A great reminder to focus on adding value to your organization

books:


	• Reinventing the CFO: How Financial Managers Can Transform Their Roles and Add Greater Value Jeremy Hope Harvard Business School Press, 2006 - 258 pages average customer review:based on 9 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Well-written proposal for a new role of the CFO

Jeremy Hope's well-written and well-documented proposals deserve careful reading by every financial executive. It is no news that the job of the Chief Financial Officer is changing. However, he points out, few CFOs understand or accept the steps they should take to prepare themselves for the demands of a new role. Hope explains what they need to do clearly and concisely, mincing no words about the troubled state of the CFO profession today. We recommend this book to CFOs and other financial professionals who want to become strategic partners in their organizations.

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Loved it, but was left unfulfilled

I loved this book. Mostly because it offers us hope. And I agree with the author that most of us finance people are making things unnecessary complicated for ourselves.

Mr. Hope makes a very valid point. We do focus too much on detail and budgets are obsolete often before they are are written down the final time.

But in the end, I was also left very unfulfilled. The author tells us how we do things wrong and shares examples of organizations that have broken free. Yet specifics are more often than not never given. We are left with broad guidelines to figure out the rest for ourselves. This makes me wonder if the book is not just an advertisement for his beyond budgeting roundtable and himself as a consultant.

I gave it three stars anyway since it gives hope and perhaps I will figure out to actually do it real soon.
His advice however can be summed up in a few lines:
1) Skip budgets and go for rolling forecasts which can be updated monthly.
2) Eliminate much of the accounting detail and set it up in the same way you report.
3) Keep your internal and external reporting the same. Don't report twice.

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A great reminder to focus on adding value to your organization

As a Controller of a software corporation looking to move to the next level, this book was a great reminder to me of the many mistakes finance professionals make every day that can result in getting too involved in the details to the detriment of evolving the business. This book contains many common sense strategies CFO's need to implement to improve the efficiency of the finance department such as spending less time on producing reports that do not get used and focus on a few KPI's to allow time for analysis and anticipating the future. Hiring staff with the right attitude and giving them the power to make decisions is also key to an efficient finance department. So many companies focus on qualifications and previous experience rather than thinking "Is this person smart enought to be trained to learn what we need them to know?". There were so many examples in this book of good business practices as well as mistakes, making the book a very interesting and informative read.
Angela Coldwell - Author of 100 Essential Steps to Career Success

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Required reading for leadership

I'll be brief given the previous detailed reviews. My view is that the author provides great insight based on my experience working for large companies struggling with many of the issues described in the book. The author did his homework. The principles are clear and nicely discussed. This reading is valuable to those aspiring to finance leadership.

I don't agree with everything the author states; more tangible examples would have been helpful; and some, important points were noticeably left out (in my view). Nevertheless, it is a great, insightful piece of work worth serious consideration by those in the business.

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A Great new angle of Financial Visiton

I just received this book last week and started reading. This has been an easy read with lots of good pointers. I kept a highligter close by the entire time I have been reading. As a CFO I often feel buried in beurocracy but this book gives ways the CFO can free themselves from some of this drudgery.

reviews: page 1, 2

On the heels of a decade of scandals and the new pressures brought on by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, corporations expect far more from their CFOs than simply managing the numbers.

They expect decision-making support and performance insights that can improve bottom-line results. Unfortunately, the complexity and detail inherent in CFOs? jobs keep them shackled to budgeting and transaction-processing systems that leave little time for value-adding activities.

Grounded in extensive research, Reinventing the CFO outlines seven critical roles?from streamlining redundant processes to regulating risk to identifying a few key measures?that CFOs must take on in order to successfully transform the finance operation.

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