THE NEW CFO.

New, as in into-the-trying-pan. Smart, energetic, ground-breaking - and sometimes downright fun - define today's winners of the chief finance title. Here, five of the chosen show why they made it to the top.

Most people wouldn't think of a career in finance as a ticket to adventure.

But the new CFOs profiled here have most unstereotypically challenged the quotidien, and found adrenalin-pumping challenges behind the numbers. All have stretched the definition of financial management past any reasonable expectation of elasticity. For quorum's Terry Allison Rappuhn, the proper practice of finance is part of the practice of medicine; she speaks of billing almost as a healing art. Warren Ligan, of Chiquita Brands, found the broadest understanding of multinational operations through a function generally considered to be the narrowest - corporate tax. Longaberger's Stephanie Imhoff learned to craft financial controls that preserve an entrepreneur's dream. The Home Depot's Dennis Carey blazed a career at the top of two of America's most financially successful companies. And our cover CFO, William Chiasson of Levi Strauss, has a habit of seeking a challenge whenever he finds himself getting comfortable.

It is a commonplace now that the role of the CFO is changing. Michael Flagg, a partner in the CFO practice of Heidrick and Struggles, defines the new CFO as "primarily a strategic business partner who happens also to manage the financial function." The new CFOs profiled here - four of the five have earned the CFO title within the past 18 months - find their new jobs are part media relations, part human resources, part marketing, part strategic planning, part technology pioneer and only part finance. Think of it as cross-training in the extreme sport of business.

Out of His Comfort Zone, Again

William Chiasson, Levi Strauss & Co.

William Chiasson, Levi Strauss

Turned CFO at LS & Co. August 1998

Up from sr. vp of finance/information systems and CFO, Kraft Foods

Bill Chiasson joined Levi Strauss & Co in August 1998, and six @ months later chief operating officer Peter Jacobi resigned. "To be honest, what really made me think seriously about leaving was watching Bill Chiasson, our new chief financial officer," Jacobi told the San Francisco Chronicle. "I said to myself, 'There really are new ways to be looking at things.'"

Chiasson wasn't looking for a job when he was approached by the San Francisco-based LS&Co. in the summer of 1998. But he was going to a wedding in California anyway, so he agreed to stay a little longer to talk about the offer. "I spent some time with some of the management team and a few board members and got excited by the notion of a company trying to redefine itself into a real consumer products company," he recalls.

LS&Co. had long dominated the blue-jeans market, but by the mid-1990s the firm had lost touch with its customers - and saw its sales decline. Chiasson was CFO of Kraft Foods at the time. His jump from a powerhouse of brand management to a company in a vortex of change would hardly be a conventional recipe for career management. But Bill Chiasson has never been very conventional. He grew up with seven brothers and sisters. His father, a zoologist on the faculty of the University of Arizona, packed the family off to Africa when Bill was about to enter his senior year of high school. While kids back home were entertaining conventional expectations for the senior prom, Chiasson was hitting the books at the University of Science and Technology in Ghana. He came back to the States with an unconventional educational objective, at least among financial careerists. "I wanted to get the best damn liberal arts education I could," he says.

The anthropology department was the star of the liberal arts program at the University of Arizona, so it was a logical choice. After getting a broad understanding of how people behave, he tightened his focus on business, taking an MBA from the University of Southern California. He launched his career in 1976 with three years of public accounting at Andersen & Co. "It was a good training ground, because it exposed me to a lot of different businesses and types of problems," he says.

The key to understanding Chiasson is knowing that he likes problematic, uncomfortable situations so much that he goes out of his way to find them. After his stint with Andersen & Co., he joined a West Coast division of American Hospital Supply, a company that was acquired by health-care heavyweight Baxter during his 10-year tenure. Chiasson moved through financial posts in several divisions and has high praise for the company's ability to keep challenging and developing high-potential financial types. But in 1988, he went to Kraft, because "I was getting too comfortable and wanted to get out of my comfort zone."

This was the high water mark of the junk-bond era. Chiasson joined Kraft as corporate vice president of analysis and planning. A big, independent company in a consolidating industry, Kraft would be an obvious target. So one of Chiasson's first projects was to develop contingency plans for a takeover attempt. A few months after he joined, Philip Morris made a bid for Kraft. Negotiations proceeded more or less according to Chiasson's plan, and Kraft became part of the tobacco giant's empire.

