CFO Studio Magazine with Alison Cornell

Advice for CFOs Looking for a Global Perch 8 WWW.CFOSTUDIO.COM Q1 2017 I had wanted to be the CFO of a publicly traded company since I was about 25 years old,” says Alison Cornell. Following a methodical career plan, she attained her goal in 2012 at a mid-cap company, Covance. She says she achieved her career objective by working hard, being persistent, making personal sacrifices, making the most of each opportunity given, being fearless, building strong teams, being a good teammate, maintaining faith and humbleness, and by helping people along the way. She also credits her husband, Dave, who supported her career aspirations and to whom she has been married for 25 years. Astutely, Cornell studied an AT&T colleague who was good at advancing his career (she worked there from 1984–2003). She questioned other associates about how they got where they were and what skill sets she would need; then she took jobs that would provide those skills. She even met one-on-one with the CFO at AT&T while she was a Division Manager and asked, “If you had one piece of advice, what would it be?” He answered, “Have a good tax person.” Now, she understands the value of that advice. Her pointers for others include: Get a system- wide understanding of all parts of the business, especially operations. Take time to develop and enhance your team, so you “have the best players on the field.” Also: “Develop the skill of asking questions from all angles in a disarming and thought-provoking way.” And, “Find balance and be present with family and friends, because they need your best, too.” it happened, they were looking for a potential succession candidate for that role,” she says. “It was somewhat serendipitous.”) But barely two years after she’d achieved that career goal, as she was in the midst of considering the merits of executing an acquisition — the target having been chosen — or doing a share buyback, a suitor from North Carolina, LabCorp, approached, and made an offer for the Princeton, NJ–based Covance. It fell to Cornell, the Corporate Senior Vice President and CFO, in a tense roughly month- long period in the fourth quarter of 2014, to give the LabCorp team a thorough enough understanding of Covance financials so LabCorp could do its own financial modeling. What she needed at her fingertips was not just the current and forecasted numbers for eight business units, but “what’s going on in each of the different markets.” On November 2, LabCorp entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Covance, and in February 2015, in a $5.7 billion transaction, completed that acquisition. “What really became pronounced were the principles of duty of loyalty and duty of care that the Board takes in making all decisions in their capacities as Corporate fiduciaries,” Cornell says. “It was up to me to present the best set of information possible, a comprehensive set of analytics, so that the Board could weigh everything possible to make the right choice. My job became informative.” She knew, of course, that there was a likelihood that the acquiring company wouldn’t keep her as CFO, and yet she immersed herself in gathering research and information to facilitate the decision. And so in her last weeks as Covance CFO, “The role pivoted,” Cornell says. “It became more about helping [the board members] do their best job.” Reputation as a Go-to Person Cornell has always used her positions to make a meaningful impact. When she was at AT&T, as CFO of the Business Network Services unit, she delved into the sales figures, so the company could understand its customer-level profitability, then introduced a sales-contribution model, and linked that to the business plan. “It changed the way we ran the sales force,” she says. In the late 1980s when AT&T sold computers, she was forecast manager for the marketing and sales operations in the Data Systems group. She noticed that inaccurate demand forecasts, based on sales projections, were hurting profitability, because they were used for manufacturing. She developed a forecasting process after gaining an understanding of what the right drivers were, and “we increased our forecast accuracy to 99 percent.” At Covance, she spearheaded a project to significantly improve profitability and Days Sales Outstanding (DSOs) for the Late Stage Development unit. In 2015 Cornell received the prestigious CFO Innovation award from CFO Studio, having been selected by an independent panel of judges. Her noteworthy achievement was introducing a “cash neutral” approach that convinced Covance’s drug development customers to provide advances, a practice that was not the customary standard for the clinical trials the company managed for them. The cash neutral plan was radical, and might not have occurred to an industry insider. “Sometimes it’s helpful not to be from the industry, as you have a fresh perspective and don’t take things as a given,” says Cornell, who sold the idea to customers on the merits of its fairness. “If you have a conversation with a businessperson that essentially says we should get paid for the work when we do it, it’s very hard [for them] to argue, especially someone who’s your customer and wants you to be successful [in delivering services to them],” she says. “[The plan] essentially laid out the math and showed them that absent the advance, we would have been “in the hole” for the trial cash-wise. With the advance, we were just neutral.” Industry practice changed as a result, she says. “For me, it’s all about making a difference wherever you are. And every day,” says Cornell. When she wasn’t driving the Finance agenda, she was the Executive Sponsor to a maternal and infant health program sponsored by the Covance Charitable Foundation and operated by CARE Nepal, which established 15 birthing centers and COVER STORY