Cook’s PlayBooks: “Best Of” Leadership Top Level Framework

Here’s the Game Plan!

“Welcome to my weekly newsletter where I share three decades of start-up wisdom and personal ‘Best Of’ lessons learned from scaling several iconic Silicon Valley companies including Intuit, Netflix, and Mozilla Firefox. My career has been profoundly influenced by some legendary coaches, mentors, and other executive team members and it is now time to pay it forward and to create a shared learning community for the next generation of startup leaders.”

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GAME PLAN:

I’ve been a CFO in Silicon Valley for the last 25+ years at some high profile companies. I’ve been asked dozens of times from VCs, CEOs, and several others, various forms of “What Does A CFO Do?” or “What Should a CFO Be Doing?” or  “Do You Have A Good Job Description for a CFO?”

I remember drawing a version of the below graphic on a whiteboard in a Kleiner Perkins conference room. It wasn’t enough to explain verbally, I felt the VC’s and CEO’s in the room had to “See It.” 

I explained how a CFO sits at probably the most unique intersection in the organization - the intersection of all the organization’s people and their activities and the corresponding data generated by everyone’s activities.  

This 2010 version was a much prettier version than my 2000 whiteboard version:

Around 2015, I created a version that looked like the one below which spoke more toward the leadership aspects required and specifically highlighting one of my main mantras:

“Strategy-Structure-Execution”

Or specifically laid out as:

Strategy > Org Structure > Systems > Decisions > People/Culture > Communications & Influence

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Once I started coaching CEOs (Leadership/Teams) and CFOs full-time, I developed the version below and it currently serves as starting point for my Coaching practice.  

This Top Level “Best Of” Framework is also my Game Plan for this weekly blog and my next 100+ posts.

You sit at the center in most likely a C-Level Role surrounded by 4 color coded zones for Leadership Mastery.  By “mastery,” I specifically mean “Learning” these frameworks and playbooks, “Doing/Implementing” them, and finally “Coaching/Teaching” these zones to your own teams.

I’ll be unpacking each of these Zones and the Frameworks and PlayBooks within each zone in my upcoming weekly blog posts. So hit subscribe to make sure you get these posts delivered into your inbox.