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Why diverse experience can enhance career path to being a successful CFO
In this episode of the Better Finance podcast, Myles Corson is joined by Dave O’Hara, Corporate Vice President and Chief Financial Officer for Commercial Finance at Microsoft.
Dave O’Hara shares how his unconventional career path, going from public policy and economic development to a friend’s software company, eventually led to being CFO of a major division in Microsoft. He attributes his career success to never staying too comfortable and embracing change, never backing down from a challenge, and finding the right mentor who can help one think differently and grow their career.
In addition, Dave discusses how Microsoft has challenged traditional roles by leveraging automation and digitization, making it replicable across multiple finance processes. This innovation has freed up time for the finance team to connect with customers directly and contribute to Microsoft’s goal to create exceptional customer experiences.
The changing role of the CFO has placed it at the heart of business, with an increasingly important role in strategy execution. While much of this evolution was already under way, and many CFOs already perform a broader strategic role for their organizations — the changes in perceptions, expectations and strategy execution are now being highlighted.
Microsoft has been at the forefront, taking a lead in AI and machine learning to support modern finance. Machine learning helped Microsoft finance resources reduce time on administering planning and forecasting, freeing time to spend with customers, reinforcing their brand.
The more leaders ask questions, the more they can influence the market and its players. Instead of working in silos, this allows CFOs and business leaders to collaborate and chalk out alternatives as a team — to work as a ‘One organization, One goal’ purpose. Being a customer-centric organization, Microsoft is driven by cross-functional teaming, collaboration, communication and one-company strategy driven by customer feedback.
Key takeaways:
Finance is often the shared reference point and connective bond pulling together all business units. Transparent communication and collaboration among C-suite and cross-functional leaders is an important component of growth strategy.
Machine learning and AI helped Microsoft’s finance resources develop predictive forecasting models and free time to spend with customers.
For your convenience, full text transcript of this podcast is also available.
Myles Corson
Hello and welcome to the Better Finance Podcast, a series that explores the changing dynamics of the business world and what it means for finance leaders of today and tomorrow. I’m Myles Corson from EY, and I’m your host. Joining me today is Dave O’Hara. Dave is the Corporate Vice President and Chief Financial Officer for the Commercial Finance Group at Microsoft. Dave, it’s great to have you here. Before we dive into our topic for today, can you share a little bit about your career journey for our listeners?
Dave O’Hara
The short version is that I graduated from university and went into business consulting for a short amount of time. Ended up working with a governor’s office, and then ended up going to work for a couple of different governors. Quickly decided politics wasn’t my thing. A friend of mine had a software company. He said, “How much do you know about software?” I said, “Nothing.” He said, “Great, come over here.”
So, I joined the software company. That company was eventually acquired by Great Plains Software, which is based out of Fargo, North Dakota, and then Microsoft acquired Great Plains, almost 20 years ago now, which is amazing when you think about it. And I’ve been with Microsoft ever since. Within Microsoft, I’ve had roles leading sales teams, leading operations teams. I was the chief operating officer of the online division for a while. Got into the finance track as the CFO for the online division and then am now the commercial CFO for the Microsoft commercial business.
Corson
There’s a lot to cover there. A lot of different experiences. It’s quite a non-traditional career journey to CFO. But is there anything you could pick out in terms of the experiences you’ve had that have maybe prepared you for the role, particularly for our listeners that are aspiring to be CFOs? What would you call out as being the things that they should be focused on developing in terms of their personal skill sets?
O’Hara
I would say that for me, people asked me, “How did you decide on your career path?” And the short answer is “I didn’t.” I just have this bad habit of wanting to run into burning buildings. Any time there was a problem, people would say, “Hey do you want to come over and help fix this?” And then I could go work on that for a while, hopefully get it on the right track. And then somewhere along the line our CFO left for the online division and they said, “You should do this job.”
