161 A custodian of value 07 " The CFO's top priority is to understand how value is created and destroyed. The global financial services' crisis happened because the leaders of the banks lost sight of how value is created. They thought they were creating value in their activities and all they were doing was moving risk around. AllIsTer wIlsON, i PArTNer, erNsT & YOuNG Is the bar too high? All that said, as you read this book, did you sometimes think that we were setting the bar too high? That this paragon CFO could not possibly exist? Some do ­ and we have interviewed them for this book. But how achievable is it? Patrick Pichette, Google's CFO, ii thinks it is achievable throughout finance: Google continues to attract and retain immensely high-caliber talent. In consequence of that, their expectation is that they're going to have a job that is immensely interesting. We naturally attract people who want their financial forecasts to work ­ and they're going to work like mad to make sure that this only takes one day of their week. Then they're going to spend the other four days of the week reinventing the business, doing crazy analyses that are going to be deeply fact based, in order to find key insights. Isn't that interesting? A whole finance function that sees running the num- bers as something they need to get out of the way so that they can spend the majority of their time on future value creation. Oh, and this is the company that can close its books in three days too. They also have a dedicated M&A team and grow through acquisitions, so they have their fair share of legacy systems to cope with. Their reality is not that remote from yours.