"The merger with Philip Morris was a terrific time," he says. "Heads were spinning at the changes Philip Morris was looking for." His star rose, as he found ways to "create a finance organization that could partner with the business side to create powerhouse brands." But by 1998, after 10 years, he found himself getting comfortable again. Then the call came from LS&Co., and he'd found another uncomfortable, problematic challenge.

As CFO of the apparel firm, Chiasson has two main jobs: leading the finance function, and helping to develop and implement strategy for the overall company. He has moved fast on both fronts in his first year there.

His first priority as leader of the finance function is to make finance serve the needs of the business. "In the past, we've focused on traditional, historical financial measures. The business managers said GAAP reporting is nice, but it isn't linked to what they were doing. We attacked that immediately, and defined 16 different metrics, a blend of leading and lagging indicators, financial and nonfinancial measures, predictive and reporting results, to measure our achievement of company strategy with the ultimate expectation that it drives shareholder value," he says. As a result, Chiasson helped the company create a "balanced scorecard" to track brand equity metrics, operational effectiveness and product development as well as financial performance.

Another priority has been to make the financial function more cost effective. To this end, Chiasson has centralized payroll, receivables, collections, payables and similar transaction processing work in a "shared services center" in Eugene, Ore. Chiasson is careful to distinguish these shared services from the kind of strategic financial activity that makes a difference at the business level. "We're pushing even stronger to empower individual brands with high-caliber people," he says.

A third priority is to recruit and develop the kind of talent that LS&Co. needs to turn itself around, and then keep going. Centralizing the transaction activity will generate savings that can be used to put more analytical and strategic talent to work at the brand level. Chiasson is defining clearly what kind of background each key financial position requires. "We've taken people we consider high-potential and formally tried to identify development opportunities that can help them to be successful," he explains. "This makes the development process more proactive, instead of just sticking up our heads when a job opens and asking who's ready for it."

But leading the finance function is only half, at most, of Chiasson's job as CFO of LS&Co. The other half is, in his words, "to build strong linkages with operating management and leaders of other functional areas." So, he's worked with the human resources area on a thoroughgoing review and revision of the company's compensation programs. He's also gotten deeply involved with the "Levi Strauss, the Americas" unit to "build and strengthen areas with strategic value." Generally speaking, the emphasis is to put more resources behind operations that directly affect the customer, and less behind operations that don't. By this standard, supply chain management and retail execution will get a bigger slice of the budget pie, while some logistics, human resources and finance areas will be cut back.

"These are all partnerships," he stresses. "It would be misrepresenting to say Bill Chiasson made these happen. It is my role as a business partner I take pride in. We've also had to make hard decisions on manufacturing infrastructure, so we've shifted the manufacturing base to other parts of the world where we can be more cost effective and more responsive to consumer demands. We have announced closure of 11 U.S. plants and four facilities in Europe. I like to think I've been a catalyst in some of these areas, but there is a lot of strong leadership in the organization."

If some of these initiatives seem like plain, common-sense business management - they are. LS&Co.'s well-known aspiration statement, which stressed diversity and promoted decision-by-consensus, was in large part an effort to get away from a business-as-usual model. The statement made truly inspirational reading, and Chiasson bristles at the suggestion that bringing basic business sense to the company marks a reversal of course. "Our values are incredibly important," he argues. "We're very much committed to the aspirations of the company. But some people would hide behind their interpretation of values and aspirations. That's why we have to clarify them. We must recognize that, in the context of our values, our goal is still commercial success."

There are, he says, sound reasons for optimism about Levi Strauss & Co.'s prospects, not least the fact that the Levi's brand is one of the world's top 10. But turning the company's focus outward to the customer instead of inward to its own culture is only the first item on the turnaround agenda. For Bill Chiasson, it's the kind of challenge that should keep him happily uncomfortable for some time.

Bleeding Orange

Dennis Carey, The Home Depot

Dennis Carey, The Home Depot

Turned CFO May 1998

Up from vp-corporate productivity and M&A, AT&T

The first day Home Depot's new CFO arrived for work, they handed him an orange apron and turned him loose in a hardware aisle. For the next month, he spent his days helping customers and his nights studying plumbing, painting and home-repair manuals. He remembers with a still-vivid frisson the fright he felt when a customer came down the aisle with a broken gadget he didn't recognize. This initiation is required for all new Home Depot hires, no matter what level they come in at. Notwithstanding Dennis Carey's three decades of experience as a top-level finance and operating strategist for companies like GE and AT&T, he had to "yessir" small-time contractors and Sunday handymen just like everyone else.

