CFO Bookshelf

I list the top business books I've read over the previous year each January. At the end of 2024, The Venture Mindset by Ilya Strebulaev and Alex Dang will easily be in my top three and possibly my overall favorite. The Venture Mindset reads fast and reminds me a little of Kahneman, Munger, and books about Buffett. Some of the big ideas we cover in this episode with both authors include roof s...

I had never heard of Edmond Safra until I read Daniel Gross's informative and inspiring biography, A Banker's Journey . For those who knew him and did business with him, he was everyone's favorite banker. His banks never had to write off loans, and many of his early deals were on a handshake. He never needed a government bailout, nor did he ever head to DC complaining about regulati...

Our newest guest may not be a best-selling author on real estate yet, but we're already predicting this former World Cup soccer player will soon be a household name in Dave Ramsey's world in a few years. Vaughn Bethell is the founder of REI Junkies based in South Carolina, and in this episode, we learn his unique process of providing real estate investors with a different way to reduce s...

One of the best management books ever written is The Effective Executive, by Peter Drucker, published in 1966 . Managing For Results and The Practice of Management are other favorites of this show. Randy Wooton joins us to discuss the big ideas in The Effective Executive . He's a three-time CEO and has held senior positions at Microsoft and Salesforce. He is also the host of The SaaS Expert V...

Consumers and anyone who studies business understand the subscription economy, but what about the usage economy? What is it? How does it differ from the subscription economy? Does it matter? Adam Howatson is the CEO of LogiSense and the author of The Usage Economy . In this conversation, Adam will give examples of companies that got it right with their usage-based pricing models and those that mad...

Have you ever left a movie theater where a film left you speechless and made you feel like you needed to rewatch parts of it to figure out what you were missing? Jeff Hooke's book, The Myth of Private Equity , left me feeling that way after finishing each chapter of his tell-all book about the exaggerations and overstatements of the private equity marketing machine. During this conversation,...

My favorite go-to person on all matters, Tableau and Dataviz, is Andy Kriebel. Andy was the first person to create a YouTube channel on Tableau. His subscriber base has surpassed 61,000, and his 750+ videos have 7.5 million views and counting. Andy is the co-author with Eva Murray of the book #Makeover Monday, and you can also follow his informative and insightful helpful hints each day on LinkedI...

I have my theories on why W. Edwards Deming is not a household name in 'all' business circles. Many view him as the 'quality' guy who had an impact on Japanese manufacturing after the Second World War. That view is limiting as Deming's management mindset was complete with four central tenets: Pragmatism The Law of Variation Human psychology Systems Thinking I used to recom...

Cory Doctorow is a science fiction author, technology activist, and journalist. He has written many books, most recently The Bezzle, a follow-up to Red Team Blues, which are the two books we'll discuss in this episode. These two books are the beginning of a series featuring the fictional forensic accountant Martin Hench. Hench is self-employed, loves being on the red team, and rakes in 25% of...

Alfred Sloan's My Years with General Motors was an immediate success and is considered one of the best management books written by CEOs of his era. Before his book, we'd probably have to go back to Henry Ford's autobiography to find a management book of this popularity. And then there's Harvey Firestone's book, which CFO Bookshelf considers a gem. Originally published in 1...

Gary Stevenson grew up in an impoverished area of East London where he could hold his life's belongings in two arms. About three years after graduating from the London School of Economics, Citibank made him a millionaire at a very young age. Gary was 'all in' on winning the trading game. But did overnight success bring him happiness? And why did he want to leave the Citibank trading...

Agile, DevOps, TPS, TOC, Deming's System of Profound Knowledge. Is there a mental construct or latticework that connects these robust systems? In Wiring the Winning Organization , Gene Kim and Steve Spear introduce the concepts of the three layers of work and social circuitry. The book also explains the author's three biggest learning pillars: Simplification, Slowification, and Amplifica...

Readers of  Corporate Counsel do not need to be legal professionals to enjoy this short book writen as a business fable. Anna is leaving a prestigious law firm to become the first in-house lawyer at a regional real estate firm in the Midwest. The book includes drama, conflict, and a grey beard, Anna's guide throughout the story. Our guest is the author, Peter Carayiannis, and some of the topi...

