CFO奥运趣谈

在这个充满激情的夏天,中国人籍奥运舞台向世界展示了自己的精彩与惊奇,就像从没有感受到北京有如此多的蓝天一样,我们从没有如此近距离的感受奥运。作家王蒙别具一格地称北京奥运是"一次精神的中国与世界的共舞"。如今舞台已渐渐落下帷幕,观众们的评论正悄然登场,本刊特别采集了一些CFO朋友的奥运趣评,以飨读者。他们是来自沃尔沃集团全品牌卡车亚洲区财务总监刘光伟、中国玉米油股份有限公司CFO王福昌、傅氏科普威总裁兼CFO王文兵、易凯资本CEO王冉、Parker Hannifin内部审计师火焱、北京金沙江创业投资管理有限公司CFO敖焱杰、中交投资有限公司总会计师游华、北京默克药业咨询有限公司财务总监邹志英、搜狐CFO余楚媛、上汽集团股份有限公司CFO谷峰、威发(中国)系统有限公司财务总监关长虹。感谢他们的热心参与!     

资本为王时代的CFO角色

杰里米·霍普在《再造CFO》一书中指出,"到上世纪80年代为止,CFO的世界在若干年里没多大变化,成功以资产负债表来衡量。年度规划程序决定了生产什么、卖什么,并告诉人们他们需要在何时达到什么目标。现在情况不一样了,人们期望CFO成为熟知企业经营状况的多面手。"随着中国本土"资本为王"时代的到来,首席财务官们正努力实践着这个被寄予了多重期待的角色。     

CFO说

银行业一直被缺乏清晰规则所困扰,对此高盛集团CFO哈维·施瓦茨(Harvey Schwartz)表示,考虑到工作量之大以及对工业和经济的潜在影响,规则的制定需要花费几年时间。施瓦茨还说,在规则确定下来之前最好不要根据猜测对业务进行较大调整。"对规则进行预测是要付出巨大代价的,同时可能出现重大失误。"他说,"因此我们从不根据预测的规则对业务进行调整。"     

CFO赶考

对中国企业和CFO而言,2008年的中国"两会"将带来一场全新的考试。策划这一《两会特刊》时,正值猪年岁末。"两会"最热的焦点是什么,CFO们最关注的焦点又是什么,这些都还是一个问号。但问题的范围基本划定,《新理财》征询CFO意见后得出的结论是:财税,金融以及资本。     

CFO应诉反倾销

在反倾销诉讼中,源于"成本数据"的短板而败走麦城的案例不胜枚举。全球经济复苏速度令人窒息,这一背景下"自由贸易"被束之高阁。美国挟"公平贸易"以令诸侯,通过"反倾销"与"反补贴"力阻中国商品势如破竹"走出去"的动能。有数据表明,目前全球35%的反倾销和71%的反补贴调     

CFO说

在英国移动通信巨头沃达丰拥有14年工作经验的CFO Nick Read表示,"有时候CFO缺乏推动企业成长的热情和决心。CFO可以适当放大自己的作用。"他呼吁财务高管们借助沟通的力量促进企业发展愿景的实现。"CFO在将战略转化为行动中发挥着基础性作用。他们需要描绘出企业发展蓝图,既要使目标清晰可见,又能激励整个组织共同努力,使企业整体沿着正确的道路发展前进。"     

CFO说

纳斯达克-OMX集团CFO李·沙维尔(Lee Shavel)指出,"美国股市结构的复杂性成为系统无法避免运行失败的‘最大障碍’。"沙维尔解释说,现代市场的复杂性,加上参与者之间的竞争,使技术的统一性和创建确定性以防止如8月22日停摆事件难以实现,当时纳斯达克上市股票暂停交易达三个小时。在沙维尔的评论中,技术故障在该次事件中的角色被极度减弱。"推迟重启交易并不是一个技术问题,我们要确保所有的市场参与者、交易员及上市公司都做好重启的准备。"     

