Maybe my inner circle is small and not representative of all business readers. However, most of my friends love investing and seemingly cannot get enough on how to invest and pick the right companies for their portfolios. Accordingly, I have three books I continually recommend for analyzing companies:
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Making an IMPACT with Project Management Offices
As a financial leader, I want to know every aspect of business. While quarterbacking my share of ERP implementations, I had only once heard the term PMO (short for Project Management Office). Accordingly, I wanted to learn more. After reading Laura Barnard’s new book on PMOs, I quickly realized she is probably the global thought leader on this subject. The book we unpack is The IMPACT Engine: Accelerating Strategy Delivery for PMO and Transformation Leaders.
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Strategy and Leadership as Service
Numerous financial blog articles and LinkedIn posts highlight the benefits of a small business owner hiring a portfolio CFO. However, I do not recall these writers commenting on why financial professionals step away from the W-2 world to serve multiple owners as clients. Sara Daw may be the first author to articulate why CFOs jump into the gig economy through her comprehensive research, which we can read about in Strategy and Leadership as Service.
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John Boyd’s Biographer on the OODA Loop, Strategy, and Careers
Maybe the name John Boyd does not ring a bell, but perhaps the OODA Loop will, the mental model created by one of the most gifted military strategists since Sun Tzu. I was so mesmerized by Robert Coram’s biography on John Boyd, I reached out to the author to talk about his book, a project that took him more than three years to write.
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Dave Kellogg on SaaS Metrics
Dave Kellogg is the former CEO of Host Analytics now called Planful. Dave is a brilliant writer on his blog called Kellblog and he’s outstanding behind a mic too. Since leaving his CEO post, Dave has been consulting SaaS-based businesses in Silicon Valley, and we hit on many of the topics that are near and dear to him.
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Strategy for Real Estate Companies
Strategic planning and real estate companies are not word pairings we are used to hearing. Charlie Hewlett is changing that mindset. He is the managing director at RCLCO, a company based in the Washington, D.C., metro area. He co-authored Strategy for Real Estate Companies. Our topics include the definition of a real estate company, a short definition of strategic planning, what strategic planning is not, SWOT, POVs, plan lengths, and who should work on the strategy process.
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A Wonderful Career in Crime
How did Charles Cowlam resort to a lifelong career in crime during the Gilded Age? During this fascinating interview, the author of A Wonderful Career Crime stumbles upon several nuggets of U.S. history that would otherwise remain undetected by well-known historians. Frank Garmon shares his favorite stories of Cowlam’s life as a fraudster, bigamist, and swindler. He takes us to the origin of how this micro-history came to be in book form.
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Paul Downs Doesn’t Need to be a Superstar CEO
Periodically, I stumble across a book where I don’t want it to end. I found Boss Life by Paul Downs so absorbing, so real, and so transparent that I felt compelled to reach out to him for an interview. Not only did he agree to do so, but he also said, “Let’s take all the time you need to answer these questions.”
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Former CFO Aaron Beam Revisits the HealthSouth Accounting Fraud
If you were asked to cook the books, would you? You may think, “Of course not.” Yet, why do CFOs do it? Aaron Beam was a co-founder of HealthSouth and their first CFO when his boss, Richard Scrushy, told him to fix the numbers so that the share price would not drop. Aaron faced an ethical dilemma.
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OKRs with Ben Lamorte
OKRs is the abbreviation for Objectives and Key Results. If you know nothing about OKRs and want to learn more, I can easily point you to one person – Ben Lamorte, a business author and the President of OKRs.com. I could listen to Ben all day, but at least we got to hear him for about an hour on implementing OKRs in your business.
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