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.

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 concentrate more on strategic planning, payroll and corporate strategy.

Although it was tough in the beginning getting people to accept a shared-services strategy, we began with low-hanging fruit, such as payables and receivables, to achieve some quick wins. After that, it became much easier to get people to embrace a shared-services approach, to the point that we now run some of our decision analysis and support out of India.

The results of our approach to centralization and shared services have been impressive and have been replicated through virtually all the other functions inside Oracle, such as human resources, legal, marketing, IT and support, which largely accounts for the doubling of Oracle's profit margins in the last six years.

* Expand Your Influence. Most CFOs already know that an important part of their job performance is their ability to act as a strategic partner to the CEO, providing sound advice on how to drive performance, enable compliance and remediate risk. Exceptional CFOs also work hard to expand their influence with corporate boards, general managers, customers and external stakeholders. Gaining credibility with these constituencies is key to becoming a trusted advisor to your CEO and taking your career to the next level.

Exceptional CFOs who have made the transition to CEO or chairman have a number of traits in common when it comes to expanding their influence. Since Sarbanes-Oxley, they take the time to meet often with corporate board members who want to bone up on auditing, risk management, insurance and IT issues. They meet weekly or biweekly with general managers to understand operational strategy and how finance can support that. And, they get together frequently with customers and analysts, to better understand where their industry is headed and how they can compete more effectively.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

I can't stress this last point enough. During my 13-year tenure as CFO, I was called Oracle's top salesman because I often met with at least three customers a day to find out what products and services they needed and where we could improve the company's offerings.

I also met frequently with analysts and institutional investors to give them as much information as possible to effectively evaluate Oracle, and I instituted a comprehensive investor website to give individual investors equal access to Securities and Exchange Commission filings, press releases, financial analyses and investor presentations.

I've carried this commitment to external stakeholders into my new role as chairman, and still meet almost daily with customers to get their take on Oracle's strategies and product offerings.

* Have an Integrated View of the Business. Still, to make the leap to CEO or chairman, it's not enough to deliver strong performance or become a trusted advisor. You need to have an integrated view of your business, one that combines the financial view, the operating view and the market view. Achieving an integrated view into the business means gaining deep operational knowledge by meeting often with your information technology team, your business units, your overseas subsidiaries and even your competitors.

Many CFOs were helped in this process by Sarbanes-Oxley Section 404, which exposed their companies' operational strengths and weaknesses. In fact, many headhunters now evaluate a CFO's fitness for the top job based on his or her ability to boost corporate performance from work done on Section 404.

The most exceptional CFOs are also getting an integrated view into their businesses by investing heavily in performance management strategies, business processes and technologies. When I was CFO, I equipped my finance team with a variety of decision-support tools to track performance and keep Oracle on track even during the most volatile stock market swings. Everyone on my finance team used Oracle Financial Analyzer to monitor both financial and nonfinancial key performance indicators, such as our days-sales-outstanding and book-to-bill ratios. We also relied heavily on Oracle's customer relationship management products to track all our sales activities, from revenue by customer and product to win-loss data.

By the time I had stepped down as CFO, we were giving constant feedback to our internal software development team on the functionality and best practices we wanted built into the next generation of Oracle's corporate performance management solutions, such as our new enterprise planning and budgeting product.

I feel strongly that providing your finance team with the right tools and intelligence gives them the integrated view they need to partner more effectively with the business and drive profitable growth and shareholder value. And, if you're a CFO with ambitions to move up the corporate ladder, such a strategy might just be the ticket that will land you in that spot.

Jeff Henley is the former CFO and is currently chairman of the board of Oracle Corp. He has been with the company since 1991.