The Olympics have medals and schools often grade on a bell shapped curve but when it comes to executive education, CFO's and other senior managers are content to attend seminars or training and receive a "Certificate of Completion". How can you engage your competitive spirit and benefit the organization you serve at the same time for better results?
As a CFO with responsibility over HR, IT, Legal, Accounting and Finance as well as risk management it is hard to have the level of depth in a topic necessary to avoid conversations around initiatives that are "dumbed down" to the expertise of myself or other senior managers. This presents issues around capital approvals as well. Certainly there is a skill to being a general manager but to engage your experts that are also your direct reports, I have a a new approach.
For the month of August I am engaging in a book swap with my IT Director. He has identified my technical reading "Mastering VMware vSphere 5" by Scott Lowe and I have identified my technical reading for him as "The new CFO Financial Leadership Manual" by Steven Bragg. The criteria is that I have read my book (with mastery of the content) and he has done the same. By the deadline of August 31st we are ready to orally quiz each other on retention and mastery of the content- loser buys lunch.
Will I be able to configure virtual servers in our network by reading one book? Would I ask the IT director to structure a reverse triangular merger anytime soon? The answer to both is no, however I expect the financial concepts of ROI on IT investments to be part of his thinking and vocabulary while I already can identify the hardware savings associated with running multiple operating system instances on the same server.
This blog is called "5 miles wide, 1 inch deep" because the role of a CFO or any senior executive prevents us from being 5 miles deep in any one area if we manage several diverse departments, but perhaps it is possible to be more than one inch deep if we challenge ourselves to continuous learning with an incentive to "Win".
I would love to hear other approaches that may work. I will update this blog with the results of this challenge... even if I lose.
Wednesday, August 15, 2012
Monday, April 23, 2012
Utilizing Game Theory to Monetize Creativity: 10 Levels of Creativity
I was on vacation watching my daughter color a picture to submit for a contest and it occurred to me that there were several levels of creativity one could use to complete this project, but the more I got to imagining the levels of artistic creativity, the further abstract I got in my interpretration of the strategy of creating art and how these same levels that further and further deviated from simpling coloring a picture could be applied to business strategy. Here is the list of levels of artistic creativity that could be applied to the contest:
1. Color the picture as an exact replication of what you have seen (color a dog brown with a black nose)
2. Color the picture using different colors or patterns (pink dog with purple spots)
3. Add additional artistic elements not in the black and white pattern to be colored (i.e. add grass under the dog and a sun and blue sky)
4. Use the lines in unintended ways (The eye on the dog could be the eye of a fish and the paws could be part of a boat and this could be an ocean picture)
5. Ignore the outline of a dog all together and draw what you want and color that.
6. Cut up the paper and reassemble into a new artistic creation or make a puzzle.
7. Go beyond art as appealing to your sense of sight and add elements that create texture, smell, taste or hearing (stick a lollipop to your art so it smells, taste and has a sticky texture)
8. Use heavy markers on the paper and get it wet so you can make your art a tattoo on your skin thereby transferring your art away from the original medium of paper all together
9. Utilize your art as inspiration for something physical such as a dance (how would that dog act?)
10. Take the opportunity of the creation of art back all the way to your goal (was it to enjoy something created by your own hands or to appreciate something beautiful, to develop a new skill or to win something)- engage the activity as the highest level of Maslow's hierarchy of human needs by engaging in it towards your own self actualization (making you more truly who you are).
As promised this list go pretty abstract by the end, but when you are creating your business strategy how deep do you need to go to get a strategic advantage over your competitors. On itunes university I downloaded Yale University's Game Theory class in by the second class there was a game which asked students to pick a number between 1-100 and the winner would be the one who got an answer closest to 2/3 of the class average. As you can imagine, almost all students figured out that if everyone chose 100 then they should choose 67 but if they chose 67 then the average would be lower than 100. If you keep assuming 2/3 of 67 and then 2/3 of 45 you have to eventually settle in on the number of times you do that math before reaching the infinite answer of 1. In this class the average iterations were 5 getting to an average about 14 with the "winning number" being 9.
Are you competitors as smart as the average Yale undergraduate student? I confess my own guess at this game was 14, not 9 but my interpretation is that 5 levels deep of creativity (in this case, I know 67 is too high of a class average and I know my classmate knows that so I know that 45 is too high and I know my classmate knows that so I know that 29 is too high....). So how can I apply my levels of creativity to my business strategy 5 levels deep? I will start by saying that without know the specifics of an industry, that 5 levels may be too many or not enough, but the value of the academic exercise to create the levels will give you strategic options whether there are very few business model options such as the case of construction for governmental infrastructure, or a myriad such as the case of new businesses in technology that Google or Apple face everyday.
