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We have spent many hours in discussion with finance leaders about the intersection of finance and sales as we try to better understand the professional collaboration required to achieve successful outcomes in these domains.

Still, few of our talks have pushed us to ponder the human elements and relationships that point to such success more than that with finance leader Kent Kelley.

From the very start of our discussion, we quickly typecast Kelley and brashly concluded that here was a mild-mannered voice of reason that had sat across the table from some of the software industry\u2019s most energetic sales titans. To be clear: Kelley\u2014a 15-year Oracle veteran whose finance career had spanned operations, sales, and marketing\u2014had never been a bookkeeper, and his consistent willingness to assume career risks along the way set him apart even more from his more traditional finance peers.

It was just such a risk attached to a challenging new role that finally led Kelley to move outside of Oracle\u2019s wide-body finance function altogether to join the management team of one of Oracle\u2019s standalone business units dedicated to industry applications.

\u201cI moved out of my office overlooking the Oracle pond to a smaller office in San Francisco\u2014I\u2019m sure that some of my friends in finance thought that I was crazy, but I was stepping out of my comfort zone and really challenging myself,\u201d explains Kelley, whose move to the business unit also led to a fateful collaboration with an executive by the name of John Andrus.

Andrus, a passionate and seasoned sales leader who had been given global responsibility for the business unit, made it clear that his plans involved broadening Kelley\u2019s responsibilities.

\u201cThis was someone who had enough faith in me to say, \u2018Hey, this organization is growing, and I need to focus on growing the rest of the world, so I need you to be my guy in North America,\u201d comments Kelley.

This would not be the last time that Andrus included Kelley in his future plans. A number of years into his new role, Andrus was recruited to be CEO of a company known as PowerPlan, and he asked Kelley to join the firm as CFO. After a \u201cthorough\u201d interviewing process with the company\u2019s board, Kelley was named CFO in 2011. \xa0

\u201cWe doubled the size of the company within our initial tenure,\u201d says Kelley, whose CFO career took a dramatic turn when Andrus was diagnosed with stage four brain cancer and then shortly thereafter passed away.

\u201cI was suddenly leading the company,\u201d recalls Kelley, who was named interim CEO of PowerPlan in late 2014. \u201cHaving to interact with the other executives at a level on which I had never interacted before led me to understand their respective challenges in a way that I had never experienced.\u201d Kelley would continue as interim CEO until the sale of the company to private equity firm Thoma Bravo in 2015, at which time he reassumed his CFO position.

Reflecting on his dynamic collaborator, Kelley remarks: \u201cJohn was an experienced leader and a great mentor as well as friend to me.\u201d

While Kelley does not recall for us the first time that he sat down across a table from John Andrus, we can assume that the dynamics of the gathering would have been much the same as those at any other meeting between Oracle finance and sales professionals, representing a confluence of both mild-mannered and passionate voices resounding together in pursuit of a successful outcome.\xa0\u2013Jack Sweeney\xa0