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As John Rex tells it, when he first arrived inside the finance function at Microsoft Corp. in 2007, one executive greeted him with \u201cHey, welcome to Microsoft\u2014if you\u2019re still here a year from now, let\u2019s reconnect.\u201d

A senior finance hire with experience in manufacturing and consumer products at such companies as Novartis (3 years) and Kodak (14), Rex was to find the message behind the conditional invitation particularly prescient only 12 months later, when he \u201cvery nearly got the boot.\u201d    

Seated across from his boss, Rex was \u201cread the riot act\u201d for having absorbed what the boss deemed to be only \u201csuperficial knowledge\u201d of the developer\u2019s plus-size menu of products and services.   

\u201cI knew that he was right, and I realized that what had gotten me \u2018here\u2019 wasn\u2019t going to be enough to take me \u2018there\u2019\u2014and that basically I had to go back to college,\u201d explains Rex, who adds that during the months that followed, he spent nights and weekends learning everything that he could about the nuances of the \u201cgo-to-market\u201d model  and the licensing approaches that governed the company\u2019s flow of revenues.  

Still, Rex tells us, he understood that in order to succeed as a finance leader at Microsoft, he needed to dramatically overhaul the management approaches and operating style that had served him well for the first 20 years of career.

He continues: \u201cI was accustomed to having information flowing toward me as a key decision-maker, whereas at Microsoft, interestingly, there was a much more egalitarian type of culture. All of a sudden, I couldn\u2019t depend on information flowing to me. Instead, I had to become a very proactive consumer of information.\u201d

To increase the flow and absorption of information, Rex spent more time every day in reaching out to others in sales and product development, while at the same time allowing himself more \u201calone time\u201d for consuming new information.

In fact, Rex found that \u201calone time\u201d was an important tenet of the Microsoft culture that underscored its founder\u2019s wish to have the company achieve the feel of a university, where every employee had dorm room\u2014aka office\u2014to which to return.  

Today, Rex views the hypothetical 12-month tryout period that the Microsoft executive attached to his arrival welcome as being not malicious but simply honest, given that the retention rate of Microsoft senior hires at the time was less than 40 percent.

Says Rex: \u201cIn the end, I became not just a much more effective leader but also a more credible one because I understood the business much better than I had before.\u201d \u2013Jack Sweeney 

CFOTL: As a former CFO and now ongoing C-suite leadership coach today, how do you feel that CFO leadership has changed over the years?

Rex: Well, I\u2019m going to take the liberty of extrapolating what I\u2019m observing about leadership and applying it to CFOs because I have a very hard time in separating CFOs from other senior leaders. There are some things that they all very much have in common, but let\u2019s look at things from the perspective of the CFO.

Over time, particularly in American business, we reward people for knowing their stuff. Now, there\u2019s nothing wrong with this. You need to know your stuff. I myself really needed to bone up and know my stuff at Microsoft. Doing so is just vital.

The evolution that I see happening in the business world\u2014and this fully applies to CFOs\u2014is that the best leaders are developing this combination of subject matter expertise and deep curiosity. This allows them to show up with what I call \u201chumble confidence.\u201d They are very, very confident in their subject matter expertise, as they should be and as they need to be, because this is required of them. But they are also extraordinarily curious about the...