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Drew Adamek

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Lap sitting on a pile of cash with arrows going up and to the right out of the laptop screen

CFO of Wasabi Technologies enjoys baking bread

CFO Michael Bayer bakes bread on the side to keep things fresh

Rolling in the dough

CFOs say a recession won’t be that bad

Economic conditions will likely improve in the latter half of 2023, CFOs tell investors.

Most CFOs now see a softer recession ahead

A remote worker sits at his desk looking at a computer

Some work is better suited to be done in the office

Instead of creating rigid hybrid schedules, consider what needs to be done.

The what matters more than the where in remote work

CFOs

Natasha Piñon

What does Mark Zuckerberg love? His AR glasses 

And what does Mark Zuckerberg hate? Meetings and managing people, apparently.

On Tuesday, at a fireside chat during Stripe’s annual Sessions conference in San Francisco, Stripe co-founder John Collison, the moderator, asked the tech mogul for “the Mark Zuckerberg management book,” or where his leadership style might “differ from the orthodoxy.”

The line of questioning came up, in part, because of Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s appearance at the same conference last year, where he outlined some of his 

, like managing 60 direct reports and personally maintaining zero work-life balance. (Fun!)

But Huang is Huang, and Zuckerberg is Zuckerberg.

Since founding Facebook in 2004 as an undergrad, Zuckerberg’s 

—and his stilted mannerisms have often taken center stage ahead of his management style. (During the chat, Zuckerberg acknowledged he was “famously awkward,” and we’re not about to argue.)

So, does a “famously awkward” man run his company any differently than a CEO famous for his notably cool 

? (And can CFOs, be they awkward or cool, learn anything from it?)

“I don’t have 60 direct reports,” Zuckerberg said, in reference to Huang’s unique move. “I don’t even like managing people,” he continued, to laughter from the audience. See above: famously awkward.

Instead, the company, like many, is organized “thematically,” he explained, where all app-related workflows, for example, report to one person, and the same goes for ads, infrastructure, and on.

“Obviously, those people are brilliant, and I work with them super closely, but I also go directly to the people who are running whatever the thing is that I care about,” he said. “We’re very non-hierarchical in that way. I think of our management team as not really just my direct reports; it’s sort of like this broader group of 25 to 30 people who I try to include in everything.”

So…he has 25 or 30 direct reports? “Probably more,” Zuckerberg acknowledged, to more laughter from the audience. But don’t expect him to treat them as traditional direct reports.

“What’s the point of having direct reports if you’re not going to do one-on-ones?” he asked, still contemplating the prospect of having 60 instead of 30-ish immediate underlings. Then, he answered his own question: “Well, I actually don’t do one-on-ones with the people that report to me either.”

But that’s not to say he isn’t communicating with this core group.

“When I say I don’t have one-on-ones, I don’t have recurring, scheduled one-on-ones,” Zuckerberg added. “I talk to all these people constantly, more than they want to talk to me, I’m sure. But I do it when I have something that I want to talk to them about, or if they want to talk to me; I try to generally keep a bunch of time open, so that way stuff is pretty dynamic.”

That’s part of a broader philosophy for this core group. “I really try to minimize standing meetings,” he said. He only has two per week with the smaller group: “an open-ended strategy discussion,” and then an operational meeting about company priorities. “And that is 

The setup allows him to actually prioritize the most important tasks on a given day—even when they’re constantly shifting.

“I get really frustrated and [in a] bad mood if my whole day is scheduled, and there’s a thing that I know is really important, and I don’t get time to do it because I’m sitting in other things that are not the most important thing to be doing,” he said. “You have too many days like that in a row and I just explode.”

At Stripe Sessions 2025, the tech mogul outlined “the Mark Zuckerberg management book,” which apparently includes minimizing meetings and one-on-ones. 

Mark Zuckerberg hates meetings, too 

This is part of our occasional series on CFOs’ first day on their current job.

It’s an activity most of us dread in adult life: walking past a cluster of tweens at the mall.

They see you; you see them. On their cherubic, unlined faces, a public reminder of your pending mortality. On your face, a look of sheer terror. Few of us get by unscathed.

But if you’re Chris Cramer, the new CFO and COO of teen accessories retailer and mall staple Claire’s, you might just have to brave the brutal, hormonal hordes before you can accept a new job offer. And in his (luckily not-at-all-harrowing) experience lies a crucial lesson for other retail CFOs.

