CFO Series - 2019

Leaders provide the culture, environment, values and incentives that foster and encourage change. Most importantly, great leaders create environments of trust that allow employees to challenge, innovate and work as teams. In a rapidly changing world, heartfelt leaders build great organizations. Understand the qualities of a great leader and find out how you can become a great and heartfelt leader no matter your title or place in an organization. In this session you’ll learn how to boost your business communication effectiveness through storytelling. Don’t just simply relay your financial results. Stories will create mental pictures, stimulate critical thinking and provide concrete examples of theoretical concepts.

Highlights

• Tell a Story - Become a memorable speaker and mesmerize your company’s audiences in a way that motivates them to take actions that improve the bottom-line.
• Heartfelt Leadership - Learn how to become a great leader and build a trusting organization.
• Eight Attributes of Successful People - Explore key actions that successful perform and implement them for your own success.
• Accounting Reimagined: The Future of Our Profession - Learn simple steps to take for creating a 21st century finance department, which will add value to your company. 

Benefits

The CFO Series provides extensive case study analysis and many opportunities for group discussion.

Designed For

This series is for people who are, or aspire to be, chief financial officers. The discussions will be most appropriate for people in medium‐sized organizations.

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Most companies manage their income statement, but virtually ignore the balance sheet until balance sheet problems create seemingly insurmountable problems. This session discusses how to analyze and manage your financial statements more holistically, allowing you to identify and correct balance sheet issues early. We'll also discuss how to calculate the cost of capital, how to use it to make superior, everyday business decisions and how it could be misused. We'll explore the numerous financing alternatives and how to choose whether to raise debt or equity. Lastly, we'll take a look at our own personal finance and the steps to build our personal net worth. Even if you are meeting your goals, you’ll gain insight and ideas that add to and reinforce what you may already be doing.

Highlights

• Balance Sheet Management - Gain new ideas to incorporate in your analyses for enhanced performance and reduced risk.
• The Cost of Capital: Why You Should Use it - Get a thorough understanding of the Cost of Capital and using it to get the biggest bang for your buck.
• Debt Versus Equity: Which Will Your Organization Need Next? - Understand what to consider in financing alternatives and their advantages.
• Build Your Personal Net Worth - Gain new insight to help you attain your personal financial goals.

Benefits

The CFO Series provides extensive case study analysis and many opportunities for group discussion.

Designed For

This series is for people who are, or aspire to be, chief financial officers. The discussions will be most appropriate for people in medium‐sized organizations.

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You can add more value to your financial leadership role when you are versed in technology trends and innovations that impact you, your organization and the accounting profession, including the IoT (Internet of Things), artificial intelligence, data analytics, business intelligence, cloud accounting software and more. Blockchain is another one of the most talked about and disruptive new technologies in the accounting industry. You’ll receive a practical and easy to understand explanation of Blockchain and the potential applications for it in accounting and finance. We’ll discuss other hot topics, including big data and data analysis that are unleashing unprecedented opportunity for CPAs to enhance their market value. Data analytics tools are getting easier to use and more powerful. And, CPAs are in a prime position to be the go-to professionals to help businesses use data analytics to make better business decisions. Lastly, we’ll review new MS Office 365 cloud-based applications that can help you transform to a digital business model. There are more than 20 unique applications available in the Office 365 bundle ranging from traditional Office desktop applications such as Excel, PowerPoint, Word, etc., to a new generation of cloud-based applications such as OneDrive, SharePoint, Yammer, Delve and more that have strategic potential for your organization.

Highlights

• CFO Technology Update - Explore the latest technology trends and innovations impacting you.
• Blockchain Technology: What Every CFO Should Know - Learn about the potential to apply Blockchain to your accounting and finance functions.
• Leverage Big Data and Data Analytics to Make Better Decisions - Get a primer on what it’s all about and how to leverage it.
• MS Office 365: Applications Lightening Round - Review the core Office 365 cloud applications, so you can assess the strategic potential for your organization.

Benefits

The CFO Series provides extensive case study analysis and many opportunities for group discussion.

Designed For

This series is for people who are, or aspire to be, chief financial officers. The discussions will be most appropriate for people in medium‐sized organizations.

