An Introduction to Personal Effectiveness for CFOs and Finance Professionals is a book that I wrote to give an outline of some core behavioural skills that are essential to business-focused Finance but don’t receive enough attention.

The book arose out of a reading project I undertook in order to get a well-rounded view of CFO and Finance business partnering roles, and the skills and behaviours involved. And I think it’s only fair to acknowledge the influence of at least some of the books I read. In fact, I’ll mention just two, because these are the most relevant to the subject matter of this book.

Firstly, a kindle-only book by Alan Warner, Finance Business Partnering - The search for value, was useful in suggesting a skills framework for Finance business partnering. Warner’s analysis is where I got the three categories that I now talk about - Business acumen, Behavioural, and Technical.

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Last week I summarized a presentation PitchBook analysts made at a Portland business event, Breakfast with PitchBook – Recap of 2019 and Predictions for 2020.

Since then a number of members from our community have asked me how they should use this information as finance leaders at their company. Here is a condensed version of my responses to them.

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Depending upon what study you look at, most of the time in sales is spent on administrative tasks instead of being in front of customers. Given that the lifeblood of a company is the revenue that our customers so generously give to us, it is amazing that so little time is spent on helping sales teams be more efficient at generating revenue. CRMs are fantastic tools for gathering data on customer and sales rep activities, but organizations spend very little time in providing meaningful information to help sales teams be more effective.

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M&A, PE and the VC markets were on everyone’s mind during PitchBook’s annual recap and prognostications.

PitchBook’s James Gelfer, Senior Strategist and Wylie Fernyhough, Analyst, updated ACG members with reflections on 2019 and predictions for 2020 on the Mergers & Acquisitions, Private Equity and Venture capital markets. Their focus was mainly on the United States.

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Anand Soni shared a few of his insights regarding the changing role of the CFO in this CFO Talk – The “Business CFO”.

He explains the changes in the role over the past 5 years and how that change seems to be accelerating. The roles of compliance and reporting aren’t going away, while the strategic and commercial aspects of the role keep growing.

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