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2012, May 18

Beyond Compliance: What I Learned as CIMA President

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Beyond Compliance: What I Learned as CIMA President

by Cesar Bacani, 02 June 2011
topics:
Management
tags:
accounting work analytics business partnering CIMA finance function George Glass transactions and compliance UCM Timber value-added services

As President of CIMA, the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants, George Glass presides over a myriad of training, research and brand-building activities across the globe, including Asia. But that does not mean that he has neglected his day job as Finance Director of UK enterprise UCM Timber Group.

 
Indeed, if anything, his stint as CIMA president has enriched Glass’s appreciation of what the finance function can achieve and how it can get there. When he hands over the CIMA presidency to Harold Baird sometime in June, Glass will be drawing on global insights gleaned in the past year to continue enhancing financial management at UCM.
 
CFO Innovation’s Cesar Bacani spoke to Glass in Hong Kong two weeks before the handover to Baird. Excerpts:
 
Your term as CIMA president is ending. What have you learned about financial management around the world, particularly in Asia? Are accountants in the East more focused on routine accounting work whereas those in the West are doing more value-added services?
You may have a Western multinational operating in Hong Kong, but given that the vast majority of the people there are working within the Eastern culture, the whole place still operates on that basis. You may get more proactive style coming out from the top, but it doesn’t trickle down very far . . . It is just different because of the culture.
 
So Asian accountants are resisting expectations for them to move beyond routine accounting?
No, I don’t think they’re resisting. I think what it comes down to is that the question is interpreted differently . . . the interpretation of what you mean by ‘strategic thinking.’
 
The Western interpretation is more proactive that the Eastern reaction, which tends to be more reactive – I will do what I’m asked to. In the West, it is: I’m trying to move on, I want to do the next thing.
 
But if you [ask]: What do you think you should be doing? Everyone says I want to add value. The question is how do you add value? And that is where it starts to get different, because I think that in the Western model of how you add value, you are encouraged to think outside the box. In the Eastern model, how you add value is without going outside the box.
 
Is there a case to be made, though, for the finance function to limit what it does to routine accounting work, to compliance and financial reporting? Isn’t that an equally valid model as accounting-plus-business partnering?
No, I don’t think it is. I believe that model [routine accounting work] is fine for standing still. But it does not represent progress.
 
If you’re going to have successful progress, that comes with good partnership, where you can share ideas, where the complementary components of different discussions will actually produce a better product or better delivery, which obviously will improve your profitability and the long-term future of the organisation.
 
Do you find that, within the business partnering model, there are different sub-models, so to speak, that apply to Asia, which is different from the West?
I think at the moment, yes. If it’s true business partnering, [the sub-models] are all on a continuum. Some are more sophisticated, some are more open than others, and I think that there are other drivers which affect business partnering.
 
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