Some employees were initially concerned that the survey could be used against them in performance appraisals. Shassian reassured them that the data would remain strictly confidential. The eventual response rate was about 80 percent. Each survey was then fed into a specially designed computer program. A regression analysis compared the skill requirements for specific jobs with the skill levels people reported, and the software spit out the largest and most prevalent gaps.

"Other companies have established a curriculum of courses that have no correlation to their needs," notes Fred Heimann, the veteran finance director at SNET whom Shassian tapped to run the new Financial Professional Development Program. He points out that the survey confirmed the obvious — accounting skills were high and accountants' insights into the business were low.

The survey also served up a big surprise: finance people were confused about where all the company financial data was kept and how best to access it. "It sounds simple, but learning this by osmosis was a poor way to learn," Heimann says.

Next month, SNET hopes to correct that deficiency by offering the first of its new courses. Another course on tap is a primer on products and services in the evolving telecommunications industry, with an emphasis on helping finance look beyond accounting issues in evaluating capital investments. Heimann expects a total of eight courses in all, including one on presentation skills. "Finance needs to learn how to sell ideas," he says. SNET managers will teach all the classes.

Although these new classes will not be mandatory, Shassian believes the self-assessment exercise has motivated staffers to fill their skill gaps. They will also be encouraged to pursue new assignments, he reasons, now that they can gauge their abilities against those needed for various finance jobs. And they will be more aware of the importance of being a business partner. If nothing else, people now seem more willing to volunteer for special projects.

Yet Shassian concedes that he's quite far away from the ultimate goal. "Bottom-line success," he says, "will be when folks want to hire my people away."

GPU Generation: Targeting Practice

A few months after he was promoted to the top finance post at GPU Generation Inc. (Genco), the non-nuclear power unit of General Public Utilities Corp., Robert Vodzack was sent to Pennsylvania State University by his bosses. They wanted him to bone up on business issues related to the rapidly deregulating utility industry. So there he was in class one day in November 1996, surrounded mostly by nonfinance executives from throughout GPU, when the idea smacked him in the face: I'm not the only one who needs this stuff.

"I went there for help with my new job," Vodzack says, "but I knew others could use it." So last July, he convinced his bosses to back a three-day program for managers from the generation unit. Developed in conjunction with Penn State, the curriculum zeros in on the financial skills needed to operate in a competitive, deregulated business environment. About 100 people have been through the GPU-customized sessions so far. Only 20 or so, however, have come from finance positions.

"The whole intent was not to have a finance-only program," Vodzack says.

Day One: Finance professor J. Randall Woolridge delves right into what he calls "the fear of finance" — the practice and the people — and he comes back to that theme again and again. "It takes trust to go from a command- and-control finance organization to having finance as part of a competitive team model," he says. At another company, recalls Woolridge, the rift between the financial and nonfinancial participants was so severe that the residue from past clashes quickly bubbled to the surface. The CFO asked the professor to leave the room, and what ensued was 45 minutes of yelling and screaming.

The GPU course work ranges from such basics as financial statements and ratio analysis to understanding the drivers of shareholder value. Particularly for nonfinancial managers, cash flow management and investing capital efficiently are foreign concepts, and in group break-out sessions, barriers break down as the finance managers help bring line peers along.

One case study that hits home starts with Woolridge explaining how investors value GPU and how that determines the stock price. He then explores a recent decision not to invest in a major capital project. The group members know the bare-bones outline of the story, but no one has ever looked at the financials to see how the projected returns made the project a no-go. "They get the idea they have to think this way in a competitive world," Woolridge says.

The lessons on the capital markets have also had an unintended consequence. Line managers used to think of finance as the nemesis, arbitrarily putting the kibosh on their projects. Now the managers realize that capital providers are telling finance what they expect.

As for Vodzack, he hangs in the back of the room, and Woolridge sees him smile like the Cheshire cat when engineers start talking about hurdle rates. Vodzack attributes some of Genco's higher profits and lower capital expenditures to the custom program. With the generation unit on the block, he believes that the training makes the unit more attractive to potential buyers.

And there's another reason for hanging around the classroom. "I learn something new with every course," says Vodzack.

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