CFO Studio Magazine with Alison Cornell

Q1 2017 WWW.CFOSTUDIO.COM 9 It’s All About Visibility C oming up from a business unit to Corporate Finance, Alison Cornell, who was named CFO of Princeton-based Covance in 2012, knew that having only short-term information available, managers tended to make short-term decisions. The 18-month rolling forecast she instituted gave management a longer- term perspective. “When I was in the business unit, it was very frustrating,” she says. But with the rolling forecast, people had greater visibility into what lay ahead. At the same time, she introduced a business unit operations review, attended by the top five or so leaders of each business unit. This consisted of a 90-minute meeting held once a month that looked at each business unit holistically. “We talked about financials, people, process issues, technology issues, customers. We looked at the business from every angle,” she says. With eight business units in the portfolio, “if you knew what was going on in what time frame, you could make trade-offs.” The two initiatives resulted in “many fewer fire drills,” Cornell says. Not just the leadership benefited from the shift away from reactive. Everyone had a better sense of business needs and challenges. five school bathrooms within the poorest regions of Nepal. With verve and solid accomplishments, she has navigated a career path through three diverse industries, her most recent CFO post being at a multinational firm in the chemical/ consumer products industry. She leveraged her past experience and expertise, taking up several initiatives including obtaining 500 million Euro Bond financing at a substantially lower rate, and identifying opportunities to build upon her Finance organization’s strengths. “Each industry and company has a culture of its own,” she says. “You need to be adaptable while maintaining your authenticity.” Lifelong Learner Raised in Sayreville, NJ, the daughter of an Army major and a stay-at-home mom, Cornell amassed extra-credit points and predominately straight A’s all through school — receiving her undergraduate Psychology and MBA degrees at Rutgers University — both with honors. Approaching college graduation, she had an internship at AT&T’s Center for Education and Training, but the company had a hiring freeze. She got into Finance by pure chance: When the freeze was lifted, the first job to open up was Financial Systems Analyst. Cornell applied and was hired. She did not realize until after she left AT&T that during her time there she “developed skills that could be used anywhere: leadership, multitasking, process design, execution, project management, influencing, problem solving — all applicable to be successful as a Finance leader,” Cornell says. Still, it takes a particular type of individual to build a career on the opportunities presented. Cornell needed to leverage her hard work and every bit of networking; furthermore, she had to develop teams to help her “get the right things done,” as Peter Drucker put it, describing the archetypal effective executive. One of her longtime practices is to discuss with each team member individual career plans in her first meeting with him or her. She told CFO Studio magazine in 2015, “Each person needs to own their career and have an individual development plan in place that you need to help enable. An individual development plan should be a living document, not just ‘check the box,’ but very thought-out and well planned.” When she moved into her Corporate VP – Global Financial Planning & Analysis role at Covance, “it just so happened I had 365 people in my group. That was the inspiration for [taking 365 days and] meeting literally everybody [live or by phone]. In my prior jobs, I always made it a point to talk to a lot of people. The 365 went above and beyond. It helped me understand them as individuals, what their challenges were, what I could do to help.” And then she shifts to a more personal tone, speaking about helping fulfill the aspirations of people who have worked on her team. “I think people tend to pigeonhole other people,” she says. “They think, ‘Oh, you’re in Finance, you don’t care about people things.’ ” But she does; she was a psych major, after all. She says she has spent “a ton of time with people talking about what their career aspirations were, about how do you even think about a career plan. I created my own template on how to do that and walked people through it.” In her own career, she says, she was fortunate to have “great internal teachers who were willing to answer my million questions.” But learning answers to questions isn’t enough. She had to prove herself again and again as she moved through the career path she had envisioned. And she’s still learning. “I do a kind of self- assessment every day.” C “Each industry and company has a culture of its own. You need to be adaptable while maintaining your authenticity.”