I resisted it for a while, because I, candidly, didn’t think I was qualified. And they said, “No, we’re not looking for some pure accountant. We’re looking for more of a strategic CFO.” And that was interesting to me. That’s one of the key questions for me, for anybody who’s in the finance discipline, is do you see yourself as core finance, or do you see yourself as more of a strategic finance person, and should find a role that fits you best, whatever that happens to be.
I just had the benefit along the way of working for a great mentor every step of the way, with the exception of my very first job. I had a person who was not a great mentor and taught me a lot about what you should look for in a mentor. And ever since then I’ve worked for really smart people who’ve helped expand the way I’ve thought about things.
My short advice would be: one is, don’t be afraid to run into a burning building, as long as it’s not truly burning. Two is, work to find a really good mentor and somebody who’s going to help you on that journey and help you grow as a human and also help you grow as a finance person. Three is a mindset and a framework. Like how do you frame up a problem? How do you approach it? Do you have the end goal in mind? Do you have a logical thought process that gets you from here to there? It’s less of the technical finance skills, although some jobs do require very technical finance skills. To me, it’s more about what’s your mindset?
And then the last thing I would say to people, that I tell my own team, is work until you’re comfortable on a job or at least 90% comfortable, and then go do something else. Because I think people often do their best work when they’re uncomfortable. Just don’t get stuck in a rut. Don’t do one thing the whole time. Don’t be afraid to go try something new because you just learn exponentially when you do that.
Corson
That’s some really great advice. I appreciate you sharing some of those things. One of the things you touched on Dave is the different roles that the CFO plays. And in our recent EY research on the DNA of the CFO, we looked at the different balancing act between growing, optimizing and protecting values that CFOs are often required to play. And one of the things we see increasingly is this focus for CFOs to prioritize the growth of the organization, and the increasing expectations on CFOs to play that role.
As you think about your role at the center of digital transformation, Microsoft’s clearly been the early adoption of the cloud. Can you share some perspectives on how you as a CFO has helped to shape that strategy, the role you’ve played and how you’ve supported the business through that transformation?
O’Hara
Part of the role of the CFO is to manage our risk, because there are good ideas and then there are crazy ideas. And our job is to help assess what’s a really good idea and what’s a crazy one. Part of it is just having a common framework for how you think about things. And so, we always start with total adjustable market. If somebody comes up with something that they want to do, or a business they want to get into, we talk about what’s the total adjustable market, how big is it, is it growing, how fast is it growing, do we have permission to play there? We start out at the highest level just saying, like, what are we really trying to get done here and is this a market that’s attractive to us?
Once we do that, then we go through and we say do we have a good strategy for getting there? And we have people write white papers; what’s the strategy behind your thinking, do you really have a plan that you can go execute, do you have a team that can go execute that plan, how do you think about that? How do you think about a three-year arc for that plan? How do you think about the first year within that plan? And we frame it up that way.
Then we get into the numbers. We don’t dive into the numbers right away. We just try to make sure people understand what they’re trying to get done; have they thought it through strategically, do we really think we have a chance of winning? And then we get into how much money is here, how would we think about investments, et cetera.
I feel like in addition to managing out risk, the other role that CFOs play is deciding where to invest money. Because it can’t just be all cautious sit back, let’s collect our piles of money. Because you quickly fall behind. So, not only do you have to manage out risk, but you have to decide where you're going to invest and bet big. And I think there’s a way of doing that within a framework that manages out the risk and puts the money in the right places. We just try to manage that process end to end.
I think the trap that CFOs fall into is they immediately go into math camp or they immediately go into “we don’t have a budget for that.” And I would encourage everybody to think about the market opportunity first, the strategy and execution second, and then start getting into some of the math camp stuff.
Corson
We’ve all been experiencing or living through the pandemic, and I would observe that many finance functions have used that opportunity to accelerate their investment in digital transformation, particularly as the need for flexibility and resilience have become even more important. As you look at this, and you look at how Microsoft has played a role supporting your clients through that transformation, in areas like cloud, for example, what do you see, the role you’ve played to date, what is next and beyond?
