The exceptional CFO: from finance to corporate leadership; Oracle's chairman--formerly its CFO--provides personal insights on how CFOs can catapult their own exceptional performance to gain even higher positions.

• Author: Henley, Jeff
• Position: Chief financial officers

What does it take for CFOs to move up the corporate ladder? I've been asked to speak on that subject quite frequently since I made the transition from Oracle CFO to chairman of the board in June 2004. Having been a CFO myself for 25 years, I can tell you that there's no magic recipe for success or substitute for hard work, but there are some basic strategies that every CFO can adopt to improve his or her chances of moving into the "corner office." It involves focusing on performance, expanding your influence and having an integrated view of the business.

* Focus on Performance. Every CFO knows that he or she is evaluated on the company's performance, but it's not always apparent just how that performance translates into career promotion. From participating in a study on CFO personal performance, I discovered that those of us who had made the transition to CEO or chairman shared two factors: We delivered total shareholder returns (TSRs) well above average during our tenures as CFO; and we had extensive operational experience, either through strong partnerships with our general managers and business units or through direct line manager experience.

Today, the most exceptional CFOs are leading their industries in TSRs by narrowing the focus of their finance activities to those that directly impact performance, such as strategic planning, operations planning and M & A. They are reorganizing and centralizing their finance structures to reduce their involvement in administrative areas such as procurement and real estate, in order to focus more time and resources on strategic issues such as corporate governance, strategy and planning, outsourcing and profitable growth.

Take, for example, Oracle's finance team's experience. In 1998, we were among the first to move to a centralized finance function based on shared services, creating service centers in California, India, Ireland and Australia that now act as hubs for our finance operations, supporting four operating divisions in more than 90 countries. We also invested in Oracle E-Business Suite to automate, streamline and standardize finance and business processes across the globe to allow us to run one instance of our financial applications in Austin, Texas, for the entire world.

These moves resulted in a 25 percent reduction in finance head count and a 30 percent reduction in finance and accounting costs. Finally, we pushed to adopt self-service wherever possible to enable local account teams to...