College II provides much more technical training for people in finance and administration. Two thousand people a year take at least 1 of the 18 one- and two-day courses that cover the nuts and bolts of risk management, activity-based costing, competitive analysis, and the like. The focus is on mastery of topics that are needed for promotion to the associate director level. P&G offers versions of the courses in each region of the world in which it operates.

College III is for newly promoted associate directors who generally have six or more years of experience at P&G. Each May, these 55 or so key managers convene in Cincinnati for a four-day seminar run by Nelson and other finance leaders. The sessions revolve around group problem-solving of real P&G case studies, and there are lively exchanges on topics ranging from new tax laws to ethical questions.

The value of cross-functional teamwork and serving as a business partner is a constant theme in all three colleges. This spring, in a move to reinforce these virtues, Nelson approved the creation of College IV for more-experienced managers. The focus will be on change management. Each class of 15 to 20 "will come to class once a month and go through various modules that they will apply to the [change] projects they bring from their own jobs," says Nelson. "It's an experiential type of training."

Despite the all-encompassing nature of P&G's Finance College, Nelson says the investment is minimal. Besides having only one staff person to run the colleges, he relies on internal subject-matter experts to do the teaching. "It's part of their job," he says.

The return on investment, however, is hard to measure. Other than anecdotal reports and a sense that the program helps foster a common culture and skills in finance, Nelson points to the assessments that are done three months after a course is offered. Both the employee and that person's manager fill out a questionnaire that asks whether the training was applicable to the job; the two sets of answers are then compared. "We can't quantify this measurement," Nelson says, "but it gives us a good idea of how well these lessons are translated."

Lucent Technologies: Only Connect

After Lucent Technologies Inc.'s 1996 spin-off from AT&T Corp., CFO Donald Peterson recognized the unique opportunity he had for a fresh start. Out went the heavy emphasis on reporting and control that had dominated training at Ma Bell; in came a 27-month program (affiliated with Babson College) for college grads that offered a heavy dose of strategic cost management and entrepreneurial finance.

"We're trying to build business professionals who happen to be expert in finance, rather than build finance professionals who then learn about business," says Gil Harris, director of internal audit and vice president of the Financial Leadership Development Program. "That sounds like a subtle difference, but we want people focused on using finance as a competitive advantage rather than as a tool for control."

But last year, Harris discovered a glitch. When the new hires rotated into short-term job assignments in between their classroom work, they couldn't "seed" finance with the new concepts they were taught, because few people understood what they were talking about.

A solution will be tested with the second group of 50 new hires who begin the program this spring. Each student will have a mentor from the finance group, and mentors will go through an abbreviated course of study that exposes them to the same new ideas. "This will be more successful," Harris predicts, "because we'll all be speaking the same language.

Southern New England Telecommunications: Filling the Gaps

Soon after Donald R. Shassian took the CFO job at SNET in December 1993, he was shocked by how much stagnation and complacency he discovered in the finance organization. Shassian had previously worked more than 16 years at Arthur Andersen, a company that invested heavily in professional development and had a stellar reputation for grooming top finance executives. No one, he quickly concluded, would want to recruit finance leaders from SNET.

"People had been in the same positions for a long time," Shassian recalls. "They thought it was risky to move. People should want to volunteer for special projects, but they were trying to be protective and secure."

This problem, he realized, stemmed from an acute lack of the skills necessary to grow within the organization. Most finance staffers didn't understand the basics of the rapidly changing telecommunications industry. They were stunted as leaders and managers. And they were so inwardly focused that they didn't have a clue about how to help other functions solve business problems.

But rather than assembling a catalog of courses or mandating job rotation, Shassian spent several years documenting the skill gaps within finance — and developing a strategy to fill them. "I could have come up with a quick solution," he says, "but I would have missed the mark. I might have made wrong decisions, and the folks participating would not have understood why this is so important."

The centerpiece of Shassian's efforts was a lengthy self-assessment survey given to about 400 finance managers in April 1997. The survey presented 98 finance-related skills covering technical competencies (for example, cash-flow analysis and process mapping), management abilities (promoting diversity, fostering teamwork), and business acumen (basic telephony concepts and "pipeline" products). For each, the employees were asked to rate their own level of expertise from 1 (novice) to 4 (expert).

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