Customer Reviews

CFO: Architect of the Corporation's Future

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

"CFO: Architect of the Corporations Future" was the worst finance book I ever purchased. I was hoping to gain some concrete suggestions on financial stragtegy. Rather, I received a bunch of "touchy feely" suggestions on communications enhancement. Obviously, the authors' have no background in corporate finance.

This is not a textbook on financial strategy and corporate finance. What it tells us is that CFO must tranform themselves into business partner and stop being bean-counters. If you do not want to be out-sourced to a shared service company, you;d better read this book. Of course, this book have shortcomings like most of the concepts like VBM, ABM & balanced scorecard are only briefly touched and because of this, the authors should have included further reference. Furthermore, some minor mistakes like getting the name of the CFO of Ericsson wrong (p13) caused me to doubt the credibility of the case studies. It's a pitty that this was not discovered during the re-printing of the book and such mistake came from an international accountancy firm like PWC.

CFOs should become more involved in choosing projects and start to help their co-workers in product development, etc. use financial tools to make decisions. There, I just told you the guts of the book. The rest of it lacks detail for something written by an accounting firm.

This book might be useful to a young person who is trying to decide whether they want a career in finance or not. Because it is trying to discuss how good companies will use their CFOs in the future. Or for that matter, someone just starting out in finance to see what types of jobs are out there.

It is a must own book if you want to impress people: all the jargons and diagrams can make anyone sounds good. But if you want to have a real impact of the company, you better find another book.

I found this book particular important as it provides a comprehensive view for those Financial Managers try to shifts from score keepers to decision makers.

And by complex I don't mean a deep thinking, analytical book. There are alot of pictures, drawings, charts, graphs, etc in here and if you don't know much about finance, you will be lost on occasion. It's a pretty decent read if you can find one for a good price.

In regards to the person from April 28, 1999, if you can seriously and honestly say that PricewaterhouseCoopers "...Obviously, the authors' have no background in corporate finance..." then you need to keep away from any business books.

I really think it is an excellent book that provides you with an overview of the new strategic role of the CFO. Its clarity of ideas and use of illustrations are key to obtaining a concise understanding of value based management and performance measurement theory. If you want to initiate exploring the world of finance's changing profile from transaction-based to value-added service function, this book will definitely give you a complete understanding of it. Once you read this book, I highly recommend PWC's "In Search of Shareholder Value" as well as Harvard's "Value Based Management".