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Do we really understand why we, and our companies, make the decisions we do? We may believe that we make decisions only after acquiring all the facts, carefully considering all the alternatives and logically choosing the best option. However, Nobel prize-winner in Economics Daniel Kahneman and his long-time collaborator Amos Tversky have proven in numerous experiments and studies that we make most decisions by intuition and not analysis. We’ll examine Kahneman and Tversky’s groundbreaking work and its implications on us, our companies and the accounting profession. The course will continue with an exploration of achieving success through experimentation. Study after study has shown that great successes rarely occur as the result of a giant leap, but rather from disciplined experimentation that builds on a foundation of learning and discovery. This session will help put you on a path of continuous achievement by teaching you how to experiment and create enduring progress. You’ll also learn a practical “real world” budget planning approach that aligns spending to long-term strategy, creates a culture of accountability and responsibility, and might actually be fun when everyone gets on board. We’ll conclude with a discussion on current best practices for finance teams to implement now and in the future.

Highlights

• Accounting Fast and Slow: Thinking About Analysis - Hear the research on how decisions are made by intuition and not analysis.
• Avoid Failure: Succeed Through Experimentation - Follow a path of continuous achievement by learning how to experiment.
• Aligning Budgets to Strategy: The Key to Profitability - Create a model for your organization’s future growth and profitability.
• The Finance Team of Tomorrow - Learn about financial management practices and new tools that make CFOs more efficient.

Benefits

The CFO Series provides extensive case study analysis and many opportunities for group discussion.

Designed For

This series is for people who are, or aspire to be, chief financial officers. The discussions will be most appropriate for people in medium‐sized organizations.

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Learn how corporate performance management (CPM) can seamlessly integrate many techniques including strategy maps, a balanced scorecard, and the alignment of KPI’s to identify and track your organization’s critical success factors. Gain insights into how to convert “too much data” into useful information and how to use metrics to create flexible budgets and rolling forecasts.

Highlights

Corporate performance management

• Poor strategy execution frustrates many executives as their organizations struggle with performance improvement, making decisions using intuition in the absence of hard data. Corporate performance management (CPM) seamlessly integrates many techniques including strategy maps and a balanced scorecard. Together they align manager and employee behavior, actions, and priorities using key performance indicators (KPIs) with specific targets to enable accountability.

Business intelligence and data analytics

• Volatility and complexity are the new normal. Most organizations are drowning in data but starving for information. The finance and accounting function has the opportunity to leverage Big Data and the continuum of analytics – descriptive, diagnostic, predictive, and prescriptive. All are useful for better decision making. Collecting, validating, and reporting data is not the same thing as analyzing information where we can glean valuable, actionable insights. In some ways the finance function is many years behind other disciplines such as marketing, sales, and supply chain managers, in applying analytics. How can the CFO’s function catch up?

Driver-based budgeting

• The annual budgeting process is often criticized as a fiscal exercise done by the accountants that is obsolete soon after it is published, prone to gamesmanship, cumbersome, not being volume sensitive, and disconnected from the strategy and needed risk mitigation spending. You can resolve these deficiencies using capacity-sensitive driver-based expense projections. Driver-based budgeting allows for quick scenario planning and far easier analysis of a growing organization whose future may look nothing like today. The budget can be periodically refreshed to create rolling financial forecasts extending beyond the fiscal year end.

Effective management accounting

• Critics have claimed that traditional managerial accounting is at best useless and at worst dysfunctional and misleading. Most line managers do not trust their management accounting data. 21st Century management accounting develops cost/unit metrics that are useful for budgeting, cost analysis and control. Current methods bring truly accurate fact-based costing visibility, tracing costs and identifying cause-and-effect relationships rather than broadly allocating overhead. This information provides the ability to reveal the true profit margins for products as well as for specific sales channels and customers. Removing the barriers caused by your current management accounting techniques can provide huge rewards.

Benefits

• Learn how to identify and track your organization’s critical success factors.
• Discover how to convert “too much data” into useful information.
• Explore ways to use metrics to create flexible budgets and rolling forecasts.
• Find out why “What causes cost?” is the most important question in management accounting.
• Understand how Business Intelligence (BI) and Business Analytics (BA) can help you make sense of your organization's data.
• Learn how managerial accounting can become managerial economics.

Designed For

Financial professionals who are, or aspire to be, chief financial officers. The discussions are targeted at those in midsize organizations.

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