CFO Bookshelf Blog

I started my career reading Goldratt and his Theory of Constraints, which includes exploiting and elevating a constrating. Instead, A Beautiful Constraint’s authors want to leverage these limitations toward progress positively. Barden and Morgan view constraints as an opportunity and use them as a stimulus to see a new or better way of achieving an ambition. Willy Donaldson and I unpack five of their seven process steps of making constraints beautiful through mindset, method, and motivation.

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Many pricing books are heavy in ideas, abstractions, and behavioral science mind-shifting. Others are focused on simple pricing tactics. Jean-Manual Izaret’s (JMI) book, Game Changer, fills a void by showing readers and pricing practitioners how to approach pricing strategically through cleverly designed frameworks and thought-provoking questions. The heart of this conversation is The Strategic Pricing Hexagon and how to play the right pricing game.

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CFO Bookshelf places The Wisdom of Finance by Mihir A. Desai in its top 25 non-fiction list in the business books genre. The Wisdom of Finance is the pairing of complex subjects in finance with literature, history, poetry, and movies. Not only is the book educational, but I found it entertaining, too. If you are looking for a how-to book, this is not it. But the concepts you will learn will last a lifetime in your mind.

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One of the best books we’ve read on private equity is by Adam Coffey, whom we interviewed two years earlier. The title is ThePrivate Equity Playbook. Adam’s newest book is based on a two-day presentation he gave on how to roll up an industry purposely and effectively. He turned his 300-plus page slide deck into the book Empire Builder: The Road to a Billion. Key themes include how to build and finance an empire-building business endeavor.

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I am not a customer of Dunkin’ Donuts, so I know very little about their origin story. When Around the Corner, Around the World hit my reading radar, I was intrigued and was compelled to read it. I was pleasantly surprised because the book is a mini MBA on how to grow a small business into an international brand. Bruce Reed calls the book a masterclass in smart growth and thoughtful leadership.

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I had never considered the business aspects of pirating until I read Katherine Howe’s newest book, A True Account: Hannah Masury’s Sojourn Amongst the Pyrates, Written by Herself. Dreams, mission statements, culture building, profit sharing, and a code of conduct and core values are some business aspects we learn in this fast-moving novel I read in two evenings. Katherine discusses the characters and the dual timelines in this historical novel set in the 1600s and 1930s.

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I’d pick The Phoenix Project if I could only recommend one book to a CEO, CFO, or COO about the essentials or the heart of IT in a heartbeat. Gene Kim is one of the co-authors of this remarkable book. In this conversation with Gene, we address The Three Ways, the four types of work, internal audit, the role of IT security, and why this novel has universal appeal across all industries and all professions.

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I cannot count the number of times I’ve heard the following question, “Mark, I’ve heard my industry EBITDA multiple is 5x. What do you think?” Many CEOs think their business value is based on a simple equation. When the book Quick Value by Reed Phillips hit my radar, I bought it immediately. Reed’s process for valuing a private company is a simple but powerful method that should be completed annually by an internal leadership team.

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