What Bose Taught Me About Influence

The influence gap behind every tax planning project, and what eight and a half years at Bose taught me about closing it.

I joined Bose in October of 2014.

The tax function was in disarray when I arrived. The senior tax leader and most of the managers had left, and one staff person was holding the function together. My first job was to rebuild it. Get the compliance filings done on time, hire the right people, get the function back up and running.

Two months in, the CFO came to me with a different assignment.

He wanted me to lead a global tax planning project, put in a legal structure that would lower the company's effective tax rate, and save millions of dollars. Bose was paying a high rate at the time, and leadership saw an opportunity.

Looking back, I should have asked more questions.

The Board had already chosen the lead advisor. The company's regular auditors couldn't take it on due to independence concerns, so a different Big Four firm was selected. Conversations had already happened that I wasn't part of. I came in to find a project partly framed by people I didn't yet know, in a company I'd been at for two months.

That was the first thing I missed. The second was bigger.

The first major planning idea was about our manufacturing operations in Mexico. We had maquiladora operations owned by a US principal, and one of the planning options was to restructure that as a Dutch principal maquiladora. The tax savings would be meaningful. From a tax perspective, it was a clean idea.

I scheduled a meeting with the VP of manufacturing and his team. The plan was an information-gathering session, where the advisors and I would learn how the manufacturing operations worked and what the operational impact of a restructuring might look like.

I'll never forget that meeting.

The VP and his direct reports walked into the conference room almost military in style. All of them six feet plus. Intimidating to say the least… The energy in the room wasn't curious. It was defensive. Within a few minutes I understood why.

They weren't open to what we were planning. They had a different idea in mind; one I hadn't been told about. The company was considering outsourcing a significant portion of its manufacturing capability to a third-party. Multiple plants in Mexico and around the world were potentially going to be sold.

My original presentation to the senior executive team had been a menu of planning options. Nobody had told me outsourcing was on the table.

I sat in that conference room and realized two things at once.

The first was that the operating leaders weren't the obstacle I thought they were. They were operating on better information than I had, and they were managing their own much larger conversation. The second was that I'd walked into the room without doing the work of building relationships, sharing what I was thinking, or learning what they were thinking. I treated it like an information session. They experienced it as being blind sided.

I hadn't done the work.

Bose is a privately held company. The culture is collaborative, but information often moves on a need-to-know basis. As a new outsider running a tax project, I didn't yet have the network or the trust to be inside those conversations. And I hadn't earned my way in.

After that meeting, we pivoted. The maquiladora idea came off the table. We refocused the project on IP planning, moving some IP profits offshore with operational substance to support it. That work eventually succeeded. The company saved millions of dollars in taxes and I was honored to receive the President's Award for outstanding contribution to Bose Corporation for the work.

But the real lesson of that project came later.

To make the IP structure work, we needed real operational change. Substance in the right jurisdictions. Supply chain flows aligned with the new structure. Hiring in places we hadn't hired before. This is not the kind of thing a tax department can deliver. It requires the company to operate differently.

The CFO promised me he'd help drive the operational changes we needed. He said he'd make sure the substance got built and the structure stayed intact.

I believed him, and I think he meant it. He was the CFO. He had the title and the authority. If anyone could help, it would be him.

What I learned, slowly, was that even a fully engaged CFO can only do so much on his own. The CFO is one voice at the executive table. The people who actually run the operating divisions have their own priorities, their own pressures, their own things they're trying to protect. The work of getting them to operate differently couldn't be delegated to anyone, including the CFO. It had to come from me too.

I needed to build that buy-in myself, division by division.

I started having hundreds of conversations. We built two committees. A senior leadership committee that made the final calls. An operating committee with representatives from fifteen different parts of the business, who could surface issues and feel ownership in the process. It was slow, but effective.

For a few years, it worked.

Then the pandemic hit.

Bose's sales dropped sharply. The company retreated toward a more US-centric operating model. Substance that we'd been trying to build outside the US never fully materialized. Each year the auditors got more concerned about whether the structure still held together. Eventually we found ourselves with a difficult-to-support structure, because the operational footprint behind it had never fully come into place.

The CFO turned his attention toward a shared service center in Portugal, then moved into a different role and a new CFO took over.

I've thought about that whole arc a lot since I left Bose in 2023.

The lesson isn't that the tax planning was wrong. The numbers worked when the operational footprint was intact. The lesson is that tax planning of that scale depends on the rest of the company being willing to operate differently for years to come, in conditions nobody can predict. That depends on relationships. On trust. On a long, slow, unglamorous process of getting people across the company genuinely bought in.

If I'd done that work earlier, that first conference room meeting would have looked different. The VP of manufacturing wouldn't have walked in defensive. He might have walked in as a partner. I would have known about the outsourcing conversation. We'd have planned around the reality of the business, not around what looked clean on paper.

The pandemic was outside my control. The operational footprint that never fully materialized was outside my control. But the influence... that was within my control, and I underbuilt it.

What I do now, with senior tax and accounting leaders, started with that recognition.

Most senior tax leaders aren't stuck because they lack technical skill. They're stuck because the work they need to do is no longer about being right. It's about being trusted enough that other people change how they operate based on what tax tells them.

That kind of trust isn't built by a memo or a presentation. It gets built one conversation at a time, before you need it, with people who don't yet know they need to listen to you.

I built mine too late at Bose.

Most of the leaders I work with now are trying to build theirs before the next big project lands.

Learn more about the Meridian Leadership Collective at gregcrossan.com/meridian