Eric McCluskey

Vice President, Financial Planning and Analysis

Born:
Los Angeles

Prior Experience:
Hyperion Solutions – VP Corporate Finance
Mercury Interactive – Senior Director, Strategic Finance
i2 Technologies – Director of Finance
Aspect Development – Sr. Manager, Finance
Compaq Computer Corp – Finance Manager
Tandem Computers – Finance Manager


Education:
UC Berkeley - BA, Economics
Anderson School at UCLA - MBA

What I like to do outside of work:
Collecting and playing vintage acoustic guitars, backpacking in the Sierras, catching live music shows whenever possible, enjoying the many attractions of the SF Bay Area with my wife and two young daughters.

Q Where in your background did you learn the most?
A: If forced to pick one period it would have to be the six months I spent traveling throughout Asia and India with a backpack and only a sketch of an itinerary, where every paradigm that I took for granted growing up in California was challenged, and my perspective expanded accordingly.

Q: If you could meet one person in history, who would you meet and why?
A: Reading through other answers, quite a few of my top ten have already been taken! So off the top of my head… I’d like to sit down with Johannes Gutenberg and take him through an internet demo. Essentially show the originator of the mass communication revolution where it has evolved to today.

Q: What’s been your biggest surprise during your time at SuccessFactors?
A: The responsiveness and action oriented nature of this company. To use a computer analogy, most places have at least some semblance of batch processing, where this company comes the closest to real time I’ve seen. No moss growing at SFSF.

Q: If you had 20 seconds to tell a new client about why they should use SuccessFactors, what would you say?
A: Over the past few decades there have been major strides in applications to support almost every enterprise function: Sales, Finance, R&D Testing, etc. But what about to optimize an enterprise’s most valuable and expensive resource… it’s people? How is it that an executive can go on the intraweb and look up the formal performance guidelines and measures for a $2K laptop, but not for many of his/her highly compensated employees? Guess what... the cavalry is here, and we’re called SuccessFactors!

Q: Why do you believe in the promise of Performance & Talent Management?
A: Performance management works. It’s been done successfully for decades in sales organizations, where commissions are paid in proportion to performance. If it can be done for sales, why not for all of the other functions within an enterprise? I think it’s simple human nature to want to look forward and understand what you’re supposed to do and why you’re doing it, and then at the end of a period look back and evaluate what you accomplished and how you can improve.

Another important data point to me is that every company I’ve worked for has had some form of P&TM process in place. Each of those companies has been in highly competitive situations and would not have invested the precious time and effort into the P&TM practice if they did not recognize the significant value of doing so. Therefore, I don’t believe the question on the table is “should we do it?” but rather “what’s the best way to do it?”

Q: Do you have a story or memory of how P&TM has helped you in your career? (a performance review, goal alignment to your team, paying people for performance, increase in performance as a results?)
A: Through my professional history I’ve augmented “standard” P&TM processes by creating my own evolving list of approximately 20 key attributes that I typically use as a scorecard for members of my team. The response to this additional report card has been extremely positive with the teams that I’ve managed. Fast forward to first time I logged into SuccessFactors: I was able to review pages of attributes to pick and choose from, detailed more completely and eloquently than I was ever able to.

Q: Why are you proud to work at SuccessFactors?
A: I strongly believe in the value of the products we offer, the vision of how this value can expand, and the drive and passion of the team to deliver this value.