The value-adding CFO: an interview with Disney's Gary Wilson. Interview by Geraldine E. Willigan.

Financing a company is more complex than ever-and more important to its economic success. The demands on a CFO are tremendous. Optimizing capital costs requires an unprecedented level of technical sophistication. Yet the best CFOs today are not mere technicians. They are also strategists and innovators. Gary Wilson exemplifies the new CFO. In his 5 years as executive vice president and CFO of the Walt Disney Company and his 12 years at Marriott Corporation, he has shown how the finance function can add value-not just account for it. How does a CFO create value for shareholders? "Just like all the great marketing and operating executives," Wilson says, "by being creative." To Wilson, being creative means rethinking assumptions and finding clever ways to achieve financial and strategic goals. Some of Wilson's innovative deal making-like the off-balance-sheet financing he used at Marriott-is well known. At Marriott, he discovered the power of separating the ownership of an asset from its control. Marriott's strength was in operations, yet the company had a great deal of money tied up in real estate. Growth would require even more investment in real estate. Wilson's solution was to sell the hotels-in effect, removing them and the debt used to finance them from the balance sheet-and contract to operate them. In this interview, Wilson gives his view of the role of finance in today's corporation and explains the thinking behind some of the successful deals he has engineered-including Disney's Silver Screen movie-making partnerships and Euro Disneyland.