Diary Of A CFO is a global Top 2.5% business finance podcast hosted by Ademola Odewade, MBA, ACA. Elite CFOs, founders and business leaders share practical strategies for cash flow, profitability, financial planning, AI-powered finance, leadership and sustainable business growth.
Built for founders, CFOs, fractional CFOs, finance leaders and consultants who want to make smarter decisions, scale with confidence and lead with data.
Expect real-world insights, proven frameworks and executive lessons for building stronger, more profitable businesses.
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Données mises à jour le 04/11/2026
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Why AI Agents Must Be Verified (Calum Chace Explains) | Voices From The Future (2036)
Épisode 91
jeudi 29 octobre 2026 • Durée 44:20
When AI can do almost every job, people can no longer earn their living through wages. Futurist Calum Chace calls this the economic singularity, and he says almost nobody is planning for it. For finance leaders, that is not a distant theory. It is a question about cost bases, controls and who owns the value AI creates.
This is Episode 1 of Voices From The Future (2036), a new series on Diary of a CFO and The King Dems Podcast. Each episode asks one of the world's leading futurists, founders or finance leaders what the decade to 2036 will demand of leaders, and what they should do now so it does not catch them by surprise.
Calum Chace, known to many as "the AI guy", is a futurist, keynote speaker and bestselling author of Surviving AI and The Economic Singularity. He is one of five co-founders of Conscium and its Chief Marketing Officer. Conscium explores whether machines can become conscious and runs an agent verification platform. Before writing about AI, Calum spent 30 years in journalism and business, including at KPMG.
Calum grew up on Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke and Philip K. Dick, but assumed human-level AI was centuries away. Then in 1999 he read Ray Kurzweil and realised superintelligence could arrive in his lifetime. Colleagues tired of hearing about it and called him "the AI guy" sarcastically. He kept the name.
In this episode:
The economic singularity, a term Calum coined in 2016, and why economists must design the post-automation economy now
Who will own a fully automated economy, and why sharing its wealth may be the hardest problem of all
Shadow AI and the "phony war": why most large companies have not deployed AI at scale yet
Conscium's five levels of AI agents and why agents need verifying before and during deployment
Ademola's offload, extend and elevate model for AI agents
Calum's timeline: possibly 10 to 20 years, and a 50 per cent chance of AGI by 2035
Why AGI is a fleeting moment and superintelligence is the issue that matters
The "jagged edge": judgement, volition, common sense and a world model that AI still lacks
The five human revolutions (fire, cognition, agriculture, industry, information) and why AI is not the fourth industrial revolution
Host and guest disagree: Ademola argues AI will remain a tool given uneven adoption across Africa and the developing world. Calum counters that this argues for slow dispersal, not against arrival, pointing to how fast smartphones and large language models spread
Calum Chace, futurist and co-founder of Conscium, on the economic singularity, AI agents, AGI and the future of finance and work, on Diary of a CFO with Ademola Odewade.
Hosted by Ademola Odewade: chartered accountant, author of Human-Led, AI-Powered Finance (foreword by Professor Dave Ulrich) and Founder of K-DEMS Consulting.
Diary of a CFO: Financial Strategies for Smart Business Growth. Global top 2.5% on Listen Notes.
The King Dems Podcast: Growth Mindset, Leadership, AI and Business Insights. Global top 2% on Listen Notes.
Conceive, believe, strive to thrive and achieve.
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Johanna Faigelman is a cultural anthropologist, speaker and the founder and CEO of Human Branding, the Toronto consultancy she launched in 2006 to apply anthropology to business strategy. She is the pioneer of Applied Anthropology Thinking (AAT)™, studied at York University and ran planning at a large advertising agency before going out on her own. Human Branding now has more than 40 people working across North America, Europe, Asia and Latin America, with clients including 11 of the world's top 20 pharmaceutical companies and brands such as Nestlé, Visa and Logitech.
Why Great CFOs Sound Different: Pace, Pauses and Presence | David Pope
Épisode 89
jeudi 24 septembre 2026 • Durée 01:31:41
The voice you hear when you speak is not the one your team hears.
David Pope is an executive voice coach based in Hong Kong for 32 years. He started in 1980s London at a Soho production company making music videos for Wham!, Dire Straits and A-ha, then joined the BBC as an assistant film editor. He founded All Voice Talent in 2010, has spent more than 30,000 hours in recording studios and coaches leaders from law firms and financial institutions in Hong Kong, Tokyo, Australia, the Middle East and London.
About 20 years ago he was told that growing his business meant leaving the studio for stages and workshops. He did, made mistakes in public and built the confidence he now teaches.
