That's a bit sketchy - I'd posit that experience is especially important for a CFO role. Too often are interesting ideas brought down by bad financial management.
I knew a man who turned a CFO of Bank of America not so well known Japanese venture at around 30 when the previous CFO died on the job, and a dozen people above him declined the job.
//Disclaimer I don't work there. But I know people who do.
While there are some articles out there bashing Bridgewater's work culture (similar to how Amazon's work culture got attacked in the press), the people I know who work at Bridgewater like it and find the work interesting and feel they are well compensated. Though, no one I know who works there had any finance background before taking the job and that seems to be OK.
Just curious if you have any thoughts on if previous finance experience before working at Bridgewater is a good thing or bad thing or irrelevant? And is there any connection between those employees that succeed at BW and whether they have previously worked in finance?
High finance is different from business experience. Yes the two worlds cross-pollinate, but by and large they are not the same. In some ways, it is like software development and IT. I contend that it is the people who did not learn the lessons of the past that were more likely to decide to become over-leveraged (let alone the massive pressure to do so as it seemed to be working for everyone else.) I presume (baselessly) that the appreciation for experience and history is something that is cultivated and evolves over the length of a person's career.
That being said, adaptable and intelligent people should be able to pick up on business decisions relatively quickly if they are given adequate support staff.
This is not surprising. Unless I'm way out of touch with modern finance, it would be much more difficult to objectively measure a candidate for a finance position than for an engineering position.
His hiring strategy was fascinating. He specifically avoided people from traditional finance backgrounds. He'd target people with doctorate degrees in math, or electrical engineering, or other non-traditional backgrounds and assume (clearly correctly) that they could pick up any necessary knowledge on finance as needed.
Ex-finance guy here, though I went against the grain and didn't go for financial companies, trying to stay close to where you came from is a solid strategy. Especially if you have some sort of business experience and a level of maturity about you, a lot of companies will be quite eager to take you on because you know the field.
The CFO at any reasonable company can read the balance sheets of a few banks in a few hours and will need to do it 4 times per year. It's days of work, not more. And if the company is big enough, this job will be in the treasury team and again, it's certainly less than $100k worth of work.
In a typical bank, AML is not part of the CFO responsibility (instead directly subordinate to CEO), and no sane bank will have a CFO whose experience is chiefly AML.
If you're determined to stay in finance, you'll probably have to stick to this model. But for a finance professional, there are many opportunities in other lines of business.
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