CEB 9th October 2014 Fedrik Hedlund, Senior Vice President Finance Europe, The Nielsen Company Why do you attend CEB events? I love the external perspective, I spend a lot of time obviously within Nielsen with finance associates and sales associates, but sometimes we just lack external perspective and that’s what CEB gives me. I get a chance to one share best practices but more importantly also to learn about the best practices. I love the research I find it cutting edge so that’s another big reason that I come. Networking is really important and it gives me a chance to meet peers and to compare notes, how we’re doing. What is the most valuable aspect of CEB membership to you? There are a lot of things. participating in the research because quite often you reach out to me so I get a chance to respond to questions and just to give me view of things and but then to hear and see the result of my peers in terms of the feedback they’re giving, where their organisations are heading compare notes I find one it’s efficient two it adds a lot of value. There aren’t many places where you can do that as efficiently because you would have to go to a lot of conferences to get this done you would have to do a lot of networking but within the CEB I can go to one place and I get you know I really get what I need so I find that the most valuable aspect. How does the rest of your function see value in CEB membership? I am not the only user of CEB I’ve pushed it throughout the organisation so we have a lot of the finance associates in Europe they’re actually members so they receive the weekly email updates on the financial planning and analysis side my leader participates in that work stream, my share shared services leaders participate in those work streams so it’s quite deep throughout the organisation and I think that’s great because it can’t just sit with me and so we really try to make it as broad as possible and it’s working really well. Why did you choose CEB to support your finance transformation? finance transformation for Nielsen and it was a European finance transformation, straight away I reached out to CEB one, I needed to know what had been done in the past in terms of what worked well and most importantly what didn’t work well right so I’d want to do what other companies did and had worked well and I did not want to make the same mistakes so CEB was a really good source for that so really the lessons learned over time. We also used the various surveys because I wanted a really good baseline of where we were pre-transformation and then I took the same survey post transformation just to make sure that I had an independent source that could verify that we’d made a meaningful improvement in our transformation effort. I network with peers as well so through the CEB network I was able to reach global and regional CFO’s and I asked them what they were doing how they were transforming and that that gave me a lot of confidence because I knew one that I was taking the organisation as far as I could because once you transform you don’t want to go half way and restart a couple of years later so I needed to find out what was the maximum extent that I reasonably could transform the organisation and I think the CEB really helped me judge where that limit would be and then I just had to resources and plan for it and execute to get there. Without CEB, how would you have run your functional transformation? I would have had to go to a consultancy firm so it would have been a lot more expensive, it would have taken a lot more time and I think I would have got a little more biased feedback. I think the value with CEB is that it tends to be fairly unbiased and based on larger sample sizes I’m really happy we could partner on our transformation and also share back to the CEB because there’s more to the story is that we’ve actually been fairly successful in our transformation and now I get to participate in various calls and conferences and help peers and contribute back to the system and that’s probably where a big piece of the value lies in terms of the network.

• published: 31 Oct 2014
• views: 9