In his early 30s, Guillermo Lopez walked into finance as an outsider. “Nobody was giving me a chance in finance because I was an engineer,” he tells us. Then a boss took “a risk” and moved him into a finance role—partly because he was “good with numbers,” and partly because his consulting background meant he could be put “in front of…external parties,” Lopez tells us. That entry point set the tone for how he builds a career: intentionally and with breadth. At American Express , he moved across b...
Feb 11, 2026•45 min
An employee is on vacation in the mountains when it happens: “I left my laptop at home.” Instead of scrambling, the employee logs into a virtual desktop from another device, pulling up what looks and feels like their own PC, delivered through the cloud. That simple moment captures how Steve Shimizu describes Omnissa’s mission—helping companies enable a digital employee experience that allows people to work from anywhere, on any device, he tells us. For Shimizu, this practical use case reflects a...
Feb 08, 2026•44 min
As he nears the end of his first 100 days at Nintex, Burt Chao is doing something many new CFOs resist: listening more than talking. Understanding the business, its people, and its real growth potential comes before dashboards or directives, he tells us. Chao describes Nintex as a company with a “long and rich history” of helping organizations automate mission-critical work, but one now entering a new season. That evolution centers on orchestration—whether AI-enabled, agent-based, or rooted in R...
Feb 04, 2026•55 min
The lesson arrived abruptly in a boardroom in Battle Creek. After months of analysis, charts, and market data, the president of Kellogg’s cereal division looked up and said, “That’s all interesting. I just don’t know what to do with it,” Dean Neese tells us. The comment landed hard. It forced him to confront a blind spot early in his consulting career: insight without action is inert. Neese and his team went back, rebuilt the presentation, and returned a week later with clear recommendations tie...
Feb 01, 2026•1 hr 1 min
This special episode of CFO Thought Leader explores how finance leaders develop not through authority or technical brilliance, but through moments that reveal emotional intelligence. Drawing on recent conversations with Kevin Rubin, Toby Driver, and Bruce Schuman, the episode highlights a consistent pattern: leadership is forged through judgment, empathy, and self-awareness when stakes are high and answers unclear. Structured in two parts, the episode first examines formative moments that reshap...
Jan 28, 2026•31 min
The accounting team at Looker showed up every day knowing their jobs might disappear within a year. The company was in limbo—acquired by Google but still waiting on European approval—so the deal hadn’t closed, integration hadn’t begun, and uncertainty hung over the office. Yet the team continued to deliver “absolutely excellent work,” taking pride in their craft even when the upside had faded, Razzak Jallow tells us. That moment stayed with him. For Jallow, now CFO of FloQast, it crystallized a ...
Jan 25, 2026•48 min
At 18, while many of his peers were heading off to university, Toby Driver made a different choice. He joined an accounting practice through an apprenticeship, a decision driven by his desire for a “quick learning curve” and real exposure to business, he tells us. From the outset, he was less interested in credentials than in understanding how organizations actually work. That instinct carried him through years in audit and into transaction services, where he learned to dissect businesses at spe...
Jan 21, 2026•58 min
When Kevin Rubin arrived at Zscaler in May 2025, he joined an established organization following the retirement of the company’s longtime CFO, taking responsibility for continuing the work of a finance leader who had already built a strong foundation. Rubin describes stepping into a business with scale, experienced leadership, and a customer base that included some of the world’s largest enterprises, he tells us. In explaining what Zscaler does, Rubin walks through the company’s core idea: zero ...
Jan 19, 2026•48 min
At Intel, Bruce Schuman remembers walking into a meeting as a controller, proud of a product change his team had worked on “for months.” Then CFO Andy Bryant asked one question—one that reframed the proposal around customer impact. “Nobody had thought about (it),” Schuman tells us, and that question “completely changed the entire conversation,” leading to a “10 times better” outcome. That moment captures why Schuman spent “two decades plus 27 years” at Intel, he tells us. Rotational roles pushed...
Jan 14, 2026•52 min
When Drew Laxton looks back on the past year at Outreach, one moment stands out—not a transaction, but a plan. The company set its annual targets, executed against them, and then exceeded expectations. “When you see green numbers at every quarterly all-hands,” Laxton tells us, “it’s amazing how that little bit of momentum just builds the company.” What surprised him most was the cultural impact: morale rose, confidence compounded, and belief followed performance. That belief didn’t happen by acc...
