Book: Deep Finance

This summer is a summer for reading in an effort to keep machines turned off (for cooling purposes). One book I’m going to touch very briefly is Deep Finance by Glenn Hopper. I say briefly because it’s not a book I’m going to say to go run and buy. It’s not a bad book but I’m not fired up by it either.

Basically, this book is about digital transformation and the imperative for finance to embark on automation of everything that can be automated. I’m with him there. Bite the bullet and go through it to get to the other side and then see what’s left that we can do. We need to get there before the others.

My sense is that most of the book is devoted to exhorting financial leaders to do the automation, so he is speaking to an audience that have not automated yet. What is the size of the audience? My guess is it is still substantial. The book was written in 2021 and I got a sense that he was finding most companies to still be on the manual tedious processes.

That is kind of the same findings I had when I went on a yearlong series of networking interviews with finance to find out where they were in the transformation process. Most of the responses were “we’re still in the manual stuff”. This is amazing because as far back as 2013, I was reading stuff from Accenture, Deloitte Touche, PWC and KPMG that finance should be undergoing automation transformation to get to the next stage of finance development.

So, the author is trying to convince financial leaders to transform their departments to get to nirvana. One of the thing everyone always say when talking about automating away the manual is that what replaces the manual will be the value added, creative, and more interesting things to do.

But they never say what those more value added, more interesting things are!

That’s irritating. What is it that is value added and more interesting to do? The author offered this same mantra, but he never delves into what would come after the automation. I think he offered something, but he was kind of vague, so I wasn’t sure. Something about maybe doing strategic work?

Typically, managers do the strategic thinking so I’m not sure that everybody can jump to that.

Towards the end of the book, the author did offer up some tips on how to go about doing digital transformation. He hit upon the common things that we must make sure to do in order for digital transformation to go through since most of them seem to fail. Again, there weren’t a whole lot of specifics there. I kind of got the impression that he left it vague enough so that the reader would call him up and hire him to do the transformation job.

As you can probably tell from reading this post, I was not totally enamored with this book, but don’t let that stop you from reading that book. Maybe you can get some use out of it. Or at least be persuaded to undergo digital transformation.