O’Hara
Well, I think the role we played to date has been helping people keep their operations going, which is easier said than done. We invested heavily, hundreds of millions of dollars, in our core infrastructure to make sure that as people were coming online with video and voice on the computer that we had the capacity to manage that. And that all had to happen in the span of about a week. (Laughs) We didn’t have a lot of time to do it. We were running fast just to make sure that our data centers were scaled up to support the growth. That was one.
Two is making sure that people could get set up and get running and not take forever to do it. We invested heavily as well in some of our customer service engineers and customer service associates to get with customers and walk through their situation and get them up and going. And then third is, we just had to make sure that people were taking a long-term view, making sure that whatever investments they were making were enduring and they weren’t just patchwork. And that takes a little bit of patience, but a lot of fast running as well. So, helping them think through their digital strategy and where they ultimately want to end up. It’s easier to do that when you have time. It’s harder to do that when you don’t have time. And so, we had to create a playbook pretty quickly that would help people do that.
We partnered very closely with others around the world in helping our customers solve those issues. Part of it is us being a technology provider. Part of it is us being a good ecosystem partner. And then part of it is working closely with companies like EY to land this stuff in customer sites.
Corson
Let’s talk a little bit more about the impact of technology on the finance function. We’ve talked about responding to the pandemic. But Microsoft is really known for taking a lead in areas like AI and machine learning through modern finance. So, within the context of your organization and your personal experience, how would you define modern finance?
O’Hara
I think modern finance is getting as digital as fast as you can, having replicable models and having models that scale up as the business continues to grow, so that you don’t have to do patchwork on things. I think we can always get better as finance individuals. Microsoft, for example, is obviously a huge global company. We have a couple of different finance teams, one on the engineering side, one on the sales side, that are part of the commercial business. And previously when it came to something like forecasting, we would have the engineering team do one forecast, we’d have the sales team do another forecast, and then we’d have the actual field leaders do a forecast. And we would take those three and triangulate and come up with what we thought was best.
I mean the engineering teams were always the most conservative, the field team was always the most optimistic, and the field finance team was somewhere in the middle. It was super predictable. But we would use that to determine how we thought about forecasting, how we thought about guidance. We just felt like there had to be a better way over the long haul, and we should be learning from past forecasts and continually getting better.
So, we came up with our own machine learning model for forecasting, and we employed that. And there was a lot of anxiousness in the finance teams because people were like, “Am I going to be out of a job? Is this thing going to replace me?” And we assured them that wasn’t the case. That we were just trying to come up with better precision around forecasting and more automation around forecasting, and we had lots of work for finance teams to do.
The first time we ran the forecast, by far the one that was furthest off was the machine learning model, but by definition it’s learning. And now the machine learning model is pretty accurate. It’s not like we rely on that solely. We still have our field and sales finance teams, and we still get the field leadership to weigh in. But the machine learning model has gotten a lot better, and we rely on it a lot. What that did for us is it freed up literally hundreds of finance resources around the globe who were previously doing bottoms-up forecasting, and it freed them up to go do things like work with customers. Those finance people now go, when you were allowed to visit customers back in the day, would go visit a customer. And now they do it over video and they talk to the customer about what we’ve done to help transform.
And last year I think we had 1,500 finance people that met with customers and walked through how we think about finance transformation, and it becomes much more real that way, because then it’s not us pitching some utopian story. This is us saying, “Here’s what we do, and here’s what we need you to do.” And for some of the finance folks that was a bit of a stretch. But once we got them in front of customers and once they found out the fulfillment they’d get from helping those customers solve those problems, we have lots of people wanting to go be with customers.
Our entire goal has been to automate as much as we can, digitize as much as we can, make it replicable, have the machine learning so it gets better, and free up your finance team to actually go work with customers.