Cramer took over the post in November 2023, and the uniqueness of the position—a joint CFO and COO appointment—was a large motivator for pursuing the role. 

“Having been a COO and having been a CFO before, I thought the opportunity to bring that experience to bear in one role was something that my background suited me for,” Cramer told CFO Brew.

Following his MBA, he moved into corporate finance-related work at IBM. And after that, for the last 20-ish years, he’s worked in specialty retail, including stints as CFO (and then COO) of Bath & Body Works and president of Parade.

Cramer’s varied career before Claire’s positioned him for his blended post, particularly in more recent decades as he held “about an even mix of what I would call purely financial roles and then roles that were either straight operational, or a blend of finance and operational roles.”

But it wasn’t just past experience synchronicity that drove him to the role. It was also the sight of overexcited tweens and their devoted parents, buzzing around malls.

 Cramer’s prep for his first day at Claire’s started long before he stepped into the role. “One of the things that I ended up finding most attractive, which ultimately helped lead to that first day, was, for me, brand matters a lot, especially in a specialty retail situation like this,” Cramer said. “Does the company have an emotional connection with customers?”

There’s an easy way to answer that question: Go to lots and lots of stores. And that’s what he did.

What he saw sealed the deal: There was “tremendous consistency” across stores, he said. You’d see “excitement, families—moms and daughters—shopping together. [You’d see] younger kids, running around the store with excitement from one display to another,” Cramer continued.

“For me, that was actually a big part of learning about Claire’s and deciding it was the kind of place I wanted to have the first day [at], because to me that felt like a brand with that emotional and customer connection that I would want,” he explained. “Frankly, that’s at the base of good specialty retailers.”

 That sense of shared enthusiasm carried Cramer into his actual first day on the job. “It’s always a whirlwind,” Cramer said of starting a new CFO role. “There’s so many different things you could look at. I start with people.”

At Claire’s, he ran an internal checklist: Who will I interact with the most? Who do I need to meet to form cross-functional partnerships? 

“I spent time with the CEO of Claire’s on my first day. I spent time with people that are direct reports of mine,” he said. “To me, it always starts with people and relationships.”

And it was that Day One communication between teams that also helped him settle into the collaborative nature of the joint COO/CFO role, he explained—a position he thinks a growing number of companies will consider in the future. 

“I think what we’re doing here at Claire’s—the CFO and COO role blend—will be more the norm rather than the exception,” Cramer said.

“Those operating decisions that a COO is involved in all have a financial underpinning. Being able to connect those operating decisions back efficiently and seamlessly…actually creates real synergy for the business,” he continued. “I think it allows the business to get to better decisions over time.”

My first day: Claire’s CFO

 Claire’s CFO Chris Cramer on the crucial task any retail finance chief should consider before a new job. 

Steven I. Weiss

Nancy McClelland was still in her early days of working as a fully licensed CPA, about a decade ago, when she took the opportunity to introduce herself to one of her idols, accounting software consultant Doug Sleeter, at the accounting technology conference he founded and led. Sleeter took one look at her conference badge, which included the name of her firm, The Dancing Accountant, and the next day, McClelland was on the main stage to open the conference, participating in a group routine to Pharrell Williams’s “Happy.”

When people talk about what could open doors during the course of a financial career, they might point to education, credentials, and upskilling. But for McClelland, bringing her full self to the job—her “multidimensional character,” as one of her clients puts it—is a large part of the secret sauce.

Being the Dancing Accountant is in one sense two different things: McClelland is a dancer performing with several groups, and she also serves as an accountant to small businesses in Chicago. But The Dancing Accountant is also a singular identity and a way of doing business for McClelland that emerged from her choice to change course in her career and her passion multiple times over 30 years of professional work.

In that same time, she says, accounting itself has changed, to allow professionals to bring more of their personality to the work. McClelland said that these days, being that open and communicative personality is an advantage for financial professionals, in a way it wasn’t when she was getting started.

McClelland keeps a note above her desk that reads, “Be an authentic reflection of yourself.” She looks at it every day to remind her of the guiding principle she brings to work and life.

 McClelland’s advice to other finance professionals: “So as long as you’re reflecting your authentic self, people are going to remember that and it’s what has led to the connections that I have with people in the accounting world,” she said.

