FINANCE & WEALTH MANAGEMENT

THE CFO:
Becoming a Strategic Partner

Overview
The growing prominence of CFOs as decision
makers in business continues to be evident
with the number of chief financial officers being
promoted to the CEO role. Much like great chess
players, today’s CFOs have to go beyond being
linear thinkers—focused on the next step to
capture a pawn or bishop on the board— to being
strategic thinkers who plan multiple moves ahead,
and even encourage competitor reaction in a
predictive way.
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The CFO: Becoming a Strategic Partner makes that jump from linear to strategic
thinking, offering frameworks, real cases, and engaged discussion with other
peers. The role expected of these financial leaders encompasses much more
than overseeing their firm’s profit and loss statement. They are expected to be
positioned as vital contributors to their company’s long-term strategy.
Wharton’s program equips you with a new toolset to help you more effectively
control costs and grow your organization by making the right investments for
the future. Wharton faculty specifically helps you leverage your financial acumen
in new ways, to better understand the strategic opportunities before you and
communicate to business partners what matters and what does not when
considering a new path forward.
The program elevates your role to one of a “value integrator,” a term coined by
IBM in its Global CEO Study to describe the best-performing CFOs. These leaders
excel at taking highly unstructured and somewhat ambiguous situations and
putting structure around them by integrating information from numerous internal
sources. You enhance your ability to forecast, measure, and monitor business
performance; manage risk; and generate predictive insights.
THE CFO
Experience & Impact
Wharton’s The CFO: Becoming a Strategic
Partner will:
•  Show the link between corporate strategy
and value creation
•  Enhance your strategic-thinking skills
outside traditional areas such as accounting
and finance
Through Wharton’s The CFO: Becoming a Strategic Partner, Wharton management
•  Bolster your leadership skills to better faculty brings an approach and perspective based on research and best practices
communicate with nonfinancial colleagues at leading companies.
•  Be a better decision maker who can assess
disparate data from many areas of your Wharton faculty offers insights and frameworks to help you more effectively
company and help the CEO, board, and other manage growth by analyzing the external forces that are shaping your business
leaders create a long-term path forward and elevating your role at the decision-making table.

Through Wharton’s The CFO: Becoming a Strategic Partner, you will gain the
leadership and business acumen to move beyond the three-day close, to focus
more strategically on your customers, markets, and competitors.

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THE CFO
 industry

Participant Profile
Participants in Wharton’s The CFO: Becoming a region
Strategic Partner may include:

•  Current and future chief financial officers

•  Vice presidents and controllers

•  Senior financial executives with strategic and

financial responsibilities

job function

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THE CFO
 TOP PARTICIPANT TITLES

•  CFO •  Director of Corporate

Development
•  Controller
•  Director of Finance
Participant Profile •  Corporate Planning Adviser

•  Delegate, Board of Directors

•  Executive Vice President

•  Finance Director
•  Deputy CFO
•  Senior Vice President
To further leverage the value and impact of this •  Director, Finance and Operations
program, we encourage companies to send cross- •  Treasurer
•  Director, Financial Operations and
functional teams of executives to Wharton. We Treasurer
offer group enrollment benefits to companies
sending four or more participants.

TOP PARTICIPATING COMPANIES

•  AARP •  BBC America

•  Adhesives Research, Inc. •  Campbell Soup Company

•  Aetna •  Crane & Co.

•  Alcan Embalagens do Brasil •  Danske Capital

•  American Express •  Delta Energy Services

•  Andersen Corporation •  Deutsche IXE LLC

•  Aventis Inc. •  Eli Lilly Asia Inc.

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THE CFO

David Wessels, PhD
Adjunct Professor of Finance,
The Wharton School
At the Wharton School, David Wessels
teaches courses on corporate valuation,
venture capital, and performance
management to undergraduates and MBAs
in Philadelphia and San Francisco, and to
executive audiences globally. Professor
Wessels has been recognized by his students
with the school’s MBA Excellence in Teaching
Award, and has been acknowledged nationally
for his research on organizational structure
and financial performance. His coauthored
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Faculty
book, Valuation: Measuring and Managing the
Value of Companies, is accepted as the seminal
text for students of corporate valuation
and investment banking. In addition to his
teaching on campus, Professor Wessels
has served on the executive development
and training faculties at Bank of America
Merrill Lynch, Coca-Cola, Ericsson, Estée
Lauder, Home Depot, Lockheed Martin,
McKinsey & Company, Microsoft, Philips,
PricewaterhouseCoopers, Siemens, and UPS.
ADDITIONAL FACULTY
Itay Goldstein, PhD
Joel S. Ehrenkranz Family Professor;
Professor of Finance; Coordinator of PhD
Program, The Wharton School
Emilie Feldman
Associate Professor of Management,
The Wharton School
Mario Moussa, PhD
President, Moussa Consulting
Kathy Pearson, PhD
Adjunct Senior Fellow, Leonard Davis
Institute of Health Economics,
University of Pennsylvania; President,
Enterprise Learning Solutions
Nicolaj Siggelkow, PhD
David M. Knott Professor;
Professor of Management;
Co-Director, Mack Institute for Innovation
Management, The Wharton School
THE CFO