While I can't provide answers to every business scenario, let me imagine a few levels for my own industry which is creating flavors for food manufacturers...
1. Sell more my existing product line to my existing customer base by varying price/terms
2. Investigate new customers that would buy my existing products
3. Create variations of my existing products to sell to my existing or new customers
4. Look not only at my customers but the their customers (end user) to predict their needs and develop flavors proactively (classic marketing)
5. Sell not only your product but your non-product related capabilities (quick development, service, international nimbleness etc.)
6. Co-develop your customers products jointly
7. Ask your customers to partially outsource their product development into your business (blending innovation and employee resources so you can't tell where one begins and the other ends)
8. Combine taste with other senses (cooling taste of menthol, or a textured taste that stimulates multiple senses)
9. Go beyond the use of flavor for how food taste but what it makes you experience (i.e. does the taste of wine at a church impact your feeling of spirituality- could it?)
10. Ask yourself where the senses overlap our being and self-actualization (Maslow) and orient solutions that are customizable at the individual experience level.
The goal is to think more deeply, I invite your feedback if you found this a helpful tool because often when creating business strategies, we can get in a rut of simple variations on our common theme.
1. Color the picture as an exact replication of what you have seen (color a dog brown with a black nose)
2. Color the picture using different colors or patterns (pink dog with purple spots)
3. Add additional artistic elements not in the black and white pattern to be colored (i.e. add grass under the dog and a sun and blue sky)
4. Use the lines in unintended ways (The eye on the dog could be the eye of a fish and the paws could be part of a boat and this could be an ocean picture)
5. Ignore the outline of a dog all together and draw what you want and color that.
6. Cut up the paper and reassemble into a new artistic creation or make a puzzle.
7. Go beyond art as appealing to your sense of sight and add elements that create texture, smell, taste or hearing (stick a lollipop to your art so it smells, taste and has a sticky texture)
8. Use heavy markers on the paper and get it wet so you can make your art a tattoo on your skin thereby transferring your art away from the original medium of paper all together
9. Utilize your art as inspiration for something physical such as a dance (how would that dog act?)
10. Take the opportunity of the creation of art back all the way to your goal (was it to enjoy something created by your own hands or to appreciate something beautiful, to develop a new skill or to win something)- engage the activity as the highest level of Maslow's hierarchy of human needs by engaging in it towards your own self actualization (making you more truly who you are).
As promised this list go pretty abstract by the end, but when you are creating your business strategy how deep do you need to go to get a strategic advantage over your competitors. On itunes university I downloaded Yale University's Game Theory class in by the second class there was a game which asked students to pick a number between 1-100 and the winner would be the one who got an answer closest to 2/3 of the class average. As you can imagine, almost all students figured out that if everyone chose 100 then they should choose 67 but if they chose 67 then the average would be lower than 100. If you keep assuming 2/3 of 67 and then 2/3 of 45 you have to eventually settle in on the number of times you do that math before reaching the infinite answer of 1. In this class the average iterations were 5 getting to an average about 14 with the "winning number" being 9.
Are you competitors as smart as the average Yale undergraduate student? I confess my own guess at this game was 14, not 9 but my interpretation is that 5 levels deep of creativity (in this case, I know 67 is too high of a class average and I know my classmate knows that so I know that 45 is too high and I know my classmate knows that so I know that 29 is too high....). So how can I apply my levels of creativity to my business strategy 5 levels deep? I will start by saying that without know the specifics of an industry, that 5 levels may be too many or not enough, but the value of the academic exercise to create the levels will give you strategic options whether there are very few business model options such as the case of construction for governmental infrastructure, or a myriad such as the case of new businesses in technology that Google or Apple face everyday.
While I can't provide answers to every business scenario, let me imagine a few levels for my own industry which is creating flavors for food manufacturers...
1. Sell more my existing product line to my existing customer base by varying price/terms
2. Investigate new customers that would buy my existing products
3. Create variations of my existing products to sell to my existing or new customers
4. Look not only at my customers but the their customers (end user) to predict their needs and develop flavors proactively (classic marketing)
5. Sell not only your product but your non-product related capabilities (quick development, service, international nimbleness etc.)