Of all the books written about Warren Buffett, I am unaware of any authors who grew up in Omaha, Nebraska and went to school with his children. Todd Finkle is the author of Warren Buffett: Investor and Entrepreneur , a book that was fourteen years in the making. If you are a Buffett student, perhaps you will have heard several of Todd's stories, but are you aware of Buffett's numerous in...

John Rossman is making his second appearance on CFO Bookshelf. We interviewed him two years ago for one of our top 10 books of 2022, The Amazon Way, Amazon's 14 Leadership Principles . John's newest book which he co-authored with Kevin McCaffrey is Big Bet Leadership . Highlights from the conversation include: What is and what is not a big bet A topic for low- and high-tech companies, bo...

Gary Harpst co-founded the ERP solution Solomon Software, which was ultimately sold to Great Plains. The CFO Bookshelf enjoys Gary's work and past books, including Six Disciplines for Excellence and Six Disciplines Revolution . Gary's newest book has been 40 years in the making. The title is Built to Beat Chaos: Biblical Wisdom for Leading Yourself and Others . A few of the themes we cov...

A Beautiful Constrain t by Morgan and Barden: is it a marketing, branding, psychology, or management book? Or is it all four? In this episode, Willy Donaldson (Simple_Complexity and Estimated Time of Departure) and I discuss five of the biggest ideas in the thought-provoking book A Beautiful Constraint . The authors state the goal is not to eliminate a constraint but to leverage it. Their book exp...

Since starting the CFO Bookshelf podcast, I have released a ‘favorite books’ show each January. I’ve always been reluctant to do so because my reading tastes may differ from yours. However, these episodes are some of the most downloaded in our podcast catalog. In this discussion, I list my Top 10 books, honorable mentions, fiction, and even books that I did not like. Other insights include what an...

Many pricing books are heavy in ideas, abstractions, and behavioral science mind-shifting. Others are focused merely on simple tactics. Jean-Manual Izaret's (JMI) book, Game Changer , fills a void by showing readers and pricing practitioners how to approach pricing strategically through cleverly designed frameworks and thought-provoking questions. This conversation starts with who should read...

CFO Bookshelf considers The Wisdom of Finance one of its favorite 25 business books. Mihir Desai combines abstract and obtuse finance concepts with literature, history, movies, and poems in his book, which was released in 2017. In this bookclub-style episode, we cover several of the themes Mihir highlighted in his educational and entertaining book: Bankruptcy (the history of Robert Morris) Options...

One of the best books we've read on private equity is by Adam Coffey. The title is The Private Equity Playbook . Adam's newest book is based on a two-day presentation he gave on how to roll up an industry purposely and effectively. He turned his 300-plus page slide deck into the book Empire Builder: The Road to a Billion . Some of the topics we cover include: investing in what you know a...

Since I am not a customer of Dunkin' Donuts, I know very little about their origin story. When Around the Corner, Around the World hit my reading radar, I was intrigued and was compelled to read it. I was pleasantly surprised because the book was a mini MBA on how to grow a small business into an international brand. Bruce Reed joins the host to uncover some of the big ideas in this book, inc...

I had never considered the business aspects of pirating until I read Katherine Howe's newest book, A True Account: Hannah Masury's Sojourn Amongst the Pyrates, Written by Herself. Every ship's captain had a vision, as did the crew. A mission steered each voyage. The crew was kept in line with its bylaws or code of conduct. Loot was allocated based on a profit-sharing plan. In this c...

I'd recommend The Phoenix Project if I could only recommend one book to a CEO, CFO, or COO about the essentials or the heart of IT in a heartbeat. The Phoenix Project is the IT version of The Goal , as both are written as a novel with a protagonist with doubts, worries, and fears. Like The Goal , the main character in The Phoenix project encounters a sage who helps him glean insights from the...

I cannot begin to count the number of times I've heard the following question or something similar, "Mark, I've heard my industry EBITDA multiple is 5x. What do you think?" As much as I want to scream at that question, this type of thinking on business value is prevalent amongst many CEOs of both big and small companies. When the book Quick Value by Reed Phillips hit my radar,...