What’s keeping you up at night? What’s on your insomnia index?
Our good friends at BCG just released their first-ever (and delightfully titled) CEO Insomnia Index, based on a survey of roughly 500 chief executives at companies with revenues ranging from $100 million to more than $5 billion. It’s basically an MRI of the tortured CEO’s soul. Meeting growth targets, managing costs, and handling board expectations top the list of stressors.
But the goriest detail of this study has to do with palace politics. CEOs of the largest companies in the study ($5 billion or more in revenue) ranked their senior leadership teams as the biggest source of stress among their many stakeholders!
And it gets worse. Of all members of the C-suite, CEOs see their chief financial officer (CFO) as the biggest threat to their job security, followed by the chief operating officer (COO). And to think that I, in my infinite wisdom, promoted my CFO, Todd McElhatton, to CFO/COO—or COFO! This man is truly a double threat.
Treating your team members like potential enemies is clearly counterproductive and downright toxic. The best leaders develop their successors; they don’t lose sleep over them. But this quote sums up what I think is really going on:
“CFOs are less backward-looking bookkeepers and much more forward-looking—developing and analyzing scenarios, providing decision support, and offering business advisory,” said Jody Foldesy, global chief operating officer of corporate finance and strategy at BCG, to Fortune. CFOs are also increasingly on the hook for AI implementation and returns: “For every company’s ledger, this is becoming an increasingly large portion of spend—and if you look into the future, it’s only going to grow,” he said.
Lots of CFOs gained attention during the shift from on-premise to subscriptions, since they had responsibility for a new business model that many people had questions about. But if subscriptions were a systemic complexity, AI is an existential one. Today, AI is detonating financial benchmarks for everything: margins, volume, valuations, pricing, everything.
Oh, and guess what? Everything is becoming much more expensive.
The CFO sits at the intersection of capital allocation, technology investment, and risk management in a way no other executive does. In many cases, they’re the first to see where optimism has outpaced reality, or where enthusiasm for innovation has outrun economic viability.
Suddenly, the person who used to be responsible for keeping the numbers is now responsible for defining reality. No wonder these people are getting so much attention! And it’s sad but not surprising that a poor confused insomniac CEO might perceive that attention as a threat.
The CFO isn’t there to take the wheel, they’re there to make sure the car doesn’t drive off a cliff. And if that feels like a threat, it probably says more about the driver than the navigator.