“You think of accountants as having the green eyeshade, their head’s down, and they don't communicate with anyone around them, they just crunch the numbers,” McClelland told CFO Brew from her home office in Chicago. By contrast, she regularly performs at clients’ events, in full costume, and said it has helped her grow her business and connect with clients.

McClelland is “kind of like the exact opposite of any accountant I’ve ever worked with before,” said Jessica Wobbekind, executive director of the Logan Square Chamber of Commerce, which also happens to be a Dancing Accountant client. “They typically are just more serious, and Nancy is such a warm personality…She really puts her heart into it; she gives her all.”

 McClelland wasn’t headed for a career in accounting from the start. She was a music major in college at the University of Michigan, who only entered the world of accounting when she took a job as a music theory teacher at a performing arts school near her university, while still an undergraduate, in 1992. That job was half teaching, and half office management with bookkeeping responsibilities.

“Not surprisingly, I was the only person who applied for that position, because that is just weird,” McClelland recalled. “But it was perfect for me.”

McClelland quickly came to realize that in a community of creatives, she stood out for her organizational skills, and spent four years after graduation as a business manager for a violin maker. After moving to Chicago and a brief stint in an accounting job at a nonprofit, McClelland decided that she was best suited for a role that involved more communication, and she hung out a shingle to work with a client base of small businesses, like a 

 store. McClelland took classes on the side, toward a masters in accounting, so that around the time she turned 40, she was a fully-minted CPA. Her firm charges hourly for its services, with a flat fee for tax returns, and employs eight part-timers.

 Also around the time she hit 40, she decided to finally pursue her dream for a creative outlet. Talking with a friend about hitting that age milestone, McClelland recalled saying “I have to say by now I really did think that I would have already started taking [go-go] dance lessons.” Her friend’s retort of “Why not?” turned into an immediate search for dance lessons in Chicago, and McClelland found a class with Go-Go dance group 

 the very next night. After a couple of months of classes, McClelland was invited to join the dance group as a performer.

Soon after the combination of her new license and new after-work hobby, a client introduced her to someone as “the dancing accountant,” and the name seemed like a revelation. “I filled out that DBA paperwork the next day,” she said.

These days, McClelland is a bit of a celebrity in both accounting and dance. She’s 

r for audiences of accountants, and now performs with three different dance groups—including the ’80s-aerobics-inspired 

 McClelland sees her own transformation as something that the profession has undergone alongside her over the past couple of decades.

“Bookkeeping used to be a lot more about recording data,” she said, but now, technology has removed a lot of the busywork and “clients aren’t paying you to get the data into the system; they’re paying you to tell them what that data means.”

With that change in practice has come a change in the types of personalities who succeed in accounting.

“It is much more not just acceptable, but maybe even desirable, to have people in traditional CPA firms or to have people in corporate accounting jobs…to be a dancer, to be a creative type, to have a loud personality, to be passionate and to express [yourself,]” McClelland said.

How The Dancing Accountant brings her personality to work

Nancy McClelland turned her passion into a feature for her accounting firm.

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Becoming an expert CFO starts here

CFOs have a lot going for them, but there’s one thing they don’t have at the moment: job security. In recent years, CFOs have had the least job security in the C-suite, according to a new Datarails study based on complete filings of company records from 2,056 US listed companies between 2016 and 2021.

Within that time range, which Datarails notes is the “latest period for which official data exists,” CFOs at the biggest publicly listed companies held the post for an average of 3.51 years. Turnover was the name of the game: 56% of companies saw at least one CFO turnover, while 16% faced more than one CFO switch.

Between 2016 and 2021, 269 major companies—including Tesla, Starbucks, United Airlines, and Procter & Gamble—clocked three CFO shake ups. Another 52 companies—including 

 International, and Avis Budget Group—saw four CFOs come and go in that same time frame, per Datarails.

And three companies entered rarefied territory: the five-in-five club. Sally Beauty, manufacturing company Superior Industries International, and marketing company Harte Hanks all cycled through five CFOs by the end of 2021.

Even though the entire industry was defined by departures, some sectors fared better than others. CFOs for hotels, resorts, and cruise lines as well as cable and satellite companies led the pack with respect to tenure length, followed by professional services. Those CFOs had an average tenure length of 3.4 years and above. At the bottom? CFOs working in railroads, advertising, and pharmaceuticals. They had average tenures of 2.7 years and below.

