899: Democratizing Workforce Opportunities | Simone Nardi, CFO, Globalization Partners

Gray-haired late-night fans may remember when David Letterman sought to ingratiate himself with his network’s new owner, General Electric Corp., by hand-delivering a bowl of fruit to GE’s executive brass. Nearly 20 years later, Simone Nardi became a benefactor of GE’s media aspirations when he traded a senior manager position on GE’s audit team for a unit CFO role inside GE’s plus-size media holdings enterprise, NBCUniversal. “While a member of GE’s audit team, I had had the opportunity to work with the head of GE’s audit staff, so when she was named CFO of NBCUniversal, she called me when she had an opening there," recalls Nardi, while referring to GE colleague Lynn Calpeter, who stepped into the CFO role at NBCUniversal in 2003 and then later returned to GE in 2011 upon the sale of the company to Comcast. That very same year, Nardi was able to take advantage of a new CFO opportunity that surfaced inside NBCUniversal Networks International's TV Production business, which allowed the unit CFO to open his first post-GE career chapter without having to change jobs. In the years that followed, Nardi tells us, he stepped into CFO roles at a number of different companies, one of which (fuboTV) he helped to take public. Still, few chapters have been as formative for the finance leader as his years at GE, which seemed to achieve a familiar rhythm over time. Says Nardi: “The approach involved different businesses, different projects, and different teams globally. We’d connect locally, map out the project, deliver it, and go on to the next one.” –Jack Sweeney