CFO Strategy and Leadership Program

Section 1: The CFO as a Leader – Setting the Parameters

• The scope of the CFO responsibilities
• Your strategic and leadership skill sets
• Your career aspirations as a CFO

What does the Modern CFO Do How Spend Time?

• Controller
• Strategic consideration
• Setting the tone
• Governance
• Mergers and acquisitions
• Investor relations
• What are the issues?
• Case Study: Home Depot
  “Exploring the issues that CFOs face during a time of change”

Setting Financial Objectives– Key Financial Issues

• Shareholder value
• Setting financial objectives
• Capital structure
• Economic value added
• Need for growth
• Organisational issues

Section 2: Financial Measures, Behavioral finance and Personal Bias

• Using the Performance Prism
• Shareholder Value metrics
• Using the balanced scorecard
• Understanding bias in financial data
• The risks of believing the numbers
• The risks of sales forecasts
• The problem of too much cost control

The Strategic Context – What are the Organisation’s Objectives?

• Where does strategy come from?
• The purpose of the firm
• Levels of strategy – corporate, business unit and operational
• Determinants of strategy
• Sources of data

Section 3: Designing and Implementing Strategy

• Analytic tools and techniques to design and build the strategy
• Integrating financial strategy into current operational plans and priorities
• Influencing, formulating and implementing strategy

Designing Strategy – Strategy from the Outside

• Introduction to industrial economic value of strategy
• PESTEL analysis
• Porter’s five force model
• Supply chain analysis

Case Study: The European Brewery Industry
“Applying the tools of competitive strategy to an industry”

Designing Strategy – Strategy from the Inside

• Resource based theory
• VRIN model
• Strategic assets
• Implications for strategy

Aligning Strategies

• Introduction to value drivers
• Need for sustainable competitive advantage
• Identifying sources of competitive advantage

Public Share Markets and Share Prices

• Linking financial performance to share prices
• Understanding fundamental value
• The difference between firm performance and share price performance
• The role of stock market analysts

Case Study: Royal Mail Group:

“Reviewing share price and analyst report to determine strategy”

Section 4: Personal Style, Leadership and Culture

• Who am I?
• Decision Profile analysis – understanding the dimensions of risk, luck, decisiveness and intuition

Personal Style and Managing Others

• The Myers-Briggs type indicator and managing different styles
• The Transformational CFO: Leading Change

The Transformational CFO

• Building sustainable leadership
• Building individual leadership capacity through self- awareness
• Becoming more reflective about leadership and how it works
• Changing the way the organisation thinks about leadership
• Culture web

Building and Leading a High-Performing Finance Team

• Assessing the strengths and weaknesses of your team
• Developing, influencing and motivating individuals
• Managing dynamics to ensure that your team is working at their peak performance

Section 5: The CFO as a Leader and Business Partner

Leading through Successful Change

• Analysing the impact of change on people and the organisation
• How your personal change style impacts your approach to leadership of change
• Supporting people through change
• Overcoming conflicts and chaos situations

Strategic Communication

• Investor relations strategy
• Designing the message externally and internally
• Managing internal messages
• Preparation for own personal strategic plan
• Final Discussion and Notes
• Training Evaluation