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.
To quote the study: “The CFO’s proximity to board members, whom they routinely brief on financial performance, forecasts, capital allocation, and risk, can earn them both credibility and influence. Over time, that could position them as the natural heir apparent to the CEO.”
Fair enough. But proximity to power has always played a role in palace politics. Shakespeare wrote some great plays on the topic. Today, I think we’re seeing a very different dynamic at play.
“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.
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 not surprising that a stress-soaked, insomniac CEO might perceive that attention as a threat.
If you’re a CEO, you’re not getting any more softball pitches about lean operating models, market differentiation, or crossing the chasm. You’re getting asked how you’re going to avoid getting killed by a meteor. And to answer that question, you’re going to have to partner with your CFO.
If you don’t, you won’t have to worry about getting stabbed in the back. It’ll be a moot point.
