Podcast

Richard Rumelt is a legendary strategy pioneer and author of The Crux and Good Strategy Bad Strategy. In this insightful episode, Richard dismantles traditional “strategic planning,” arguing it is often merely a financial budget masquerading as actual business strategy. He emphasizes that true strategy is problem-solving rooted in rigorous diagnosis. We will also discover how to identify the crux while breaking through unconscious constraints to achieve coherent, highly impactful, and addressable strategic organizational action.

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What if the smartest investing move was simply to stop selling? Author and former CBS News chief Neeraj Khemlani joins CFO Bookshelf alongside his friend and investment expert Matt Ankrum, CFA, to unpack The Coffee Can Investor—a book born from a $5 million gift to three daughters, a century-old coffee can, and one obsessive question: what do 100-bagger stocks have in common?

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Gavin McMahon is an engineer by training who has worked across the defense, automotive, and publishing industries. He served as VP and Director of Web Strategy at Gartner and is now co-founder of Fassforward—a 25-year-old leadership and communication consultancy recognized on the Inc. 5000. All of their work, Gavin says, comes down to two things: leadership and storytelling. The double S in the name honors his business partner, Rose Fast.

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Jonathan Stark is the author of Hourly Billing Is Nuts and host of the Ditching Hourly podcast. He has spent two decades helping independent consultants escape the trap of trading time for money. In this conversation, Jonathan breaks down why hourly billing structurally undermines knowledge workers and shares the mindset shifts and practical tools—value pricing, fixed-fee proposals, and access retainers—that can transform a professional services practice.

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Most finance books recycle the same material. Finding Value in Numbers doesn’t. Mark Gandy sits down with author Ehsan Ehsani to unpack a book he calls his new favorite finance read with math—and he’s read nearly all of them. From ROIC adjustments to marginal investing frameworks, Ehsan brings fresh thinking to fundamental investing in a way that’s both intellectually rigorous and genuinely approachable.

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Al Dunlap didn’t just cut costs — he cut everything. When he took over Sunbeam in 1996, he slashed 6,000 jobs, closed factories, and sent the stock soaring. Wall Street loved him. But behind the numbers was a fraud: cooked books, phantom sales, and a company quietly dying. By 1998, he was fired, banned by the SEC, and Sunbeam was bankrupt. Was he a turnaround genius or a corporate psychopath? My friend Gordon Graham joins me to find out.

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Kyle Hegarty is a gifted, story-driven writer, best known for his first book, The Accidental Business Nomad. His newest book, Sales Punks, tackles the sales recession facing B2B teams and offers remedies for an outdated playbook. Kyle breaks down the difference between the seller’s journey and the buyer’s journey—and why that mindset shift is critical. You don’t need to work in sales to enjoy this one. Plus, Mark shares his seven all-time favorite sales books.

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One of the best business books I’ve read in the past five years is Railroader by Howard Green, and it’s easily in my Top 100 business reads of all time. Howard’s newest book is about another CEO who spent 43 years at Scotiabank, known as Canada’s most international financial institution. The CEO is Rick Waugh, and it is a perfect, very readable case study of leadership during a crisis and extreme economic challenges.

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James Beard Award-winning restaurateur Kevin Boehm has opened 40 restaurants in his 30-year career, collaborating with top chefs while earning Michelin stars. His Boka Group is now one of the world’s most successful restaurant companies. Boehm’s journey has been complex, shaped by a turbulent family life and a shocking revelation about his father that drove him in the restaurant industry. There, he discovered the magic of hospitality and the thrill of a chaotic dining room.

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Hand me a book by a creative thinker with hands-on experience helping business leaders and organizations of varying sizes get unstuck, full of mental models and thought-provoking frameworks that can be mastered in no time, and I’m hooked. That was the case with George Pesansky’s new book, Superperformance, which helps individuals and organizations achieve their full potential. George is one of those authors who is interesting, compelling, and articulate, and that’s deeply rooted in a unique origin story.

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