Cfo Thought Leader

Among the learnings that Dev Ahuja has gleaned from his three-decade-long, globe-hopping finance career, perhaps none has delivered a more enduring instruction than that which followed his very first hop.By his own account, after Ahuja had reached the summit of Novartis’s finance executive ranks in India, the drug giant invited him to occupy an office at its Basel, Switzerland, headquarters. Here, Ahuja was promised, he would be able to apply his flourishing financial acumen on a more global scale.  “I thought that I knew what it took—I came with a lot of confidence rather than in a mode of humbleness and wanting to learn,” comments Ahuja, who let us know that his first years at headquarters did not always go as planned.Ahuja reports: “The Swiss don’t mince words."Confronted with his shortcomings, Ahuja set out to get things back on track—beginning with a hefty dose of self-scrutiny.  “I had done a miserable job because I really had not made the effort to build relationships and take the t