A prouder, lesser man would have been shocked or offended by such treatment. But Carey had never been picky that way. He grew up in a paper mill town in Maine, bred to hard winters and hard work. When he was 16, he started spending summers on Long Island, N.Y., working for his uncle's landscaping business in affluent Great Neck. He cut grass, trimmed trees, planted, drove a truck and managed a crew of 12 grown men. "I learned to motivate people," he says. "This wasn't the liveliest bunch when I arrived, but I was able to turn that around, and we were rockin' and rollin' by the time I left." He also learned about a standard of living he'd never imagined, one he determined to experience for himself. He went back home to the University of Maine, where he studied business and played wide receiver on the Black Bears team that went to the Florida Citrus Bowl in 1966. They lost the game, but Carey won strength and discipline, and he had a sheaf of job offers to think about on graduation; he took the one from General Electric.

Carey was a star in GE's financial management training program, but he and his wife were feeling claustrophobic in their tiny Stamford, Conn., apartment. So they moved into a 37-room mansion in Greenwich - as caretakers. Neighbors included Victor Borge, the entertainer. "We lived on the third floor - it was terrific. Even though I was cutting the lawn and pruning trees, the family allowed me to go to parties with their friends, and I realized that even though these people all lived in beautiful mansions, they weren't any smarter than me."

Carey's colleagues at GE kidded him about his side job, but it didn't hurt his visibility in the company. "I thought I'd be stronger at GE if I could not only do very well both in the financial management program and on the job, but also do this. I thought it would be viewed as a little different and it was - everybody knew what I was doing and got a kick out of it," he says. Visibility is a good thing in an organization, and almost any way to get it is a good way. Carey's boss's boss asked him to come over to his home and help cut down a big tree in his backyard.

That's not the only reason, or even the main one, that his career progressed so rapidly, but it is worth noting that Carey is the sort of man who doesn't flinch from stepping down the ladder a rung or two in order to climb higher. He had moved through several promotional levels when his mentor, Larry Bossidy, recommended that he spend some time on the corporate audit staff. Everyone who joined the audit staff came in at the same level - and Carey had already been promoted several levels above that. But the experience he could gain as an auditor was unique. "The GE audit staff isn't like others; it's not all accounting and finance," he explains. "Half of it is operational auditing, trying to improve efficiency and wring costs out of manufacturing, engineering, warehousing and so forth." It was a dilemma, but not a very hard one to solve, given Carey's priorities - he dropped back several levels and joined the staff.

GE had a system of managing its auditors similar to that used by football teams, or the U.S. Army Rangers. "Every year," says Carey, "they'd take 10 people and force-rank you in the group. Some people progressed, and some didn't." He rose to second from the top in eight years. GE had a rule that no one could go to the top audit job without rotating back into the corporation for a while, so Carey asked for and got a general management job running a small GE auto leasing business in Illinois. "We really grew that business, and I was promoted to vice president for automotive financial services. We had a ball with that business, started an auto auction chain, grew it, positioned it well, and then I got a call to come back to the number one position on the audit staff."

He demurred, understandably. The Kidder Peabody derivatives trading scandal had just broken and, like other defense contractors, GE was also under pressure for cost accounting practices that led to such headline-grabbing line items as $500 toilet seats. "They wanted me to work on both those things," Carey says. He decided to take the job when he learned that he could implement a program to turn the audit staff into a sort of SWAT team to help business units solve a range of problems. After a few years as auditor, he was tapped to run GE Capital Corporation's LBO business. Then the call came from AT&T.

He'd been declining calls from headhunters for years, but when Larry Bossidy left to run AlliedSignal, he decided that it might be time for him to check out the wide world, too. AT&T offered the challenge of helping turn around a vast, lumbering monopoly, but the opportunity looked better from afar than close up. "I thought it was going to be terrific," Carey says. "It was, from a 'wow, this is really different' standpoint but ... I saw an opportunity in a culture I could get really excited about at Home Depot. People are so committed, so focused on the values. Here, they really walk the talk."

