CFO's Under Pressure The Cover Story by Stan Brin.
There's a story about a software company that sent its entire staff to Comdex in Las Vegas. After a hard day of buying and selling and connecting, the marketing and sales people went to the casinos and the developers went to the shows. The bean counters went up to their rooms, called home and talked their kids through their homework.
Financial executives are different. They inhabit the higher realm of corporate power, but they don't run the company. Their skills earn them excellent salaries, but they are offended by displays of wealth. Their decisions affect management, stockholders, and the public at large, but they can be fired on a whim. Corporations great and small entrust their senior financial officers - CFOs, controllers, vice presidents of finance - with the keys to the company safe. An overwhelmingly, they earn that trust.
There is a lot of give and play in their roles, especially in smaller companies, where a single executive can be expected to wear multiple hats. One of these muti-hatted people is Doug Schneider, who is both CFO and chief operating officer of Overnite Express, a privately held regional air delivery company based in Irvine.
Schneider says, "One of our other partners prepares the books for me, I analyze them and make financial and business decisions based on them. When you share operations and financial hats, you understand what the financials mean and how to immediately apply them"
