5 Becoming a custodian of value It's tougher than ever 01 We acknowledged in the Introduction that the role of the CFO has never been more complex. Business today depends on the finance function to fulfill a much wider range of tasks, from operational to strategic, than ever before. This book gives you the opportunity to step back and look at what this very challenging environment means for your job and your function. In this first chapter, we scope your new job description and contrast it with the traditional CFO job, which is already broad. The coming decade presents you not only with challenges, but also with the opportunity of a lifetime. We believe that you need to think and behave differently as you pursue your important mission ­ to ensure that the value of your firm is sustained and grows. We cover what this new mindset looks like, as well as how you can develop your extended finance team to think and act in the same way. We then move on to suggest new ideas that can help you to execute at a much higher level. Chapter 2 covers leadership ­ some of the ideas may be familiar to you and others novel. But while we `know' leadership, we often forget to `do' leadership the right way. So a rehearsal of the most important aspects of leadership in finance is always useful. Chapter 3 introduces process management. Here we grapple with the idea of the finance factory ­ certainly a new and contentious idea. Be open-minded ­ we think you will find some new tricks extremely helpful in enabling you to balance all the plates you currently have spinning. In the three chapters that follow, we spell out in some detail how these new ideas can help you to execute the finance mission ­ value creation through control, risk management and investment. Finally, we close the book with