Video"You can really go faster," says Washington accounting professor Jim Jiambalvo, who is conducting several trainings for Microsoft employees. "When you're talking about cost structures that they can relate to, for example, they understand your points much more readily."
A Tool of Restructuring
Custom programs "address the culture and social dynamics of the company, and help foster new capabilities," says Carolyn Woo, dean of the University of Notre Dame's College of Business, in South Bend, Indiana, which counts AlliedSignal Inc., Bayer Corp., and Excel Industries among its major clients. "We look at custom programs as a way to help management internalize change as part of a broader organizational problem or strategic initiative," adds Cam Danielson, director of executive education at Indiana University's Kelley School of Business, in nearby Bloomington.
Companies grappling with reengineering and downsizing, mergers, or the search for new strategic directions often are among the biggest users of custom programs. For ABB Inc., the Fuqua trainings were a way to help fuse the four diverse cultures that had been brought together in the 1990s to make up the domestic arm of ABB Ltd. "We had no synergy," says Cheryl Sulborski, ABB Inc.'s vice president of human resources. "We wanted to bring executives from all these companies together to focus on common ABB principles and get a chance to network."
ABB treasurer Wentworth kicks off the two-week program with a day on basic corporate finance, teaching alongside Fuqua finance professor Dan Laughhunn. Wentworth offers insights into why cash flow and working capital are important in various operating departments, and in the corporation as a whole. "People from operations don't understand why we keep this company thinly capitalized," he says. "I give them a better feel for why we beat on them to collect receivables, stretch payables, and work their working capital. It is a way of heightening the awareness of what finance does and selling the function."
Says Laughhunn, "Functional managers are masters of their domain, but don't see where their task fits the overall strategy." He views the program's greatest success as creating "a mindset where [participants] take ownership of performance at their level, and of how their actions and control levers have an impact."
For McManus and other finance professionals, the finance piece of the training is old hat. But the Fuqua program did open her eyes, she says, in its examination of such operational topics as the need for rapid-fire customer-complaint resolution. "I did stuff on the fly I didn't think I could do on the fly," she says.
The Microsoft Way
At Microsoft, the dive into custom training started with the realization last year that its finance instruction needed serious work. "We didn't do much of it, to be honest with you," says Norman Tonina, Microsoft's senior director of finance development. What there was seemed flat, and concentrated rather dryly on a hodge-podge of issues such as communication skills and corporate accounting systems and tools. Tonina arranged Microsoft's first course, an introduction to finance, with University of Washington professor Jiambalvo.
Microsoft shunned open-enrollment classes, feeling that content specific to the company and its industry environment was essential to any relevant understanding of finance. At the same time, it thought sending people away to school a poor use of employee time, and it wanted to keep as much control over the program as possible. So Tonina decided to work directly with Jiambalvo under contract.
The first class "was a real success story," says Tonina, who quickly saw the benefits of using a professor paired with a Microsoft manager, the method the company chose for the first training. He won CFO Maffei's approval to expand the program for finance, and has continued to work with him, taking the course offerings into new areas.
The expansion has been rapid. Courses today include activity-based costing and management, the analysis of variances, performance measurements, and a recent addition, "unstructured strategic thinking," which includes an examination of competitive issues.
Brian Armstrong, a corporate planning manager who prepares semiannual business reviews for Microsoft subsidiaries, has taken several classes already, including the one on strategic thinking. "That was great, because we really got to drill down on events in the marketplace and do a lot of role-playing trying to understand our competitors," he says. "I have a better understanding now of what their offerings are, and how I can incorporate that in our business reviews."
The role of the trainings is likely to increase. Last year, for the first time, the CFO recommended that finance people sign up for executive education programs--a suggested total of 16 hours of them. Tonina believes the recommendation was made because "we now have a credible number of offerings from which to choose."
Microsoft takes its time selecting professors from the University of Washington stable. "We've been careful," says Tonina, "not to pick extreme academics for this assignment." The professors are, however, becoming very well versed in the inner workings of Microsoft, and in the nuances of tailoring finance courses to a corporation's needs. Jiambalvo, for example, has stopped importing case studies from outside the high-tech world. One classic activity-based costing case he introduced, involving John Deere & Co., was popular in open-enrollment trainings. But participants in the Microsoft program made it clear that "managers and controllers want to see situations in their space, as they would say."
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