The Best Podcasts for CFOs, Finance Professionals, and Economics Enthusiasts
Podcasts are most often associated with entertainment, or maybe edutainment: the ever-popular This American Life and its spinoff Serial, the TED Radio Hour, Radiolab, Lore.
However, sometimes you want a podcast that can help you in your career, make your job easier, or give you a new outlook on how you do business. That’s why we’ve put together a list of our top podcasts for CFOs, finance professionals, and econ enthusiasts. All can teach you something, but we’ve thrown in a couple of more fun ones for good measure. We hope you enjoy!
The Accounting Best Practices Podcast
Hosted by Steve Bragg, an author, CPA, and mountain climber (yep, that’s right) who’s written more than 70 books and courses on accounting, The Accounting Best Practices podcast covers topics like Fixed Asset Counting, the CFO Career Path, and Accounting in a Startup Company. The episodes are short—around 7 or 8 minutes—and offer practical knowledge and advice for anyone working in the business finance department. With 204 episodes, you’re sure to find a topic to interest you.
CFO Podcasts are created by CFO magazine, and cover a variety of topics pertinent to the CFO position. We like this series because it features interviews with experts in the field. From academics to CIOs, venture capitalists to authors, the guests on CFO Podcasts always have something interesting to share. To get started, try Practice Makes Perfect: How to Better Manage Working Capital, an interview with Prof. James Sagner of the University of North Carolina and the University of Connecticut at Bridgeport.
This is one of the more lively financial podcasts for CFOs out there. Co-hosted by finance professionals Jack Sweeney, Ethan Carlson, and Steve Player, this podcasts features in-depth interviews with—you guessed it—CFO thought leaders.
What makes the guests on this show thought leaders is that they are each somehow driving change within their companies. That could mean taking a new approach to managing growth in a high-tech company, refocusing the CFO position on people rather than metrics, or letting go of old ways that are no longer supporting an organization’s success. It’s a fun show that’s bound to give you some insight into your own leadership and business ideals.
Freakonomics probably doesn’t seem like the most business- or CFO-related podcast on this list, and it’s true that it’s quite different from the others. Freakonomics, you surely know, was a book by economist Steven D. Levitt and journalist Stephen J. Dubner that explored counter-intuitive ideas about things like real estate, teachers who cheat, and strange baby names. Now they’ve got a podcast that does the same sort of thing.
Often, the episodes don’t even seem to be about money or economics at all, but they do share one important characteristic: each episode challenges one or more deeply held preconceived ideas that most of us have. And being able to challenge long-held ideas is part of what makes one a great business leader, whether you’re a CFO or CEO.
You’ve probably heard stories from this unorthodox money and finance show on NPR—they broadcast regularly on the news show Morning Edition. But Planet Money is also a twice-weekly podcast that aims to look at current events affecting the economy in a fun, interesting way. Recent topics include an onion-farmer-turned-onion-trader who made millions, how the Federal Reserve plans to make $3 trillion disappear, and what’s really happening in China’s economy.
Hopefully, this list will mean you never have to spend 20 minutes finding something to listen to on your ride home again—or at least, not for a while.
And if all this boundary-bursting, budgeting podcast talk has inspired you to try something new at your organization, take a look at our budgeting solution, True Sky. We think it’s a great way to lose some of those old, constraining ideas that can make budgeting such an onerous process. Contact us today!