Corson
That’s a great example of the changing roles that are created. Most people are freed up from doing what we describe as the mundane tasks, into doing these higher-value responsibilities. And it ties back into what we were talking about earlier on in terms of enabling growth. If you can spend time facing off with customers, reinforcing the brand, really bring the products to life, that’s clearly very valuable.
One of the things we do talk about as part of that growth story is also the longer-term aspects to it. One of the trends we see in the market is investors looking for companies to tell a longer-term story about their growth potential. You can never get away from the short-term metrics, but the ability to tell the long-term value creation story is just such an area of focus right now. Can you share any experiences you’ve had in terms of how Microsoft thinks about that and how it communicates?
O’Hara
With Microsoft, Satya coming in was obviously a bit of a change. Every meeting would start out with, what’s your growth strategy? It’s ironic that people weren’t getting asked that question before. Oftentimes they were managing large businesses, multibillion dollars, and they were just trying to hold onto that business. And Satya just said, look, that’s not going to be the future. You have to have a growth strategy. Tell us what that is.
And people occasionally couldn’t answer. Like “I don’t have a growth strategy.” He’d just send them off and say, “Come back when you have a growth strategy.” And so that would force them to look at the total adjustable market, new markets they could break into, adjacent markets where we had permission to play. How do we think about that? How do we think about enabling partners? And forced a different framework for how people think about it. That to me is the starting point.
And then the CFO’s job in that is to support the business leaders as they’re trying to seek out that information and put together a business case. But it’s also to lean on folks to harvest spend that’s being made on areas that aren’t growing, or on businesses that maybe are past their prime. It’s both figuring out where to invest, but it’s also figuring out how to get the sources to invest.
I remember when we started on this journey, we were a mid-single digit grower. People thought Microsoft was out of the game. And then we just picked a few areas, the cloud being the primary one, but a few other areas where we felt there was going to be growth. And we did that, we moved spend from older areas to newer areas. At one point with Azure, we felt like we had 80% of our resources on Azure, which was a very small business, and 20% on the rest of it, which was a huge business. But we just felt like that’s where the world’s going. You need to overinvest, but you don’t do that just by adding. You have to go get it from somewhere.
So, for us, it was really about how do you manage that transition? I talk about that like it was an event. It wasn’t an event. It was a five-year journey. Every year we would invest a little more and harvest a little more. And then we got to where Azure was growing enough that we had enough revenue coming in that we had kind of harvested what we could, but we had enough revenue coming in to continue to invest. So, then it was more about the investment.
What most companies were struggling with is, especially existing mature companies, is how do you harvest in a way that gets your spend into new areas and new markets that are growing.
Corson
It’s interesting. That five-year journey you’re describing, it is something that your CEO, Satya Nadella, covered in his book, which is really about the cultural transformation, the mindset shift that you mentioned Microsoft has been on. Can you talk a little bit more about what that meant for you personally and for your organization and how you’ve seen that sort of cultural influence shape your role and your team?
O’Hara
I think the most prominent thing, Myles, is that Microsoft used to be organized in silos. We all had our business groups, and, in fact, at one point we had literally seven different P&Ls. And those P&Ls were responsible for their P&L. But there really was not incentive or obligation to work across the P&Ls. People would do it occasionally. But really, it was like you manage your business. And Satya just said, “Hey, we’re a global company, all of this stuff accrues to the same goal, which is helping customers transform. So, we need more working across Microsoft.” And we started with the One Microsoft initiative and that required people who had been running separate businesses — Windows and Azure were separate businesses — it required us to get in a room and say, okay, these are all products that customers use, how do we think about it? It got us thinking across business group lines.
The other thing that it really had an impact on is, we did start late in the cloud. But still we got started and we were getting going. And we were sitting in the room and we just said, “Look, we have to come up with some differentiated value prop here, something that sets us apart. What do we think that is?”