His first initiative as CFO was to "close the gaps" between headquarters support people and the stores. Through a program called "Building Bridges," he is working to make sure the culture at headquarters mirrors that in the store aisles. The key is making headquarters people "bleed orange," that is, feel The Home Depot passion for customer service and recognize their customers in the faces of the store staff. "When people come here from the stores now, we put up banners, welcome them, make arrangements to greet them, ask how we can help them," he says. More substantively, Carey beats the drum for keeping all reports and analyses relevant and readable - making sure the "so what" question is answered.

In addition to finance and systems, his job responsibilities include mergers and acquisition, store construction and store planning. At present, Home Depot has 800 stores. Carey's goal is to double that in the next three years, and maintain bottom-line growth at 20 percent per year.

"I'm not interested in a pure finance role," Carey says, "I really enjoy a variety of things. I consider myself a businessman." His advice to early and mid-career financial types is straightforward: Take risks, and reach for breadth. "You can always go back to your specialty, but it can be so much more fun and so much more rewarding if you go outside your area of comfort," he says.

Bedside Manners

Terry Allison Rappuhn, Quorum Health Care

Terry Allison Rappuhn, Quorum Health Care

Turned CFO June 1999

Up from controller, Quorum Health Care

In the fall of 1998, Brentwood, Tenn.-based Quorum Health Care was rocked by a U.S. government lawsuit alleging that the company had systematically cheated Medicare by filing false cost reports. The stock market reacted violently to the news, dumping Quorum shares so aggressively that the company lost $700 million of capitalization in a single day.

Terry Allison Rappuhn had joined Quorum just five years before the crisis broke, and she was devastated. "It was a complete shock to hear such allegations about a company I thought I knew well," she says. "The only way you can keep your sanity in that kind of situation is to do what you know to be right."

Rappuhn had been sensitive to doing what is right at least since sixth grade, when news of Martin Luther King's assassination was greeted with cheers by some in her native Chattanooga. "I remember a lot about the civil rights movement, though I was still quite young," she says. "I think growing up in those years gave me a real sense of fairness and a commitment to treating people with respect. You saw some people behave admirably and some behave poorly, and it was easy for me to see what kind of person I wanted to be."

Rappuhn worked in a restaurant to put herself through high school and college, graduated from Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro, and then spent 16 years in Ernst & Young's health care practice. She joined Quorum in 1993, in no small part because of the company's well-publicized commitment to ethics and integrity. She started out as head of the audit function, rose to controller in 1996, and was in that position in October 1998, when the Department of Justice sued Quorum for alleged violations of the False Claim Act and sent the stock south. In April 1999, Quorum's president resigned. When the CFO left "to pursue other areas" in July, the company announced that Rappuhn would be replacing him.

Rappuhn dismisses any suggestion that the departure of Quorum's top executives so soon after the government sued might lend some credibility to the allegations. She believes the allegations are false, and motivated by greed and self-interest. A former employee of a hospital that Quorum had managed set the court action in motion, and Rappuhn says that this person, referred to in court papers as the "relator," would receive a share of any recovery made by the Justice Department.

"We have investigated this with lawyers and accountants, have spent millions of dollars and have simply concluded the allegations are not true," Rappuhn emphatically declares. "If you look at what is alleged, it would have involved hundreds of hospital CFOs and auditors, over more than a decade. It's not possible to do that. We're not afraid of the truth, and we want a full public airing of the case."

Meanwhile, Rappuhn has been moving fast to shape a new role for herself as CFO. She came well prepared for almost every dimension of the job. She has been one of Quorum's main investor relations people since 1996, because her promotion to controller also included treasury responsibilities. She has also been one of the main architects of a financial structure that is about 40 percent equity, 10 percent high-yield debt and 50 percent in bank credits. Capital structure issues intrigue her - she says she finds it "very interesting" to consider whether, when and in what form Quorum should raise capital, but she knows that one of her disciplines as CFO must be to draw back from the details.

"The biggest challenge is to step out of some of the daily activities I've been spending time on and make sure to spend more time thinking about the strategic direction of the company," she explains. "I'm also spending a lot of time thinking about what kind of CFO I want to be, talking to others in and outside the industry about what a good CFO should bring to an organization."

