80 Years of faces in finance.

• Author: Cheney, Glenn Alan

It's no coincidence that the 80 years of Financial Executives International's existence have been witness to the most financial innovation in history. Technology, economics and politics converged to create new opportunities and unprecedented challenges, and the changes came with snowballing velocity. The people who mastered these financial changes were leaders whose role in the advance of business and the global economy is inestimable.

The tsunami of change began with the political upheaval brought about by the Great Depression. Recognizing the need for action, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt introduced a broad array of new financial policies--together known as The New Deal--managed by a corps of financial innovators.

Joseph R Kennedy Sr. was named the first chairman of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Federal Reserve director William H. Woodin assumed leadership of the U.S. Treasury, overseeing the famous "Bank Holiday" and the abandonment of the international gold standard. Within a year, he resigned and was replaced by Henry Morgenthau jr., who crafted the financing of the New Deal and later established the War Bonds system that financed World War II.

It was at the end of 1931 that Arthur Ray Tucker wrote a letter proposing the establishment of the Controllers Institute of America, which would eventually evolve into Financial Executives International. Tucker was the institute's first employee and served as director-secretary until his retirement in 1947, by which time the institute was a large and growing organization.

Following the war, as business boomed, corporations saw their financial management become more intricate and essential. Frank Donaldson Brown was treasurer of General Motors Corp. through the Depression and the war, using uniform accounting principles, standard financial ratios and flexible budgeting strategies to turn the foundering automaker into the largest industrial company in the world. Robert Strange McNamara, having cut his teeth on statistical analysis of bomber performance during the war, turned his analytical skill to the management and financial analysis of Ford Motor Co., becoming its first president from outside the Ford family and later serving as secretary of defense and president of the World Bank.

The auto industry also produced Jerry York, who went from chief financial officer of Chrysler Corp. to CFO of IBM Corp., working with its then-chief executive, Louis Gerstner, to reverse the company's downward spiral, remaking it into one of the largest and most profitable U.S. companies. It wasn't only the U.S. automotive industry that produced such financial leaders, of course. General Electric Corp. contributed several superior leaders, including Alva O. Way, who served as CFO and applied his...