We had all these customers that were using Microsoft products. And we said, “Wouldn’t it be great if we had interoperationally across our existing on-prem products and our cloud products. And wouldn’t it great if from a licensing perspective we enabled customers to use whichever was best for them, or even run in a mixed mode. It was set up as we just needed differentiation. But in the end, the customers said, “This is exactly what we need because we have these very material investments in old tech, and we’re not really to throw those out. Having said that, we do need to get to the cloud, we understand that. So, we need to run in a mixed mode for some period of time.
We would not have had a hybrid strategy if we weren’t forced into it, for lack of a better word. Market forces dictated that we go do that. But that’s the type of evolution that Satya talks about when he says, “Hit refresh.” You’ve got to think about things under a new lens. Growth being one, but also what do the customers really need? And are you identifying with what the customers need? Hybrid strategy being an example of that.
Corson
It sounds like collaboration and that teaming — it is such an important component of that culture shift. I’m interested in your perspective in terms of C-Suite collaboration and sort of cross-functional collaboration. Because in the survey that I mentioned, the DNA of the CFO survey, one of the things that was interesting is, whilst the relationships between CFOs and CEOs are strong, there’s some room for improvement in some of the other functional relationships. Like CMOs, CHROs. Where perhaps almost 50% of the CFOs we spoke to said there were challenges with those relationships. How’s your experience of that and the importance of that cross-functional teaming and collaboration?
O’Hara
For us, collaboration is great. First thing we had to have was just communication. People didn’t even know what the others were doing. So, we just said, “Hey, we’re all going to get in a room, we’re going to be very transparent about what’s going on, we’re going to be transparent about how we think about opportunity and investments and resources, and we as a collective management team are going to make some decisions.” And before that would have all been done in silos.
The first thing we had to do was get people to communicate. Once they communicate, and once things have become more evident, then I think you can sit down and say great, now we have a better sense of all the pieces of the puzzle, and we can start moving some stuff around and making investments that are aligned. In terms of communication, when one business group was making a big bet on an area, another group could look at it and say, “Hey that makes sense for me too, I’ll go bet on that same area.” And that all sounds obvious, but it wasn’t happening at the level it needed to.
So, first there’s communication. Second there’s collaboration. And the third, I think, what results is a one company strategy that accrues to the greater good. And I think all of that is very driven by what your customers were telling you. We’ve done a much better job of getting in front of customers. Personally, I’m on several customer calls a week. That’s probably not traditional for finance folks. But I just feel like that’s where the rubber meets the road, as they say, and that’s where you have to get feedback from customers on what your go-forward strategy should be.
The most important role that finance folks can be is the connective tissue. They can pull the engineering teams together; they can pull the marketing teams together with the engineering teams. They can pull marketing together with Ops, talking about things like skew strategy. Our job is to be the orchestrator of pulling all those people together and making sure you have that connective tissue so that it does operate as one Microsoft.
Corson
That’s a really important point, David. Finance often is the language of business, so it’s the common framework that can actually enable some of that collaboration and communication. It’s the shared reference point.
I want to go back to one of the things you mentioned around the predictive forecasting. Microsoft has spent a lot in that area. As you think about, particularly coming back to the pandemic implications, the speed with which a lot of organizations have had to reforecast and adapt, the agility with which they’ve had to deal with not just the pandemic but also some of the macroeconomic and geopolitical uncertainties, has really put pressure on some of these forecasting processes. I’m just interested in how well the forecasting models have held up with all of that disruption and whether you see if that actually is just going to further accelerate the shift from the traditional way of forecasting and planning to the new technologically enabled ways.
O’Hara
The good thing about machine learning forecasting is it’s built on data, and you can go back as far as you have data and use that to inform your decisions. What it’s not as good as is predicting things like pandemics. That’s why I always think there’s going to be a very human element to finance because the models are great when considering history. But when there’s a sharp left turn, they’re less great at it.
And so, when the pandemic hit, we had to sit in a room and say, “What do we really think is going to happen? How should we align accordingly?” We took the point of view that it was going to be a trough and it was going to be a trough for a while. And so, we scaled our investments accordingly. The first left turn was the pandemic itself. The right turn was how quickly we recovered, which we didn’t expect either of those. Nobody had forecast the pandemic; nobody had forecast the fast recovery.
