684: Completing the Job at Hand | Paul Ottolini, CFO, Russell Reynolds

When Paul Ottolini is asked to share a personal trait—one that a family member might divulge to us— the seasoned finance leader tells us that he likes to cut his own lawn and that he is known for being “cheap.”

Still, Ottolini makes clear to us that it’s more the satisfaction of completing a job and not the cost savings that regularly fuels his pursuit of manual tasks.

“I’m smiling when I spread 10 yards of mulch,” says Ottolini, whose words perhaps provide a clue to his past as well as to a work life cadence with which one suspects that he has rarely if ever fallen out of step during his more than three decades of career-building.

The son of a chemist employed by General Motors Corp., Ottolini graduated from General Motors Institute (now Kettering University) after completing a co-op undergraduate degree that permitted students to pay for their education by alternating 3 months of classes with 3 months of work inside General Motors.

Upon graduation, Ottolini joined GM, where he worked 2 years as a software engineer before heading to business school at Harvard. With an MBA in hand, Ottolini next joined Deloitte Consulting, where for 6 years he piled up frequent flyer miles as a client-facing consultant—before a surprise return to GM.

“I had wanted to get off the road, and while with GM I knew that it probably was going to take 15 years to match what Deloitte had offered me in 6, I felt that coming from a GM family, I wanted to go back,” recalls Ottolini, who notes that at the time, he was introduced to the GM opportunity by a recruiter from Russell Reynolds Associates, the executive search firm whose CFO office he now occupies.

And just as GM and later Russell Reynolds would make repeat appearances in Ottolini’s professional life, so too did Deloitte, to which Ottolini returned in the early 2000s to serve in a succession of finance leadership roles that ultimately allowed him to place both feet on the CFO path. - Jack Sweeney

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