Interview with Tim Dunn, former CFO of Nike Canada.
In our interview, Dunn shares his insights on the reality and future of financial management, including the technology trends currently shaping the profession. He also shares valuable lessons on navigating a crisis and explains what makes Nike’s approach to corporate leadership so effective.
What skills do financial managers need to develop as they move into more senior positions?
At Nike, my job is to help managers become executives. The key difference is that managers execute their assigned tasks, while executives decide what needs to be done oman telephone number data including who should do it. It’s a more strategic approach.
The best way to advance is to demonstrate that you can perform at a higher level than your current position allows. It’s also worth observing successful leaders as role models—and applying their best practices to your work.
Of course, to advance, you need to have technical skills. As financial professionals, we are always improving in this area, mastering selected competencies from scratch. For example, if you specialize in taxes, it is worth improving your technical knowledge of taxes.
But technical skills aren’t usually what stop people from advancing. Those can be learned over time. Leadership skills: soft skills, communication, strategic thinking, and self-awareness. They’re harder to develop on your own—they require feedback from those around you.
What do financial managers need to learn about the non-financial aspects of a company’s operations?
At Nike, understanding the brand world is essential when working with partners. For example, if you’re dealing with someone in design and innovation who’s creating shoes or apparel, you need to understand what that person does and how their work adds value.
People appreciate our brand for innovation. We take something new and transform it into a product that is better than its predecessor. If it’s a shoe, it’s lighter or has better grip. Or it has better compression, better weight distribution when running, maybe it keeps you warm. All of that helps improve the athlete’s performance – so you have to understand the innovation process and how innovation translates into value.
Another example is marketing , where we are one of the biggest brands in sports. We need to understand how putting our Swoosh (the Nike logo) on the pitch authenticates our brand in the eyes of consumers and how that creates value. Understanding how the marketing team allocates budgets is important if you want to advise them and help them understand how their spending is related to the company’s performance.
That means you have to build trust. You want your team members to be able to tell you what’s going on or come to you with a question. They have to understand that you’re not always going to be the bad cop. If the finance person is always the bad cop, that’s not good for the working relationship. So it’s about building business partnerships.
If you learned about the world of finance in college or from a textbook, you will understand financial reports and analysis. However, to work with people in other roles and be a true leader, you need to understand what motivates other team members and what their interests are.
The last 15 years have been difficult for businesses due to a series of crises. How can a financial manager help a company prepare for potential financial risks in the future?
There are two types of financial risk. There are normal challenges and those that companies should expect and be prepared for – for example email marketing: learn how to make good use of this tool a slowdown in the pace of economic growth or a breakthrough performance from a competitor’s new product that reduces your market share.
But normal challenges are different from major crises . No one was prepared for a pandemic or a war in Ukraine. When things happen of such enormous importance, they are not predictable. Then the CFO has to meet with other leaders of the company and develop a way to deal with the problem. Calmly, wisely and quickly.
There are always people in an organization who will be in shock. Their natural reaction is fear, which can affect their ability to help the company get through a crisis. That’s why it’s so important for the leaders of the company, including the CFO, to step away for a moment and decide how to get through this crisis together.
When the pandemic hit, our CEO was very honest with us when we understood that this was going to last more than a few weeks. He explained to everyone that there were three stages that we would have to go through. The first stage was the one that we were in at the time: closing offices, plants, everything that could be closed – and slowing down the business .
So we had to focus on our online business and keep our distribution centers open. Then we talked about what happens after this phase, the recovery phase and getting back to normal .
Communication across the company was consistent. Other leaders, including our CFO, kept the rest of the organization in the loop. That made us feel like we were in this together. We knew where we were and how we were going to get through it. That kind of clarity is important when you’re dealing with such a massive global event.
Are there any lessons that financial managers can learn from the pandemic experience?
I think there are a lot of lessons, but one that was important for us was cash. It was a cash crunch, which meant that our finances on the revenue side were significantly impacted by the situation. Some costs could be reduced benin lists but not laying off a significant portion of the team—which we obviously didn’t do at Nike—meant that we were struggling with cash.
As a global business, we didn’t have a significant problem getting credit. We were able to get three or four times more credit than we ultimately needed. And we probably had enough money to do it ourselves.
So for someone preparing for a huge challenge that will impact their business, the most important lesson is that you need to have enough credit to survive the crisis.
Doesn’t this mean that CFOs have more power on the supervisory board, especially in shaping corporate strategy?
If you work in finance, yes, you suddenly have a much bigger role. You are much more important to the ongoing operations when a crisis like this occurs.
Even when conducting business under normal circumstances, finance has an important function in forecasting, building business partnerships and navigating a more competitive environment.
In my experience of over 30 years, competing in the market with other players has never been an easy subject. It has become increasingly difficult, but it has not happened overnight. We always know what is coming and we expect it. These events may be bigger or smaller than you expected – but these are natural things that all finance people have to be prepared for. Their job is to explain them to the board so that a decision can be made.