CFO Bookshelf Blog

I’m going to make the bold statement that Roger Martin is this era’s Peter Drucker as a prolific business writer. Roger has co-authored my favorite book on strategy, Playing to Win which is simple, concise, pragmatic, and has plenty of sticky concepts. Roger’s newest book is A New Way to Think. If you like Adam Grant, Dan Pink, the Heath brothers, or Matthew May, this book belongs in your book queue, the topic in this conversation.

Bob Swan is the former CEO of Intel, and he calls Talent: The Market Cap Multiplier a book that should be the cornerstone of every organization’s growth strategy. Ram Charan is the co-author of this book which is essentially General Atlantic’s private equity playbook for finding, obtaining, and facilitating senior leadership talent. In this conversation, Ram discusses talent banks, leadership scorecards, and the initial one-to-one meetings with CEOs and their teams.

I make no apologies for believing that Ben Lamorte is one of the most gifted business teachers and coaches I’ve ever encountered. While he’s the global go-to expert in OKRs and coaching other coaches, he could be that conversationalist who can inspire, educate, and inform on any business topic. In this episode, Ben is back to talk about OKRs. In this show, we address outcomes vs outputs and where KPIs fit in this conversation.

If you ask ten successful CEOs what they do, you’ll probably hear many answers–all good, but vastly different from executive to executive. A dream team of McKinsey partners decided to research this very question based on 200 in-depth interviews and surveys with successful CEOs. Their findings are found in the new book, CEO Excellence: The Six Mindsets That Distinguish the Best Leaders from the Rest. The book is practical, inspiring, and refreshingly insightful.

If you are looking for the PayPal version of Brad Stone’s, The Everything Store, that book has arrived. Jimmy Soni is the author behind The Founders where he takes us on a deep, yet informative and eye-opening journey from PayPal’s pre-startup days to just after its IPO. The book is rich with insights we’ve never heard before, and the bookends are incredible–the three-hour conversation with Elon Musk and the moving and inspiring epilogue.

As we observe the DNA behind some of our favorite CEOs, patterns will start to surface. Some are natural at scaling companies to new levels. And then there are the stories of Phil Knight, Jeff Bezos, Reid Hoffman, and Sara Blakely who started with a kernel of an idea and went on to launch brands that are household names. In this episode, we learn about a new leadership framework that defines the unique abilities of impactful leaders.

I read upwards of 120 books every year, and during every 12-month stretch, I’ll come across a few business leaders, entrepreneurs, and start-up founders that I admire, appreciate, and want to hold up for others to see and read about. Names in the recent past have included Alan Mulally, Bill McDermott, Ed Stack, and Hunter Harrison. The newest name I’m adding to the list is Joe Coulombe, the founder of Trader Joe’s. I would have loved to have met this larger-than-life creative thinker.

Dan Montgomery is the first person I’ve heard that connects OKRs with strategy. But Dan is not talking about this old industrial mindset of predicting and then controlling in yesterday’s strategy process. Dan lifts the idea of sensing and responding, the heart behind what he calls agile strategy. He also explains why OKRs are the engine to this strategy framework which consists of continuous experimentation. We learn more in his book, Start Less Finish More.