Lifelong learning = success: Financial Executives International Hall of Fame 2010 inductees.

• Author: Graziano, Cheryl de Mesa
• Position: Cover story

Those who reach C-level roles in multinational companies bring with them a mix of impressive skills. They may start out in finance, operations or management, or in staff or line positions. But if climbing that career ladder is their destiny, they'll need to amass experience in operating the business from various divisions, units and roles.

The basics may be developed in school, but learning is a lifelong process, whether one spends an entire career with the same company or switches companies, even industries. The key is to continually take on new and more complex responsibilities.

The two executives profiled here--the inductees to the 2010 Financial Executives International Hall of Fame--clearly fit this executive profile.

Karl M. von der Heyden retired in 2001 as vice chairman of PepsiCo Inc.'s board of directors. His professional career with Pepsi dates to 1974, where he served in various management positions until 1980, and later rejoined the company in 1996 as vice chairman and chief financial officer. Between Pepsi tenures, he assumed a number of senior leadership positions, including CFO, Senior Vice President and director at H.J. Heinz Co.; co-chairman and CEO and CFO at RJR Nabisco; and CEO of Metallgesellschaft Corp.

Ulyesse LeGrange retired as senior vice president and chief financial officer of ExxonMobil Corp.'s U.S. Oil and Gas operations in 1991 after a distinguished 40-year career, holding a number of key positions. He began as a clerical employee at its Baton Rouge Refinery in Louisiana and worked his way up to president of Exxon Pipeline Co. and vice president and controller of Exxon Corp.

Karl M. von der Heyden

Karl M. von der Heyden says his 40-year finance career goes so far back that he's "almost a dinosaur." It's been a career marked by dramatic change in financial leadership. When he was starting out, he says, finance was in the background, providing staff support to the operating management. Finance people, he says, were like engineers in the ship's engine room, whose job it was to make sure the ship sailed smoothly and who stayed out of sight.

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Contrast that with today's financial executives who "are much more visible, tend to be more outgoing, more involved in running the business and in corporate strategy and risk management." Today's finance executives are "more connected to the business as active participants."

After earning his high school degree in Germany, von der Heyden took his first job--for 2 1/2 years--as a management trainee for Berliner Bank. While at university in Germany he spent semester breaks with Coopers and Lybrand--three separate times, in three separate European offices, and established his link to his first job in the United States.

He subsequently graduated from Duke University and obtained an MBA from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in 1964. While much of his experience has since come on the job, he says "the information you acquire in graduate school--the essentials, such as a good knowledge of accounting, financial modeling, discounted cash flow analysis, etc."--served as a good professional foundation.

"You learn all the time--every day you learn something new," he says. "Occasionally you have to go back and study it in more detail and brush up on certain things you may not have, that you have forgotten or that you never knew."

Von der Heyden's career path has taken him to a variety of primarily consumer businesses, with much of it at PepsiCo Inc. He has many fond memories of the company and its "extremely bright and good people."

One early mentor, Donald Kendall, the then-CEO and chairman, who still maintains an office at its New York headquarters, started as a syrup salesman ("He had an incredible grasp of every aspect of the business").

After von der Heyden left Pepsi to become chief financial officer and director of H.J. Heinz Co., he and Kendall kept in touch and still do, though both are retired. When he returned to Pepsi as vice-chairman in 1996 after stints at other companies, he says "it was like I never...