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Eric Kutcher is the chief financial officer and senior partner at McKinsey & Company, the global consulting giant. He’s been with McKinsey for over 25 years. Kutcher lives in California and travels the world extensively in his role.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
How do you see the role and importance of the CFO changing in the next year or two?
I don’t know that I can point to the next year or two, but I can say I think the CFO role is very different than it used to be. As a CFO, I think you are probably, if not the only one in the organization, one of two or three, who sees the whole field. And in many ways, that to me is the CFO role going forward. You are the strategic architect, because you understand the economic model, you understand how that’s going to evolve, and you understand how to allocate resources.
You understand where you’re going to need capital. You really are moving the components in a way that will drive long-term value. That’s much more what CFOs do today. And they are naturally also agitators. I think the CFO has to put the tough questions on the table, in part because they see it first.
What’s top of mind for you this year?
We’re in this very interesting moment where there is no question the macroeconomic situation is iffier then it’s been quite some time. And the most likely scenario is some level of economic slowdown. So you’re looking at it saying, “How do I navigate uncertain times? Not with the notion of, “I’m trying to protect,” but rather, it’s “How do I advance? How do I move the organization forward with greater speed? How do I make the bets that are really going to create what we often call strategic distance, competitive distance?”
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The other thing I spend a lot of time thinking about for our firm is the business model of what we do and how we do it is changing. One of the things you’ll hear us talk a lot about is shifting to becoming much more of what we would call “impact partners.” For a long time, we were a strategy firm; we would give insight to our clients about the types of things they should do. What we are trying to do much more now is, “How do we work with our clients to not just leverage those insights… but to actually get to action and to impact?”
What are you doing to upskill this year?
I spend a lot of time trying to understand. I get information from the clients I speak to. I actually see what’s going on the ground. I can understand the context much more because it’s really easy to sit in my office and look at numbers and say, “This is wrong.” Then you go out to the market and understand what’s really going on with the competitive dynamics. You realize you learn more in a given day than you ever thought.
I spend a lot of time upskilling by just being in different places and learning. I will go out to talk to a broader set of CFOs and ask the question, “How do you handle X, Y, and Z?” I do a lot of my personal learning in that way.
You can go anywhere in the world you want for an afternoon free—where do you go and what do you do?
I’d find a ski mountain with a foot of new snow. I can just be out there in nature because it is an incredible opportunity to clear my head and just enjoy something that brings me real joy.—DA