6. Co-develop your customers products jointly
7. Ask your customers to partially outsource their product development into your business (blending innovation and employee resources so you can't tell where one begins and the other ends)
8. Combine taste with other senses (cooling taste of menthol, or a textured taste that stimulates multiple senses)
9. Go beyond the use of flavor for how food taste but what it makes you experience (i.e. does the taste of wine at a church impact your feeling of spirituality- could it?)
10. Ask yourself where the senses overlap our being and self-actualization (Maslow) and orient solutions that are customizable at the individual experience level.
The goal is to think more deeply, I invite your feedback if you found this a helpful tool because often when creating business strategies, we can get in a rut of simple variations on our common theme.
Monday, January 9, 2012
The value of Face to Face to increase innovation and collaboration
While reading the Steve Jobs biography one important concept jumped out at me that is often overlooked in the digital age. Quite simply, the ability to innovate and collaborate is exponentially more when we meet and talk face to face. This runs very contrary to the efficiency we are promised with email, skype and other multimedia communication methods.
Steve was a rebel in many of his management practices and the one that is most transformational to way we do business is to set people up to meet and talk by keeping smart people in close proximity of each other. At Pixar he made sure the building had a central atrium and even designed it to only have two bathrooms so that everyone would be forced throughout the day to travel in the same direction and encourage chance encounters. The plans for the new Cupertino headquarters is similarly a circle design and all in one building to house 12,000 employees rather than the campus design you often see. In fact Microsoft has a separate 4 story building for there human resources where they presumably would have very little contact outside of their department. Ironically, a Harvard professor studied Microsoft and reported that the best way to encourage collaboration was to put people in close proximity to each other and to make them the same hierarchal level as a Vice President is most likely to email another Vice President or people in the same location regardless of whether the organizational structure is a pyramid or matrix.
How can you measure this? Within a time management framework, I have proposed to one of my departments that they create goals based on their current time allocation to have more face to face meetings by documenting the percent of time in each of these buckets:
It is important to note that there is nothing wrong with spending time on analysis, or training and time to think is critical, but this time management model will tell you more about the productivity of your direct reports than the effort they expend or the hours they spend at work. Please let me know if you find this a helpful tool as their is no one "correct" allocation of time but rather an awareness of opportunity to be more productive in the time you spend at work.
Steve was a rebel in many of his management practices and the one that is most transformational to way we do business is to set people up to meet and talk by keeping smart people in close proximity of each other. At Pixar he made sure the building had a central atrium and even designed it to only have two bathrooms so that everyone would be forced throughout the day to travel in the same direction and encourage chance encounters. The plans for the new Cupertino headquarters is similarly a circle design and all in one building to house 12,000 employees rather than the campus design you often see. In fact Microsoft has a separate 4 story building for there human resources where they presumably would have very little contact outside of their department. Ironically, a Harvard professor studied Microsoft and reported that the best way to encourage collaboration was to put people in close proximity to each other and to make them the same hierarchal level as a Vice President is most likely to email another Vice President or people in the same location regardless of whether the organizational structure is a pyramid or matrix.
How can you measure this? Within a time management framework, I have proposed to one of my departments that they create goals based on their current time allocation to have more face to face meetings by documenting the percent of time in each of these buckets:
Listen (Face to Face)
1. Internal
a. Interdepartmental__%
b. Daily Departmental__%
2. External
a. Current Business Needs__%
b. Innovation (New Ideas)__%
Communicate (Face to Face)
1. Internal
a. Reactive (I heard you)__%
b. Proactive (Would this work?)__%
c. Departmental Performance Management__%
2. External
a. Expectations aligned to Initiatives/Goals__%
b. Performance Management__%
Self Awareness
1. Personal/Professional Development and Training__%
2. Time to Think__%
Other
1. Email__%
2. Phone Calls__%
3. Analysis__%
It is important to note that there is nothing wrong with spending time on analysis, or training and time to think is critical, but this time management model will tell you more about the productivity of your direct reports than the effort they expend or the hours they spend at work. Please let me know if you find this a helpful tool as their is no one "correct" allocation of time but rather an awareness of opportunity to be more productive in the time you spend at work.
Tuesday, December 13, 2011
How a CFO can Monetize their Social and Peer Network
You have spent time diligently researching your partners, consultants and vendors and you have invested your personal time into your network of your peers. Now the challenge is how to be more profitable and getting a return on the investment in time while maintaining transparency and integrity. My experience as a CFO of a financially successful company is that there is no shortage of vendors asking for time on my calendar to pitch ideas and certainly the existing vendors, bankers and consultant are happy to take me to a favorite sporting event or golf to talk business. My rational question is "If they have money to spend there, how do I reallocate it back to my company so my CEO sees the value?"