So, we had to adjust twice. And now what we’re seeing, because we’re in the cloud, what we’re seeing is a much faster ramp than we had forecast. Before, as a matter of how you manage your investments in a thoughtful way, now it’s a matter of, how can we find enough people to help us on this journey, and how can we find enough smart humans to figure out the next thing that we need to be doing.
So, we went from being in a good position to being in a position where nobody really knew what was going to happen for sure, to now being in an even better position. Because I do feel like cloud companies are better positioned after the pandemic than they were before. And now we’re just trying to keep up with the growth.
Corson
We spoke previously to the VP of Finance and FP&A at Lowe’s Companies. And one of the things we talked about there was really helping to understand the drivers of business performance, particularly in the pandemic, and how that was changing behaviors. And to your point, as the effects of the pandemic started to wear off, what was changing consumer behavior? And again, going back to your point about data, the ability to mine data to really understand what those drivers are and to be able to take action accordingly as you see things starting to move, is a big opportunity. So, that’s somewhere again you can maybe share some perspectives of what you’ve seen in terms of leveraging cloud and sort of access to much bigger volumes of data.
O’Hara
That is the benefit of the cloud, is you can have all this data in one location. And if you have good tools set up, and good data mining, you can find gold nuggets in that data. You have to have good data scientists who know what they’re doing and know what they’re looking for. Nate Silver would say you have to separate the signal from the noise. And so, I think that’s been one of our biggest areas of investments is data scientists that can both help us and help customers sift through the data and figure out how we’re going to take advantage of it.
I would say that in addition to the data, which is great to have those data scientists doing that, we just need to keep an ear open for our customers who are telling us, “Here’s what I really need.” And we have to ask that third or fourth question to find out what they’re really looking for. And then you can go back and validate it with the data. As with all things, it continues to be some combination of AI and automation along with human intervention to make sure that you're catching the right signals. Because I just don’t think there would have been any way to predict the pandemic. There were very few people that were predicting the fast recovery that came. So, we just have to marry up the data with the people. What are you hearing, what are you seeing, what trends are out there? And just react quickly.
Corson
You mentioned some of the skill sets, and particularly as the finance organizations go through digital transformation, what are the kind of skill sets that you think are going to be most in demand?
O’Hara
To me the most relevant skill set is critical thinking. Do you know how to identify a problem, can you frame it up, can you think about it in a consistent way? Once you do that, can you create an execution plan that goes and follows through and makes things better? And so, I think people look at transformations as being some overnight thing, and they’re obviously not. It’s a multiyear journey.
Sometimes you’ve just got to break things into pieces and fix them a piece at a time. But I think the most important thing to me is having a common framework or a common approach in terms of how you solve problems. Because if you have that, and you can share that with your team, then people start thinking about things the same way. You pick up pace, you can solve things faster, you can get more scale by having many people helping solve these issues. The mindset and the common framework of problem solving would be number one for me. You obviously need to be pretty good with numbers. But I feel like that’s table stakes for being engaged.
The last thing that I would say is, I feel like it’s my job and my team’s job to be a trusted partner for the business leaders, whether it’s marketing, engineering, whatever. They need to know that you're in it with them, and that you are there to help, and that you’re not a blocker, you’re an enabler. We spend lots of time making sure that relationship is solid and that it’s a trusted relationship. So, you do need some good relationship skills. Old stereotype of finance people sitting in a dark room, hitting a keyboard, those days are gone. You need to be much more holistic in your approach.
Corson
A really important point. Again, in the research we can find that this balance of the IQ with the EQ is so important for finance executives to be successful going forward. Because to your point, it’s all about relationships. You have to be able to get beyond just the traditional skills of finance and rational, logical thinking, and be able to communicate things effectively. And you gave a great example of your finance people now being out facing off with a client, and the ability to build those relationships and communicate in different ways, is such an important skill set.
