CFO Bookshelf

Many business students and most strategic analysts are familiar with Porter's Five Forces competitive framework.

Katherine Gehl is a former CEO and was frustrated with the lack of innovation and competition she was noticing in our two-party political system.

After successfully publishing a white paper on the issue and a solution with Michael Porter a few years ago, she recently released her first book with her research partner entitled The Political Industry. Katherine is our guest on this installment of CFO Bookshelf.

Last week, we heard from the President of Kolbe Corporation, Amy Bruske. We enjoyed that conversation so much, we decided to unpack much of what she had to say on conative strengths.

Mark and Bruce addressed the relevance of Kolbe in the business and smaller work teams and that this is an assessment that will have a major impact on your life personally and professionally.

Amy Bruske is the president of Kolbe Corp. She is also the co-author of Business is Business with her step-mother, Kathy Kolbe.

Amy discusses a number of topics on the show including an overview of conative instincts, her book, and why teams get stuck.

CFO Bookshelf is impressed with the Canadian software company called Dryrun which specializes in cash flow forecasting. The co-founder of the company, Blain Bertsch joins us to talk about his company, the software, and cash flow modeling in general.

You probably know her for the best-selling book, Multipliers. But Liz Wiseman is also the author of one of CFO Bookshelf's favorite books on A-Players entitled Rookie Smarts. Liz tells us the difference between having a rookie and a veteran mindset.

Bruce and I enjoyed our conversation so much last week with OKR expert, Ben Lamorte, we wanted to unpack that discussion by sharing our own observations.

Key themes include:

• starting small
• is it flavor-of-the-month?
• teams vs. individuals
• the OKR cycle
• is the OKR process only short-term thinking?
• grading the OKR process each quarter
• moving the needle

Ben Lamorte is one of the top experts and consultants on implementing OKRs around the globe. He's an author and the President of OKRs.com.

In this episode, Ben explains how Jeff Walker, his mentor and former CFO of Oracle, introduced the OKRs concept to Ben.

Ben goes on to explain that OKRs are simple to implement, but hurdles and barriers can surface near the beginning of an implementation -- he explains his process in getting team buy-in.

Brian Jones joins the 2 CFOs at CFO Bookshelf to talk about organizational health and the benefits to the company as a whole.