CFO Bookshelf

Of the many books that leadership authors have written about how to lead others and one's self, Mark believes Eric Alexander's book may be the first to pair stewardship and leadership together. His new book is entitled Stewardship Leadership for Stinkin' Accountants: Serving as the CFO.

Eric was a longtime CFO for Happy State Bank, and after his tenure, he veered into packaging the many concepts he learned into workshops, coaching, and mentoring those in financial leadership positions and beyond.

Some of the interesting and unique topics covered in the interview include hiring for character, the link between trust and verification, the crux of developing others, prescripting, 720 thinking, and the humor behind geewhiz data.

Running Against the Herd is not only a new book title in the investment genre, but its content is also for any leader, CEO, or manager who makes decisions for a living.

While much of the literature in behavioral economics and finance is academic in nature, Eddie uses his background as a long-time chief investment officer to offer practical solutions to addressing the biases that thwart our decisions the most.

He does this through stories and examples from his work and adds humor to make key ideas stick.

While this is a topic that has not been broached the way the author has done so, anyone outside the investment community will learn much from this hard-to-put-down book.

Is it possible to read a fascinating true story about a professional roulette player where gambling is not placed on a pedestal nor glamorized?

I believe the answer is yes if you listen to or read The Gambler's Game by James Darnborough, who is the grandson writing about a legendary professional gambler who was known for breaking the bank at Monte Carlo at the turn of the 20th century.

This story is broken into three simple timelines that show how to achieve goals, build resilience, and know when relationships become your number one priority in life. 

I enjoyed reading Lencioni's The Ideal Team Player even though it was a bit too simplistic with a focus on just three labels to describe a person you want on your team.

After reading Molly Tschang's new book, Say It Skillfully, I thought this was the book that Lencioni should have written.

Molly states, "Every word out of your mouth, what you say and how you say it, signals more to the team and leadership than your credentials. Your words determine how people think about and experience you."

She clarifies this through her me-you-we mental model, which helps us to handle the toughest conversations with more confidence and ease.

Molly is a long-time coach and consultant and has worked with high-performance teams at Cisco, Deloitte, and IBM. She's also a member of the Marshall Goldsmith 100 Coaches.

Richard Rumelt is a legendary strategy pioneer and author of The Crux and Good Strategy Bad Strategy. In this episode, Rumelt dismantles traditional "strategic planning," arguing it is often merely a financial budget masquerading as actual business strategy. 

He emphasizes that true strategy is problem-solving rooted in rigorous diagnosis. Discover how to identify the crux while breaking through unconscious constraints to achieve coherent, highly impactful, and addressable strategic organizational action. 

What happens when a great storyteller learns that one of his closest friends is building an investment portfolio for his three daughters that he hopes will grow to a half billion dollars over the next thirty years?

What happens is that we get a book pairing similar to The Education of a Value Investor (Spier) meets a mentor, The Dhandho Investor (Pabrai).

In this case, the storyteller is Neeraj Khemlani, who tells Matt Ankrum's investing story in The Coffee Can Investor. During this conversation with Neeraj and Matt, we learn the story behind the coffee can and how to go about investing passively while being active at the same time. 

While this book reveals Matt's insights for 100-baggers and the frameworks he uses for identifying such stocks, it's not a book on theory. Instead, Neeraj reveals the thirteen stocks Matt has invested in and why.

In his new book, Story Business, Gavin McMahon argues that the best-packaged ideas—not just the best ones—win in the marketplace. Drawing on his background as an engineer and his work in the defense, automotive, and other industries, Gavin frames storytelling as a fundamental business device baked with emotion. 

He moves beyond simple marketing, providing a practical framework across six genres—value, product, brand, sales, leadership, and culture. His creative guidance shows leaders of any kind how to transform dry data into compelling narratives that inspire action and drive success.

Jonathan Stark needs no introduction in the value pricing world. Many years ago, Jonathan came to the realization that hourly billing was not a workable solution for him and his software development clients. He eventually ditched the billable hour in favor of value pricing.

Flash forward to the present, and he's recorded more than 500 episodes on his podcast, Ditching Hourly, and he's impacted well into the thousands of people he's coached, mentored, and spoken to as they have transformed their billing practices as Jonathan once did.

On this show, we discuss Jonathan's short and impactful book, Hourly Billing is Nuts. Even if you do not work in professional services, you'll learn much from this conversation.

At the end, Mark has a surprise as he retells one of his favorite stories of all time, which is about hourly billing that winds up having a positive ending.

The subtitle of Ehsan Ehsani's new book Finding Value in Numbers is The Essential Investing Toolkit to Win on Wall Street.

If I may, I'm adding my subtitle too, which is Learn a Handful of Key Financial Concepts for Your Small and Growing Enterprise. Accordingly, this book is not just for Buffett-like value investors but for CEOs, finance directors, operating managers, and board members.

In this conversation we hit on some new ways to approach ROIC, which goes far beyond some of the conventional thinking and math found in finance textbooks. We also bust a few sacred cows, such as discounted cash flow analysis.

Finding Value in Numbers is far from a finance book for value investors with repackaged recycled content found in other similar books. The content is fresh, interesting, and even entertaining at times.

They called him 'Chainsaw Al.' In 1996, Al Dunlap took over a struggling Sunbeam and did what he did best: he cut. He let go 6,000 employees and closed 18 factories. The stock price? It nearly quadrupled in less than two years. To Wall Street, he was a superstar. But the 'turnaround' was a house of cards. 

To meet impossible targets, Dunlap used 'cookie-jar' accounting and 'channel stuffing'—basically booking future sales today to hide massive losses. 

By 1998, the board fired him, the SEC banned him for life, and Sunbeam was headed for bankruptcy. So, was he a genius who saved companies, or a corporate 'psychopath' who destroyed them for a quick buck?

In this episode, I bring back my friend Gordon Graham, the author of The Intrepid Brotherhood, who knows what it's like to work for a psychopathic leader. We explore this topic as we go through some of the key ideas in John Byrne's book, Chainsaw.