Reading: Re-inventing the CFO:How Financial Managers Can Transform Their Roles and Add Greater Value

The good: a few interesting ideas
The less good: ...too much around the few interesting ideas

Here is a small book that I thought would give me a bit more insight in how a CFO can help his company. I was very curious to see if anything new would come up.

Let's get to the points that were interesting. First of all, it is always reassuring to know that most companies face the same type of challenges and issues. To put a mild positive spin to it, you are not doing worse than anyone else and knowing that the grass is not necessarily greener on the other side of the fence lets you somewhat focus on your own situation.

Secondly, Mr Hope introduces the notion that budgets and targets are not necessarily all that productive: his main point is that they generate more work and game inefficiencies rather than letting the organization be adaptive, track opportunities and focus on business growth.

Thirdly, the author emphasizes on a huge simplification of reporting and recommends analyzing trends, detecting anomalies rather than spending time in minor details and numerous indicators that hardly anyone ever reads. One of the amusing recommendation by the way is to simply stop issuing reports. If someone starts yelling, then it must be important, otherwise just let it die and move on to more value added activities.

So how do you move to value added activities? Quite mathematically, if you cut on the labor intensive-low-return activities, you free yourself up for more contacts with the business side, better understanding of the keys indicators that do matter to your company, and play a better role as a trusted adviser.

Well, all this makes perfect sense. 

As much as I understand we are all trying to market something, be it ideas, services or products, it is somehow difficult to chase away the uneasiness that emerges from reading Mr Hope’s essay.

The author is indeed absolutely right to talk about the increasing difficulties and complexities that the finance organization is facing, and yes, sometimes many would like to feel that they are contributing a lot more to the organization and the growth of the company. But quite frankly, do we really need that many pages to be sold to the solutions that Mr Hope is presumably able to bring? Does he really need to use that much verbiage to say in an apparently very educated way what could be explained simply?

If Mr Hope’s target audience is the finance crowd that wishes to emerge from its excel reports and play a more active role in supporting the business, then he should know better. We still can call out a small Sales pitch when we hear one.

Reinventing the CFO mixes concepts worth taking a look at to the work experience of a consultant who probably enjoys the sound of his own voice ( a trait we are numerous to share...). 

Some editing would have better served the author.

All in all, some interesting ideas for a quick read.

3 stars out of 5.

Gilles Daquin