Reinventing the CFO: How Financial Managers Can Transform Their Roles and Add Greater Value.

• Author: Marshall, Jeffrey
• Position: BookSHELF - Book review

Reinventing the CFO: How Financial Managers Can Transform Their Roles and Add Greater Value, by Jeremy Hope. Harvard Business School Press, 258 pages. $29.95.

Reinventing the CFO has lots of good things going for it, not the least of which is an effusive set of cover blurbs from CFOS themselves talking about "redefining the role of finance," "a wake-up call for CFOs and their colleagues" and "essential reading for individuals taking on the senior finance role."

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Hope, an author and the research director of the Beyond Budgeting Round Table, a nonprofit that helps organizations improve their performance management processes, also chooses some fine examples of CFOs in diverse companies from around the world, among them Unilever, American Express, GE Capital, Cognos, Telecom New Zealand and the World Bank.

Then, too, he smartly divides the book into seven critical roles that the CFO must play. These are: freedom fighter, analyst and adviser; architect of adaptive management, warrior against waste; master of measurement; regulator of risk and champion of change. (All are alliterative, in case you hadn't noticed.) As he probes the...