Looking back, CFO Ravi Narula tells us that he wishes that he had become a “servant leader” sooner, as he references the familiar leadership tag signaling a mind-set focused on serving others. “If you asked me 15 years ago, ‘Do you have a servant leader mind-set?,’ unfortunately, I would have said ‘No,’” comments Narula, who credits a graduate executive program at Stanford University for helping to raise his acumen when it comes to the role that servant leaders can play in successful businesses....
Feb 01, 2023•57 min
The Goldman Sachs “anti-raid” team was between conference calls with an embattled client company when word came that a senior member of the target company’s management team had unexpectedly died. Looking back, Tom Fennimore says that the next few months of his early career years at Goldman then became a transition point—or period of accelerated learning. “It was a very sad situation—they were in the process of being raided,” explains Fennimore, who lists the anti-raid transaction as one of two t...
Jan 29, 2023•52 min
It’s no secret, professionals from various departments must work together to correctly calculate Customer Lifetime Value (CLV), Customer acquisition cost (CAC) or Lead-to-customer ratios. This episode we explore how collaboration and communication is always essential to ensure these calculations and others take into account all relevant factors. This episode features the FP&A insights and commentary of CFO Thomas Fennimore of Luminar Technologies, CFO Jared Poff of Designer Brands, and CFO John ...
Jan 27, 2023•31 min
Back in 1993, Don Alvarez was an auditor with Deloitte’s San Francisco office when specialty retailer and coveted client company West Marine went public. For Alvarez, the day began with WM’s management explicating the novel steps behind pricing its offering, which was followed by the requisite trip to a Bay Area printer. The long day turned into a long night, so there was little hesitation on Alvarez’s part when West Marine’s CFO offered him a lift back to the accounting house’s office. St...
Jan 25, 2023•49 min
Not unlike many of his CFO peers, Jeremy Klaperman spent the early years of his finance career in trying to rectify the damage brought on by the irrational market behaviors of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Unlike most, though, he found that his repair duties frequently involved visits to a remote Japanese fishing village. “A lot of the work in investment banking during that 2001 to 2003 time frame involved picking up the pieces of all of these different failed businesses,” recalls Klaperman, w...
Jan 22, 2023•44 min
Our resident thought leader Brett Knowles explains how artificial intelligence is already being used to predict employee turnover, job satisfaction, and other key metrics, allowing managers to take proactive steps to improve employee engagement and retention. Brett & Jack discuss how AI-powered performance management systems are already tracking employee performance and are providing feedback and guidance to help employees improve. This episode features the workforce insights and commentary of C...
Jan 20, 2023•50 min
It’s perhaps no surprise that the late 1990s came to mind for Anup Singh when we recently asked him to share with us a finance career lesson or insight from his past. It seems that our CFO guests have become ever more reflective on the period of years preceding the dotcom implosion as they seek to help their companies navigate the murky economics of the post-COVID age. “This was a time when many firms ignored the core fundamentals of a successful business model,” recalls Singh, who at the time h...
Jan 18, 2023•37 min
Steve Mitchell had not been working for Irish telecom giant Eircom for even half a year before he decided that it was time to explore other opportunities. For the previous 4 months, the seasoned operations executive had been commuting weekly to Dublin, Ireland, from his home in the United Kingdom as he sought to nurture Eircom’s waning mobile customer relationships. However, Eircom’s CFO upended Mitchell’s plans by offering him the position of corporate finance director. “I went over ther...
Jan 15, 2023•1 hr
When Keith Stauffer’s youngest son learned in grade school that his family would be moving to Singapore, he likely breathed a sigh of relief. After all, his older brothers had already lived in Spain and the United Kingdom, and it would have been only natural for the youngest Stauffer to feel that he had some catching up to do. “Although a lot of people hesitate on opportunities abroad because their kids are a certain age or are going into a certain grade, we have always taken sort of the ...
Jan 11, 2023•48 min
August might be Patrick McClymont’s preferred month when it comes to entering the CFO office. “September is great, but you may want to show up a little before in order to get your feet wet,” comments McClymont, who last September became CFO of Hagerty, a once–stand-alone insurance agency for classic automobiles that has now morphed into an automotive enthusiast brand that in addition to insurance products also serves up to its car-minded customers a menu of “membership” programs and experi...
