Video"There is a competitive streak in me," declares Nick Rose. "I was looking at the top of the pyramid from day one."
That is how the finance chief of Diageo, a £10 billion (€12.6 billion) UK drinks group, describes the conviction that fueled his rise from the junior finance ranks at carmaker Ford in the early 1980s to more senior roles at Diageo, including the top finance post, which he reached in 1999. The climb up the corporate ladder to CFO — lasting nearly 20 years — involved frequent job rotations in a variety of countries and markets at both companies, giving him a "fantastic grounding in the art of finance."
If aspiring CFOs could choose only two companies to have on their CVs, Ford and Diageo would be high on the list. Finance chiefs from some of the UK's leading multinationals got their grounding at these companies, including ex-Ford man George Rose of BAE Systems and Diageo alumni Andrew Higginson of Tesco, Julian Heslop of GlaxoSmithKline and Ken Hanna of Cadbury Schweppes.
If the most valuable career lessons are learned on the job, Ford and Diageo should be considered two of Europe's top "academy companies." To identify other top incubators of financial talent, CFO Europe traced the career paths of 200 CFOs from the region's largest listed firms. (See "Career Paths" at the end of this article.) Certain companies appear frequently on finance chiefs' CVs. What's their secret?
Recruitment experts agree that academy companies have several things in common: robust graduate training programmes for finance recruits; regular job rotations — generally at least every two years; foreign assignments; and clearly defined processes for identifying talent and succession planning. "Beyond that, you also need to have a very visionary CFO, who will take risks on individuals and get the business to accept rotation outside of finance," says Laurent de Meeus, a partner in the London office of Egon Zehnder, a recruitment firm.
The Road to CFO
When Rose graduated from Oxford University, he wanted to work at Ford "because of the financial training that it had become known for." In the ten years that he spent at the auto firm, he switched jobs every 12 to 18 months, gaining experience in planning, treasury, M&A, strategy, investor relations and other functions, in the UK as well as the US. Further promotions would have kept him in Detroit, but he was drawn to the UK for family reasons and so decided it was time to leave.
"There was a pace and directness in the American environment that I wanted to replicate back in the UK," he says. In 1992, he joined food and drinks group Grand Metropolitan as treasurer, attracted by the company's entrepreneurial spirit and lack of a rigid hierarchy. Regular job rotation resumed and, shortly after Grand Metropolitan's 1997 merger with Guinness to form Diageo, Rose became CFO of the entire group.
Despite reaching the top, Rose hasn't stopped thinking about career paths. "As a function, we take complete ownership of the development of finance people across the business," he says. "We spend a huge amount of time rating and ranking the vast bulk of the finance department."
Given his experience, "the rotational development theme is strongly embedded in the way that we run the function," Rose says. Diageo's "finance leadership group," comprising Rose and the major regional and functional finance heads, consults a "huge matrix" that compares business needs against the next best moves for high-potential employees.
As Rose did, finance managers at Diageo can expect to be assigned to new challenges frequently, covering postings across the group's increasingly international portfolio of brands, its finance shared service centre in Budapest, or even in sales, marketing, HR or general management. At Diageo, nobody with ambition "goes straight up one chimney," Rose says. He reckons around 50 senior finance employees are currently on foreign assignments.
What's more, finance has become a key source of promotions for the group's top management jobs. CEO Paul Walsh and the heads of the Asia-Pacific and international (mostly Africa and South America) business units all hail from finance. "While there are a lot of great finance people out in the world who come from Grand Metropolitan, Guinness or Diageo, there probably would be a lot more had we not provided career opportunities outside of the finance function," Rose notes. "It's a key to Diageo keeping its best people."
David Davies, a Grand Metropolitan graduate, is one who got away. His long and winding road to the CFO post at OMV, a €20 billion Austrian oil group, took him through seven separate employers, including other acclaimed academy companies like UK industrial gases specialist BOC and US entertainment firm Walt Disney.
After a stint in accountancy, first at Touche Ross in Liverpool and later at Price Waterhouse in Milan, Davies' first corporate job was in internal audit at BOC (now part of Germany's Linde). Within a year, he recalls, he was pushed "out of the comfort zone" to his first line position, as finance director of the speciality chemicals division. Suddenly, he had to talk to "grizzly manufacturing people" and row with the sales team. "I had no training for that, but you learn on the job," says Davies.
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