It wouldn’t take a genius to predict that a global pandemic might have at least some impact on turnover. Rocket scientist or not, you’d be at least somewhat right: While CFO turnover stayed steadily high throughout the duration of the study, the figure hit a high point in 2021. Though it wasn’t covered in the study, there was less 

 at Fortune 500 companies from Q1 to Q3 in 2022 than in 2021, per executive search firm 

. However, the firm said the “slowing turnover may paint a misleading picture,” and didn’t expect the dip to last.

But for all this turnover, there’s a bright spot: As the CFO role has changed to meet an increasingly challenging economic backdrop, pay has increased “to meet this burden,” according to the report’s authors. Average CFO pay, which includes salary, bonuses, stock awards, and options, rose from $2.4 million in 2016 to $3.5 million in 2021, marking a 40% increase, per Datarails.

Still, the report’s authors don’t expect the CFO mass migration to let up soon. While CFOs have “emerged as second only to the CEO in terms of responsibility and accountability for business performance,” the “immense” pressure of the role looks set to continue, the report’s authors note.

“With more economic challenges ahead, the pain points fueling this exodus are unlikely to be soothed in 2023,” they wrote.

a 2D animation of an angry businessman lifting a barbell with hourglasses as weights

High pay, high turnover 

CFOs have the least job security in the C-Suite, study shows. 

If 8:30am in a hotel conference room filled with well-dressed CFOs is the last place you’d expect to hear Metallica, then you’ve never seen Jack McCullough speak. In fact, much of a McCullough speech is…different than what one would normally see at a high-powered business conference.

To watch McCullough work the crowd during a conference is to really see him shine. At the 20th annual 

, a conference he co-founded, McCullough moved from table to table for hours, attendees calling out to him as he moved through the room. There were over 400 CFOs and finance professionals at the one-day conference and, to an outside observer, it seemed like McCullough knew each one.

“I’m visible within that community because I’m the founder of that conference,” McCullough told CFO Brew recently. “And it was the 20th year; there’s just a comfort level that people have developed with me.”

But that’s not really surprising; one CFO who’s known McCullough for decades called him, “the consummate networker.”

“He just knows everyone…and that comes across in the work that he does. It’s a really powerful differentiator for him,” Michael Bayer, CFO of Wasabi Technologies, who met McCullough in the early 2000s, told CFO Brew. “He’s seen as the connector.”

, a professional association with 2,000 members and 30 chapters across the US and Canada (with another opening soon in Las Vegas), author of two books, and a co-founder of the MIT Sloan CFO Summit, McCullough has been a tireless advocate for decades in helping CFOs transition from a technical, backward-looking accounting role to becoming more strategic, empathetic, and inclusive business partners and leaders.

“He really wants to build an excellent community of finance leaders that goes beyond the finance and accounting,” said Joyce Bell, CFO of JM Bell Consulting and a founding member of The CFO Leadership Council. “It’s really recognizing that the role of a CFO is very much of a leader, so you need to have emotional intelligence and need to understand what leadership and development is.”

In chapters across the country, members of the CFO Leadership Council hold networking events, and offer informational presentations by experts and local CFOs on a variety of topics including ethics, technical accounting, and leadership.

From the beginning, the group focused on two things that set them apart from other organizations, according to Bell and Bayer. First, they focused on developing soft skills over technical skills, and second, local member advisory boards drive each chapter’s content based on local issues and challenges.

In many ways, McCullough’s career trajectory tracks with the seismic shifts in the CFO role in the last two decades. After studying accounting at Suffolk University in Massachusetts, he spent three years as an auditor at Peat Marwick, the predecessor firm to accounting giant KPMG. Seeking more challenges in his career, he moved into industry at Boston software startup Gensym as its controller.

“I found the business side of auditing more fascinating than the accounting side of auditing,” McCullough told CFO Brew. “At Gensym, I felt like I was building something and I did not feel that way in public accounting.”

At that time, the path to CFO was changing. 

, especially in the tech industry, companies started looking for CFOs to take on a more strategic role.

“[That] was the first time the CFO was really becoming a center of not just thinking about one’s dollars and cents, but more about business strategy, articulating that in a difficult environment,” Bayer told CFO Brew. “The story was changing so quickly; the Internet was coming.”