Jan 08, 2023•1 hr
Things were going downhill for David Quinn when he met his future wife—or such might be the obvious punchline to punctuate Quinn’s disclosure that he met his wife on a ski vacation. Still, Quinn lets us know that the timing of his match being made was in sync with the escalating financial crisis of the late 2000s—a grim environment that quickly fogged over the career trajectories of many banking executives. Quinn, who was then head of FP&A for Citigroup’s UK retail banking operations,...
Jan 04, 2023•50 min
Back in the mid-1990s, before email became widely used across corporate America, the executives of Frito-Lay’s northern California region suddenly found their mailboxes full. “We were getting all of these letters from people asking, ‘What did you do? What’s going on in northern California?,’” explains Tom Fitzgerald, who at the time was finance director for the region, a geography known to be a sales laggard among Pepsico’s 24 business units, within which Frito-Lay itself was a particularly heav...
Jan 01, 2023•57 min
When consultant Steve Player died last month at the age of 64, the business function that he had tormented, ridiculed, and war-hammered for more than two decades stood quivering in the shadows. Still breathing, the beast of a business process known as budgetary control had withstood its most notorious assailant’s heaviest blows—in itself a resounding tribute to those industry high priests who had given the process life in the first half of the 20th century. However, many agree that it’s only a m...
Dec 30, 2022•29 min
The following is a Holiday Replay of a popular 2022 episode. Last October, shortly after being named CFO of machine learning start-up MOLOCO, Brandon Maultasch decided to forgo yet another welcome coffee to instead engage with a wide flock of MOLOCO employees on the virtues of discounted cash analysis. “The last thing you want a new people leader talking to the entire company about!,” confesses Maultasch, before launching a stirring defense of the fall discussion that he refers to as a “teach-in...
Dec 28, 2022•57 min
The following is a bonus replay of one of 2022's popular episodes. When Herald Chen was growing up in a town not far from Pittsburg, he dreamed of someday running the small town’s steel mill. Years later when he was graduating from the University of Pennsylvania, the steel mill no longer occupied Chen’s maturing career aspirations. “My two job offers were to either go make soap for Procter & Gamble at a manufacturing plant in Baltimore or go to Wall Street,“ remembers Chen, who adds that the off...
Dec 25, 2022•42 min
Brett & Jack discuss what might be a popular response to employees "quiet quitting" or what among managers has been dubbed "quiet firing" - the withdrawal of coaching, support and career development to an employee, which results in pushing the employee out of an organization. This episode’s featured Workplace Champions share their different perspectives on how to manage their organization’s talent as a collective unit. Brett believes that human capital pain points are challenging finance leaders...
Dec 23, 2022•44 min
Back in the year 2000, as Arthur Andersen saw a stream of young accountants exit the firm to join dotcom start-ups, Kevin Rubin’s workload continued to escalate as the public accounting firm felt the pinch of a constricting workforce. Nevertheless, Rubin’s career ambitions remained in lockstep with the public accounting house. In fact, even today he believes that he may have stuck with Andersen had the accounting house not collapsed in the aftermath of the Enron scandal. Andersen’s fate, the imp...
Dec 21, 2022•55 min
It was nearly 18 years ago that Icertis CFO Rajat Bahri stepped into the CFO office for the first time. Thus began a stretch of time that Bahri, not unlike many of his CFO peers, has populated with various distinguished CFO career chapters ranging from 3 to 5 to 8 years in duration. Still, for Bahri, "18 years" means more than this, as it also represents the amount of time he invested prior to receiving a CFO appointment, making it a worthy touchstone with regard to which we ...
Dec 18, 2022•50 min
If you had told Brian Gladden in 2006 that he would shortly be working for a Saudi crown prince, the 14-year GE finance veteran may have replied using a shorthand equivalent to “when pigs fly.” As a GE finance executive, Gladden had served in a string of senior roles, including a number in which he reported directly to GE CEO Jeff Immelt. Nevertheless, when GE announced in 2007 that it had signed a definitive agreement to sell GE Plastics to Saudi Basic Industries Corporation (SABIC) in a deal v...
Dec 14, 2022•46 min
Back in 2009, as businesses navigated the repercussions of Wall Street’s collapse, Razzak Jallow found himself standing at a departure gate with a boarding pass that read simply “SaaS.” To be clear, Jallow had just nabbed a spot on Adobe Inc.’s Creative Suite finance team, and the journey on which he and his colleagues were about to embark was the software company’s migration from a perpetual, boxed software model to one based on SaaS subscriptions. While Adobe was not alone, and the path to Saa...
