Reinventing the CFO: Moving from Financial Management to Strategic Management - Hardcover

Johanson, Henry; Walther, Thomas; Dunleavy, John; Hjelm, Elizabeth

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0070129452 ISBN 13: 9780070129450

Publisher: McGraw-Hill Education, 1996

Synopsis

This book enables you to chart your company's course. "Reinventing the CFO" is the groundbreaking guide by financial veterans Henry Johanson, Thomas Walther, John Dunleavy and Elizabeth Hjelm that offers a proven blueprint for professionals making the enormous shift from "number cruncher" to strategist and business partner. Based on Coopers & Lybrand's pioneering "Office of the CFO frameworks", it leads you through the live critical steps that will define how you can face today's challenges: partnering and integration; redefining the role of finance and retraining staff to understand business operations and market drivers; strategy; applying traditional analytical skills and business judgment to the question; where should our company apply its capital resources? management control; producing a new set of strategic measures that business managers can use to anticipate problems and monitor progress; cost management; creating an aggressive, long-term least-cost program that replaces "cost accounting" and continuously drives costs down from within; and processes and systems-classifying each financial process as "core," "support," or "no added value," and determining the real drivers that affect the company's profitability.

About this title

From the Author

Gives CFOs and staffs a framework to contribute to business
Based on a study of more than 50 global companies, this book offers a framework for CFOs and their staffs to radically rethink their role within today's corporations and ensure they contribute to the business' success -- not just keep its numbers and books. Many companies are addressing how to get their back office accounting processes and operations to be more successful, but now the challenge is to make the Finance organization become more effective, not just more efficient. This means that CFOs and their staffs need to have enchanced business analytics, a healthy financial community united by a common sense of priorities, critical strategic performance measures that are leading indicators of business health, and a robust set of cost management tools and techniques. Hope you enjoy it! For many years we saw CFOs working on these issues and helped them chart a path through this. This book represents the best of those learnings. We would love to hear your reaction and comments.

From the Back Cover

The CFO of the future will be the CEO's navigator, anticipating risks and charting the course to new corporate destinations. Today's superstar CFOs don't just retool back office operations. They make the entire organization more effective and profitable and they are an integral part of their company's future success. This groundbreaking guide offers a proven blueprint for financial professionals making the enormous shift from "number cruncher" to strategist and business partner. Drawn from Coopers & Lybrand's tested Office of the CEO framework, it presents a five-step, in-depth approach that explores the growing role of CFOs and their staffs in business partnership; strategy; performance measurement; strategic cost management, and processes and systems. Urgent changes are under way in the role of the company finance department, provoked by mergers, acquisitions, LBOs, and bankruptcies. . .and, globally, by rapidly emerging markets, falling trade barriers, adn intense competition. At top organizations, Chief Financial Officers are multi-faceted visionaries who work with CEOs to determine the future of the organization. Such "super CFOs," to quote Fortune magazine, "shape strategy. . . and can be worth billions to a company and its shareholders." This pathbreaking book presents a framework for finance professionals to re-evaluate how they can truly add value to their business. Based on Coopers & Lybrand's pioneering Office of the CFO program, it reveals how to move beyond internally focused financial management to provide insights and analysis that deliver competitive value and direction to the organization. Drawing on extensive experience with companies of all sizes in many industries, the authors lead CFOs and their colleagues through five critical steps that reflect the challenges facing them today: Partnering and Integration redefining the role of Finance and retraining staff to understand business operations and market drivers. Strategy applying traditional analytical skills and business judgment to the question: Where should our company apply its capital resources? Management Control producing a new set of strategic measures that business managers can use to anticipate problems and monitor progress. Cost Management creating an aggressive, long-term, least-cost program that replaces "cost accounting" and continuously drives costs down from within. Systems and Processes classifying each financial process as "core," "support", or "no added value," and determining the real drivers that affect the company's profitability. Highlighted by proprietary information from Coopers and Lybrand's study of 50 benchmark companies worldwide, as well as illustrative case studies, Reinventing the CFO is essential reading for all financial executives who want their companies and themselves to survive and compete in the 21st century.

Edition details

• Publisher: McGraw-Hill Education
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0070129452
• ISBN 13: 9780070129450
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 167