McCullough said his ultimate career goal at that time was to become a CFO, and after five years at Gensym, decided he needed an MBA to bolster his resume.

After earning his MBA at MIT Sloan, McCullough worked a series of CFO roles throughout the Boston technology ecosystem through the early 2000s before returning to KPMG in 2010.

However, a side hustle was about to take off.

 full tilt in the 2000s. Regulatory changes in the wake of accounting scandals like Enron and the 2008 crash put new responsibilities and demands on the CFO, and CFOs were increasingly being seen as strategic business partners to the CEO.

For McCullough, navigating that rapid change at a smaller company was a growing challenge. Existing organizations’ finance professionals focused on larger companies, and the professional associations were more top-down advice than he wanted, he said. He decided that he needed a network of peers experiencing the same challenges to share with.

Looking to build that network, McCullough organized the first of what was then called the CFO Roundtable at a conference room at MIT in 2006. Expecting 20 people to attend, nearly 60 showed up for the first meeting, he told CFO Brew.

“I realized that, quite by accident, I touched a nerve,” he said. “I felt some comfort, knowing that there are a lot of younger CFOs struggling to figure things out in a rapidly changing world.”

The CFO Roundtable grew quickly. What McCullough originally intended to be an informal get-together four or five times a year turned into a monthly event. A steering committee of CFOs was formed to help develop programming for the group, and it became an important part of the Boston finance ecosystem, according to Bell.

“What differentiates it [is that] it’s by and for the members, versus a national organization creating all of the programs,” she said. “It is asking members, ‘What is it that’s top of mind for you?’ and creating programs around that.”

One of the early focuses for the organization was developing soft skills such as emotional intelligence, mastering difficult conversations, and ethics. McCullough and others in the organization realized that as the role was changing, the most successful CFOs were not necessarily the best accounting technicians, but the best leaders.

“We collectively realized that the soft skills were critical,” McCullough told CFO Brew. “I remember people rolling their eyes and saying, ‘What the hell are you doing? What does that have to do with being a CFO?’”

But CFOs and aspiring finance professionals understood. The group grew organically throughout the 2000s, with chapters opening across the country, often spread by members moving to new cities. McCullough eventually changed the name to the CFO Leadership Council (CFOLC) and incorporated it, leaving KPMG in 2006 to run the CFOLC full time. McCullough sold the CFOLC in 2021 to the Chief Executive Group (CEG), a publishing and events company, but remains its president.

With its new partnership, CFOLC has ambitious expansion plans, including opening international groups, according to McCullough.

McCullough’s own remarkable soft skills are driving much of that expansion, several people who have worked with him over the years told CFO Brew. Colleagues describe him as an empathetic, energetic, and compassionate leader.

“He’s very thoughtful, very collegial and collaborative in a difficult environment, because he’s trying to corral sponsors and CFOs and thought leaders,” said Bayer.

Stephen Gregorio, CFO at Tomorrow.io. Gregorio hired McCullough for his first finance job after he left public accounting and has watched McCullough grow as a person, a CFO, and as the leader of the CFOLC.

“He’s been an amazing asset for people like me and others that want to get more information about what’s happening in other parts of the finance world,” said Gregorio.

In his late 50s, McCullough knows he won’t be running the CFOLC forever. But the community, and the energy he derives from it, still motivates him to help make CFOs better and he still feels that he has a lot of work to do.

“We as an organization have a responsibility to make sure that women have leadership opportunities,” he said.

The CFOLC has launched several mentorship and diversity programs to support women and finance professionals of color, including the 

, which supports underrepresented groups with learning and networking opportunities, and creating a 

No matter how long he stays with the CFOLC, building a community, connecting with others, and boosting finance professionals of all stripes in their careers, has been worth more than a lucrative career as a CFO himself, McCullough told CFO Brew.

“I hope I won’t look back and say, ‘Geez, I wish I had a little bit more money in the bank account,’” said McCullough. “It was a decision I made: love or money, and I picked love, fool that I am.”

CFOs

Mark Zuckerberg hates meetings, too

My first day: Claire’s CFO

How The Dancing Accountant brings her personality to work

Becoming an expert CFO starts here

Becoming an expert CFO starts here

High pay, high turnover

Everybody knows Jack

News built for finance pros