Upfront: Asking All the Right Questions -- and Offering Many Right Answers

For more than a decade, business books and magazine articles have chronicled the transformation of the CFO from transaction supervisor to business strategist. At least that's the ideal model for the job that exists in some companies, while in others the evolution of the position has stalled somewhere along the way.

In "Reinventing the CFO: How Financial Managers Can Transform Their Roles and Add Greater Value" (Harvard Business School Press, 2006), author and consultant Jeremy Hope dissects all of the ways the role has evolved to the betterment of certain organizations (including American Express, Toyota and Cognos) and offers detailed explanations and solutions for problems that have prevented that upward evolution in many companies.