Three countries, three business units, four years. The same disciplined approach, adapted each time.

Novartis hires five MBAs a year globally into a CFO development program designed to build senior finance leaders by moving them through different countries, business units, and corporate functions. The premise: senior finance value comes from breadth — the ability to walk into an unfamiliar environment, understand how the business actually works, and partner with the people running it. The program is built to produce that.

I spent four years in it. Switzerland to Canada to Portugal. Animal Health to Pharma. Group Capital Markets to country finance. Three countries, three business units, and a series of cross-functional projects that didn’t fit neatly inside any one function.

The mandate was always some version of the same thing: come into a finance team that was already running, figure out what was working and what wasn’t, and make the function better — without breaking what was already good, and without alienating the commercial leaders the function exists to serve.

In Switzerland, working with the Animal Health Division, I led the strategic five-year planning process with the regional CFOs and partnered with commercial teams to translate it into operational targets. The plan wasn’t the value — the plan was the artifact. The value was the conversations the planning process forced, and the alignment those conversations produced. Separately, I led an offshoring initiative that moved analysis work into the India team, which freed regional analysts to do strategic work instead of report production.

In Canada, as Finance Director for the Neuroscience and Cardio Metabolic franchises, the work was operational rhythm. The monthly planning cycle was taking too long and accuracy was sitting at 65% “good.” We rebuilt the workflow — pushed accountability wider across the country organization, restructured the close calendar, and rolled out the SAP EPM tool that became the global standard. Monthly planning finalized four days earlier. Accuracy moved from 65% to over 85%.

In Portugal, the work was different. The country had just been through a series of compliance issues that triggered personnel changes in finance, and I was placed there to stabilize the function while a permanent leader was recruited. The work was three parts at once: managing internal teams and an outsourced provider across three countries, implementing controls recommendations that came out of the compliance review, and rebuilding cross-functional trust with the commercial organization that had stopped relying on finance during the disruption. The function came back online. Reporting accuracy improved. The relationships were repaired enough that the next finance leader could build from a working foundation instead of starting from a deficit.

In Group Capital Markets, the work moved from operating to corporate. Board-level analysis on financial strategy and risk management. Liquidity modeling and ratings agency liaison. Investor relations support. And as a workstream lead, the diligence and documentation coordination on a $2B public market debt offering — one piece of a broader portfolio of capital markets work that’s part of any global treasury function.

Four years, four roles, no role that needed to be rescued by the person who came next. The Canada planning process became a global template. The Portugal function rebuilt and stayed rebuilt. The Switzerland strategic plan was the foundation the next year’s plan built on. The SAP EPM rollout was used as the model for other markets.

Senior finance value, at any scale, looks like this: walk into an environment you don’t fully understand yet, partner with the people who do, figure out the small number of things that will actually move the function forward, and build the cross-functional relationships that let those changes stick.

The four-country experience compresses something most senior finance leaders take fifteen years to accumulate: the muscle memory of figuring it out. Different country, different therapy area, different finance team culture, different commercial leadership style — same disciplined approach to understanding the business and building the systems that let it run. That’s the part that translates to fractional CFO work directly. Every engagement starts the same way: an unfamiliar business, a team that’s already running, and the work of understanding it well enough to know what to actually change.

The other thing that transfers: most finance improvement isn’t dramatic. The Canada planning cycle didn’t get faster because we ran a transformation program. It got faster because we pushed accountability wider, restructured the calendar, and rolled out a tool. Three concrete moves. Each one boring on its own. Together, four days faster and 20 points more accurate. Most strategic finance work looks like this.