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Editor's letter.

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People skills are always being lauded as essential for long-term career success, but it is only recently that they seem to be taking almost more precedence than technical expertise. Take a look at recruitment adverts for finance directors, and you will find that the attributes looked for tend to be "team leadership", "communication" and "people management". An accountancy qualification seems almost to be an after thought.

It may seem to some that financial managers should be concentrating more on the benefits of net present value, activity-based management and general number-crunching than on softer people issues. But finance departments are not what they were. Just last month, Consignia (formerly the Post Office) announced that around 2,000 of its transaction-processing staff, many of whom are likely to be in finance, are being outsourced. With nuts and bolts finance under threat, the ability to translate financial information into plain English, to motivate employees, to build relationships with investors and other stakeholders and to lead from the front, are invaluable.

A good example of this new approach is Nick Montagu, chairman of the Inland Revenue (page 26). A philosopher by training rather than an accountant, he has changed the way the Revenue works fundamentally. He has seen the organisation through tough times -- including a merger with the Contributions Agency and the introduction of self-assessment -- but his focus has remained on its people and how they can help customers. The fact that Montagu knows the names of every...

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