Books can both entertain and edify. They can bring us to different worlds and help us better understand this one.
There are also books that can empower us to become better leaders and improve our business skills. If you’re a CFO or finance professional, those insights can go a long way to helping you grow and thrive.
But, with a long list of business and strategic finance books to choose from, how do you know which will be worth your time?
In a recent episode of The CFO Show, sponsored by Vena, our own CFO Melissa Howatson listed 13 of the best books for CFOs. An amalgamation of both her own picks and those of her guests over the past year, the resulting CFO reading list will give you a place to start as you build up your to-be-read pile this year.
“As a CFO, I've always believed that the best leaders are lifelong learners,” Melissa said on the podcast. “I'm thrilled to share some of my go-to reads. The ones that have truly influenced how I navigate the world of finance and leadership. We've also tapped into the collective wisdom of our past guests, creating a must-read list for leadership excellence.”
The only question is, which book will you dive into first?
Multipliers, by Liz Wiseman
High Growth Handbook, by Elad Gil
The Beauty of Discomfort, by Amanda Lang
Conscious Business, by Fred Kofman
Thinking Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman
Moneyball, by Michael Lewis
The Advantage, by Patrick Lencioni
Crossing the Chasm, by Geoffrey A. Moore
Amp It Up, by Frank Slootman
Build, by Tony Fadell
The First 90 Days, by Michael D. Watkins
The 15 Invaluable Laws of Growth, by John C. Maxwell
Who Moved My Cheese?, by Spencer Johnson, M.D.
The first recommendation for our CFO reading list is by Melissa herself. Multipliers is a 2010 book by leadership advisor Liz Wiseman and covers two different types of leaders. The first type, Diminishers, always need to be the smartest people in the room—using the energy and capabilities of those around them to fulfill that agenda. Meanwhile the second type, Multipliers, inspire employees to do more and be better—multiplying the impact of their leadership.
“[Wiseman] talks about how the best leaders make everyone else smarter. You can choose to be either a Multiplier or a Diminisher,” Melissa says. She adds, that distinction has helped her assess her own leadership style, as she constantly tries to ensure she’s being a Multiplier with her team and not diminishing their potential in order to expand her own.
Another one of Melissa’s CFO reading list recommendations, High Growth Handbook was first published in 2018 by global technology executive and angel investor Elad Gil. Gil has worked with companies like Airbnb, Twitter (now X), Google and Stripe, helping them grow from small to big businesses. This book offers some of the secrets to those successes, providing a playbook for small companies looking to grow.
“He has identified common patterns and challenges in high-growth situations. The book provides an easy-to-understand playbook for navigating those challenges and scaling high-growth startups,” Melissa says. “What I love about this book is how packed it is … the number of insights that you glean from so many different companies, experiences, and the variety of topics. It's the kind of book that makes you feel like you're getting 10 books in one.”
Melissa’s third and final recommendation is The Beauty of Discomfort: How What We Avoid Is What We Need. Written by author and business journalist Amanda Lang, this book was first published in 2017 and explores the role discomfort has in helping us achieve success. Leaders embrace discomfort, she theorizes, and they've developed ways to cope with it. That discomfort, in turn, helps spur them on and push their limits, becoming an impetus for change and growth.
This resonates with Melissa not just as a finance leader, but in all facets of her life. “I think about this book a lot in my personal life,” she says. “As a mom, I think about ‘how do I apply this with my kids?’. Am I building enough resilience in them? It is so tempting to want to jump in and always clear the path and make life easier, it’s much harder to stand back and sometimes let them fail. But it's actually in some of those failures and learnings and having them lean into those uncomfortable situations that they're going to grow and develop and build that resiliency.”
The next title on our best books for CFOs list was recommended by Nicolas Herman, CFO of Microsoft Americas Enterprise. Conscious Business: How to Build Value Through Values is a 2005 book by Fred Kofman. A leadership coach and founder and president of the Conscious Business Center, Kofman previously worked as Vice President at both Google and LinkedIn. Conscious Business provides advice for executives looking to improve their performance by helping them find their passion, communicate authentically, coordinate actions with accountability and more.
“It talks about the notion of success beyond success. What is true success?” Nicolas says. “And so, success is not necessarily being right. It's not necessarily the way we measure through metrics and performance.”
Benjamin Tal—Managing Director and Deputy Chief Economist with CIBC Capital Markets Inc.—recommends Thinking, Fast and Slow. This is Daniel Kahneman’s book on the two systems that drive our decision-making processes: the fast system, which is intuitive and emotional, and the slow system, which is logical and deliberate. Kahneman—a Nobel Prize-winning psychologist—explores both methods and the ideology behind them in the bestselling 2011 book.
The pages within outline many of Kahneman’s theories on how the mind works and how to make the best choices in our business and personal lives. “It tells you really how to think and what not to think, how things are shaped by the psyche and how you can impact the psyche of people in a very significant way,” Benjamin says. “I highly recommend it if you haven't read it.”
You may already be familiar with the 2011 Brad Pitt-starring film, Moneyball. Well, for our 2025 CFO reading list, Peter Arrowsmith—Managing General Partner at JMI Equity—recommends the book that the movie was based on: Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game. Written by Michael Lewis, the non-fiction bestseller was first published in 2003. It’s about baseball on its surface—following the success of the Oakland Athletics, a team with a low budget paired with a unique approach to success—but it goes beyond that too, exploring how underdogs can prevail with the right approach (and yes, the right data).
