Bad Blood is subtitled, Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup. This is the story of Theranos, the blood testing company started by a 19-year-old Stanford dropout, Elizabeth Holmes, and now called the biggest fraud since Enron. I started reading this book, by Wall Street Journal writer John Carreyrou, in August, not knowing that […]
Author Archive | david lightfoot
Book Review: Double Entry
Double Entry refers to the bookkeeping system which uses a self-balancing set of accounts, where every entry is double-sided, a debit and a credit. Author Jane Gleeson-White subtitled her book, How the Merchants of Venice Created Modern Finance. The book starts with a speech by Bobby Kennedy decrying the things that Gross National Product does […]
Book Review: Fulfillment—Winning and Losing in One-Click America
The pandemic has acted as an accelerant to trends that were already taking place. The pandemic led to everyone shopping from home and Amazon was the biggest beneficiary of the growth in online shopping. With the rise of Amazon and Jeff Bezos, there has been a rash of new books about the company and its […]
What I Do, Part 3
Four weeks ago, my blog was about What I Do. That resulted in a follow up with more detail on the topic of coaching upcoming executives. This is the second follow up on What I Do, this blog on my involvement with acquisitions and sales of businesses. Let’s first talk about acquisitions. Sometimes existing clients […]
What I Do, Part 2
My last blog was titled, “What I Do.” I got a lot of comments and several people asked me to elaborate on some of the points. One of the things I mentioned that I do, is CEO Coaching. Don’t confuse this with joining a CEO Peer Group with a facilitator, which I often recommend because […]
What I Do
I have been a consultant CFO for longer than any W-2 job I ever had, and I only wish I had started my practice sooner. I enjoy working with small business owners because it is satisfying to help people achieve their dreams. Recently, I’ve been talking to new referrals and been reminded that I have […]
Book Review: The Bomber Mafia
I read every book that Malcolm Gladwell writes. This is his latest. It is a diversion from his usual topics, most of which are based on social science. This one is about something he has touched on in his podcast, Revisionist History, and is a topic he is particularly fascinated with. That topic being war […]
Book Review: The Premonition—A Pandemic Story
When writing his previous book, The Fifth Risk, author Michael Lewis explored the risks that the federal government protects us from through the use of experts in the government. These experts had been ignored for decades. The first three years of the Trump administration, they got lucky. Then came the coronavirus. Michael Lewis has become […]
Post Pandemic, Part 2
This is the second part of my thoughts on post-pandemic workplaces, management, company structures and company cultures. Last week I gave you my general thoughts, including my recommended approach to business owners trying to figure out the combination of going back to pre-pandemic norms while adopting new approaches learned over the last 15 months. Briefly, […]
Post Pandemic, Part 1
We’re coming out of the pandemic and it seems to be happening very fast. For business owners, what’s next? The consensus is that the pandemic acted as an accelerant to trends that were already underway. What the pandemic did was accelerate those trends about ten years in the space of about 15 months. To me, […]