When Kabir Ahmed Shakir first arrived inside the CFO office at Tata Communications, the former Microsoft India CFO quickly determined that there was one person above all others who held sway over the company’s maturing transformation plans. “The person who is actually giving pricing to our customers needs to know how much cash we make on Year 1, Year 2, and Year 3,” explains Shakir, whose 2-year CFO tenure has spanned a period in which the company’s free cash flow has grown twentyfold. “We had to bring our ‘cash thinking’ down to the deal profitability level,” reports Shakir, whose choice of words at first makes it sound as though his finance team had become tasked with running an errand. However, Shakir quickly clarifies the magnitude of what he was looking to achieve: “I wanted there to be an undying focus on cash. It’s not the most profitable companies that survive—it’s the liquid ones.” While this is certainly an organizational mind-set that many CFOs eventually rea...