800-CEO-READ Blog

Financial Intelligence -- Good Morning

Good morning to everyone. First, we’d like to say thank you to Jack and Todd at 800-CEO-READ for asking us to host the blog today. As the authors of Financial Intelligence, A Manager’s Guide to Knowing What the Numbers Really Mean, we are excited to share with you more information about financial intelligence and about creating a financially transparent organization.

To start, we’d like to share with you our paths to our philosophy, that everyone in organizations should understand how financial success is measured and how they make an impact. Karen took the academic path. It all started when she noticed that CEOs and others would always say that everyone in the organization was important to success, but they rarely told employees how they impacted success or even how success was defined. So her Ph.D. dissertation focused on that issue. And from there, she founded the Business Literacy Institute, a firm dedicated to teaching employees, managers and leaders about the financial side of the business.

Joe’s path was on the practical side. After earning an MBA from UC Berkeley, he worked at Ford Motor Company and a few others before joining a start-up business, Setpoint Inc. The two other owners of Setpoint had some bad experiences as engineers – being asked to do things that just didn’t make sense to them. When the two engineers founded this company, they decided everyone would understand the ‘whys’ of decisions, and even include employees in the process of managing the financial side of the business. Joe became the person who taught everyone about the numbers, and created the system that they use to this day to share the numbers and talk about the business every week with all employees.

Throughout the day we’ll be posting information about finance that we hope will help you lead, manage and work better.