Partnering for Performance: Unleashing the Power of Finance in the 21st Century Organization.

• Author: Marshall, Jeffrey
• Position: Review

By Martin G. Mand and William Whipple 3d. Amacom, 220 pages. $27.95.

The concept behind Partnering for Performance isn't revolutionary. In fact, it's become a common refrain in recent years: the chief financial officer and the finance function need to be an integral part of management in order for a company to operate at maximum efficiency. The authors, with more than 50 years of combined business experience, profess to have learned the value of this concept on the job; indeed, Martin Mand was for years the chief financial officer at Northern Telecom, now Nortel Networks.

There's a lot of good thinking in the book, and no shortage of depth. The discussion of strategic value enablers (SVEs), for instance, centers around financial executives as critical developers of strategic value. A considerable amount of theoretical terrain is...