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New Book Release: BOARDROOM LESSONS “Mistakes I Made as a CFO — So You Don’t Have To”

By David Jolliffe Andersen Alumnus LinkedIn

Over forty years in business I have seen companies succeed spectacularly, fail explosively, and occasionally do both at the same time. I have also been fortunate enough to have a great deal of fun along the way. 

 During that time, I worked with many talented people. Some were colleagues, some were bosses, and some became mentors. A few of them appear in the stories that follow, but many others influenced my thinking and judgement in ways that are harder to capture in a short anecdote.  

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Like most careers, mine did not follow a perfectly straight line. I worked in a variety of businesses and industries, each with its own challenges, personalities and pressures. Some experiences were clearly successful. Others were considerably more difficult. But even the challenging periods proved valuable, because they often contained the most important lessons.

 Looking back, what strikes me most is that the things which shaped my judgement were rarely the topics covered in textbooks or training courses. 

 They were situations where decisions had to be made when the answer was not obvious: when numbers did not quite make sense, when strategy looked convincing on paper but questionable in practice, or when people and incentives did not people and incentives did not behave in the way they were supposed to. Those are the moments where real learning tends to happen. 

 Throughout my career, I was fortunate to receive advice and guidance from people who had already learned some of those lessons before I had. Their judgment and experience saved me from making certain mistakes, though certainly not all of them. 

 BOARDROOM LESSONS describes several experiences that stayed with me over the years. Some are small incidents that carry surprisingly large lessons. Others involve strategic decisions or business situations that unfolded over many years. 

 They are not intended as definitive answers. Business rarely provides those. Instead, they are simply observations drawn from experience. Moments where events clarified something important about how organizations really are work, how numbers should be interpreted, and how decisions are made. 

 If even one or two of these lessons resonate with someone starting out in their business career and perhaps help them avoid learning those lessons entirely the hard way, then writing this book will have been worthwhile. 

 Because in business, as in life, most of the valuable knowledge does not come from theory. It comes from experience.

 BOARDROOM LESSONS is now available on Amazon

About the Author: David Jolliffe is an Andersen Alumnus and works as a Fractional and Advisory CFO. After more than four decades as a CFO and senior finance leader, David Jolliffe learned that the most costly problems in business rarely begin as disasters. They begin as small decisions, overlooked details, or assumptions that quietly go unchallenged.