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1961 hit musical How to succeed in business without really trying In the film, an ambitious window cleaner is promoted to CEO and sings the praises of his future in front of the executive bathroom mirror. The play featured Frank Loesser's satirical ballad “I Believe in You,” which mocked simplistic career recipes and self-help manuals. Despite this ridicule, confidence is as essential to career success as trust from others. Recognizing your career potential by a skilled mentor is important in a new book by U.S. Sen. Dave McCormick and his wife, prominent financial executive and former National Security Director Dina…

Tensions become acute when boards inherit decades of accumulated systems, processes, and organizational debt along with ambitious growth plans. How can you modernize quickly enough to compete globally while maintaining operational integrity across your franchise network? That's the challenge facing the board of Tony Roma's parent company RomaCorp, which is simultaneously cutting through traditional complexities and expanding into markets such as China and the Middle East. The board approach reveals how governance can move beyond oversight to active strategic prioritization, especially when resources are finite and every decision cascades across franchisees. In the following interview, Tony Roma CEO and Romacorp…

Here's the hard truth that most CEOs don't want to admit. Your talent strategy can either make your company invincible or powerless. Having founded multiple companies and led teams of tens of thousands of people over the past 25 years, I can tell you that the biggest mistake leaders make is believing their talent strategy can be imitated. They read books, hire HR consultants, and assume there is a universal strategy for managing people. there is no. At Simpro Group, we see this every day. The success of our commercial and residential trade customers depends on our ability to successfully…

It’s rare to find a CFO who not only manages the numbers but also champions the people and the product with equal passion. Eliran Glazer, the CFO of monday.com, is that leader. As a CFO, “You can be a problem solver. You can be an accountant. You can be a business strategy guy. I saw myself as all of the above throughout my career,” says Glazer. “This is what took me to where I am.” Glazer joins Jack McCullough to share his journey, from an early fascination with math and physics to his current role steering a tech giant through…

When Mark Penn assumed the role of CEO at MDC Partners in 2019, the company was collapsing. A marketing holding company once valued at $1.5 billion had plummeted to a market cap of just $90 million, weighed down by poor governance, fractured culture and mounting debt. “It was an archipelago,” Penn says now, “a collection of separate islands.” But Penn didn’t see chaos—he saw opportunity. Having spent decades building companies, running billion-dollar marketing budgets at Microsoft and guiding political campaigns at the highest level, he brought to the task a rare combination of strategic clarity and tactical discipline. Backed by…

As last month's AI for Finance Forum in New York City (co-hosted by AWS and CFO Leadership) drew to a close, the closing keynote uttered an unpleasant analogy: “Finance is like a duck.” On the water, he is calm, collected and delivers on time. Behind the scenes, you're frantically working on manual adjustments, spreadsheet gymnastics, and low-value tasks that take up the bulk of your team's time. After spending a full day learning about AI partners and their use cases, the room full of financial industry leaders knew exactly what was going to happen next. The AI ​​gives you the…

David Eslick is feeling pretty good about today’s M&A environment. A dealmaker extraordinaire, the CEO at Marsh McLennan Agency (MMA) has closed 131 acquisitions since 2009, six of them since November. Although unsettled by the uncertain impact of President Trump’s sporadic and unfolding tariffs on the economy, he’s hopeful the chaos has calmed. “The tariffs seem to be settling in, seem fairly balanced and less significant. That’s what our middle-market clients have been telling me,” Eslick says. While high interest rates and concerns over regulatory interference have disrupted the dealmaking of many companies, the provider of insurance solutions has a…

How can CFOs build a “future-proof” financial organization? Patrick Villanova has some ideas, and it starts with letting go of fear. “There has never been a time in history where there hasn't been some degree of macro headwinds, geopolitical instability, or exogenous disruptive forces for businesses,” he told CFO Leadership. “Company leaders must prepare for these issues, but they also need to recognize that ultimately they have no influence or control over them.” Villanova was promoted to Los Angeles-based Blackline's CFO earlier this year, following the retirement of longtime CFO Mark Partin. Mr. Villanova previously served as chief accounting officer…

I've been in business at a senior level for a long time, so I understand how other members of the C-suite view the chief marketing officer. No one sits as far across the table from the CMO as the CFO. It's not difficult to understand why. Because marketing is expensive, creative, and difficult to quantify. CFOs control the purse strings and like numbers that line up neatly. And all smart people (and CFOs usually are) seem to think that if they're given a marketing job, they can do it too. So start by liberally leveraging the Dunning-Kruger effect, mix in…

Howard Wilson, CFO of PagerDuty operates in the realm of digital operations and incident response, where efficiency and resilience are paramount. A company that serves as a vital “safety net” for over half of the Fortune 500, especially as they explore new technologies like generative AI, PagerDuty focuses on anticipating disruptions and safeguarding against costly incidents. Wilson spoke with host Jack McCullough to share PagerDuty’s mission and his personal story—from growing up in South Africa and his early career in software engineering to his unconventional path to the CFO role. Listen by clicking below. The Q&A, lightly trimmed and edited…