Participant Attending The Emerging CFO Program

Curriculum

How do you become a strategic financial leader? How do you stay current with emerging techniques and trends? And how can you secure a key seat at the table?

The Emerging CFO delivers with a comprehensive curriculum that combines equal parts strategy, finance, and leadership.

The carefully-designed curriculum also explores emerging trends and challenges in finance, such as mergers and acquisitions, globalization, and behavioral finance. And you’ll gain a deeper understanding of the importance of aligning finance with strategy and leadership.

Program Highlights

Below is just a sample of the sessions you’ll experience as part of the program.

How do Great Companies/Leaders Happen

Most successful businesses are discovered, not planned. This fact leads many to conclude (wrongly) that such successes are just luck in action. In fact, the discovery of successful business follows a clear pattern — both among entrepreneurial companies and among established, innovative firms. What role can you play in the discovery process at your company? To address this question, we’ll talk about the characteristics that make for a great leader.

Quote
The world of a CFO has changed dramatically. It used to be about technical expertise. Now CFOs need to make strategic financial decisions in a changing dynamic environment.
Attribution
Ilya A. Strebulaev, Faculty Co-Director

Motivating Others to Perform

As they look for more effective ways to inspire their employees to work harder and smarter, most managers rely on financial “carrots” as motivators. This session will explore alternative “psychological levers” — tools that truly motivate people to perform without calling for excess spending. Examples from successful companies that have unlocked their employees’ true potential by providing meaning in their work will also be presented and discussed.

The Challenge of Change

When companies are successful, they have all the resources and capabilities to stay on top. Yet companies are increasingly losing their competitive edge because they fail to leverage their resources to respond to threats. To avoid this “success syndrome” and adapt to change, managers must be effective at executing incremental innovation and leading revolutionary or discontinuous change — they need to be ambidextrous.

This session introduces the idea of the success syndrome and the role of leadership and culture in overcoming it. It begins with a quick review of the evidence and provides a framework that managers can use to diagnose the culture in their own organizations.

The Rise of Shareholder Activism

This session will discuss the dramatic rise in activist campaigns in the public markets in the U.S. as well as around the globe. We will ask why there has been such a dramatic increase, forms of activist campaigns, and the consequences for firms that face activists.

Contact

Associate Director, Programs Executive Education