Having grown accustomed to charting the careers of our finance leader guests from their early professional days up through their entry into the CFO office, we did not change course for Elaine Sun, an accomplished investment banker turned finance leader who last month stepped into her third successive finance chief posi

Will Johnson can still hear the question that momentarily muted a management dinner and prodded the gathering’s executive diners to thoughtfully dispatch an answer.    “’If you weren’t in your current role, which one—held by a peer at this table—would you assume?,’” recalls Johnson, echoing the inquisitor’s words. “The

As we seek to highlight the milestones that mark the path to the CFO office, one of our favorite queries is to ask finance leaders to recall from their career-building years the first time they presented to their company’s board.     For Adriana Carpenter, memories of that board gathering will forever call to mind ASC

Hilary Maxson’s path to the CFO office of French multinational and energy automation behemoth Schneider Electric began at a kitchen table in upstate New York. Or at least that’s what comes to mind for us when she tells us about her “purpose-driven” parents, including a father who is a professor of agronomy at Cornell U

Last October, shortly after being named CFO of machine learning start-up MOLOCO, Brandon Maultasch decided to forgo yet another welcome coffee to instead engage with a wide flock of MOLOCO employees on the virtues of discounted cash analysis. “The last thing you want a new people leader talking to the entire company ab

Unlike many of his finance leader peers, Jean Lavigueur has little difficulty in identifying where and when his path to the CFO office began.   It was back in the early to mid-1990s, he recalls, when—after he had spent nearly 10 years with PwC—a charismatic entrepreneur client named Louis Têtu convinced him to join his