What do you think the financial manager should do to get the team’s formal commitment? One of my tasks as financial manager was to implement a customer profitability system at a Swedish company located in Amsterdam. The system required a team of people from different parts of the company to aggregate and analyze information related to customer activities. Under my direction, this team of workers had created all the necessary processes and analyses for the customer profitability model. The new system had already succeeded in helping the company’s account managers to derive more profits from their existing customers.

Pleased with the results of my team’s customer profitability system, the Swedish head of the branch asked me to ensure that the system remained in place even after I had returned to the US. With this in mind, I wrote a formal document that stated the individual commitments of everyone on the team in terms of the profitability system over the next year. My intention was to have each member of the team individually sign up to these commitments. My Swedish branch head believed that the idea to have all the team members agree to their commitments on paper was an excellent one because he believed that the project might otherwise fall apart after I had left Amsterdam.