The conclusion I have come to is that you can negotiate much more than your companies business to get favorable treatment from the people that have legitimately earned your business. I learned this practice from a VP of Quality/Regulatory at my company who negotiated almost half off software by promising the vendor he would get him additional customers and revenue by recommendation if he lowered our price and extended our payment terms. This got me thinking that if it works on software, capital expenditures then maybe it can work effectively on consultants etc. I have engaged in outsourcing much of my basic information technology infrastructure to a firm that has exceeded my expectations in many ways and as a result I am vocal to my peers when they complain that they are being under served by their internal technology employees but don't have an alternative that they are willing to take a risk on. After lining up more than three new contracts for this firm I am now much more valuable to them then my own companies contract would suggest and find them flexible when asking for additional resources without being charged as I would have several years ago. My consultants related to specific US tax credit are also very worthy of attaching my name and reputation to and I believe I can continue to extend that relationship out several more years without any cost increase by proving my value as a referral.
It is critical that these referrals are done transparent to the benefit I could receive and that they are told that these are negotiation points that my peers can extend to their own network. My change in behavior is the move from advocating for services that I am happy with to sharing that leverage with my own company in the form of something that doesn't benefit me personally. In essence, you too can be a salesperson for your critical vendors and the commission can go to your company!
The conclusion I have come to is that you can negotiate much more than your companies business to get favorable treatment from the people that have legitimately earned your business. I learned this practice from a VP of Quality/Regulatory at my company who negotiated almost half off software by promising the vendor he would get him additional customers and revenue by recommendation if he lowered our price and extended our payment terms. This got me thinking that if it works on software, capital expenditures then maybe it can work effectively on consultants etc. I have engaged in outsourcing much of my basic information technology infrastructure to a firm that has exceeded my expectations in many ways and as a result I am vocal to my peers when they complain that they are being under served by their internal technology employees but don't have an alternative that they are willing to take a risk on. After lining up more than three new contracts for this firm I am now much more valuable to them then my own companies contract would suggest and find them flexible when asking for additional resources without being charged as I would have several years ago. My consultants related to specific US tax credit are also very worthy of attaching my name and reputation to and I believe I can continue to extend that relationship out several more years without any cost increase by proving my value as a referral.
It is critical that these referrals are done transparent to the benefit I could receive and that they are told that these are negotiation points that my peers can extend to their own network. My change in behavior is the move from advocating for services that I am happy with to sharing that leverage with my own company in the form of something that doesn't benefit me personally. In essence, you too can be a salesperson for your critical vendors and the commission can go to your company!
Monday, November 21, 2011
Using valuation models to create value
You have your 2012 budgets set, you have aligned your resources to the key initiatives and objectives in your multi-year strategic plans and you have dashboards set to measure your organization's progress at least monthly. Can you now answer the question- will my company be more valuable to all shareholders, customers and employees? How do you benchmark how aggressive the management team's commitment is to increasing the value of your company? There is one more best practice I recommend senior financial executives put in place and get the entire senior management team fluent in interpreting. That is the appropriate valuation model. While public companies have the stock market to interpret the success of your performance, it is entirely based on the confidence of forward looking statements and projections which by practice need to be somewhat more conservative than internal goals in order to avoid disappointing the market with downward revisions. Private companies have much less pressure outside of banking relationships to quantify financial projections and are less likely to be measured on incremental value added unless a good phantom stock plan or equivalent long term incentive system is in place.
Which valuation model should you use? If you are a privately held company I would argue the best measure is your EBITDA (earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization) with an appropriate industry multiple reflective of your size and the ratio of EBITDA to net sales. The multiple becomes a big variable here because if relies on outside verification of other competitors that are publicly held and past transactions. However, it focuses that management team on not only growing the profit, but maintaining your financial standing relative to your competitors and rewards consistency of profitable growth relative to sales which reduces the risk for outside financiers and merger and acquisition professionals when viewing your company for sale even if you have no intention to sell but may in the future seek "growth capital" that is non-bank funding for your companies growth. Another method that is more simple to track is a discounted cash flow model that allows you to view the last few years of history and project your 5-10 year business plans to arrive at the value of your business. This method is particularly good when replacing your projections each year with actuals and maintaining a consistent level of conservative modeling. The key to each of these methodologies is rewarding the management team for some type of quantifiable risk reduction (bigger balance sheets with more history are lower risk or lower beta than the small companies without a longer term history).
