Deciphering the International Language of Treasury with Stephen Harper

UK Treasuries back in the day were very much cash FX debt. So they were, I wouldn't say they were ivory tower, but they were somewhat staid and they were somewhat sort of financially regulated, more a subset of a generic finance function. And what you had on the European continent was the first sprouts, if you like, of treasury that actually required a treasurer to spread his wings somewhat wider, to get involved into things that were outside of the three basic pillars of generic corporate treasury. And by that I mean project financing, I mean working capital enhancement, I mean a lot of greenfield development as a number of the European operations were seeking lower cost blue collar input into their manufacturing. So I probably was one of the early adopters, if you like. And you might ask me why I would then leave someone like msd. And I can answer that very simply. I left MSD because my learning curve was becoming somewhat one sided. I thought that in order to make myself a more rounded individual, I needed to go and work for somebody who desperately needed money as opposed to somebody who had a lot of money. So that sort of took me down to the Flextronics of this world. Probably one of the biggest companies that nobody's ever heard of. Yes, that is an outsourced manufacturer and works on 1 and 1 and a half percent margin making electronic equipment for everybody else around the globe. And that involves serious complex funding strategies, it involves working capital management, it involves new efficiencies and those efficiencies sort of take you across the border from pure finance into what I would call financial operations. And indeed, one of the first things I noticed at that point in time was that I no longer had an office. So I stopped working in an office and I actually moved myself and sat on the factory floor because my boss, the CFO at the time, would always be very fond of telling me that if I couldn't see where the excess and obsolete was inside the factory, then I couldn't actually see where my cash was. And as the treasurer that was my problem. So having done Flextronics and Flextronics being a truly global company, so I was a part of moving operations from Ireland to the Czech Republic, from Austria to Hungary, from Sweden to Poland, ultimately from Hungary to the Ukraine, this also transpired that we were moving from Japan to China, we were taking a lot of European operations down into Malaysia, and indeed we were moving operations from the likes of California across into Mexico. And that meant that I was traveling 90% of the time. I had offices around the globe because we were always trying to apply best practices wherever we learned them, to our other factories. And as such, the company sort of profited from that very flexible workspace allowance that it gave its employees.