Jan 11, 2026•42 min
In this Planning Aces special episode, CFO Thought Leader brings together three finance executives operating in very different industries—but facing remarkably similar planning challenges. David Lee of WEBTOON, Cristina Kim of Octaura, and Zane Rowe of Workday share how FP&A has evolved from a periodic planning function into a continuous decision system. Across global consumer platforms, fintech infrastructure, and enterprise software, each CFO explains how they use leading indicators, forec...
Jan 08, 2026•42 min
In his late 20s, Jorge Pliego found himself financing a major expansion in Mexico—not by calling corporate for cash, but by rethinking the entire structure. At Procter & Gamble, he was given the chance to fund a new paper products facility locally, navigating tax and financing incentives until the deal carried “zero” interest cost, Pliego tells us. Convincing senior leaders in Mexico and at headquarters required clarity, confidence, and an understanding of the business beyond finance alone. ...
Jan 07, 2026•46 min
In his first “60 to 90 days” as CFO of Presidio, Manny Korakis learned that preparation doesn’t cancel pressure, he tells us. “Now the buck stops here,” he tells us, and he “didn’t really appreciate the pace” required until he was living it daily, he tells us. Korakis traces his move into enterprise thinking back to the McGraw Hill companies. Early on, he was “very technical” and “pretty close” to a singular controllership focus, he tells us. Then a mentor CFO pulled him into what they called th...
Jan 04, 2026•38 min
As one year closes and another begins, most of us are wired to look forward—to new goals, fresh plans, and the next chapter. But this special episode of CFO Thought Leader invites you to do something slightly different: look back. Not to financial milestones or career titles, but to the moments that quietly shape who we become long before anyone hands us a business card. In this episode, three CFOs take us back to the earliest chapters of their lives—stories of family, displacement, discipline, ...
Dec 31, 2025•28 min
When it came time to pick our holiday bonus episodes, Tim Arndt quickly came to mind. Few companies sit at the crossroads of as many 2025 storylines—tariffs, data centers, and AI—as Prologis. In our February conversation, Tim walked us through a “merger of equals” that reset leadership, the capital-markets discipline that followed, and why logistics is about “atoms, not electrons.” He tells us Prologis oversees roughly 1.3 billion square feet across 20 countries, with nearly 3% of global GDP tou...
Dec 28, 2025•48 min
As the year comes to a close, we’re revisiting a conversation that feels newly relevant. This week, we’re re-releasing our CFO Thought Leader episode with Jonathan Carr , recorded three years ago—long before any exit was in view, but rich with insight into how he thinks about leadership, growth, and decision-making under uncertainty. That mindset was shaped early. Just 18 months after finishing college, Carr was placed in charge of a major Oracle implementation at a Stryker manufacturing plant i...
Dec 24, 2025•35 min
As we re-release this conversation with CFO Karen Williams during the holiday week, we’re opening the episode with a short preface drawn from something she shared recently on LinkedIn. In a post about books that shaped her as a leader, Williams reflected on culture, bias, and the importance of staying open to different perspectives—ideas that echo throughout this episode and frame how she’s built her career. Those themes weren’t always obvious early on. Williams traces a formative lesson back to...
Dec 21, 2025•48 min
Roy Hefer expected a quick coffee. Instead, a “30 minutes” introduction with a newly appointed Lumenis CEO stretched “more than three hours,” he tells us, as they talked through her plan to transform a flat-growth, cash-bleeding medical device company and “ultimately take it public,” he tells us. That conversation marked a shift from theory to ownership. After five years at McKinsey—based out of Tel Aviv, but spending “most of my time abroad,” he tells us—Hefer realized he was “a doer,” he tells...
Dec 17, 2025•48 min
Matthew Novick traces one of his earliest business lessons not to a boardroom, but to a furniture store in Portland, Maine. Growing up in his family’s business, he learned how to read credit reports, price products, and assess who was “credit worthy,” skills that showed him how decisions affect a business long before he ever closed a set of books, Novick tells us. That operational grounding followed him into finance. Early roles at IBM and AOL put him on both the expense and revenue sides of the...
Dec 14, 2025•58 min
At 19, working part-time in a bank branch while attending college, Ed Hagan made a simple recommendation: expand the branch. The idea was taken seriously enough that he was transferred to the bank holding company’s finance and accounting department, where he suddenly found himself helping with acquisitions, preparing board materials, and contributing to an IPO. The exposure was far greater than he expected at that age, Hagan tells us, and it sparked a curiosity that would shape his entire career...