While many valuation firms are excellent at this exercise, I am of course happy to share templates to get you started. Several people on linkedin have already requested these templates and if you like, please send me an email to jevanoff@fona.com. Keep in mind, the exercise is of little value unless you review this for consecutive years and do some analysis on what drives the incremental or decremental value from the prior analysis. Also, don't fool yourself with increasing levels of optimism for future growth or the amount of risk. If an independent professional would not arrive at the same conclusion with an intimate knowledge of your company, you should re-examine your assumptions.
Best of luck creating more valuable companies across the world!
Which valuation model should you use? If you are a privately held company I would argue the best measure is your EBITDA (earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization) with an appropriate industry multiple reflective of your size and the ratio of EBITDA to net sales. The multiple becomes a big variable here because if relies on outside verification of other competitors that are publicly held and past transactions. However, it focuses that management team on not only growing the profit, but maintaining your financial standing relative to your competitors and rewards consistency of profitable growth relative to sales which reduces the risk for outside financiers and merger and acquisition professionals when viewing your company for sale even if you have no intention to sell but may in the future seek "growth capital" that is non-bank funding for your companies growth. Another method that is more simple to track is a discounted cash flow model that allows you to view the last few years of history and project your 5-10 year business plans to arrive at the value of your business. This method is particularly good when replacing your projections each year with actuals and maintaining a consistent level of conservative modeling. The key to each of these methodologies is rewarding the management team for some type of quantifiable risk reduction (bigger balance sheets with more history are lower risk or lower beta than the small companies without a longer term history).
While many valuation firms are excellent at this exercise, I am of course happy to share templates to get you started. Several people on linkedin have already requested these templates and if you like, please send me an email to jevanoff@fona.com. Keep in mind, the exercise is of little value unless you review this for consecutive years and do some analysis on what drives the incremental or decremental value from the prior analysis. Also, don't fool yourself with increasing levels of optimism for future growth or the amount of risk. If an independent professional would not arrive at the same conclusion with an intimate knowledge of your company, you should re-examine your assumptions.
Best of luck creating more valuable companies across the world!
Thursday, November 3, 2011
Initiative Dashboards for CFO's- Revisiting your best work
Dashboards are a great tool. In one page of graphs and ratios a talented finance executive can quickly spot operational inefficiencies that may be hidden in the balance sheet or income statement. Recently I saw my ratios of accounts payable to inventory drop which was surprising since I had moved all my top suppliers to 45-60 day terms from standard 30 day terms in 2009. While this provided great cashflow in the midst of the economic downturn and cover for the customers that were stretching out their receivables to my company, over the past two years all these suppliers quietly moved their terms back to 30 days without a call or letter to purchasing or accounting.
This got me thinking about a new tool for CFO's. Do I have an initiative dashboard to measure the staying power of cash flow initiatives or even profit initiatives? The inherant assumption is that when an initiative is developed it has unique characteristics beyond the ratios it will impact. For instance, increasing vendor payment terms will increase payables and provide short term cash flow but if payables are increasing due to growth and cash flow is shrinking due to other reasons you can spend a lot of time tracking down the multiple variables that impact the ratios before arriving at the conclusion that an initiative reversed itself. In this example, the unique characteristics of this initiative is the percent spend of the vendors that originally agreed to longer payment terms. Some of those vendors were replaced which lowered the importance of their longer terms. The other characteristic is the payment terms themselves. By creating a dashboard of the terms for top 20 vendors and the percent of total spend that they represent, I have a much clearer understanding of how to revisit this initiative with purchasing. Also, the value of iniative is timeliness and trying to cutoff the reversals before a supplier becomes too entrenched in that new business practice is important to your negotiating leverage.
I hope this one example will inspire you to look back at your best ideas and generate a initiative dashboard because it is much easier to maintain good business practices and to generate a great new idea and push your organization and your customer/supplier to implement.