She Left Audit at KPMG and RSM to Rebuild How Finance Works | Esther Adeogun | Diary Of A CFO
Épisode 88
lundi 14 septembre 2026 • Durée 58:02
Most finance teams start closing the month before the month has even finished.
Esther Adeogun spent over a decade in audit and assurance across KPMG Nigeria, WYZE, Sapro, PKF Littlejohn and RSM UK, working between Lagos and London. She audited multinationals with US, Canadian and Australian parent structures. She then left professional services to found Valdore Systems and Intelligence Limited (VSIL), a pre-product platform building what she calls an intelligent operating layer: financial intelligence, controls and real-time visibility embedded directly into business workflows rather than applied after the fact.
The pattern that convinced her was not jurisdictional. Across Lagos, London and multinational engagements she kept meeting the same problem. Organisations had invested heavily in software, yet finance teams still ran on spreadsheets, manual reconciliations and judgement applied outside the system. Some of her design partners begin their July month-end work in the second or third week of July in order to report to management by 4 August. That is time taken away from professional judgement and scepticism, and Esther argues the gap between activity and visibility is the thing worth closing, not the accounting concepts underneath it.
Why Transformation Programmes Fail | Zhanna Zhuravleva | Diary of a CFO
Épisode 87
vendredi 11 septembre 2026 • Durée 01:14:14
Most transformation programmes fail because the organisation is quietly protecting the very thing you are trying to change.
Zhanna Zhuravleva grew up in Georgia and lived through war as a child, then built her career across Russia, Israel and the UK. She completed two master's degrees — finance and human resources — followed by postgraduate study, and taught finance, management and philosophy at a university in St. Petersburg.
She started in industry as a Kaizen team leader and went on to lead HR and cultural transformation across organisations of more than 1,000 people in 40 countries. She is a Chartered Fellow of the CIPD, has run over 3,000 sessions with leaders, and founded Awake Conscious Play, a school of conscious leadership and leadership transformation.
Early in her career she ran a textbook transformation — designed framework, defined KPIs, strong governance. Six months later almost nothing had changed. The organisation was not governed by its processes; it was governed by informal power. Everything since has been built on that finding.
The 30% improvement in employee satisfaction and 10% reduction in turnover she reports came from no single initiative — a culture hub that put interns and juniors into the improvement process, people partners trained in coaching, and one-to-ones where the feedback actually changed the next decision.
Business Valuation: Why Buyers Ignore Your EBITDA Multiple - Mark Mills, OBE
Mark Mills OBE started Cardpoint plc from scratch in 2000. Two years later it floated on AIM at a £7 million valuation. By 2006 it was turning over £100 million a year on £19.8 million of EBITDA, and he exited in 2007 at £175 million.
He now sells other people's businesses. One owner was told his company was worth £3 million. Mark sold it for just over £10 million. Nothing changed in the accounts — what changed was who the business was presented to, and why they needed it.
In this episode:
- Why bids from strategic buyers don't resemble a multiple of EBITDA
- The £3m-to-£10m sale, and the buyer maths that produced it
- Rule one of any business model: recurring income — learned from a payphone business that died in the 1991 recession
- How Mark and his CFO reverse-engineered £100m of revenue onto a sheet of paper, then landed within 2%
- Why "in three years" is a useless target and "by 31 August 2029" is not
- Solving a working capital problem by finding a bank with too much physical cash
- The one metric he never ignores when assessing a company for sale
AI, Bias & CFO Decision-Making Under Pressure | Dr David Rock
Épisode 85
vendredi 21 août 2026 • Durée 01:38:20
What happens to financial judgement when AI, cognitive bias, uncertainty and executive pressure collide in the boardroom?
In this episode of Diary of a CFO, Ademola Odewade sits down with Dr. David Rock, Co-Founder and CEO of the NeuroLeadership Institute and originator of the field of neuroleadership, for a powerful exploration of the neuroscience behind executive decision-making.
This conversation goes beyond accounting and financial strategy.
It examines the brain behind the numbers.
Dr. Rock explains why even highly intelligent executives can make poor decisions under pressure, why recognising your own cognitive biases is harder than most leaders realise and how AI can either strengthen human judgement or encourage cognitive surrender.
One principle captures the conversation perfectly:
“Human in the lead, not human in the loop.”
