How do you drive innovation in a finance organization?  This is one area that we often do not spend enough time on but definitely should.  One activity that Microsoft Finance did was what is what we called Finance Thinkweek.  Chris Liddell (MSFT CFO) launched a process to seek ideas from all MSFT Finance employees.  The process was modeled after Bill Gates' Thinkweek process where employees submits ideas for his review.  For Finance, the purpose of Thinkweek was to drive idea generation to improve Finance as well as to drive overall shareholder value for MSFT.  We asked for the papers to be submitted in one of three categories: 

Personal Leadership
Ideas relating to people, including attracting the best talent, building individual and team skills, and improving the ability of people to contribute to the success of their team and Microsoft.

Business Insight
Ideas maximizing our ability to impact the business, including thinking strategically, developing strategic plans, or influencing key decisions.

Business Excellence
Ideas advancing how we plan and execute on our existing objectives and how we drive real productivity and operational improvement.

The participation and idea generation exceeded expectations as we received over 200 papers from finance employees.  Ideas included topics such as widening the 520 bridge (congested freeway from Seattle to Microsoft), improving analytical techniques, changing MSFT capital structure, organization design among others.  We are in the process of following up with each author to determine next steps.  We have also launched several projects as a result of Finance Thinkweek such as job rotation, external leadership, etc.  One result that we did not expect was the amount of energy and buzz that this initiative created in MSFT Finance. 

We are very interested in what you are doing in your organizations to drive innovation in Finance.      

Byron Rader, Finance Director
Microsoft Corporation