Dec 11, 2022•46 min
When Checkout.com CFO Céline Dufétel tells us that her career decision-making has been driven not so much by titles or status but by an inner push to acquire the next level of skills or types of skills, we can’t help but note a mysterious coincidence. It seems that a former McKinsey & Company partner had just shared the exact same thought with us almost word for word. Moreover, so, too, had a former CFO of T. Rowe Price. Of course, there’s a sound explanation for this concurrence, and—much l...
Dec 07, 2022•35 min
Jim Moylan is perhaps our first CFO guest to list the leasing of oil rigs as one of the experiences that best prepared him for a CFO role. Of course, he makes it clear that the experience is worthy of mention not so much because of what he was selling but because he was selling at all. “The best way to learn what a company does and understand its value proposition is to be a salesperson, and I have told this to people everywhere that I’ve been,” comments Moylan, whose stint as ...
Dec 04, 2022•45 min
To grow efficiently businesses must have legibility across the organization, explains Airtable CFO Ambereen Toubassy, who tells us legibility can only be achieved by having everyone throughout the business using the same metrics. Along the way, Toubassy says finance leaders must ensure their organization’s data capture is being conducted correctly and consistently. It may sound easy, but as this episode’s three Planning Aces reveal achieving legibility is a growing business presents daily challe...
Dec 02, 2022•41 min
Shana Veale had been working in the Albuquerque, New Mexico, office of Arthur Andersen for only about 8 months when the 88-year-old stalwart accounting house collapsed. Being a recent college graduate at the time, Veale tells us, she really didn’t grasp all of what the news headlines attempted to convey as the turn of events surrounding the Enron scandal unfolded. “We began having these weekly calls internally to discuss the circumstances, but then the cuts came in May ...
Nov 30, 2022•27 min
After Chip Zint jumped two levels in NCR Corp.’s retail division finance hierarchy, he couldn’t help but savor the moment while reflecting on the fact that his career years thus far—including nights and weekends studying for an MBA—had all been put to good use. Still, while altitude matters when it comes to career leaps, where you land in an organization—and when—sometimes matters more. In Zint’s case, his arrival as sales finance head for NCR’s retail division coincided with the completion of o...
Nov 27, 2022•48 min
Brett & Jack discuss the workforce rantings of Elon Musk and the new Twitter owner's November 16th deadline for employees to decide whether to leave or stay. Is Musk's leadership style solely responsible for the turmoil at Twitter or are there other contributing factors? This episode's featured Workplace Champions expose how leaders seek to optimize work environments to empower people to do their best work. While Jack views the talent mind set of each of the three featured finance leaders as the...
Nov 23, 2022•48 min
When Jonathan Carr first walked through the doors of the Stryker Inc. plant in Arroyo, Puerto Rico, the boyish newbie accountant no doubt turned the heads of a few managers. Having finished college only about 18 months earlier, Carr was now the accounting and finance “lead” for a major software implementation under way at the medical device manufacturer’s Puerto Rican plant. To succeed in his new role, Carr would need to have local managers as well as senior IT executives walk him through...
Nov 20, 2022•35 min
Few finance leaders have better revealed to us the career-transforming powers of IPOs than CFO Tony Tiscornia. Turn back the clock to 2015, and Tiscornia is the accounting-minded VP of finance for spend management software company Coupa. “I was really a controller—a business controller, but still a controller,” explains Tiscornia, who notes that his world began to change following the appointment of Todd Ford as CFO. Read More Ford, a finance leader with a rich IPO resume, would join Coup...
Nov 16, 2022•35 min
In March 2020, when Eli Lilly announced that it would begin providing drive-through COVID testing services to the state of Indiana’s healthcare workers, more than a few hospital administrators likely scratched their heads. After all, the giant pharma company was not in the business of providing healthcare services, any more than it was a medical device manufacturer. Still, drive-through testing turned out to be just the most recent offshoot of an effort under way inside a specialized faci...
Nov 13, 2022•1 hr
When Brett Powell is asked what distinguishes his day-to-day role as a finance leader inside the world of academia from that of his CFO peers residing within industry, Powell without hesitation says, “Complexity.” Aware that such a one-word answer would likely summon only more questions, Powell continues: “Essentially, when you think about it, we’re running a city … we house people, we feed people, we provide them with utilities. Everything that’s required to run your hometown needs to be r...
Nov 09, 2022•44 min
