Chief Financial Officer (CFO) Leadership

In this course, you will learn the key principles of CFO leadership. Taught by experienced CFOs, the class will put students in the shoes of CFOs navigating complex, high-stakes situations. The teaching team will guide interactive classroom discussion and debate. Guest speakers in 2023 include the CFOs of AirBNB, Meta, Walmart and Zoom. Finance 582 is for future CFOs and everyone who will work with CFOs - CEOs, senior executives, venture and private equity investors, board members, bankers, auditors, and regulators, in other words, just about everyone now at the GSB. CFOs often determine a company's direction and strategy, and their leadership can set the stage either for growth or austerity. This class aims to inspire curiosity in the CFO role by highlighting the many ways CFOs can lead. This 2-unit course will have 9 class sessions in April & May 2023. Grading will be based on class participation (40%), a midterm project (30%), and a final CFO case study project (30%). 25 CFOs from leading companies including the CFOs of AT&T, DoorDash, General Mills, Qualcomm, Visa, and Wells Fargo have agreed to speak with student teams for the final case study project. The teaching team is led by Jeff Epstein, former CFO of Oracle and board member at Kaiser Permanente, Twilio, Okta, Couchbase and AvePoint, and Mitesh Dhruv, former CFO of RingCentral and board member at ZoomInfo, along with Elena Gomez, CFO of Toast and board member at PagerDuty, Smartsheet and the U.C. Berkeley Haas School of Business, and Khozema Shipchandler, COO and former CFO of Twilio.