In this episode, you will learn:
Why leadership creates three major cognitive challenges: capacity, self-regulation and social cognition
How pressure and uncertainty can affect executive decision-making
Why technical competence does not eliminate cognitive bias
How CFOs and finance leaders can use AI without outsourcing critical judgement
Why accountants, lawyers, marketers and other executives can interpret the same business information through completely different mental models
How the SEEDS framework helps teams identify patterns of bias
How the SCARF Model explains Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness and Fairness
Why stronger decision processes can matter more than relying on individual objectivity alone
Why one of the most important jobs of a modern leader is simply to create clarity
AI Won’t Replace You. Someone Using AI Will | Ashley Stahl on Career Reinvention
Épisode 84
dimanche 16 août 2026 • Durée 38:27
Sponsored by BetterHelp. Start your growth journey with a credentialed therapist and get 10% off at https://betterhelp.com/kingdems
Ashley Stahl believes the future of work will not simply be about AI replacing humans. The bigger risk is being replaced by someone who knows how to use AI better than you.
In this episode of Diary Of A CFO, Ashley Stahl joins Ademola Odewade for a powerful conversation about career reinvention, artificial intelligence, leadership, personal branding, intuition, entrepreneurship and finding meaningful work.
Ashley’s own career has been anything but linear. She moved from national security into career coaching, entrepreneurship, authorship and helping experts turn their ideas into powerful signature talks. Her journey demonstrates why the skills developed in one chapter of your career may become your competitive advantage in the next.
One of Ashley’s central ideas is simple: you cannot think your way into career clarity. You have to explore your way into it. Careers are experiments. Reinvention requires the willingness to test, learn, fail, recalibrate and move again.
We explore:
Why successful careers are no longer linear
How to know when your career is genuinely misaligned
The difference between your values and your skill set
Why career transitions should not automatically be feared
How Ashley moved from national security into entrepreneurship
Why a TEDx talk transformed her career
How storytelling can create business opportunities
Why intuition matters in leadership and business decisions
The difference between intuition and impulsiveness
How executives can create space for better decisions
Why clarity comes from experimentation rather than overthinking
How transferable skills can power career reinvention
How AI will reshape careers
Why employees who learn to leverage AI could outperform those who resist it
Why follower count may be one of the most overrated personal-brand metrics
How CFOs Can Turn AI Investment Into ROI | Oluchi Ikechi-D’Amico
Épisode 83
mercredi 5 août 2026 • Durée 01:11:31
Sponsored by BetterHelp. Start your growth journey with a credentialed therapist and get 10% off at https://betterhelp.com/kingdems
How can CFOs and business leaders turn AI investment into measurable financial value?
Oluchi Ikechi-D’Amico, Founder and CEO of Fully Bossed, joins Ademola Odewade on Diary Of A CFO to explain why successful AI transformation requires more than purchasing technology. Organisations must change behaviours, strengthen leadership capabilities and connect AI adoption to measurable outcomes such as revenue growth, cost reduction, operational efficiency and return on investment.
Oluchi spent nearly two decades advising CEOs, boards and major financial institutions. Her experience includes senior roles at Accenture and EY-Parthenon, more than 30 transformation and M&A programmes and transactions with a combined value exceeding $15 billion.
In this episode, you will learn:
Why many organisations invest billions in AI without achieving the expected ROI
How CFOs can measure the business value of AI adoption
The difference between adopting AI and enabling behavioural change
How AI can reduce costs, improve efficiency and create new revenue opportunities
Why transformation programmes fail without effective leadership
How to define the right KPIs before investing in business transformation
Why human judgement, storytelling and executive presence remain essential
How Oluchi evaluated the risk of leaving an EY partner role to build Fully Bossed
What major M&A and organisational transformation programmes involve
Why leadership is defined by impact rather than job title
Oluchi’s message to finance leaders is clear: AI can generate the report, but it cannot replace your ability to challenge the assumptions, defend the analysis and influence decisions in the boardroom.
This conversation is essential listening for CFOs, finance directors, CEOs, founders, investors and transformation leaders seeking to generate measurable returns from AI.
How Busy Professionals Can Use AI to Invest Smarter | Eric Chu, CFA
Épisode 82
lundi 27 juillet 2026 • Durée 43:13
Sponsored by BetterHelp. Start your growth journey with a credentialed therapist and get 10% off at https://betterhelp.com/kingdems
Eric Chu, CFA, CEO and co-founder of TradeDesk Securities, joins Diary Of A CFO to explain how busy professionals can use AI to research investments more efficiently without outsourcing their judgement.
For professionals with investable income but limited time, this conversation offers a practical framework for thinking about AI, financial regulation, risk management and long-term investing.
Eric built his career across investment banking, hedge funds and data centre development before co-founding an SEC-registered broker-dealer designed specifically for working professionals in their 30s and 40s.
His experience during the 2008 financial crisis, including receiving a job offer from Bear Stearns that disappeared when the firm collapsed, shaped the disciplined approach to risk that now underpins TradeDesk Securities.
