CFO Bookshelf

What happens when a great storyteller learns that one of his closest friends is building an investment portfolio for his three daughters that he hopes will grow to a half billion dollars over the next thirty years? What happens is that we get a book pairing similar to The Education of a Value Investor (Spier) meets a mentor, The Dhandho Investor (Pabrai). In this case, the storyteller is Neeraj Khemlani, who tells Matt Ankrum's investing story in The Coffee Can Investor. During this conversat...

Can you name a work of fiction that centered around a stock picker? Alternatively, can you provide three fictional titles related to personal finance? If both answers are no, this episode provides a brief synopsis of four works of fiction revolving around personal finance and investing. One of the titles is new. Three have been written in the past twenty years, and one is a classic you might want on your bookshelf (the numbers do not add up because we've added a bonus title at the end). Execu...

Every financial executive should either have the book Valuation or have it on their physical or digital copy in their antilibrary. CFO Bookshelf is thrilled and honored to have the lead author of all eight editions of this foundational book on valuation, which is used in many financial curricula around the nation on college campuses. In this conversation, we hit on ROIC, growth, economic profit, long-term thinking, and the best way to read this book. Executive Wins PodcastThe Executive Wi...

Why has Taylor Swift trademarked her and her cats' names? And how does she protect the approximately three hundred trademarks she owns? As Kary Oberbrunner tells us, we're just like Taylor in that we're all IP companies. In this engaging conversation about IP, we learn about Instant IPᴵᴾ, the role blockchain plays in IP, the reason good fences make good neighbors, and why you should consider an IP holding company. The book title we're discussing is Kary's, You Are an IP Company, which was kic...

As my consulting practice started taking off about twenty years ago, I started reading everything I could by Fred Nickols, who blogged regularly for the software vendor, SmartDraw. Fred's articles were short, to the point, and always included a simple visual framework that was easy to comprehend. I ultimately read every post on that blog. Fred is a long-time consultant who calls himself a solutions engineer. In this conversation, we talk about his favorite frameworks and the origins of those ...

I'm betting that over half the CFO Bookshelf listenership participate in an NCAA tournament basketball pool at the office. Accordingly, I thought I'd share a story from a basketball legend I don't think I've ever heard retold from a leadership expert during a speaking event. I end this special episode on my three favorite basketball movies. What are yours?

When I first experienced the Cynefin Framework in an HBR article many years ago, I never tried to adapt it to my work until I interviewed Bryce Hoffman, author of American Icon and Red Teaming, a few years ago. While Bryce made the Cynefin Framework seem more understandable and accessible, Kevin Eikenberry has gone further to show leaders how to act when surrounded by varying problems they are trying to navigate with this sensemaking framework. Kevin has written nearly 20 books, and his...

I recently came across a book that's been out for over 10 years by an exceptional and tenacious researcher and an engaging writer, Lodewijk Petram. His book, The World's First Stock Exchange, might be the first to explore how early investors first bought and traded shares of the VOC of this next stock exchange. The founding of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) in 1602 marked the beginning of Amsterdam’s rise from a modest market town to a global financial powerhouse. The Company’s introducti...