The pat answers - to increase shareholder value, be fair, help people develop - don't go far enough to describe what she has in mind. Rappuhn sees the finance function as an important part of health care - not just because it supports infrastructure, but because the way it is handled can help make patients more comfortable. "For example," she explains, "when somebody is going in for surgery, it is the hospital's responsibility to see what their insurance coverage is, what the patient will have to pay and to structure a payment plan. Our industry has a hard time doing this - they don't want to ask sick people for money - so instead, three months later, the patient gets a bill he's not expecting, and he's not prepared to pay. Explaining things in advance and making whatever monthly payment arrangements are necessary would be a service to the patient." Finance as a stress-reduction therapy - there's a concept to ponder.

Trust and a Dream

Stephanie Imhoff, The Longaberger Company

Turned CFO August 1998

Up from senior manager, Ernst & Young

The assignment: Bring financial discipline to a company inclined to such whimsies as a $35-million headquarters building shaped like a basket, complete with humidity-controlled handles and cherry trim. The company is family owned, the founder a visionary entrepreneur, the product a dream, a softly colored bubble of homey longing. It took an exquisitely soft touch, and a firm hand, to contain this bubble for its own preservation in a network of financial controls, Stephanie Imhoff managed to strike the right balance.

In August 1998, she was named CFO of the Longaberger Company, famous for high-end basket-weaving, and the following March became the first non-family member appointed to the board in a quarter century. "The appointment to the board marked a moment in my career I will forever remember," Imhoff says. "It signified a lot more than just putting me on the board as a finance person - it was a testament to trust in the relationship we had built over the years."

Imhoff grew up in the town of Shady Side on the Ohio River, surrounded by the rural headland values Longaberger's marketing so successfully evokes. She graduated from Bowling Green University in 1982, interned with Arthur Young in Toledo, then moved to Houston for a few years spent auditing oil and gas companies. But Houston was far away in every sense from the rolling green hills and calico curtains of Ohio, and as soon as she could come home, Imhoff did, transferring to Columbus to work with small, privately owned client firms. Longaberger became her client in 1988. It was then a $40-million firm, just 15 years old, but poised for growth and looking for strong but gentle financial guidance. After four years as her client, Dave Longaberger asked Imhoff to join the company.

"I was quite happy at Ernst & Young, and I wasn't looking to leave, but I believed in Dave Longaberger's vision, a vision shared by his two daughters. I liked them and believed in them and decided to go for it," Imhoff says.

The fifth of 11 children, Dave Longaberger had founded the company in 1973 to keep a basket-making tradition alive - his grandfather had taught the craft to his father, who had passed it along to Dave. In 1978, he started to sell baskets through home presentations. By the end of the 1990s, Longaberger's sales staff consisted of 50,000 independent part-timers selling to friends at basket parties. Most of the company's growth explosion happened after Imhoff joined in 1992, including construction of a tourist village and world-class golf course drawing half a million visitors a year.

Imhoff came into Longaberger on the sales, not the financial side, in order to gain a better understanding of this unique business. "Our representatives are motivated by their love for the product, and they want to share it with their neighbors, friends and family," Imhoff says. "They tell the story of the aura around the product, who Dave Longaberger was, how the baskets are made, why they're made that way. It's a relationship business."

Imhoff moved into a financial role after a few months in sales, where she found that the nature of the business made a delicate situation downright ticklish. "Budget discipline was the first challenge. How could we build financial controls and maintain the entrepreneurial spirit? For vision and fortitude, I'd match Dave Longaberger against any entrepreneur." Successful entrepreneurs don't get that way by taking "no" for an answer, but Imhoff had to find a way to impose financial controls on the dream.

"I had a very strong and trusting relationship with the Longaberger family," Imhoff says, "We talked about growth plans, where we wanted the company to be long term, and how we could get there while keeping ownership private. Eventually we agreed on some financial benchmarks, and I was able to say if we want to get to this level of financial stability, here is where we have to be along the way."

Privately owned Longaberger met its growth objectives in large part through cash flow, but Imhoff recalls a lot of time spent convincing bankers that this extraordinary-looking business made sound financial sense. The company does not publish its financials, but its financial underpinnings have been strong enough to support two long-term private placements of debt in the insurance market, the most recent (in 1997) for $50 million.

