CFO Bookshelf

When I finished reading Next Generation Retail by Deborah Weinswig and Renee Hartmann, my first thought was that the great ideas in this book apply to direct-to-consumer manufacturers and professional services firms.

In this conversation, co-author Renee Hartmann helps us to understand better the following technologies that are not just for big companies:

• metaverse
• blockchain
• live streaming
• social commerce
• data and the CORE framework
• retail media
• quick commerce
• supply chain
• Headless CaaS

Derek Lidow is a former business founder of a major global semiconductor company that he ultimately sold. Today, he's a professor at Princeton, where he teaches entrepreneurship, the topic of his newest book, The Entrepreneurs.

This book is rich with historical stories of entrepreneurs doing the same things in the past as they are doing today.

In this deeply insightful conversation with Derek Lidow, we learn the three major traits of entrepreneurs, the origin of the term creative destruction, the role of outsiders in business innovation, the concept of swarming, and the law of unintended consequences.

When Walter Chrysler built his New York skyscraper in the early 1930s, his critics stated the building was a monument created for himself. The same comment could have been applied to John Jakob Raskob's justification for building The Empire State Building.

In this book club-style conversation, John Coe and I dissect the book, The Birth of a Building. The author's book addresses how a book is conceived, financed, designed, and constructed. Unlike Chrysler and Raskob, this book starts with a purpose and a philosophy for any real estate undertaking.

Our guest is John Coe, the podcast host of Icons of DC Area Real Estate.

Curiosity drives much of the content on this podcast, and when Erik Hanberg's book, The Little Book of Boards, showed up in my email, I felt compelled to buy it for several reasons.

Of the six or seven boards I've served on, some have been boring experiences, others have been exceptional. I was curious if this book would have been valuable to me during my first board experience, which wasn't great--it definitely would have been.

While Erik's background is in the non-profit world, this book and conversation apply to any organization.  Some big ideas we hit are performing due diligence for the board you are considering, getting involved outside board meetings, strategic planning, compensation committees, and mission statements.

Not only is Neil Dahlstrom the author of the business historical narrative Tractor Wars, but he's also the Branded Properties and Heritage Manager at John Deere. Before that, he was Deere's Corporate History and Archives Manager.

Neil admits he wanted to be Indiana Jones when he grew up and even worked in a museum in high school.

During this conversation, we learn what a corporate archivist does, how to start a company archive, and how to start a career in this field.

All of us have heard of the cola wars, the tennis shoe wars, and certainly the PC wars. But the tractor wars?

Neil Dahlstrom is a historian and archivist for John Deere, and he's the author of Tractor Wars, a historical narrative of the race to be the top manufacturer of power farming at the turn of the twentieth century. Will it be International Harvester, Ford, or the much smaller player, John Deere?

Neil's book is a story of what-ifs, including pricing wars, business rollups, marketing insights, and bold moves by Henry Ford.

Derek Sivers was an accidental business founder. All he wanted to do was put his music online and sell it online before the dotcom bubble when PayPal did not exist yet.

During one four-year period, his revenues jumped from $1 to $20 million while his staff count surged from 8 to 85. He eventually sold CD Baby for $22 million in 2008.

Derek tells his founder's story in the book, Anything You Like. Since it's a book I recommend to every CFO, I invited Hannah Munro, the host of the CFO 4.0 podcast, to unpack this story full of ups and downs for this fascinating business founder.

If you like books similar to Shoe Dog and Derek's, we list our top ten titles in this unique leadership genre. You can revisit that list here: Books Similar to Anything You Like and Shoe Dog.

One of the best books we've read in 2023 is the story of Dame Stephanie 'Steve' Shirley, who started a business of women freelance programmers in a male-dominated world in the 1960s based in London.

The bookends of this remarkable story include an escape from the Holocaust from her homeland in Austria to her new adopted country in England, thanks to Kindertransport.

While there are many business insights in Steve's book, Let It Go, she pulls back the curtain to reveal the many ups and downs in her family life, including the love, care, and hardship of raising a son who was profoundly autistic.

The other bookend describes Steve's goal of co-ownership with her staff, along with the gifting of many millions of dollars through philanthropic causes.

Read the show notes - LINK

We learned many linear frameworks in business school to help us solve simple to complex problems. Yet, systems thinking was probably missing from that curriculum.

The Fifth Discipline (Senge) and Systems Thinking (Meadows) are typical starting points for learning systems thinking. However, those books are not written from a business person's perspective.

Simple Complexity, by Dr. William (Willy) Donaldson, is the most readable and pragmatic book I've read on systems thinking. The author has a business background and uses stories from the field to simplify what otherwise would be obtuse and confusing concepts.

In this conversation, we will learn the bare essentials of systems thinking and how to apply this skill in our organizations.

David Axson is called a CFO whisperer, but I'm also calling him an expert on calling the flaws and weaknesses of some of the biggest name management tools and systems from the past that are still influencing our decision-making today.

David is the author of the 2010 book, The Management Mythbuster. In this conversation, we hit on a variety of topics, such as:

• annual budgeting
• performance pay
• calendar-driven reporting
• informational vs. analytical data
• EBITDA
• management GURUs
• cost allocation

We wrap up with David's appreciation for the business classics, and we'll hear his five favorites.

Show Notes: Read Here