O’Hara
There’s an author by the name of Adam Grant who wrote a book that he recently published. And he talks about inverse charisma. And inverse charisma is basically the ability for folks to ask enough questions and be curious enough that they get the other human talking and sharing their learning and sharing what’s going on in their head. And finance folks can benefit from that. Because if you build up a trusted relationship and you can ask enough questions, and you can get people talking, you can learn a lot about where they want to go, what they want to do, and it enables their journey. And so, I think that is certainly a skill that can be learned. You don’t need to be born with it. I think it’s a skill that finance folks can and should focus on.
Corson
Your point here about intellectual curiosity and going back to the point of that growth mindset, the willingness to learn and to be expansive in your thinking, is again such a differentiator for finance executives.
David, at the start of the conversation you mentioned the importance of mentors in your career journey and how important it was in your development. Perhaps you could also share what you are now doing as a mentor for people in your team, and how are you sort of instilling some of these lessons and development opportunities and creating the mindsets that you see as important for your team to be developing?
O’Hara
I had somebody say the other day that I do more one on ones than any human they know. Which, those one on ones are really just mentor sessions either with my team or with people in other parts of the business. And what I do when people come and talk to me, is I just ask questions and be curious and find out where they’re at, and what it is they want to talk about.
A lot of times they think they understand the issue they’re trying to solve, and they really don’t. I’ll just try to help them frame it up in the right way. Like, “Are you sure you know the issue at hand? And are you sure that others agree that that’s the issue at hand? And have you clearly communicated that?” And if it is, great. Then let’s talk about how do you frame it up in a way that’s solvable? Like break it into pieces, identify the pieces that are easier to fix, identify the pieces that are harder to fix. Who else do you need to bring in to help solve the issue? Have you had conversations with those folks yet? Does this all line up with where Microsoft is going as a company? I know it’s important to you, but is it important to the company as well? And then ultimately you help them think through that. Not in a “leading the witness” kind of way, but just in a curious way. And then they walk out and feel better about being able to go solve the problem.
Sometimes it might take two or three of those sessions before you get through, but it goes back to what I said. What I value most in a finance person is critical thinking and being able to frame something up and solve it in a consistent way. If you teach enough people that, you can scale across the business. And I think that’s kind of where Microsoft is now. Not to get overconfident, but I do think that we have a finance team that has really developed our strategy chops and really developed our problem-solving chops, and that’s what gets us invited to the meetings that matter.
Corson
I can imagine that’s a really inspiring organization to be part of and wanting to grow and develop your career with it. This has been a great conversation, very wide ranging. We covered a lot of topics. As we wrap up, are there any final recommendations that you provide to our listeners as they think about digital transformation of their finance functions? And what would you share?
O’Hara
I would just say challenge your teams to get outside the norm, get outside what they think their traditional finance role is. People need to earn their way into conversations and so you need to be thoughtful about where and how you do that. But I think as long as you're focused on true learning and truly enabling your business partners and you’re curious and you’re working with them, they will bring you along for the ride. And I think your life will be better for it, and you’ll be a more fulfilled finance person, and you’ll be able to just look and see the direct impact of your work. Which I think that’s what everybody wants in life is to have a positive impact. There’s a way of stretching beyond the stereotypical finance role and getting into more of a trusted business advisor role and helping grow the business.
Corson
Dave, I appreciate your time today. And thank you for sharing with us your CFO journey and some of the insights from your experience in Microsoft.
O’Hara
Happy to be here, Myles.
Corson
For our listeners, thank you for joining us as always. You’ll find links to the materials referenced today on our site, ey.com/BetterFinance. And if you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe or leave a rating review wherever you listen to your podcasts. We look forward to welcoming you on the next episode of the Better Finance Podcast, a series that explores the changing dynamics of the business world and what it means for finance leaders of today and tomorrow.
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