Dec 10, 2025•56 min
At first, we wondered why Zane Rowe was once again leading us back to Continental Airlines. With notable CFO tenures at VMware and EMC—chapters rich with transformation—surely there were fresh stories to surface. But as Rowe began tracing the logic behind flight profitability, route modeling, and data-rich decision making, the relevance snapped into focus. His Continental experience isn’t just a recurring anecdote; it’s the lens through which he still interprets complex systems today. That early...
Dec 07, 2025•46 min
In her second week as CFO, Cristina Kim sat with Octaura’s leadership team reviewing a three-year strategy and ambitious 2026 targets, she tells us. As the numbers appeared on the screen, her instinct was to do what she had done for nearly two decades: probe what might go wrong, stress-test assumptions, and look for what could break, she tells us. Mid-meeting, she experienced what she calls an “aha moment”—realizing she was no longer outside the story but inside it, responsible for helping the t...
Dec 03, 2025•52 min
The morning after Airbase’s sale closed, Aneal Vallurupalli woke up to a very different org chart. Before the deal, roughly a third to almost half of the company reported to him, including onboarding, professional services, account management, customer success, and financial services revenue, he tells us. The day after, those teams rolled into the acquirer and “I have my EA reporting to me. And that was it,” he tells us. It left him thinking, “wait a minute… I’m not making any decisions anymore,...
Nov 30, 2025•46 min
Stuart Leung had occupied the CFO office at Flexport for only a few months when he realized the supply chain management company’s growing margin pressures stemmed not from a single root cause but from many. From pricing misalignment to invoice errors, Leung had compiled a lengthy list of snags. Along the way, he began empowering the people closest to each issue to drive the necessary improvements. By implementing more than 15 “big rock” initiatives—tracked through monthly reviews—Flexport rapidl...
Nov 26, 2025•57 min
In this special retrospective episode, we revisit three standout conversations from our archives to explore how automotive CFOs have long shaped strategy inside some of the industry’s most complex business models. From auctions to dealerships to early-stage EV manufacturing, these finance leaders reveal how they navigated scale, technology shifts, and operational risk. KAR Auction Services CFO Eric Loughmiller discusses turning massive transaction data into intelligence. Warren Henry Automotive ...
Nov 23, 2025•23 min
The email with the term sheet arrived first, then the bottle of champagne from the CEO, Jayme Brooks tells us. The lender had agreed to a nontraditional structure that allowed Capstone to borrow against intangible assets, creating a lifeline at a moment when revenue had dropped about 40% and market cap had fallen from roughly 400 million to 25 million, she tells us. Cost reductions, including a 25% reduction in force and ultimately a 50% cut in the cost structure, followed, she tells us. But the...
Nov 19, 2025•39 min
Jack Welch’s binder hit the floor before Michael Bourque had time to react. At just 23, he sat in a Honeywell acquisition review meeting as the “keeper of the numbers,” rifling through a binder he knew didn’t contain the EPS detail Welch demanded. When the answer didn’t come, Welch “swept his binder off the table, threw it across the room, and got up and left,” Bourque tells us. The moment stayed with him—not only the need to anticipate every question, but the feeling of “how I was treated,” a l...
Nov 16, 2025•55 min
In this episode of Planning Aces , we spotlight FP&A insights from three CFOs leading innovation with discipline: Chris Sands (InvoiceCloud) , Steve Sutter (Celigo) , and Niels Boon (Cint) . Each shares how finance is shaping AI, go-to-market models, and data-driven transformation without losing rigor. From building an “AI Ops” function and embedding finance in sales strategy, to piloting AI tools in small, staged experiments, these leaders treat innovation as a managed process. Our resident...
Nov 15, 2025•35 min
When Troy Anderson accepted the CFO seat at Kelly Services in 2024, he stepped into an organization that, as he tells us, “had done a number of acquisitions … and really invested in the business.” The legacy staffing firm had spent nearly $1 billion to expand its reach but had yet to fully integrate those pieces. Anderson’s mission: align a global operation that had grown faster than its systems. It was a familiar challenge. Across three decades and multiple industries, Anderson has made a caree...
Nov 12, 2025•53 min
When David Lee joined PG&E in San Francisco, the company was collapsing under the weight of California’s first energy crisis. “These utility veterans kind of got us into this,” the new CFO told him, handing him an unusual assignment: act as an “anti-CFO.” Lee spent his days testing every forecast and financing plan, proposing contrarian options like a preferred-equity line from KKR. The exercise, he tells us, forced him to “think independently” and learn how to guide a public company in deep...
Nov 09, 2025•54 min
