Category: Leadership & Culture

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

  • 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…

  • Bookkeeping Is Strategic: Why Foundational Finance Is the Biggest Competitive Advantage Small Agencies Don’t Realize They Have

    Recent LinkedIn posts seem to diverge on the proper role of a CFO. There are two schools of thought. One warns against overpaying for a glorified bookkeeper masquerading as a CFO.  “Bookkeeping is clerical — don’t pay a CFO to do bookkeeping.” Another describes bookkeeping as fundamental; fit for strategic oversight at the CFO level.…

  • Back to Basics: How Old-Fashioned Controls Power Modern Payments and Decentralized Innovation

    I started my career at Johnson & Johnson, trained under the old Coopers & Lybrand partners. One of the things I loved most wasn’t the binders, the flowcharts, or even the meticulous audits — it was the Credo. The principles weren’t just words on paper; they guided how decisions were made, how markets were run,…