“What it’s really about is changing how folks or teams or organizations address problems and opportunities in a way that tweaks the model and allows them to look at opportunity differently," Peter says. “The takeaway is teams can achieve a lot if folks really are willing to check their ego at the door, to understand where their value is on the team at that time. And when teams do that, great things happen—the underdogs can become the winners.”
Released in 2012, The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else In Business is the book Tracy Edkins—CHRO Board Member and Advisor—picked for our CFO reading list. Written by management consultant Patrick Lencioni, it looks at the most important trait businesses can have today if they want to maintain a competitive advantage. That is, organizational health. A healthy organization, Lencioni argues, is consistent, welcoming and unified—and he uses anecdotes and tips to show why that makes such a huge difference today.
“Every organization struggles with being really, really clear on strategy, understanding when to zig versus zag, minimizing churn for your employees and knowing how to hold the leadership accountable for when they're actually the problem,” Tracy says. “But quite often that doesn't happen, does it? … And I really loved how this book laid that out.”
The 1991 classic, Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers, is the book pick of Craig Schiff, President, CEO and Lead Analyst for BPM Partners. The book—written by organizational theorist Geoffrey A. Moore—has become a go-to source for executives looking to bring cutting-edge products to market and searching for ways to reach a larger audience. It explores the Technology Adoption Life Cycle and the chasm that exists between early adopters and the early majority—as well as how to narrow that chasm to accelerate product adoption.
“A new CEO came into one of the companies I was at and dictated, ‘I want all senior management to read this book.’ And I'm thinking … ‘no one tells me what to read. I read whatever I want,’” Craig remembers. “But I read the book, and [it was] unbelievable, I loved it. It was actually something we could apply, and that I've applied to pretty much every company I've been in since.”
Ruth Zive, CMO of LivePerson, recommends Amp It Up: Leading for Hypergrowth by Raising Expectations as one of the best books for CFOs. It’s the 2022 book by Frank Slootman, CEO of Snowflake Inc., a cloud-based data storage company that saw a record IPO under Slootman’s leadership. In the book, the author explores how your business can achieve growth and scale as well, through cost-effective organizational improvements. He offers tactical advice and principles that can guide change and help you make hard choices that break through the status quo.
“There's one notion in the book that I just find myself coming back to over and over again, and that's that … execution trumps strategy every day of the week,” Ruth says. “A brilliant strategy that doesn't get executed against is a failure, but a scrappy execution in the absence of a strategy is still a success. So, I will always over-index on execution over strategy.”
Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making is engineer and inventor Tony Fadell’s 2022 bestselling book. It explores some of the most groundbreaking products that have been released and the inventors behind them. As part of the teams that created the iPod, iPhone and Nest thermostat, Fadell brings his unique perspective to the pages within, providing advice to readers on topics that range from leadership and design to mentorship and failure.
Sruthi Lanka, CFO of Public.com, recommends Build, whether you work in a startup or a large company. “It left a huge impression on me,” she says. “It focuses on some of the pieces of working across companies, working with partners.”
The First 90 Days: Proven Strategies for Getting Up to Speed Faster and Smarter is James Suh’s contribution to our CFO reading list. The CFO of the Florida Panthers calls the 2003 tome by executive coach Michael D. Watkins “a great book”—especially for people beginning a new job. The book looks at the transitions managers face when starting a role at a new organization—and the challenges they encounter. While they have a chance to make important changes and shape the organization as a whole, they’re also vulnerable to making the wrong choices, which can taint their tenure going forward.
Watkins offers tactics to help navigate these hurdles. “[It’s about] coming into a new role and really embracing a role and figuring out what you need to do in those first few months,” James says. “To not take everything on and try to over promise and under deliver, but to really understand what you're here to do and how to set your mind and your priorities straight to really set yourself up for success in the long term.”
“He breaks down every law in a meaningful way—a purposeful way,” Kendra says. “It's very much just, you should learn these different techniques and ways of being, because it's about being a good human—not just being a good business owner or a good leader but being a good human.”
A classic business book first published in 1998, Who Moved My Cheese?: An A-Mazing Way to Deal with Change in Your Work and in Your Life offers a parable to readers designed to help them deal with change and de-stress their lives. Recommended for our CFO reading list by Donna Dellomo—former EVP and CFO and current Senior Strategic Advisor for Lovesac—the book by Dr. Spencer Johnson has been shared across businesses for years. It offers a way to help both leaders and employees deal with the anxiety that happens around change and teaches them how to accept it in all facets of their lives.
“It really talks about organizational change. It talks about how people deal with change, how people accept change. What do you do with change? What does change mean?” Donna explains. “And I'm telling you, it is the smallest, easiest-to-read book.”
“Being a great CFO—or any leader for that matter—is about continual growth, fresh perspectives and the willingness to learn from others,” Melissa says. And whether you’re reading strategic finance books, leadership tomes or the latest inspirational bestseller, books offer the potential to provide exactly that, offering different perspectives and learnings.
We just hope our list of best books for CFOs gives you a good place to start as you aim to find useful insights of your own. Any one of these books offers plenty of knowledge that can help you develop your business skills and grow as a leader.
So, start stacking your bookshelves and get started with your 2025 reading now.
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