I don't mean to sound all Philip Greenspun (blog), but why don't we see Big Companies outsourcing their CFOs to India or somewhere equally cheap and skilled?
What's a CFO, really? The head accountant, bean counter, number cruncher, etc? A growing number of financial analysis jobs are being moved overseas, so why not CFOs? Think of the cash savings! Last time I checked, large corporations pay their CFOs several hundred thousand dollars per year as a base salary. And at some public companies the CFO can make millions in stock option exercises.
If these overseas workers are good enough to screen my medical profile and my x-rays, cat scans, and do my taxes, why aren't they good enough to track company numbers and let the CEO how many bags of money are left in the vault?
Posted by jzawodn at December 08, 2003 08:53 PM
Jeremy -- you're a genius! No, really, it's a fantastic idea.
--j. (bit scared by the idea of MS' CFO being named "John Connors" btw.)
Um, yeah, outsource one of the top executive positions overseas. How stupid. Gezus.
While I'm all for outsourcing the accounting side of this position, I don't think that outsourcing the entire CFO job would really work. Since the Enron/Worldcom/etc. fiascos, CFOs have new responsibilities for signing off on the accounting statements that corporations publish. Would you want some minimum wage worker in another country responsible for this aspect of a company that you hold stock in? I certainly wouldn't. I want this guy to be close to the other execs. I want them all to know exactly what's going on with my company.
CFOs make a name for themselves by building themselves up and by doing so they are building investor relations and trust in them. I don't trust to invest in a random-someone I don't know and other big(ger) investors and companies won't invest without knowing their good track record either.
Jeremy,
I thought you did not care about politics! Wait a second I guess you do now. Well, take a look at my blog on this issue. I think as IT workers we are resposible on letting general public know what is the implication of outsourcing Information.
My two cents, Maxim
It's not really that naff of an idea, when you get right down to it.
I can't see C-level positions, but it's possible a wider slice of professions besides manufacturing, IT and call center could start moving including management positions.
http://www.ensight.org/archives/2003/12/09/outsourcing_clevel_positions.html
You are a little slow in noticing this trend towards outsourcing top management. It has been several years since the Presidency and Vice Presidency were outsourced to Enron and Haliburton. We should just cut out the middlemen and outsource our government directly to the House of Saud.
why stop at CFOs? Why not go the whole hog and outsource the entire United States..?
Heh, luckily for me it's not 'just bean-counting' :p Most of my revenue right now comes from small companies who hire me to do CFO type stuff. All of them would never want to outsource to India or somewhere like that. I always work very closely with the owners of the companies, and being able to work face to face with their finance guy is crucial. It might work for some companies, but I've never been involved with one that doesn't at least want monthly face-to-face contact.
Any C-level executive should be doing more than just one job function. A CFO who's merely a bean counter should be fired and replaced with someone else. CFOs should most likely be spending most of their time with customers, suppliers, analysts, large investors, the board of directors, and the other senior executives, actively being involved with the running of the company, and acting as a representative of the company to the outside world. You can't separate the roles either; you can't effectively be a good C-level exec w/out covering all the aspects of the job.
You're definitely onto something here. But first we're going to need to outsource all the expensive domestice management consultants to cheaper offshore firms. ;-)
-rhs
I'm not sure why everyone decided to jump down your throat on this, since you were obviously trying to make a point and many of your readers interpreted the thought literally.
CFOs tend to decide what kind of beans to be in the business of, rather than spend time counting them. There are other high-ranking positions though, that it might make sense to outsource along with some of those you mentioned. Controller, for example.
It's also strange that someone pointed out that having a foreign, "minimum wage worker" would be a bad idea for an important, high-ranking finance job. I'm not sure when salary and integrity became symbiotic. The same person cited Enron is his comment, which is clearly the best counterexample for the hypothesis he made later.
Although America's economy has, overall, lost jobs since the start of the decade, the vast majority of these job losses are cyclical in nature, not structural. Now that the economy is recovering after the recession of 2001, so will the job picture, perhaps dramatically, over the next year.
CFO's position is wider, deeper and proactive: The nation state in which it is available, the responsibility that is a kind of intrapreneurship for the entity, the cultural, social and environmental objectives of the Company and many other issues that need to be addressed by a CFO make the position surely a counterpart of CEO.
Outsourcing all activities to support a CFO is possible and not the CFO post itself. It is possible for a great consultant to support with analytical and objective information support from outside the Company. In one way this improve the objective evaluation of issues more meaningful. The experienced middle management experts can be outsourced to English speaking intelligent country like India.
