Jeff Henley: A Lifetime of Achievement

Oracle chairman receives 2007 Bay Area CFO Lifetime Achievement Award.

The internet boom. The dot-com bust. Software consolidation. Not many software companies have been strong enough to withstand the volatile market forces buffeting technology investment cycles these past 20 years. But then again, not many companies have had the benefit of an experienced chief financial officer and turnaround veteran like Jeff Henley guiding their finances over this turbulent period.

Now chairman of Oracle, Henley was brought on board by Larry Ellison in 1991 to save the company from financial crisis, and he remained as CFO and executive vice president until 2004 to oversee Oracle's evolution into the largest enterprise software vendor worldwide. On June 6, 2007, Henley's accomplishments were recognized by his peers at the Bay Area CFO of the Year Awards event in San Francisco, when he received the 2007 Lifetime Achievement Award and was inducted into the CFO Hall of Fame. The Lifetime Achievement Award honors chief financial officers who have played a critical role in the success of their companies and whose contribution has significantly and uniquely affected the greater Bay Area business community over the course of their careers.

Deloitte & Touche Vice Chairman Mark Edmunds presented the Lifetime Achievement Award to Henley, citing his ascension to the chairmanship of Oracle as evidence of his exceptional qualities: "While talented CFOs frequently become CEOs, it is truly exceptional when a CFO becomes chairman of a [US]$16 billion revenue company," noted Edmunds. He also cited Henley's strong commitment to corporate disclosure and customer satisfaction and his charitable work with organizations such as the Boys and Girls Clubs of America and the University of California campuses at Los Angeles (UCLA) and Santa Barbara (UCSB) as reasons for the award.

In 2005, Henley's performance as CFO was profiled by the CFO Executive Board, a Washington DC organization representing 600 CFOs from the Fortune 500 and Global 2000. "During his CFO career at Oracle, Jeff Henley embodied what we consider to be a high-performing CFO: one who is focused on affecting operational performance, who delivers positive total shareholder return, and who motivates behavior changes across the entire organization," explains Scott Bohannon, executive director, CFO Executive Board. During Henley's 13-year tenure as Oracle's CFO, his work to centralize and standardize Oracle's back-office operations helped the company consistently maintain some of the highest operating margins in the software industry.

George Reyes, now CFO at Google, remembers the influence that Henley had on him as a young finance executive back in the early days of his career in Silicon Valley. "I have been fortunate enough to have had Jeff Henley as a mentor since meeting him at Memorex Corporation in 1976. Later, we shared the ups and downs of the internet boom and bust while I was at Sun and he was at Oracle. Throughout all those years, Jeff has been a role model not only because of his exceptional performance as Oracle's CFO but also because he is an outstanding individual and a good friend," says Reyes.

Although his career has been marked by success, Henley considers his efforts to globalize Oracle's operations as his most important accomplishment: "It took us about five years to consolidate on a single global instance, standardize our business processes, and centralize them in two global shared service centers, and the process wasn't easy," he recalls. "It's a great source of satisfaction knowing that the work we did to restructure Oracle's back-office operations is now paying off in the form of a stronger company much better positioned to provide new technologies and services to our global customer base."

Henley credits his success in large part to the people who supported him during his tenure as CFO. "When you are the CFO of an organization as large as Oracle, you can't do it all by yourself," Henley observes. "You need to empower people, give them the information and authority to drive change, and then turn them loose. Many of the executives helping manage Oracle today were on my finance team, and they've done an incredible job growing the business since I assumed the chairmanship. Knowing that they are there maintaining the financial and operational discipline we established back then gives me great confidence that Oracle will be a force in the software industry for many years to come."

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Anne Ozzimo writes frequently on financial management issues.