,” he posited.

“Operations will be looking at cycle-time improvements and inventory improvements and so on. Sales will be looking at gross margin improvements and overall profitability. Since CFOs are among the few leaders with very nice connections with all of the different functions, they have more visibility by design. They had it before, but they were not leveraging it.”

That tide is turning, and more progressive organizations are taking hold of how CFOs can collaborate with different functions for better results. Bhuskute estimates that the number of proactive leaders in the discipline is floating at 25-30%, and he expects that growth to continue. “Ten years back it was only maybe 5%.”

A decade ago in a different company, Bhuskute attempted to promote his collaborative approach, telling the corner office that part of their improvement goals had to be finding serious cost savings. “Their reaction was, ‘Oh, Ash, do you want me to sell my kidneys?’ But in about eight months the same folks were achieving 200% of their required goals.”

It’s all about leverage

Finance deals with a treasure trove of information and minutiae that’s often overlooked as points of action for progress. Upon close examination, the department can begin to use that data as if they are running their own company to preserve cash. There’s a lot of opportunities for the department to help make the business better, no matter how well operations are being run. Developing a well-rounded, action-oriented talent bench is a must.

His management style is rooted in a 3-P approach from the start: people, process, and productivity/profit. “First, you have to make sure your employees have the right skills. If you do the people and process part right, the productivity and profit shows up,” he said. “A CFO shouldn’t try to reverse the sequence because when they do, the company benefits initially, but it won’t be able to sustain it.”

The execution of 3-P leadership manifests differently depending on the outcomes being sought. Influencing the people part of the equation might mean measuring what they’re doing to improve stakeholders’ experience, or it could mean evaluating how to make their people’s work-life balance better, or offering better career, training, or engagement options. “You start with that right P and then focus on process improvement aspect of it,” he said.

Bhuskute is a fierce proponent of Kaizen, and Lean Six Sigma principles. A few years back, as director of finance for the Danaher Corporation, a leading global life sciences and diagnostics innovator and one of his several stints at the C-level, he found that the organization viewed Kaizen as “the way of life,” and promoted it throughout the organization. That continuous improvement mindset mattered regardless of the size of an initiative, from quantum improvements to minor but meaningful advancements.

“Even the accountant levels are finding opportunities which could be worth hundreds of thousands of savings, and that’s just a mindset change,” he noted. “You start with the people, take care of them. Then drive the process improvements and product improvements to go after cost improvement opportunities. If you do those two things right, there’s your profit. You don’t have to pursue it. It becomes a natural outcome.”

One of the key areas where he uses Lean Six Sigma is his own finance area. In his tenure with a company that took 15 to 16 days to close their books, he hired lean consultants to work with his team, and they came up with a solution to reduce the cycle time on financial close to just six to seven days.

“It was a remarkable improvement with such a quantum leap,” he said, adding that not only did the business do better, they added value by investing time into the effort that served their business partners well and gave them the time to continue to develop solutions that benefit the firm and their partners going forward. “Everyone is zoomed in, believing and marching in the same direction to get the mindset of, ‘I need to find something which creates value.’”

The collaborative approach is also a better atmosphere for intellectual development and enrichment at every level. Bhuskute doesn’t believe in dinging people when anticipated outcomes don’t come out as planned. Instead, if something goes wrong, the process is pressure tested. “Typically, there’s a hole in the process where something falls through the crack,” he mused. “Most of the time you’re going to find that it was the process, which is the problem, so you try to get the points of failure closed.” As he sees it, no matter who you throw into that process, the right results will follow.

On a personal level, his cross-cultural career is a source of joy for him and seems to be his professional destiny. Growing up in a university town shaped his curiosity and vision for what a successful business could be. He credits his father, the late Manohar Pandurang Bhuskute, who was a professor in The Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IIT), a public research university and technical institute in Mumbai that is considered one of the top universities in the world, on par with MIT and similar gold-standard higher education providers around the globe.

“My dad used to teach master’s and PhD students,” the business and accounting major recalled. “All of the people you’d hang out with in that town were the nerds,” he recalled. “That helped me to see a different spectrum because in all the places I’ve worked, I’ve engaged with engineers, and you have to think like them in terms of what they need. That probably has some role in my success because I was able to understand their needs better,” he concluded.

“Each country has its own education system and own geographic strengths, right? (As CFOs) our job is to get a tremendous amount of these highly intelligent juices and bring them together to create something really great out of it. If a certain location has certain strength, our job is to capitalize it and marry with the local strength in such a way that all those creative juices come up with something very phenomenal.”