Class Acts

And for those who stand at the head of a classroom either full- or part-time, he says, there is yet another attraction in the teaching profession: "It's a chance to provide a little bit of community service — some payback, if you will. You get to share with others the things that went right, and some of the things that didn't go so well."

Roy Harris is a senior editor at CFO.

The World Is Your Schoolroom

Outside the executive suite and the finance department, here are some audiences for teaching-minded CFOs.

Operating Managers: From sales and marketing to the production line, they need to understand how their department interacts with finance, and how what they do affects overall profitability and stock price.

Employees: More are seeking financial grounding about how incentive programs work for them, and how economic profit reflects their efforts; also, stock options or retirement-account shares make them a special class of worker-owner to be coached.

Wall Street: A longtime CFO audience, analysts and investors often need briefings in both corporate strategy and finance principles.

The Public: The largest stakeholder group, and the press that represents it, often search for positive or negative community impact from corporate actions.

Business Schools: Here can be found a future source of finance or other young managers — along with an educated consumer group that is constantly forming opinions about your company.

Bringing It Home

Some tips from Harvard's Samuel Hayes for making finance topics more understandable.

Tip #1: Apply financial principles to familiar spheres of reference for the audience; a family's income, for example, compares with corporate revenues, and a special roof-repair account resembles a depreciation reserve.

Tip #2: Use visual symbols to describe difficult concepts; on the balance sheet, a "giant sponge" soaks up funds, and the sources and applications of those funds are equal.

Tip #3: Concentrate on key ratios and relationships, like compensation-expense-to-revenues or liabilities-to-net-worth, to show how various functions of a corporation affect each other.

Tip #4: Don't fear tackling great financial myths that pervade the nonfinance world, including the "low cost of equity."

Tip #5: Despite the availability of sophisticated computer spreadsheets, be able to conceptualize the big picture simply — "on the back of an envelope or on a paper napkin."

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