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I cannot tell how is each company organized, but I am working in a $250 billion company and I had the occasion a few years ago to find out in detail how this wo

I cannot tell how is each company organized, but I am working in a $250 billion company and I had the occasion a few years ago to find out in detail how this works when our CIO had to approve some IT purchase and there were some technical problems with the authorization system: our CFO does not have the authority to sign or approve any IT contract and nobody in the company will ever execute the payment. We are not organized as military, but each of us have spending limits (from $10,000 the lowest to a few hundred millions $ for CxO) and we cannot override that. Yes, we had people that bought stuff in their spending authority but not in their domain authority (that is much harder to limit in a system) and they were fired every time it happened.

wpietri 7y ago
Perhaps you should consider that your old, $250 billion company is going to be a bit more formal than a young, $50 million company. If your company really does have a purchasing proces so rigorous that it will reject an "IT" contract signed by the CFO despite it being within their purchasing limit, then there's a reason for that. The reason typically being that in the past there was enough naughtiness by some CxO that they went to all the trouble of putting some heavy bondage into their purchasing rules. Also, I would be willing to make a cash-money bet that CxOs shopping outside their domain authority don't get immediately fired for that. Even at your company.
- AdrianB1 7y ago
  Yes, you are right, they are not immediately fired; they "retire" immediately or leave the company in the next few months. In the past month we just "retired" a few directors and another one is "just leaving" in 3 months, until then his spending limit is revoked and he is just onboarding the replacement.