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When Brett Powell is asked what distinguishes his day-to-day role as a finance leader inside the world of academia from that of his CFO peers residing within industry, Powell without hesitation says, “Complexity.”

Aware that such a one-word answer would likely summon only more questions, Powell continues: “Essentially, when you think about it, we’re running a city … we house people, we feed people, we provide them with utilities. Everything that’s required to run your hometown needs to be replicated on a university campus.”

Still, Powell points out that one of the fundamental differences has to do with an organizational mind-set when it comes to cost allocation and subsidization. 

“Corporations will look at each of their product lines and try to understand the profitability of the product, and if one is losing money, then they just end that product line and move on to something else—but we don’t think about academic programs in the same way,” comments Powell, who adds that during a previous CFO tour of duty he had created a resource allocation model for a “resource-restrained” university, only to quickly discover how cross-subsidization activities between the different departments and programs added new layers of complexity.

“Just putting the data in front of people was not enough—they needed to really understand the perspective and the strategic direction that we were trying to follow,” remarks Powell, who notes that he would often find himself helping different department heads to understand why getting less of a subsidy wasn’t always a negative for their department.  

Says Powell: “If a university’s business school is generating so much profit that it can subsidize other programs by a certain amount, then we need to think about how this subsidy might be able to grow if the business school were to invest more—and to understand how all of the other programs might ultimately be able to gain from the business school’s success if we started to make such decisions differently.” –Jack Sweeney