Many founder and CEOs of companies don’t realize that CFOs are more than accounting, bean-counters. A good CFO is a true business partners to a CEO in helping to set strategy and deliver results across the company.
While it’s important for the CFO to be able to collect information and report company results, it’s equally important for to the CFO to help the CEO and management team to understand what the information is telling them.
The article below from the Wall Street Journal illustrates this with several examples of how some prominent companies benefitted from the CFO working in partnership with the CEO. Here's a good quote from th article.
“In one way or another, many of the most successful CFOs are heavily involved in business operations. They also tend to have a long history of setting strategy alongside their chief executive, according to an analysis of S&P 500 companies by recruiter Korn/Ferry International .”