Even so, Dell's basic model–selling direct to the customer–has helped pave the way for handling the new complexity, Schneider argues. "Because we were so close to the customer, we've always had to have a lot of information at our fingertips, like sales and margins," he explains. He says that his finance operation stays close to the business. "I won't say we're as fully automated as some," he says, "but we run P&Ls down to everything. I can give you revenue date, margins and costs for our TV sets right down to region, and I can give it to you almost instantaneously, and that's just one minor product." The next step? "I will be able to do all the cost accounting in China, Malaysia, Ireland and anywhere in the U.S. we operate, all from one site. We're really big on analytics." Under Schneider's direction, intranet and Web-based tools have become "ingrained" in Dell's finance operations. "Schneider has been very skillful at deploying technology," says Susan Skerritt, a New York-based partner at Treasury Strategies Inc. "His department uses the intranet extremely effectively for data capture, reporting and analytics. It makes everything easier and also positions finance to communicate with all the business units. It might seem obvious that a technology company like Dell would do this, but you'd be surprised. They don't all do it that well."

Dell's CFO since 1998, Schneider has also worked hard to ensure that everyone in the company understands the financial consequences of decision-making. "When I came here, for example," he says, "we sold service warranties and had no idea whether we were making money or losing money on them. When we examined them, we found that some cost as much as we were selling them for." Now, he says, it's possible to go anywhere in the far-flung company, "and people know that whatever they do, there's an impact on return on investment."

Schneider is the first to say that the nature of the job of CFO has changed over the past few years. In fact, if things back in the old days had been like they are today, he might still be a partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers. "I had been at Price Waterhouse for 19 years, and a partner on the MCI account for five years," he recalls. "I felt like I was always advising, but wasn't part of the decision-making. So when an opportunity presented itself to move to MCI as senior vice president for finance in 1993, I took it. Actually, it would be illegal now to do what I did then–going from an accounting partner to the client's finance department. But back then, it was not a problem."

Three years later, he moved to Dell as its vice president of finance and comptroller. Schneider was named acting CFO in 1998 and CFO in 2000. "When I joined Dell, it was one building in Texas with a few hundred people," he recalls. "Now the headquarters has a whole campus and 10,000 people, and we're throwing up new buildings in China, India, North Carolina, Indiana…"

To broaden the understanding of finance within the company–and to bring a better understanding of operations into the finance department–Schneider has taken the concept of job rotation to a higher level and moved it beyond the boundaries of finance. For example, he recently moved a finance executive into a customer service area and then back into finance; an engineer in the procurement operation was brought into finance and later moved to sales for the large corporate business group, and an IT executive was moved into finance. "At Dell, there's a considerable amount of movement in and out of finance to other parts of the company," says Skerritt. "That's good, because it gives people in finance an understanding of the whole business operation. It's fairly unusual, especially in the tech industry. More often you'll find people staying in finance and even staying within certain silos within finance. This is obviously something that Schneider encourages." Besides his responsibilities at Dell, Schneider also serves as an outside director on the audit committee of the board of Gap Inc. In this role, he wins kudos as well: CEO Paul Pressler says the Dell CFO has "helped us frame our financial architecture." Pressler adds that Schneider "has been extremely helpful and insightful regarding the implementation of Sarbanes-Oxley legislation." According to Pressler, he is "a provocative voice at the table, always willing to challenge management with new ideas and approaches."

Despite Dell's impressive performance over the years, Schneider has a reputation for sober reporting. "Regardless of a tendency for investors to get carried away with the story, Schneider has been very conservative," says Goldman's Conigliaro. "He has not played up the hyperbole. But his conservatism is not sandbagging either. He and Dell are very open about providing information, without jeopardizing their competitive position. He is part of that small cadre of very senior officers at Dell who have endeared themselves not only to investors but to customers as well–he's very direct, with very little subterfuge. It's really easy to understand what Dell is trying to do because he states it right up front. That kind of powerful credibility is very unusual in the industries I cover. In fact, I would say that in my own universe of companies, Dell has the most credibility." As a CFO, it doesn't get any better than that.

John Alchin and Lawrence Smith, Co-CFOs, Comcast

Back in 2002, when Sarbanes-Oxley required CEOs and CFOs to start signing off on financial reports, the signers at Comcast Corp., the cable giant, were Brian Roberts, the company's president and CEO; John Alchin, its treasurer and executive vice president; and Lawrence Salva, its chief accounting officer and controller. At the time, no one at Comcast had the title of CFO–the jobholder who normally is responsible for certification. Roberts wanted Lawrence Smith, another executive vice president who was in charge of Comcast's mergers and acquisitions and accounting, involved in the sign-offs as well. The solution was obvious, albeit unconventional: Make both Smith and Alchin CFOs. So do co-CFOs step on each other's toes? Sharing the CFO title works because Comcast's environment is "collegial" and not "highly political," Smith says. According to Alchin and Smith, their joint title simply formalizes a division of labor that already existed and that suits each of their backgrounds and talents. Smith, 57, who joined Comcast in 1988 after 18 years at Arthur Andersen, is responsible for tax and corporate development in addition to accounting and deal making. He's the inside man to Alchin, who is the public face of Comcast, along with Roberts. Alchin, 56, who signed on in 1990 after working in banking, is responsible for treasury, debt and equity issues and investor relations.

