How To Lead In An Era Of Disruption

After decades of stability, the finance function has had to navigate a sea of change, from the rise of AI and other emerging technologies to ever-evolving roles. For Alok Ajmera, fostering “people-focused” leadership across the enterprise and embracing data are lifeboats to shore.

Ajmera is CEO of Prophix, a company based in Mississauga, Ontario, that offers a financial performance management platform for CFOs and other finance professionals. He shares best practices for how everyone within the C-Suite can best weather change, and emerge even stronger.

How do you foster a culture of innovation within your company, ensuring that your team remains ahead of the curve?

A culture of innovation begins and ends with an organization’s people. For our company, we genuinely strive to practise people-focused leadership because we genuinely care, value and respect all Phixers, as our employees are affectionately known. We commit to serving our teams, creating a healthy environment for our people and prioritizing their well-being, growth and development. At Prophix, we listen actively, meet often, promote open communication and create a safe space for diverse perspectives.

Our company’s core values are built with continuous innovation top of mind—meaning we want to be making smart improvements without disrupting momentum for ourselves or our customers. Prophix is all about mutual success, from creating close and active relationships with our customers to bringing the best-fit talent into our thriving culture. We push each other’s potential, championing collaboration and challenging conventions together.

You started as a consultant and rose through the ranks to CEO. What’s driven you to stay at one organization and what advice would you give to aspiring CEOs who are looking to make both short- and long-term impact within their organizations?

My journey from consultant to CEO at Prophix has been shaped by a deep belief in the company’s vision and the impact we can make for finance leaders. Staying with one organization has allowed me to see the evolution of both the company and the finance industry. While it’s remarkable how much has changed in terms of automation and capabilities, there is so much about finance that has remained consistent and fundamental to its DNA, and I have a tremendous respect for how the industry operates.

Frankly, the corporate finance industry went decades without a tremendous amount of innovation or technical disruption, but that is all changing in real time. New technologies are being introduced that offer the opportunity to fundamentally change how people work in financial planning and analysis. These technologies will enable finance leaders to reshape the perception of their roles from “bean counters” doing mundane, spreadsheet-centric activities to strategic contributors to the business who evaluate data, translate and interpret information in a significantly more meaningful and thoughtful way.

It is extremely gratifying to have spent a career empowering the finance function to do its best work and we’re now seeing so much of that work bear fruit. So I suppose my advice would be—have patience.  The reward will be worth it. 

With the rapid advancements in automation technology, how do you envision the future relationship between people and technology in the workplace, and the role automation will play in driving corporate strategy?

At a macro level, I advise professionals to embrace the technologies of today and prepare for the technology disruption that’s coming tomorrow.

Data has become the key to everything in today’s business world. That means there’s a new imperative for corporate leaders to collect data points, whether it’s financial or operational data, as the basis for gaining meaningful insight into not only the current state but what’s on the horizon. 

I’ll repeat it for those who couldn’t hear in the back, though…collect data! Too many professionals aren’t even collecting it now, and it’s setting them up for failure.

And, of course, collaboration has become a new imperative across functions. In our core market of finance, we believe that the office of the CFO must consider itself an “internal service bureau” in partnership with various business functional areas or partners. These functional areas are the finance department’s “clients,” and just like any good service provider, finance needs to sit down with its clients—these functional leaders across the organization—and understand how they can speak the same language and what will help the business make better decisions.

Finance, or any other function, can then leverage more advanced technologies to derive insights for its business partners, collaborate with them to identify trends, support the business with modeling and scenario analysis to understand what these trends mean and demonstrate how the business can capitalize on opportunities and mitigate risks.

This all sounds basic and intuitive, but it too often doesn’t happen across the organization since the finance/business partnership isn’t often done meaningfully and isn’t appropriately valued. And this scenario plays out across multiple departments, not just finance.

What are the best aspects and the worst aspects of being a company CEO during these times?

It’s an incredibly exciting time to be a business leader, particularly in the technology space. The rapid pace of advancement, particularly in AI and automation, is just starting to impact how businesses operate and create value, but the returns are already staggering. Prophix, at the forefront of these generational changes within the finance department, is the perfect place for me, as an innovator and a business leader, to watch it all unfold.

But obviously there is a lot of uncertainty in the global business market and the world at large, and that makes for some intense and challenging moments. Burnout for leaders and entrepreneurs at this level is a real concern and something of which I try to be very mindful. I think it’s critical for leaders to understand their strengths and weaknesses and surround themselves with an executive leadership team that dovetails with those skills. Every leader has a particular skill set; you need to know and respect your own limits.