CFO Bookshelf

Joe Coulombe is one of the most intelligent, creative, and thoughtful CEOs I've read about in the past ten to twenty years. He grew Trader Joe's into one of the most successful and iconic brands in the grocery industry before he sold the business in 1979.

Patty Civalleri is the co-author of Becoming Trader Joe and was a dear friend of this gifted entrepreneur. In this episode, we touch on his compensation philosophy, creative marketing strategies, the books he read, product knowledge, and saying no to the big brands.

Dan Montgomery is the founder of Agile Strategies, a boutique OKRs firm, and the author of Start Less Finish More.

Dan states the old strategic planning model of predicting and then controlling needs to give way to sensing and responding, and he calls that agile strategy.

In this conversation, he hit on many fascinating concepts:

• limitations of The Balanced Scorecard
• executing vs formulating strategy
• the retreat to cozy mental models
• the fit between OKRs and agile strategy
•  multicausal systems
• minimal viable strategies
• STEEP framework
• Platonic values
• Cynefin framework

Good luck on finding a book about phantom stock plans that's simple to understand with practical examples. It does not exist.

However, Paolo Pasicolan has created nearly a hundred such plans with the law firm he works for, Miles and Stockbridge. Paulo's explanation of phantom stock plans is clear, concise, and complete.

I've always been intrigued about the roles of business psychologists and certified business coaches and their ability to elevate the performances of the people and businesses they work with.

In this show, I visited with Dr. Russell Thackeray, a business psychologist, certified coach, trainer, and renowned speaker. We addressed topics such as resistance, when to hire a business coach, the intentions and execution of tough love, psychological capacity, and much more.

I first heard Captain Charlie Plumb's POW story some twenty years ago, and I'm thrilled to share this conversation where we talk about Louis Zamperini, an unlikely parachute dialogue, culture, the leadership of Admiral James Stockdale, and some astounding research regarding PTSD of the men held at the Hanoi Hilton.

If you do an Amazon search on KPIs, the top result will be KPI Checklists by Bernie Smith. Bernie's newest book is entitled Gamed, our topic for this discussion.

We'll find out why so many smart and creative people have a hard time agreeing on KPIs, what black hat testing is for incentives, and the KPI framework named ROKET-DS.

One of the rock stars of financial modeling is one of the founders and the Executive Director of the Financial Modeling Institute, Ian Schnoor.

In this episode, we talk about the multi-disciplinary requirements of financial modeling, the planning process, component vs systems thinking, and other big ideas around this critical business skill.

My four favorite authors on performance measure with improvement as the primary aim is Don Wheeler, Stacey Barr, Dean Spitzer, and Mark Graban.

In this conversation, we find out three of the most important questions surrounding performance improvement the right. Our guest is Mark Graban, and he's the author of Measures of Success, our topic for this episode.

Have you ever worked for a psychopathic CEO? If not, odds are that you will at least once in your career. That's according to the founder and president of the CFO Leadership Council, Jack McCullough.

Jack's newest book is, The Psychopathic CEO, and we'll hear more about who they are, how they make their way into a company, and what to do should you work for one.

Every current and past senior executive at Amazon will say their leadership principles are behind every groundbreaking innovation.

Every student of business knows about Amazon's obsession with its customers. But that's only one of the leadership principles. In this episode, John Rossman, the author of The Amazon Way delivers some of the big ideas and concepts baked into these inspiring, yet challenging leadership principles.