The Hindu Business Line : Stress on role of finance professionals in management

Making a point: Mr D.K. Agarwal, General Manager (Finance), ONGC, delivering his lecture at the BL Club, ICFAI Business School, in Kolkata on Wednesday. Mr Santanu Ray (left), Director, ICFAI Business School, and Prof. Arup Choudhuri, are also seen. —

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Kolkata, Sept. 5 Successful organisations do not let complacency creep in and ruin the results of their accomplishments. A finance professional’s job, aimed at enabling the organisation he or she is working for, is to prevent such complacency from setting in.

Speaking at a meeting titled `Role of Finance in Modern Management’ at the ICFAI Business School here on Wednesday, under the aegis of BL Club, Mr D.K. Agarwal, GM, Finance, ONGC, underlined the responsibility of finance professional in converting non-performing assets into performing ones.

Dwelling on the significance of this critical input – an enabler of processes, as he put it – he said the management of an organisation strives to make dreams come true by putting such dreams on that organisation’s specific agenda.

Such dreams are then converted into quantifiable, realisable targets; the management ensures their hot pursuit, courtesy regular evaluation and review of performance. The task of finance professional is to reinforce this pursuit across-the-board by aligning resources. However, there has to be room for regular mid-course correction.

“Your role is to facilitate recognition of all the contributions that make those dreams come true,” Mr Agarwal told the B-School students even as he pointed towards the value of utilisation of the resources that are available at hand.

Simply put, an organisation will become richer if its ‘output’ becomes greater than the ‘input’ it has used, the ONGC executive, who also dwelled briefly on his initial work experience, said. That initial experience has helped him strengthen his views on a range of issues, he maintained.

A finance professional will at all times need to keep in mind the resources that are at his or her disposal. Given the nature of these resources, targets should be quantified in such simple terms that the organisation concerned should be able to justify the resources that are being consumed, was essentially the argument that was put forward.

Earlier, referring to the implications of finance, Prof Santanu Ray, Director, ICFAI Business School, Kolkata, said a critical portion of the country’s CEO community is made up of finance professionals. This, he felt, may well be determined if a quick survey is done among chief executives. The latter are steadily evolving – emerging as managers who are capable of performing multiple roles.

ICFAI Business School, incidentally, offers an MBA programme on a two-year full-time campus format. The programme is aimed at students who wish to acquire broad knowledge on concepts and techniques applicable for efficient management of businesses.

Prof Arup Choudhuri, Associate Dean, maintained that finance is more often than managed well by a visionary. Considerable perfection is needed in this area, he pointed out.

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