Session Highlights
THE LINK BETWEEN CORPORATE STRATEGY
AND VALUE CREATION: MEASURING
PERFORMANCE examines what really drives
growth for the world’s largest companies,
beyond innovation—namely, clever market
selection on a very granular basis. In this
session, we discuss how to identify, choose, and
capture the value associated with momentum
markets. We explore how each person plays a
role in building the world-class capabilities that
are required to lead in the momentum markets
that the organization chooses.
CRITICAL THINKING focuses not only on
common systematic biases that afflict decision
makers, but also on how to overcome these
biases—particularly in today’s challenging
environment. Through a series of examples
and case studies, specific decision failures
are identified and analyzed. The implications
of these decision traps are examined, and
recommendations on how to improve our
decision skills are offered.
CREATING AND SUSTAINING COMPETITIVE
ADVANTAGE discusses new thinking in
competitive strategy that stresses the
importance of trade-offs and fit in achieving
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and sustaining a competitive advantage.
In particular, this session will focus on
the tool of mapping a firm’s “system of
interconnected choices,” which depicts a
firm’s core and supporting activities and
their interdependencies. Such maps help
managers understand underlying trade-
offs and prioritize resources.
STRATEGY AUDIT AND CONNECTED
STRATEGY provides a systematic way to
analyze a firm’s strategy, i.e., to conduct a
strategy audit. Participants identify drivers
of differentiation and cost, and analyze the
value proposition and desired capabilities
and activities. As participants work on the
audit, many issues related to the strategic
decision process are discussed, including
data needs, biases, and influence processes
within firms. In a subsequent session,
participants use their prior analyses to
generate and assess strategic initiatives.
MANAGING FLEXIBILITY USING REAL
OPTIONS helps participants select the
most promising ideas for new products
and projects and pursue them in a focused
way. This session explains real-options
reasoning—a dramatically different
approach for selecting and managing
uncertain but high-potential projects.
The session then develops a framework
for building a project portfolio in order to
achieve a strategic allocation of resources
among projects. Key themes include
entrepreneurial leadership, intelligent risk
taking, conscious approaches to learning,
and making choices proactively.
STRATEGIC PERSUASION takes an
“inside-out” approach to help participants
recognize which persuasion styles come
most naturally and enable them to
understand the steps they must take to
gain influence, credibility, and confidence
in their organization.
DESIGNING THE CORPORATE PORTFOLIO
examines how companies create
shareholder value and why traditional
performance measures, such as earnings
per share and cash flow, fail to measure
value. What really matters is whether
the company’s growth is profitable and
sustainable, and how much investment is
required to achieve it. After this session,
you will be able to explicitly measure your
company’s key value drivers—return on
investment and organic revenue growth—
and link financial measures directly to
corporate strategy.
THE CFO
Sample Program Schedule* THE CFO:
BECOMING A STRATEGIC PARTNER

DAYDAY
1 1 DAY 2 DAY 2 DAY 3 DAY 3 DAY 4 DAYDAY
4 5
BREAKFAST
BREAKFAST

Program
X Overview Real Options
X Strategy Audit andX Connected Strategic Persuasion X Designing the Corporate
Strategy Portfolio: Piel Cosmetics

Link
X Between Corporate X
Strategy Audit and Connected
Strategy and Value Creation:
Strategye — Group Exercise
Driving Organic Revenue X
Growth
X Strategy Audit and Connected X
Strategy
X

LUNCH
LUNCH

Creating
X and Sustaining
Competitive Advantage
Creating and Sustaining
Competitive
X Advantage —
Group Exercise
Link Between
X Corporate Corporate Strategy
X Strategic Persuasion
Strategy and Value Creation:
Measuring Performance
X X

Creating and Sustaining

Competitive Advantage Cocktail Reception Free Time Free Time

DINNER
DINNER

SCHEDULE A CONSULTATION:

+1.215.898.1776 (worldwide) | execed@wharton.upenn.edu

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*Program start and end times are subject to change.
Please DO NOT make travel arrangements based on this agenda.

CP-CFO-0817