Imhoff was already pivotal in the company's financial and strategic affairs when she was named CFO last year, so the move up did not change her responsibilities, but confirmed her role in the company, as the appointment to the board endorsed her relationship with the Longaberger family. Sadly, Dave Longaberger died in March after a long bout with cancer. Imhoff says that his daughters share his dream, and thanks to his mentoring, will be able to carry it forward. "He knew, as do Tammy and Rachel, that I always have their best interest 100 percent at heart," she concludes.

Tour of Duty

Warren Ligan, Chiquita Brands

Turned CFO January 1998

Up from vp of taxation, Chiquita Brands

Hardly anyone who has ever talked with a tax attorney or tax accountant came away impressed by the tax person's breadth and perspective. "It's true that, as a profession, we are not very good at communicating, bridging and forming relationships so other disciplines can understand and appreciate what we do," Warren Ligan concedes. "But I went into tax because I thought it was one of the more complicated and comprehensive disciplines in a company, and I had a goal of totally understanding the operations of a major multinational. The best financial people are good tax people, because if they're vigilant about doing their jobs, tax people develop a great understanding and appreciation of all areas of the business. And if you don't understand tax, what you do financially may hurt more than it helps."

Chiquita recruited Ligan as vice president of taxation in 1993, and when CFO Steven Warshaw was promoted to president last year, Ligan stepped into the CFO's job. The only thing a career in tax did not prepare him for was dealing with "the Street." Ligan says if he had been thinking ahead to being CFO, he would have spent more time learning how equity and credit analysts make their calls. "Part of the job of the CFO is to let people on the outside understand how the company views itself, its markets and its opportunities. As CFO, you get a lot of their questions directed at you and you have to be trained in how to handle them, particularly in public forums where, when you open your mouth, it's fair game," he says.

Ligan's first year as CFO has given him ample opportunity to come up to speed on investor relations, though. A $200-million bond offering concluded in the summer of 1999, and several small acquisitions have kept him very much in the public eye.

If Ligan's route to the top seems unusual, it's not the first time he's gone against the grain. In 1970, at the height of the Vietnam War, he volunteered to join the Army. An understandable move for someone with a military career in mind, but Ligan didn't want a military career. Nor did he want to go to Vietnam. His wasn't the case of a young man sure to be drafted making the best of a bad situation by volunteering. Ligan's number in the great draft lottery was 250, so he would not have been conscripted until the supply of eligible draftees born on the 249 dates of the year drawn before his had been exhausted.

He joined the Army to see the world, and to get some career training, and Ligan volunteered for service with the understanding that he would be trained in electronic surveillance. "I didn't think they'd spend all of the time and money it took to train me, and then put a rifle in my hands," he says. People who know the Army might marvel at Ligan's simple faith - but his bet paid off. He never went to Asia. He got to go to Europe, instead. He liked the Army so much, he stayed for six and a half years and came back to civilian life in 1976, with a remarkable degree of self-discipline and a commitment to a career in international business.

He took a BA at a small, private college, then a law degree at the Detroit College of Law, working at various jobs to earn while he learned. He then went to Coopers & Lybrand for what he calls "the obligatory two years of public accounting." He had already decided to make a career of the inevitable, and (having cheated death) specialized in taxes. After his stint with Coopers & Lybrand, Ligan joined Upjohn in Kalamazoo, Mich., as a tax guy. In the evenings, he commuted 167 miles to Chicago, where he earned a masters of law in taxation at DePaul University. Searle lured him away with an offer to become director of international tax. Overseeing preparation of Searle's consolidated tax return gave him exposure to such treasury activities as borrowing and hedging and made him more keenly aware of the impact of tax on financial strategy.

As CFO of Chiquita, he's a strategic partner in one of the most influential companies in the United States. Chairman Carl Lindner has long been a power in Washington and a lightning rod for criticism - most recently for his role in the "banana war" that may result in U.S. trade sanctions on a broad range of European exports, and perenially for his influence on Latin American governments with less than salubrious records on human rights.

Ligan staunchly defends the company's record. "It's always easy for a large agricultural company to be in the crosshairs of activist groups," he says. "But we're doing things right. Folks are going to take indiscriminate shots, that's going to happen, but you have to keep your focus on corporate responsibility, and community responsibility, and not let other things sideline you."

Gregory Millman is a freelance writer based in New Jersey.