CFO Series: The Effective CFO (E2411053)

• Understand how to work more effectively with the sales function and the large impact that accounting has on sales. Understand how to enable sales to enhance financial results in your organization.
• View enterprise and corporate performance management (EPM/CPM) as the seamless integration of managerial methods rather than as a process.
• Understand how business analytics is an advance over business intelligence and where Big Data fits in.
• Identify and differentiate strategic KPIs in a balanced scorecard and operational performance indicators (OPIs) in dashboards.
• Properly calculate product, service-line, channel and customer profitability for analysis, insights and actions.
• Perform “predictive accounting” for capacity-sensitive driver-based budgets/rolling financial forecasts, what-if analysis and outsourcing decisions.
• Overcome implementation barriers such as behavioral resistance to change and fear of being held accountable.
• Look at the requirements of the modern-day CFO differently and be an effective leader in your organization.
• Better understand how identifying and defining environmental, social and governmental efforts within an organization and measuring and reporting on those efforts will make their organizations more efficient and profitable.

Sales and accounting are not alike. Both functions should work together to achieve superior financial performance. If accounting and sales work together effectively, then net income, revenue and sales incentives would all increase. Thinking differently about how to work together will dramatically enhance financial performance. Imagine at least a five-percent increase in the bottom line.

Many CFOs place too much emphasis on external financial and statutory compliance reporting for government regulatory agencies and not enough on corporate performance management (CPM) methods, including internal management accounting. The former is for valuation (e.g., inventories and COGS). The latter is for “creating wealth value” to support better decisions. This course will provide tools and information for CFOs to transition from bean counters to bean growers. The best CFOs not only keep score, but they enable the organization to score more, which is much more valuable.

With all the buzz about the additional responsibilities of CFOs today, what are the essential skillsets for success? How do you excel when you are spread so thin? Becoming the multi-skilled CFO companies are looking for requires you to balance traditional responsibilities with new demands. How do you utilize your key relationships and your team to fill the gaps and make sure nothing slips through? To be effective requires a shift in the way financial leaders think and approach their day. Thinking differently about how to accomplish the broad spectrum of CFO responsibilities is a key lesson in your essential lifelong learning. We will review many tactics to help you become even more effective.

ESG broadly covers many of the non-financial issues every organization faces. The use of ESG as a term however conjures images to many of tree-huggers protecting rare species at the expense of jobs and growth, requirements that well-qualified candidates are not hired or passed over for promotion because they do not meet “diversity standards” and that companies are constrained by restrictive laws and regulations from conducting their business. ESG is not about limiting growth or profitability. It is about measuring non-financial information and using that information to make companies more efficient and more profitable. ESG is not a fad that will go away but a method of viewing our organizations so that they can be better and more profitable.