Jack McCullough knows a guy. Or, better said: Everybody knows Jack.
As founder of the CFO Leadership Council, an international network of thousands of senior finance execs, McCullough uniquely has his finger on the pulse of CFOville. So if he thinks you need an MBA for Lunch, which is, coincidentally, the name of his latest self-published book, you listen.
The interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.
When did you first start working on—or even just thinking about—this book as a topic?
I gave a presentation to a PE firm, or more exactly, to the CFOs within their portfolio. One of the PE people made the comment [that] they probably wouldn’t hire a CPA for a CFO [role] unless they had another credential. They just valued the MBA credential more. I got my MBA when I was in my 20s. It was pretty easy to do. In my case, I took a year and a half off and did it. It’s a little harder to get an MBA when you’re already CFO. If I had gotten my MBA at 45, say, at that point I had a house, full time job, I was president of this company, [had] two kids. It would have just been really difficult to do. And yet, CFOs, a lot of them need that credential.
I got my MBA in the 1990s, and the world’s changed just a little bit, and so has the nature of the CFO role. It was all of those things coming together, and the last [reason was] there was a data point, probably five years ago now…it was the first time there were more MBAs than CPAs amongst CFOs. And that was probably unthinkable ten years before. So I said, “Hey, can I get the essence of it in something that people can read in an hour?” I’d like to think I pulled it off.
How did you organize your ideas, and extract the best bits of some of those programs into this very bite-sized format?
The first chapter, in fact, is on finance. I wrote the book for CFOs, and I almost feel like I should tell them to skip Chapter One. But I couldn’t write a book that replicates the MBA without at least some financial principles.
But there are other [MBA concepts] that I feel like CFOs need to understand a little bit better, like data science. It’s not there yet, and maybe it won’t be, but trend-wise, data science is becoming more important than knowledge of accounting and whatnot. Data science is where the action is. It’s where CFOs can actually bring a lot more value to the rest of the leadership team, to boards, to investors. I don’t want to say data science didn’t exist, because obviously it did, but it really wasn’t much of a priority when I was at [MIT] Sloan. And Sloan, along with Chicago, are probably the two most quantitative MBA programs.
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I [also] wanted the marketing thing, because that’s such an underrated thing. And then I talked a lot about the CEO/CFO relationship, leadership, and strategy generally, just because it’s what’s expected of CFOs. It’s no longer the CFO of the future. It’s the CFO today.
You were leaning into this idea of the pocket size, grab and go, you can read a chapter on your lunch break, kind of thing. Anything else to add on the formatting?
It was designed to be a one-hour read. I don’t think you can read the book and all of the appendices in an hour, but you can read the chapters and the intro. I wanted something quick that you could do on your break. My hope is it’s one of those things you keep it handy, either on your desktop, on your laptop, or just physically near you. You pick it up and it’s a reference guide. “The marketing people are talking about CLA. What is that? Let me look it up in there,” that type of thing. I’m assuming that they’re not going to look up discounted cash flow or something like that, but they can look up some pointers.
It’s the type of book you read once or twice, and I think you’ll get something out of that, but then just keep it with you. Check it out once in a while. “I’m presenting to the board. What did he have to say about that? I remember that he mentioned Warren Buffett is somebody I should emulate. What about Buffett’s style would be so compelling?” It’s that type of stuff. Read it once, read it twice, and then you’ve got it for life.