About CFO Thought Leader

Our mission is to bring you personal firsthand accounts of CFOs who are driving change within their organizations.

In addition to their company history we also share the career journey of our spotlighted guest: What did they struggle with? How did they persevere? What makes them successful?

We highlight leadership lessons, “Ah-ha!” moments, and the things that finance leaders stopped doing that was sapping value from their work. Our CFO thought leaders have taught us that one of the most important tasks is to identify “what to stop doing” in order to create the capacity for doing what is required by finance in the 21st century.

CFO THOUGHT LEADER is all about inspiring finance professionals to take a leadership leap. We know that by hearing about the successes — (and yes, also the failures) — of others, today’s CFOs can more confidently chart their own leadership paths across the enterprise and take inspired action.

Our Journey

Hello, Jack Sweeney here, host & creator of CFO THOUGHT LEADER. First, welcome to CFO TL headquarters. Whether you’re a finance professional aspiring to take a leadership leap or a seasoned CFO seeking to better expose the path ahead for yourself or those executives you are developing, we are here to help you by peering into the minds of finance leaders who are driving change.

Today’s menu: strategy, leadership, and transformation — all prerequisites for today’s finance leaders.

Our journey began, when Steve Player (more on Steve below) introduced me to Jeremy Hope, the late author of Reinventing the CFO (Harvard Business School Publishing, 2006), I asked Jeremy why so few business thinkers wrote about the finance department. He explained that very few business thinkers of the last century felt compelled to even peer inside the finance department, much less write or talk about it.

To its credit, Reinventing the CFO was one of the first books ever to place a lens exclusively on the role of the CFO. However, what made Jeremy’s book truly remarkable was that its greatest insights had been gleaned from actual CFOs he had engaged in lengthy interviews — hundreds of them.

We’re Elevating the Voice of Finance Leadership

Jeremy wasn’t the only author querying CFOs. Inspired by Jeremy’s work, Steve Player, a finance author and top consultant, began interviewing CFOs around the globe and publishing his articles (titled “The Finance Transformation”) in a magazine I had been fortunate enough to join as editor. As a career journalist, I had arrived inside the finance corridor after 20 years of editing magazines about the highly dynamic industries of management consulting and high tech. I viewed this latest tour of duty as being less about change and more about the numbers. I could not have been more wrong. Over the ensuing years, I had the pleasure of being among the first to read Steve’s interviews, which each month chronicled the innovative milestones of a new ilk of finance leaders who were dedicated to transforming the role of finance in their organization.

An AH-HA Moment: Going Mobile

Here’s where I had an Ah-ha! moment: I had this thought that mobile technologies could perhaps help us to share the lessons of this new ilk of CFOs, but do so in their actual voice. Along the way, we could inspire other CFOs and aspiring finance leaders out there who were looking to advance their strategic thinking and evolve the role of finance within their own organizations. Let’s call it CFO THOUGHT LEADER!

Going forward, our goal is to create targeted, mobile content and engage some of the best minds in business today. We will judge our success by the followers and fans we gain, as well as how the practices being shared transform finance into providing greater value to organizations across all business sectors.

We look forward to you telling us how we are doing. If you like what you’re hearing , we would much appreciate a rating and review in iTunes, Google Play or Stitcher this will help us reach an even greater audience of finance professionals. — Jack Sweeney