Good morning,
Fortune’s 2021 Global Forum was underway both Tuesday and Wednesday. The (virtual) gathering of high-powered CEOs and leaders addressed an unprecedented year and the road ahead. But there was also plenty of talk about finance and the bottom line.
I’m sharing a few quotes from leaders that touched on points of great interest to financial professionals.
Bitcoin on balance sheets
“We bought Bitcoin because we were going to lose as much money with our treasury strategy every year as we made operating the core business. This was our way to protect and preserve shareholder value without decapitalizing the company and putting all the shareholders, all the employees, and all the customers at risk. We haven’t found it to be a distraction. We found it to be life affirming.”
—Michael Saylor, founder and CEO, MicroStrategy
Are we headed for higher inflation?
“I think it’s inevitable with what’s happened. We’ll see sequential increases. How much? I don’t know. What is clear is across many different input goods costs are up. And that’s going to have to be reflected over time throughout the economy.”
—David Taylor, chairman, president, and CEO at Procter & Gamble
Experience as a CFO can help in the CEO role
“I’m probably biased, but it felt like an advantage because you were trying to think through, end to end, all of the implications, financially … I think having that experience of working with investors and working with some of our external constituencies was actually very helpful. And I think for myself, at least, helped create a very calm and steered ship as we went through some really turbulent waters.”
—Corie Barry, CEO at Best Buy, who was formerly the company’s CFO
Sharing expectations for board representation
“Something we adopted a few years ago on our public side is actually with respect to shareholder votes, and sharing our expectations around board diversity, and voting against boards where we don’t see that diversity. In Canada, last year, we voted against 10, which is down from 39 the year before. So we’ve actually seen tremendous improvement over the past few years.”
—John Graham, president and CEO at CPP Investments, a Canadian pension plan and institutional investor
Diversity impacts earnings
“The investment business is all about great judgments and making great decisions. And you cannot do that unless you have a diversity of experiences, backgrounds, perspectives—in an inclusive culture—and an ability to share those viewpoints. At Carlyle, we’ve studied this, and we can see that diversity drives better performance. At our portfolio companies, for instance, those with diverse boards, their earnings grow 12% faster than those portfolio companies that aren’t as diverse.”
—Kewsong Lee, CEO at The Carlyle Group
See you tomorrow.
Sheryl Estrada
sheryl.estrada@fortune.com
Big deal
The 2021 DataAware Pulse Survey, released June 8 by Ascend.io, a data engineering company, focuses on the work capacity and priorities data professionals —analysts, scientists, engineers—and enterprise architects. Almost all of the respondents said their teams are at or over capacity in workload. The data is based on a survey of 400 U.S.-based professionals.
Going deeper
In the report The Future of the Finance Function, Boston Consulting Group (BCG) discusses how the overarching role of finance may be to become the “custodian of performance,” which entails steering enterprise-level performance. The future of finance will be a “lean, hybrid function—part human, part digital—with finance specialists focused on value-adding activities,” according to the report. Finance careers will have more diverse career paths and flexibility, professionals will engage with new and stakeholders, and finance will “break down silos, removing hierarchies,” BCG suggested.
Leaderboard
Katherine Fogertey was named CFO at Shake Shack, Inc., effective June 14, 2021. Fogertey joins Shake Shack, following more than 15 years at Goldman Sachs, becoming lead analyst covering the restaurant sector.
Frank Teruel was named SVP and CFO at Mitek Systems, Inc., a global software company, effective July 16, 2021. Teruel was previously the chief operating officer at ADARA. He will succeed Jeff Davison, who announced his retirement earlier this year.
Overheard
“For the moment equity markets are enjoying a kind of Goldilocks period, where inflation is not too hot and not too cold.”
—Helaba economist Ulf Krauss on inflation, as told to Fortune.
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