Banking on Breadth: Why CEOs Value Cross-Functional Perspectives (page 3 of 3)

He notes that even for someone concentrating in finance, cross-functional perspectives are important. "You can't just look at the numbers," he said. "You need to understand what is behind the numbers. And if you want to be good at marketing, you have to understand finance, and how value is created."

Gaining Interdisciplinary Perspectives
How can interdisciplinary perspectives be developed? Traditional career paths cause managers to burrow ever deeper into their specific fields of expertise. Sometimes managers need to create a detour to increase perspective. Neubauer had built a successful finance career when he became the treasurer of PepsiCo, the youngest treasurer of a Fortune 500 company. But he shocked colleagues when he left the corporate post for a senior financial position at PepsiCo's smaller Wilson Sporting Goods division.

"Many of my friends on Wall Street didn't understand why I'd go from a corporate job to a division job, but my dream was to run a $500 million company by my early forties," he says. "And I needed to expand beyond corporate finance to get there. I needed to learn how to manage a business. What is marketing? How do you run a sales force? What is product development?" This prepared him to move to ARA Services in 1979, and later become CEO of the company, which was renamed ARAMARK.

This doesn't mean that young managers can succeed as absolute generalists, the panelists stressed. Managers need a deep grounding in a specific discipline, but also the ability to think outside that frame. "We still look for people who can demonstrate competency in one area such as accounting," says Neubauer. "If a manager is just cross-functional, forget it."

Fribourg notes that companies can encourage these perspectives by assigning employees to work in different parts of the organization throughout their careers. "You need to encourage people to change roles and get into different parts of the business."

Wharton has launched a new cross-functional initiative designed to strengthen and cultivate this interdisciplinary approach to teaching and research. "Business practice in a global economy demands that business leaders have a broad range of knowledge," says Wharton Dean Patrick Harker. "It is not enough to specialize in just one area."

While it is risky to explore disciplines and jobs outside one's core discipline, the world is changing so rapidly that being locked into a single perspective also can be dangerous. "The biggest risks you take in your career are going into totally unknown parts of the business," Fribourg told his audience. "Don't go down the traditional path. The whole world is going down that road. Try something new and different. You don't know what the world is going to be like tomorrow. Standing still in a fast-changing world may be the riskiest strategy."

Rapid change and uncertainty demand broader insights and creative approaches. "When you wake up in the morning, it is a very different world than when you went to bed," Neubauer says. "You have to integrate, triangulate, and focus on the total gestalt of the problem you are trying to solve. Analytical models can only take you so far. Seek opportunities to broaden your perspective."