SSO Pro Graduate Spotlight: Clint Eastwood on Negotiation?

Andy Hoy, Chief Financial Officer for Lonza operations in North America and Global Process Owner for Lonza’s global Record to Report processes, reflects on Eastwood's memorable tag lines (and how these could help in negotiations!). Q: What are your three main challenges in the year ahead? Finalizing the R2R global blueprint Leading the finance organization through the implementation of a global business services concept Embedding a continuous improvement culture within the services organization. Q: How has the SSO Pro course helped develop some solutions to these? SSO Pro course has expanded my perspective and provided a great checklist of things to be considered during the shared services transformation process. Q: Have you been able to share some of the tools and templates with your team and/or stakeholders to improve your processes? The most valuable elements of the program so far have been the softer skills such as change management, negotiation approaches and stakeholder management. These have helped me frame requests & focus my efforts towards obtaining the decisions I need to move forward. Q: What was your favourite module? How has it impacted your day-to-day output/work? A difficult choice given the variety of subjects covered during the course, but I think the most personally valuable topics were from the Contracting & Negotiation modules, followed closely by the shared services considerations at the end of the course. These 2 sets of modules have provided me with a way to sharpen my approach and focus in moving forward the change agenda in my company. Treating management decisions in the context of a negotiation framework utilizing the concepts of needs, wants, trade-offs, as well as the traditional inputs of risk, reward, costs, resource constraints, priorities and timelines has been beneficial. [inlinead] Q: How have you celebrated your accomplishment? Unfortunately not yet. Recently I have been involved in multiple workshops, project meetings and communication road shows all designed to further the shared service change agenda in the company. The course has provided me a renewed energy and enthusiasm to push hard to achieve what I believe is the best long-term solution for the company. I hope to take some time out at an upcoming off-site team event to share my learnings and reflect on the accomplishment. "Probably the most obvious comment is the greatly enhanced respect for those professionals that work in and around the shared service and outsourcing industry." Andy Hoy, CFO, Lonza America Q: If you could choose anyone to lead one of the modules, or perhaps a new module, who would it be and what would their topic be? Interesting question. Perhaps Clint Eastwood would be a good to lead the module on negotiation, he certainly had plenty of tag lines from his many movies that would make the material instantly memorable. I also suggest the introduction to the entire course could have been crafted and communicated by the individuals who developed the intro to the Star Trek series! As far as other modules or topics, I would be interested in a technology based module covering some of the available process technologies used in shared services or outsourced environments, such as optical character recognition, electronic data transmissions, automated document processing etc. I could also imagine a set of modules on leadership skills and competencies would fit well with the existing portfolio of modules. Q: How does your learning from the program fit into a larger leadership development approach? As a CPA and FCMA I have very focused learning objectives and goals around my functional competency in finance. It was great to participate in the SSO Pro learning environment and look at topics and areas that typically I find it difficult to make time, alongside the requirements of my position as well maintaining my professional credentials. Q: In addition to the content and skills learned, what else did you gain from the course? Probably the most obvious comment is the greatly enhanced respect for those professionals that work in and around the shared service and outsourcing industry. When you work on individual problems or projects it is easy to forget that to be successful in this environment you need a comprehensive toolkit, great listening & communication skills and a determination to face the new and the different every day. You all have my sincere respect and admiration. Q: Did going through the program inspire a new interest in a topic, role or project for you? Actually, as I was going through the material I kept a log of inspirational ideas that came to me based on the topics I was working through. I now have a comprehensive list of initiatives to consider for the future, which I plan to incorporate into future plans over the next few months.

SSO Pro Graduate Spotlight: Clint Eastwood on Negotiation?

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SSO Pro Graduate Spotlight: Clint Eastwood on Negotiation?

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