What also makes a difference is their relationship with Comcast's 45-year-old CEO, whose family controls about a third of the company's voting shares. Roberts, Smith and Alchin make most decisions jointly in a process that Alchin says reflects the "collaborative way" that Roberts runs Comcast. So while they are co-CFOs, their most significant role is as part of this decision-making triumvirate. And there are a lot of decisions to make–particularly on how best to expand the business. Comcast built its empire through a series of acquisitions, the most notable of which was its 2002 purchase of AT&T Broadband. Comcast now towers over the rest of the cable television industry with 21.5 million subscribers, almost twice as many as its biggest competitor, Time Warner Cable. Comcast gets high marks from analysts for its track record on acquisitions. "One word comes to mind: discipline," says Ted Henderson, cable industry analyst at brokerage Stifel Nicolaus & Co. in Denver. He cites Comcast's bid for the Walt Disney Co. in February 2004. "The Disney board and Disney shareholders thought that bid was not high enough and Comcast did not chase that bid," Henderson says. "If they had to overreach, it did not make sense for the Comcast shareholders, and they walked away."

Neil Begley, a ratings analyst who follows the cable industry for Moody's Investors Service, talks about Comcast's "patience and perseverance," and recalls its 1999 bid for MediaOne, which was bested by a higher offer from AT&T, then entering the cable business. "AT&T trumped them, but [Comcast] had put into the deal a [$1.5 billion] break-up fee," Begley says. "They took that, sat back and watched." A few years later, when AT&T decided to get out of the cable business, Comcast bought AT&T Broadband, which included the MediaOne systems, "at a very favorable price," he says.

Smith says Comcast takes great care in making acquisitions. "We have not taken the approach that anything we see, we buy," he says. "We analyze every opportunity very thoroughly. We've never overpaid." Comcast looks not only at cost but whether an acquisition fits its strategy, he says, and it benefits from being able to move quickly. "While we analyze things very thoroughly, we don't have a massive bureaucratic structure," Smith says. "If it's a competitive environment, we will be the successful bidder because of the speed with which we move."

NEVER BITING OFF TOO MUCH

Analysts also note Comcast's ability to make its acquisitions work, and in particular, its revamping of AT&T's cable business. Stifel Nicolaus' Henderson says that some analysts thought Comcast might be biting off more than it could chew, given that it had about 8.5 million subscribers to AT&T's 14.5 billion. But "it has been an absolute raging success, the integration of those two systems," he says. In just two years, Comcast improved the margins on the operations it acquired to about 40%, up from roughly 20% under AT&T. Tuna Amobi, senior cable and satellite analyst in the equity group at Standard & Poor's Corp., notes the current buzz about Comcast bidding for the properties of bankrupt Adelphia Communications and says Comcast's contemplating another deal just two years after the $54 billion AT&T Broadband purchase "speaks for itself."

Despite all its acquisitions, the deal-making group at Comcast is small, with six professionals in corporate development. They report to Smith, as does another team of eight people that functions like a venture capital firm, keeping an eye on new technology and Internet content and making small investments in those that could prove useful for Comcast. Begley notes Comcast's ability to reap profits from its non-cable investments that it then reinvests in the cable business, like the $7 billion it got for its share of shopping network QVC.

As Comcast has grown, it has reworked its balance sheet and eliminated bank financings at the subsidiary level. It has already erased $8 billion of the debt it was burdened with after the AT&T Broadband deal closed in 2002 and currently carries solid investment grade ratings of BBB/Baa3.

In fact, Alchin told an analysts meeting in December that Comcast is in "the catbird seat." The company has completed rebuilding its network, which allows it to cut back on capital expenditures and enjoy an increase in free cash flow. Alchin estimates 2004 capital spending will fall to $3.4 billion, from $4.1 billion in 2003, with free cash flow totaling $2 billion by the end of 2004. The company still faces challenges, one of which is the competition for cable customers from satellite TV providers and regional Bell operating companies, which charge less. Comcast is battling that by offering its customers extras, Alchin says. And Comcast sees most of its future growth coming from new products, like high-speed Internet access and Internet phone service. For example, it currently has more than 6.5 million subscribers to high-speed Internet access, a business "that didn't exist as recently as the late 90s," Alchin says.

