Global CFO Excellence Awards 2020

12 Acquisition International - Global CFO Excellence Awards 2020 Mar20364 Best Executive Education CFO (UK): Angela Cruickshank Providing immersive learning experiences that are immediately transferable and actionable in the real world, The Leadership Network® (TLN) helps business leaders make impactful and lasting changes to their professional lives and global industry. Since its inception, the firm has helped more than three thousand executives transform other companies such as Adidas, Phillips, Johnson & Johnson, Tetra Pak, Sony, IBM, and Electrolux. As we take a closer look at the outstanding work of CFO Angela Cruickshank, discover more about the successes of TLN with her exceptional efforts. LN is hugely innovative in the way it allows business executives to get the corporate and cultural message to their teams at a fraction of the time and cost of traditional classroom training. Whether needing to educate ten or ten thousand individuals, TLN has pioneered the way for widespread education from executives. TLN’s innovation is allowing its customers to reduce business travel, cut carbon footprints, track education progress with detailed analytics to ensure everyone is trained to the same world-class standard, use the platform to hold meetings, and collaborate with teams and train employees in a safe environment. It does this through a virtual reality innovation called GEMBA, which allows customers to learn new concepts, test their knowledge, and practice new skills in life-like situations, all from the comfort of their office or home. One of the key figures at the executive level for TLN is CFO Angela Cruickshank. After graduating from New Zealand’s Victoria University of Wellington with a double degree, each with double majors, Angela headed to the United Kingdom. There, she soon discovered that she enjoyed the challenges of working with mid-market PE-backed SMEs, and the satisfaction of growing businesses to a successful exit. Her career has seen her span the world, working with companies and clients in Europe, Asia, and North America. One of those companies was in the corporate events space, which is where Angela then met TLN’s Chairman and the CEO. When the opportunity arose three years ago to join them in this new venture, she jumped at the chance. Many of the skills she learned from the events industry were transferrable and, having previously worked on digital transformation, put her in a prime position to support TLN’s transition into a tech- based training provider as a natural evolution. Since then, Angela’s leadership has continued to evolve as well, becoming flexible to the people she is with. At a board level, she is unafraid to ask the big and challenging questions or play devil’s advocate in order to make sure herself and her colleagues are making strategic and commercial decisions that are right for the business and can be delivered. However, when leading her own team, Angela tends to be a lot more collaborative, as a leader should be. Leading by example, teaching and imparting knowledge and wisdom, and most importantly, having fun along the way. Finance may not be traditionally renowned for being an exciting part of a business, but Angela makes sure that her team has something to look forward when coming in every day. Moving wider, Angela stands as a safe set of hands to the business T as a whole. A guardian of reason, whose insight and experience is invaluable in making the right decisions. Being an innovative scale- up company comes with its own set of challenges, most around cash management in the journey from an in-person executive training provider to a truly digital, VR training provider that offers a scalable solution to the customers’ challenges. Angela’s financial and business acumen constantly enables TLN to strike the right balance between maintaining consistency with its established products, whilst simultaneously driving and funding the development and commercialisation of the innovative VR offerings. Careful cash management enables TLN to deliver the highest quality training for its members, without stifling the creativity and development in the tech side of the business. Arguably the greatest challenge that TLN and Angela have faced of late is the same as that of most businesses – the global pandemic of Covid-19. As many entities will seek to tighten budgets, impose blanket travel bans, or implement retrenchment plans in the coming months, those that survive will be the most resilient and innovative. Fortunately, TLN and Angela have worked hard to bring about that resilience and innovation with a fantastic new opportunity. In addition to offering advanced teamwork and collaboration opportunities at scale, GEMBA has recently introduced the Developing Lean Leaders VR Masterclass, allowing companies to train global teams to become Lean leaders in 12 weeks. If there was ever a time companies needed a culture of improvement, it is now and GEMBA training provides a solution. Numbers on a page or a spreadsheet are meaningless without context or knowledge. Angela’s success, and that of TLN, is thanks to her ability to know a product, her staff, and her customers. With the three being so intrinsically linked, and Angela’s deep knowledge and ability to recruit a team of expert professionals, TLN is in very safe hands indeed. Contact: Angela Cruickshank Website: https://theleadershipnetwork.com/