Author: admin

Kate Gulliver has been Wayfair's CFO for four years. But she has effectively worked for five different companies under the same roof. There was a story of a pre-IPO toddler, a super-growth rocket ship, a COVID-19 boom, a post-COVID-19 hangover, and now a pivot to growth. Add to this six years of running a human resources function, and you have one of the more unusual and profitable executive trajectories in American business. She shared what she learned at the CFO Leadership Council's 2026 Spring Leadership Conference in Boston. Survival reveals everything. When Wayfair finally decided to turn a profit, every…

Jennifer Langton has built a career through strategic pivots. Beginning in the finance sector, eventually earning the CFO seat at Atari, Langton switched gears for an operational role as senior vice president of player health innovation at the NFL. Now, she’s become a strategic advisor to organizations undergoing transformations of their own. She credits her time as an athlete for the mindset that helped her succeed, no matter the title. At 13, she was the only female player on an all boy’s lacrosse team, and went on to join the Youth Hall of Fame in Long Island and play for…

The headlines don't seem to agree on where the economy is heading, and business leaders, economists, and most importantly, consumers don't seem to agree. Stock markets are booming as millions of wage earners strain under high prices. Employment statistics can be strong or weak from month to month. And with the policy environment changing weekly, planning can feel almost futile. Emily Mandel, senior economist and associate director at Moody's Analytics, came to the CFO Leadership Council's Spring 2026 Leadership Conference in Boston to read up on what's happening, what could happen, and what CFOs can do about it. Her conclusion…

Karen Walker has grown finance organizations at some of the technology industry's fastest-growing companies, including Uber, Pandora, PagerDuty, and cloud security company Sysdig, where she currently serves as both the CFO and a member of the CEO's office. This last role is a new problem. When Sysdig's co-founders needed an operator to go to market and run the company while focusing on product and engineering, Walker stepped in. At the CFO Leadership Council's Spring 2026 Leadership Conference in Boston, she shared what she learned about scale, influence, cyber risk, and what it takes to grow beyond the finance chair. Before…

Coordinated retirement of employees, often referred to as “collective retirement,” is no longer limited to Wall Street and insurance brokers. Competitors across industries are increasingly hiring entire teams to accelerate growth, gain customer relationships, and avoid the slow process of building capacity organically. For CEOs, the impact goes far beyond hiring new employees to replace retirees. Sudden team departures can disrupt operations, weaken customer trust, damage reputations, compromise sensitive information, and cause widespread attrition across the organization. In many industries, hiring established teams is a faster and cheaper growth strategy than acquisitions. Companies can gain customer relationships, organizational knowledge, and…

When Gina Geter joined Hasbro three years ago as CFO and COO, business wasn't in great shape. With thin profit margins and a vast portfolio, the company best known for Monopoly, Nerf, and Transformers needed to figure out what it actually wanted to be when it grew up. Getter has been working with CEO Chris Cox to lead what the company calls its Playing to Win strategy. The idea is to pivot Hasbro away from being a toy company and into, in her words, a “modern play company” built around IP that can survive across physical products, digital games and…

For years, most boards have followed the same ritual. Two weeks before a board meeting, directors receive a thick digital packet (often over 100 pages) and do their best to find the “needle in the haystack” before showing up in the boardroom. Florin Rotar, group CTO at Atos and former chief AI officer at Avanade, believes that those days are rapidly coming to an end. “I think it's important to move away from the old-school approach of big decks and piles of materials in terms of being prepared before the board meeting, asking the right questions during the board meeting,…

When Charlie Wagner joined Vertex Pharmaceuticals in April 2019, he joined the company six months before the approval of Trikafta. Trikafta is a cystic fibrosis drug that later became the standard treatment for 95% of CF patients worldwide. He could see what was going to happen. Although the science was strong and the pipeline was interesting, the company was not ready to scale. Over the next seven years, revenue grew from $3 billion to $13 billion, market capitalization from $40 billion to $110 billion, and 2,500 employees were transformed to 7,000. Wagner, who now holds the titles of both CFO…

Sandra Clarke has seen healthcare cost management from all angles, including pharmaceutical companies, insurance companies, and finance departments. A former chief financial officer at Blue Shield of California, she points out that the company paid for its employees' medical expenses like any other employer. “We didn't have free health care,” she told a room packed with CFOs at the CFO Leadership Council's Spring 2026 Leadership Conference in Boston this week. “We paid like everyone else.” We live in an era where premiums are increasing by 10 percent annually for most employers and more than 20 percent for smaller employers. Only…

Editor's note: Libby Rodney is chief strategy officer at Harris Poll and one of the sharpest minds in understanding consumer and social trends in business today. She will be the keynote speaker at the Leadership Summit this November. Learn more and join > We live in a big confinement. Now every meeting begins with the same question. What is the ROI? What's the reward? Did that dinner actually lead to a deal, did that conversation convert, and how much is this worth on the balance sheet? We have become very good at measuring things. We are finding it increasingly difficult…