Gary Crittenden, CFO, American Express

For a top executive at one of the world's leading financial services companies, Gary Crittenden, 51, doesn't mind being hands-on when it comes to cost cutting and financial management. Soon after arriving at American Express Co. as CFO in 2000, he turned his attention to the company's global procurement strategy, a $5 billion system for purchasing everything from technology and temporary labor to advertising and materials. To his dismay, he discovered that the company wasn't making the best use of its own procurement card technology. Its approach was badly decentralized, too costly and lacking in key controls in his view. So in his first few months, Crittenden led a far-reaching overhaul, making sure procurement staff were charged with negotiating deals with a core set of vendors and conducting order follow-ups to cut out waste. New Web-based technologies were deployed for electronic purchasing, online travel booking and expense management. When it came time to make sure all employee purchases went through the new system, Crittenden made himself top cop. If employees were found to have placed an order outside the new procurement system, they would receive a reminder in the form of a letter. After a second offense, another letter was issued, along with a $1,000 fine. A third violation earned the wayward employee a $10,000 fine plus a call from Crittenden himself. "It didn't take many calls from me for people to understand that we were very serious about trying to centralize this," he explains. "People have really focused on trying to do the right thing for the company." The overhaul saved the company $588 million between 2001 and 2003.

As CFO, Crittenden has been at the center of an effort that began in 2000 to redesign the Amex financial model. "Gary's brought discipline to the M&A function and put in place a centralized corporate divestiture and acquisition program," says Ken Wilson, vice chairman at Goldman Sachs Inc., who has worked closely with Crittenden on several American Express deals and financings. "American Express is a lot more than a credit card company. It's a processor and provider of marketing services, and he's worked hard to get that story across to Wall Street. And I think it has been reflected in the value of the company."

As part of this re-engineering, Crittenden has been charged with improving operating earnings by $1 billion a year through a combination of cost cutting and revenue opportunities. He expects the company to reach that goal in 2004, as it did in the three years previous. The strategy reflects a need for more investment dollars to spend on certain products, such as card rewards or marketing. "[CEO] Ken [Chenault] made a commitment that we were really going to change the nature of our business model and really make it much more flexible," says Crittenden. "The whole idea here is to try to make your model, your business, as variable and responsive and flexible as you can." The goal is an organization able to respond more quickly to either a significant negative event on the scale of 9/11 or a positive one, such as when a new initiative goes well. As Crittenden explains it, there are many areas that contribute to the company's more flexible strategy, including a newly launched 12-month rolling forecast effort. Twice a month members of Amex's global leadership team meet and pull together the forecasts from the business units. Open and unhedged positions worldwide are reviewed, as are positions in the currency and equity markets, to get a clearer view of ongoing risks. Adjustments are considered in the event of changes in any market value that could impact the company's bottom line. "We have moved much more to a driver-based planning model," explains Crittenden. "We look at what [drives] our business results, and we are constantly updating those drivers to say 'Are things trending the way that we think?'" Another area of flexibility management with which Crittenden has been deeply involved is called "investment optimization"–a process that compares the returns on the plethora of marketing and other spending programs across the company. For instance, the process helps the company decide if it would be better off launching a card acquisition program in Brazil or a customer loyalty program in Minneapolis. "There are literally thousands of those programs," Crittenden says, "and we just didn't have a good system four or five years ago for evaluating [them]."

Thanks in large part to these efforts, Amex is on the rebound. The company is on a solid growth path again, helped by higher consumer spending levels, its stock is moving steadily higher and a series of aggressive strategies are in the works. A recent Supreme Court victory has cleared the way for the company to offer, for the first time, its core credit card in partnership with other financial institutions in the U.S., opening a potentially huge strategic opportunity. Partners for the new card program include MBNA Corp. and Citibank and others are expected. The acquisition of Rosenbluth Travel in 2003 is helping the company gain new efficiencies in its travel services business, while the purchase of Threadneedle Asset Management, also in 2003, brought an expertise in international equities management to Amex's equities advisory business, American Express Financial Advisors (AEFA).

READY FOR EVERYTHING

The comeback at Amex follows some very lean years, especially the period from 2001 to 2002, when it was forced to shed a stunning 16% of its workforce. But Crittenden, who served as CFO for Monsanto Co. and Sears Roebuck and Co. prior to signing on with American Express, jumps at a challenge. "Both experiences [Monsanto and Sears] helped me understand some of the issues we have here but obviously the scope and complexity of American Express is larger than either," Crittenden says. "That is what made this such a compelling opportunity for me."

Crittenden sits on two corporate boards, Staples Inc. and TJX Companies Inc., where he has also impressed his peers. "As we were looking for a board member to replace our lead [outside] director, two people recommended Gary," says Staples CEO Ronald Sargent. "We knew we wanted someone with a strong business sense and a strong financial sense. Gary is a very versatile player. He could be CEO at a lot of companies today."