Category: Leadership & Culture

Lessons on team management, mentorship, internal controls, and building productive teams.

  • The Pacer

    Working with founders is like being the pacer in a race: you run at what feel like sprint speeds to you, yet seem almost leisurely to them. There is always a goal—an Ahab-like pursuit—and you get to run an important leg of their journey, making it your own by helping translate ambition into measurable progress.…

  • Passion, Accounting, and the Stories We Tell Ourselves

    The Problem with “Follow Your Passion” Stories I’ve been reading and watching a lot of TED talks lately—successful people telling the story of how they followed their passion and ended up fulfilled, happy, and successful. There’s a recurring theme: “Follow your passion. Look at me—I did, and it worked.” These talks highlight the outcome. What…

  • You Can’t Handle the Truth

    A Few Good Men It’s always bugged me a bit to admit it, but in many ways Nicholson’s witness-stand rant in A Few Good Men—I agree with it. We do live in a world with “walls.” Outcomes matter. Success requires the right players in the right positions, and that requires ruthless decisions. Turnarounds are not…

  • Finance Leadership – This Never Happened at J&J…

    My First Experience Outside the Family of Companies Let’s Play a Game: You’re the New Controller… You’re the first real financial process leader this founder-led, publicly traded company has ever had. You walk in thinking, “Great — time to bring order, structure, controls.” Cute, right? One morning the CEO’s assistant steps into your doorway. “Larry…

  • If One Person Leaving Breaks Your Finance Function, It Wasn’t Built Right

    The hidden cost of ignoring financial infrastructure—and why heroic CFOs aren’t the solution I recently came across a sharp, insight-packed LinkedIn pitch – the kind we all scroll past daily. The story was familiar: a CFO leaves, the business slows, the forecast softens, Board decks lose clarity, and meetings drift into opinion because the numbers…