政府CFO的觉醒

多少年间人们一直有一个关于危机的设想:如果没有了电,世界将会怎样?这个命题的范围现在似乎可以更狭窄一点:如果没有了信息化,世界将会怎样?可能所有的沟通都将停止。     

CFO新考题

进入2013年,有两个词变得格外火爆:一是"大数据",另一个,则是"移动互联网"。作为信息时代的产物,二者自产生之后,就犹如一场旋风,迅速席卷全球。如果说,在前两年,业界对于"大数据"和"移动互联"的讨论,还只是局限于憧憬阶段的话,那么近两     

CFO驭变

从低调潜行到"首席忽悠",2012,看知名CFO如何演绎变"化"财道。天下武功,无坚不破,唯快不破。对公司理财而言,为企业创造价值,已成CFO共识,但在瞬息万变的商业环境中,唯有拥有应对变化的快速反映能力,才能真正赢。任何武功,都有自己的不足,防守的再好,也有破解方法,只要意识、攻、守、应机变化等速度远远高于对方,势必游刃有余。公司理财也是如此,现实工作中面临的种种困惑不仅仅要求CFO"武功"高强,要想轻松驾驭变"化",必须具有快速化解困惑的能力,才能发挥"武功"的威力。     

企业集团财务管控与上市公司现金持有水平研究

与现有基于上市公司单个企业的研究不同,本文以股改后2006—2009年沪深股市3958个A股上市公司为样本,考察了企业集团财务管控对上市公司现金持有水平的影响。实证发现集团控股上市公司现金持有水平较高,国有集团控股的更高。集团财务管控方式显著影响上市公司现金持有水平,集团选派CFO使之显著降低,拥有财务公司的集团选派CFO使之降幅更大,高达30%。财务公司对现金持有水平影响不显著,但按CFO选派、ERP、产权性质分组后发现,当集团选派CFO或上市公司有ERP财务系统或民营控股时,财务公司显著降低上市公司现金持有水平。上市公司ERP财务信息系统能够提升公司现金管理水平,提高其现金持有水平,而集团选派的CFO可能会通过财务公司和ERP配置现金,降低其控股上市公司现金持有水平。     

The value-adding CFO: an interview with Disney's Gary Wilson. Interview by Geraldine E. Willigan

Financing a company is more complex than ever-and more important to its economic success. The demands on a CFO are tremendous. Optimizing capital costs requires an unprecedented level of technical sophistication. Yet the best CFOs today are not mere technicians. They are also strategists and innovators. Gary Wilson exemplifies the new CFO. In his 5 years as executive vice president and CFO of the Walt Disney Company and his 12 years at Marriott Corporation, he has shown how the finance function can add value-not just account for it. How does a CFO create value for shareholders? "Just like all the great marketing and operating executives," Wilson says, "by being creative." To Wilson, being creative means rethinking assumptions and finding clever ways to achieve financial and strategic goals. Some of Wilson's innovative deal making-like the off-balance-sheet financing he used at Marriott-is well known. At Marriott, he discovered the power of separating the ownership of an asset from its control. Marriott's strength was in operations, yet the company had a great deal of money tied up in real estate. Growth would require even more investment in real estate. Wilson's solution was to sell the hotels-in effect, removing them and the debt used to finance them from the balance sheet-and contract to operate them. In this interview, Wilson gives his view of the role of finance in today's corporation and explains the thinking behind some of the successful deals he has engineered-including Disney's Silver Screen movie-making partnerships and Euro Disneyland.     

CFO role and CFO compensation: An empirical analysis of their implications

Given concerns over CFO pay, especially incentives, and considering the tension between a CFO’s fiduciary responsibility and being a key member of the firm’s executive team, we examine the determinants and effects of CFO compensation amount, incentive intensity, and proximity to CEO compensation in a sample of European companies (FTE 500, 2005–2009). First, we focus on the CFO role as a determinant of CFO compensation. Like prior work, we proxy for CFO roles by using hand-collected public data on education and past professional experience, but we supplement these proxies with proprietary data to more directly capture the firm-specific nature of the CFO job in term of its similarity with that of the CEO. We thus argue how CFOs can have varied roles characterized by different levels of financial expertise and CEO-likeness, and document that it is this latter aspect that is associated with CFO compensation. Second, we study the effects of CFO compensation design on outcomes in the CFO’s realm related to financial reporting. We find that CFO financial expertise is positively associated with financial reporting quality, while a CFO’s pay long-term incentive intensity and a CFO’s incentive compensation proximity with the CEO are negatively associated with financial reporting quality. Overall, then, our results suggest that CFOs get rewarded for their CEO-likeness, and particularly for their being similar to the CEO in terms of tasks and decision making authority. But it is their financial expertise that is positively related to financial reporting quality. At the same time, using compensation that is more incentive intensive and more similar to that of the CEO appears to be potentially detrimental to the quality of financial reporting. These results are relevant for boards involved in selecting highly expert CFOs, and their compensation committees charged with defining subsequently effective incentive compensation plans for those CFOs.     