This got me thinking about a new tool for CFO's. Do I have an initiative dashboard to measure the staying power of cash flow initiatives or even profit initiatives? The inherant assumption is that when an initiative is developed it has unique characteristics beyond the ratios it will impact. For instance, increasing vendor payment terms will increase payables and provide short term cash flow but if payables are increasing due to growth and cash flow is shrinking due to other reasons you can spend a lot of time tracking down the multiple variables that impact the ratios before arriving at the conclusion that an initiative reversed itself. In this example, the unique characteristics of this initiative is the percent spend of the vendors that originally agreed to longer payment terms. Some of those vendors were replaced which lowered the importance of their longer terms. The other characteristic is the payment terms themselves. By creating a dashboard of the terms for top 20 vendors and the percent of total spend that they represent, I have a much clearer understanding of how to revisit this initiative with purchasing. Also, the value of iniative is timeliness and trying to cutoff the reversals before a supplier becomes too entrenched in that new business practice is important to your negotiating leverage.
I hope this one example will inspire you to look back at your best ideas and generate a initiative dashboard because it is much easier to maintain good business practices and to generate a great new idea and push your organization and your customer/supplier to implement.
Tuesday, September 20, 2011
If you want to be rich... (give it away)
Buried deep in many how to get rich books are two underlying principles of many millionaires. First, it requires discipline not to spend every dollar you make which has been taught to a multitude of lottery winners as well as Forbes Magazine's documentation on how even a billionaires can go broke (Bjorgolfur Gudmundsson). Robert Kiyoski in his book "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" advocated for spending time in the military or a religious order if you need help controlling your urges. The second principle is that very few people get rich by trying to do so. They have a passion for anything from the internet to a new invention and getting rich is a by product of doing what they love and years of practice.
I propose that many bad financial decisions are made out of fear, but giving to charity can help break that destructive cycle of thinking "what if there isn't enough for me after I give, or I will give when I have/make more money". My wife's father learned this lesson early when he accepted cash bonus for some breakthrough work instead of an ownership interest that would have made him millions. Charity not only makes a social difference but helps you as a person break your focus on money so you can focus on your passion which is more likely to make you rich! Some of the best financial advice I ever heard was "somebody you know makes less money than you- live like them".
Charity consists of giving your time, talent and/or treasure (money). I will leave you to decide how you donate your time and money, but I suggest that your CFO talents can make a global impact on rethinking how charity works. The most famous example is probably Mohammad Yunus and his creation of microfinance/microcredit which earned him a Noble Prize in 2006. While encountering many obstacles, I am currently investigating variations on his theme- specifically looking at how profitable corporations can donate their superior credit rating to provide low interest loans at little or no cost to the corporation (much easier to ask a company for some of its available credit than actual money). Another idea I am working on is a charity that serves families with medical insurance but can't afford the deductible or copays. The bulk of the medical treatment would not be paid by the charity, rather the insurance company if only donors helped get the treatment started with as little as $20 for a doctor visit.
I hope you have ideas on how you can accelerate the tired old model of charities asking for money and spending it - many times without the means to measure the impact and decide if they are truly making a permanent difference or just a temporary one. As talented finance professionals, I urge you to apply those talents and I think you will find yourself thinking less about your networth and more about your passions and talents.
I propose that many bad financial decisions are made out of fear, but giving to charity can help break that destructive cycle of thinking "what if there isn't enough for me after I give, or I will give when I have/make more money". My wife's father learned this lesson early when he accepted cash bonus for some breakthrough work instead of an ownership interest that would have made him millions. Charity not only makes a social difference but helps you as a person break your focus on money so you can focus on your passion which is more likely to make you rich! Some of the best financial advice I ever heard was "somebody you know makes less money than you- live like them".
Charity consists of giving your time, talent and/or treasure (money). I will leave you to decide how you donate your time and money, but I suggest that your CFO talents can make a global impact on rethinking how charity works. The most famous example is probably Mohammad Yunus and his creation of microfinance/microcredit which earned him a Noble Prize in 2006. While encountering many obstacles, I am currently investigating variations on his theme- specifically looking at how profitable corporations can donate their superior credit rating to provide low interest loans at little or no cost to the corporation (much easier to ask a company for some of its available credit than actual money). Another idea I am working on is a charity that serves families with medical insurance but can't afford the deductible or copays. The bulk of the medical treatment would not be paid by the charity, rather the insurance company if only donors helped get the treatment started with as little as $20 for a doctor visit.
I hope you have ideas on how you can accelerate the tired old model of charities asking for money and spending it - many times without the means to measure the impact and decide if they are truly making a permanent difference or just a temporary one. As talented finance professionals, I urge you to apply those talents and I think you will find yourself thinking less about your networth and more about your passions and talents.
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