Dates and location
Pricing
Hours
Dates and location
Pricing
Hours
Description
Are you a financial professional who wants to move beyond the scorekeeper role and become a true strategic partner at the executive table? Do you find yourself in strategy conversations where you can quantify the numbers but struggle to challenge the strategic logic itself? This course is designed to change that.
This seminar is built around three enduring principles: that great strategy emerges from insight, choice, and disciplined execution - not from templates and goal lists. Drawing on the most respected frameworks in modern strategy, the course equips financial leaders with both the conceptual vocabulary and the practical analytical tools to make a meaningful and differentiated contribution to their organization's strategic management process.
This seminar is organized around four pillars of modern strategy. The first pillar establishes the intellectual foundation describing the nature and need for strategy. The second pillar develops the strategic mindset and paths to attaining strategic insight. The third pillar focuses on crafting robust strategic alternatives and evaluating the difficult trade-offs that define a genuine strategy. The fourth pillar addresses implementation, execution, and the monitoring systems that allow leaders evaluate and react to strategy as it evolves.
Learners leave equipped to facilitate a rigorous strategic conversation, recognize the hallmarks of good and bad strategy, evaluate alternatives using a financial lens, and help their organization align its people, processes, and systems to deliver on strategic commitments.
Key Takeaways
Upon completion of this course, learners will be able to:
- Facilitate a rigorous strategic conversation using an integrated strategic management framework.
- Distinguish good strategy from bad strategy by identifying common failing strategic frames.
- Evaluate an organization's integrated set of strategic choices to ensure internal coherency and financial viability.
- Conduct a strategic situational analysis using a variety of strategic analysis frameworks to synthesize a clear strategic Diagnosis.
- Cultivate strategic insight using different analytical and critical thinking pathways.
- Identify the Seven Powers underpinning durable competitive advantage.
- Evaluate strategic alternatives using a financial and risk lens.
- Align the business model with the financing structure, sourcing capital, quantifying risk, forecasting returns, evaluating opportunity costs and sunk costs.
- Align the organization's people, processes, systems, metrics, and incentive structures to execute the chosen strategy.
- Establish a metric hierarchy that links front-line operational activity to the corporate KPI and strategic goals.
Who Will Benefit
This course benefits finance leaders and professionals who want to move beyond reporting numbers and become trusted strategic partners in executive‑level decision‑making.
How to Access the Course
This course is a live webinar. You must attend the live course to receive verifiable CPD hours. We recommend you join five minutes prior to the scheduled starting time. To get the full experience of this interactive course, use a computer that has video and microphone capabilities.
If available, course materials can be accessed 2 business days prior to the course and should be downloaded in advance.
Registration, cancellation, withdrawal and all other CPA Ontario PD policies can be found here.
Speaker(s)

Blair Cook, CPA, CA CPA (Ill) MBA, is a seven-time CFO, a director of multiple companies and organizations, and a thought leader in all matters of the Office of the CFO. Blair is the co-founder of Executive Finance Partners, a global professional development and executive coaching firm. He serves as a corporate director and audit committee chairman of publicly listed companies: Terravest Industries and Clarke Inc. He is also the Board Treasurer of the Devour Food & Film Festival. Blair is the author of The Illiterate Executive: An Executive’s Handbook for Mastering Financial Acumen.