Asked to recall the experience of stepping into a CFO role for the first time, Nicole Anasenes doesn’t mince words.
"It’s a very lonely, scary moment,” comments Anasenes, as she considers her early days at technology company Infor—a CFO appointment that preceded more recent CFO engagements at Squarespace and now technology firm Ansys.
“If only someone would have told me how lonely it feels to make certain decisions—you can bounce ideas off people, but you are the ultimate decision-maker,” continues Anasenes, who says that, looking back, she may have been able to ease some of the decision-making concerns if she had had a broader professional network to which to turn.
“I happened to have been lucky that Charles Philips, the CEO of Infor, was a financially savvy person, but since then, I’ve built a much broader network of people and a framework for how to have these type of conversations in which you don’t divulge the specifics concerning your company but get the mentoring and support that you need,” remarks Anasenes, who prior to entering the CFO office at Infor spent more 14 years at IBM Corp., where she last served as CFO of the tech giant’s middleware group.
“I learned very quickly after leaving IBM that you need to be open to networks and different types of networks,” explains Anasenes, who adds that her appetite for networking has grown along with her CFO talent development responsibilities.
“You are only good as the talent you attract, retain, and are able to keep engaged, so my relationship with the executive search community is quite broad,” she notes. –Jack Sweeney
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