Are small family firms financially sophisticated?

We study the drivers of financial sophistication in small family firms. Sophistication is defined as the use of non-basic financial products such as options, swaps, debt restructuring, and mergers and acquisitions (M&A) advisory services. Our analysis is based on a unique dataset with detailed information on 187 Italian family firms. We find that the main drivers of financial sophistication are: (1) the generation that currently owns the firm; (2) the presence of a non-family CFO; and (3) the existence of a non-family shareholder. We analyze the impact of these factors on the following four classes of non-basic financial products: corporate finance, cash management, corporate lending and risk management. Our results can be used to determine the characteristics of financially sophisticated family firms and whether their corporate governance and ownership structure increase the use of non-basic financial products.     

CFO gender and earnings management: evidence from China

We study the effect of chief financial officer (CFO) gender on earnings management (EM) in China’s listed firms from 1999 to 2011. In the cross-sectional analysis, we find that female CFO firm-years exhibit significantly lower discretionary accruals, lower total accruals, lower abnormal production costs, and higher abnormal discretionary expenditures, than the male CFO firm-years. We further examine the relation between CFO gender and EM surrounding CFO transitions. We find that the departing male CFOs are more aggressive than the departing female CFOs in managing up earnings during their last year with the firm and the newly appointed male CFOs are more aggressive than the new female CFOs in managing down earnings during their first year on the job. The evidence surrounding CFO transitions suggests that male CFOs are more aggressive than female CFOs in manipulating earnings, either in the last attempt to save their jobs or to take bigger credit for any future performance gains. Overall, our empirical evidence suggests that female CFOs engage in less EM and are more conservative in financial reporting than their male counterparts.     

CFO Fiduciary Responsibilities and Annual Bonus Incentives

We examine how firms design bonus plans of their CFOs. CFOs participate in decision making much like other executives, but they also have significant fiduciary responsibilities for reporting firms' financial results. Responsibility for financial reporting raises the question of whether it is appropriate to pay CFOs annual bonuses contingent on self-reported financial performance. In this paper, we provide a framework that characterizes CFO bonuses as a tradeoff between CFOs' decision-making responsibilities and their fiduciary duties over financial reporting. This framework yields a number of implications that we examine empirically using a proprietary survey of CFO compensation practices of public and private firms. Our main finding shows that from 2003 to 2007 public entities (relative to private entities) reduced the percentage of CFO bonuses contingent on financial performance. We interpret this result as evidence that firms mitigate misreporting practices in part by deemphasizing CFO incentive compensation.     

MIT Roundtable on Corporate Risk Management

Against the backdrop of financial crisis, a distinguished group of academics and practitioners discusses the contribution of financial management and innovation to corporate growth and value, along with the pitfalls and unintended consequences of such innovation. The main focus of most panelists is the importance of a capital structure and risk management approach that complement the strategy and operations of the business. Instructive examples are provided by Judy Lewent, former CFO and head of strategic planning at Merck, and Lakshmi Shyam‐Sunder, director of finance and risk management at the International Finance Corporation. But if these represent successful applications of finance theory, what about the large number of cases where the use of derivatives and other innovations has led to high leverage and apparent risk management failures? Part of the current trouble, as pointed out by Andrew Lo, can be attributed to the failure of risk managers and their models to account for highly improbable events—the so‐called fat tails of the distribution. But, as Robert Merton suggests in closing, there is a more comprehensive explanation for today's problems: the tendency of market participants to respond to potentially risk‐reducing financial innovation by increasing their risk‐taking in other areas. “What we have here,” says Merton,

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