{"id":5030,"date":"2025-04-30T18:04:47","date_gmt":"2025-04-30T18:04:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nehrlich.com\/linkedin\/uncategorized\/if-you-want-to-understand-how-executives-think-you-have-to-understand-the-money\/"},"modified":"2026-03-12T21:29:29","modified_gmt":"2026-03-12T21:29:29","slug":"if-you-want-to-understand-how-executives-think-you-have-to-understand-the-money","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nehrlich.com\/linkedin\/uncategorized\/if-you-want-to-understand-how-executives-think-you-have-to-understand-the-money\/","title":{"rendered":"“If you want to understand how executives think, you have to understand the money.”<\/a>"},"content":{"rendered":"

“If you want to understand how executives think, you have to understand the money.”<\/p>\n

That statement from Alan Morley during my master’s program in Technology Management at Columbia University changed the course of my career. <\/p>\n

I had been a software engineer for almost ten years, regularly getting frustrated with how business decisions were made at the startups I worked at, which is why I had finally enrolled in the master’s program to figure out what I was missing.<\/p>\n

When Alan said those words, I realized I didn’t understand the money, and I had never thought about the money. We took classes in corporate finance and strategy as part of the program, but classes don’t help you really internalize the details of a P&L (Profit and Loss) statement and how to do an ROI (Return On Investment) calculation.<\/p>\n

When I was looking for my next job after graduating, I saw a position to be a revenue forecasting analyst in the finance department at Google. I had never conceived of myself as a finance person, and hadn’t planned to leave tech roles. But Alan’s words echoed in my head as I considered that if I was the one forecasting the money, I’d really have to understand it. And, boy, did that turn out to be true.<\/p>\n

Within six months of starting that job, I was regularly standing in front of Google’s executive team to talk about revenue and present the latest trends. I was meeting weekly with the ads leadership team and sometimes the CFO would join. I was involved in executive discussions at Google faster than I ever imagined possible…because I understood the money. <\/p>\n

Those discussions later led to me becoming the Search Ads Chief of Staff (because the VP knew that I deeply understood the business), where I led business strategy and operations for a $100+B business for six years. Working with world-class executives each day set me up to then transition to executive coaching to share I learned from observing how they worked. My career trajectory accelerated significantly because I took that one idea about understanding the money seriously.<\/p>\n

P.S. If you want to learn more about what executives care about, I’m giving a free webinar on Maven tomorrow (Thursday, May 1st) on how to Grow Your Executive Influence and Get Things Done. Join the 220+ people that have already signed up via the link in the comments.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“If you want to understand how executives think, you have to understand the money.” That statement from Alan Morley during my master’s program in Technology Management at Columbia University changed the course of my career. I had been a software engineer for almost ten years, regularly getting frustrated with how business decisions were made at…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5030","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nehrlich.com\/linkedin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5030","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nehrlich.com\/linkedin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nehrlich.com\/linkedin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nehrlich.com\/linkedin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nehrlich.com\/linkedin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5030"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nehrlich.com\/linkedin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5030\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5550,"href":"https:\/\/nehrlich.com\/linkedin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5030\/revisions\/5550"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nehrlich.com\/linkedin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5030"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nehrlich.com\/linkedin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5030"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nehrlich.com\/linkedin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5030"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}