Cfo Thought Leader

As John Rex tells it, when he first arrived inside the finance function at Microsoft Corp. in 2007, one executive greeted him with “Hey, welcome to Microsoft—if you’re still here a year from now, let’s reconnect.”A senior finance hire with experience in manufacturing and consumer products at such companies as Novartis (3 years) and Kodak (14), Rex was to find the message behind the conditional invitation particularly prescient only 12 months later, when he “very nearly got the boot.”    Seated across from his boss, Rex was “read the riot act” for having absorbed what the boss deemed to be only “superficial knowledge” of the developer’s plus-size menu of products and services.   “I knew that he was right, and I realized that what had gotten me ‘here’ wasn’t going to be enough to take me ‘there’—and that basically I had to go back to college,” explains Rex, who adds that during the months that followed, he spent nights and weekends learning everything that he could about the nuances of