You will learn in this episode:
Why AI’s biggest advantage for investors is time, not information (23:11)
What happens inside a data centre when you send an AI prompt (20:38)
Why Eric describes the Bear Stearns collapse as his first real lesson in humility (14:27)
The regulatory requirements TradeDesk Securities follows as a FINRA and SIPC member (18:17)
Why individual investors may have a structural advantage over professional fund managers (28:03)
How Eric and his team build trust in a highly regulated financial industry through direct expertise (31:44)
Where AI in finance could go next, including sector-specific AI engines (33:58)
Eric’s honest and non-committal perspective on cryptocurrency as an asset class (38:07)
Guest:
Eric Chu, CFA, is CEO and co-founder of TradeDesk Securities, an SEC-registered broker-dealer created to help working professionals invest using AI-powered insights and portfolio tools.
She is an EY Entrepreneur Of The Year 2026 Ontario finalist, an EY Winning Women 2025 honoree and a 100 Women to Know Winner 2026.
In this episode:
Why Johanna works on the principle that roughly 80 per cent of decision making sits at the unconscious and subconscious level (her working rule, not a cited study)
Why she places almost zero value on the answer to a direct question
Every business problem is a human problem: why doctors who say in surveys they will prescribe a drug still do not
Applied Anthropology Thinking (AAT)™, the approach she created when she founded Human Branding
The Who Say Do principle: who people are, how they say things and what they actually do
Ten years with no holidays: the unglamorous reality of building a bootstrapped consultancy
Why saying no protects a company's vision more than saying yes
How Human Branding uses AI: a closed model built about five years ago, with Johanna reporting 30 per cent efficiency gains overall and 80 per cent on analytic grunt work
Where they differ: Ademola asks what AI will do better than humans in anthropology, and Johanna is not convinced it will do anything better, only that it frees people for the human work
Her one piece of advice to women founders: your difference is your advantage
Johanna Faigelman, cultural anthropologist and founder and CEO of Human Branding, on consumer behaviour, decision making, Applied Anthropology Thinking, bootstrapping and human-led AI, on The King Dems Podcast and Diary of a CFO with Ademola Odewade.
What is Applied Anthropology Thinking?
It is Johanna Faigelman's approach to using anthropology's methods, especially ethnography, to uncover the hidden drivers of customer behaviour and turn them into marketing and strategy. She built Human Branding around it in 2006.
Can AI replace market research?
Johanna's view is no. AI speeds up the analysis of transcripts and data, but the insight that changes behaviour depends on human wisdom that is often not captured in language at all.
Hosted by Ademola Odewade: chartered accountant, author of Human-Led, AI-Powered Finance (foreword by Professor Dave Ulrich) and Founder of K-DEMS Consulting.
Diary of a CFO. Finance leadership, unfiltered. Ranked in the global top 2.5% of podcasts.
This description contains paid links. We may earn a commission at no extra cost to you.
- The three most common executive presence faults: speaking too fast, a monotone delivery and filler words
- Why a slightly slower pace reads as authority when you present results, and rapid delivery reads as nerves
- The emphasis pause before a key figure, such as a 33% rise, so the number lands with the room
- The rhetorical question pause before the answer
- Chunking: mark a script with slash marks and stress one word per chunk, what Pope calls "audio punctuation"
- Speakers who think they paused for five seconds usually paused for half a second
- Gravitas is a balance of authority, energy and warmth, not a booming voice
- In Center for Talent Innovation research, 5% of senior leaders named appearance and 28% communication as core to executive presence; the majority named gravitas
- Pope's Voice Influence Framework: voice, presence and messaging
- Pope says charisma can be developed; Ademola argues it is largely natural
Hosted by Ademola Odewade — chartered accountant, author of Human-Led, AI-Powered Finance (foreword by Professor Dave Ulrich), and Founder of K-Dems Consulting.
The King Dems Podcast. Growth Mindset, Leadership, AI and Business Insights. Ranked in the global top 2% of podcasts.
Diary of a CFO. Finance leadership, unfiltered. Ranked in the global top 2.5% of podcasts.
This description contains paid links. We may earn a commission at no extra cost to you.
The one sentence she would give a Fortune 500 CEO: an intelligent operating layer embedding financial intelligence, controls and real-time visibility into business workflows
The exact shift from auditor to founder, moving from "what went wrong" to "why did the system allow this to happen in the first place"
Why real-time reporting does not overturn the historical cost concept, and what she actually means by real-time
What SAP, Oracle and Microsoft would say in response, and where the design philosophies genuinely diverge
Where AI earns its place, and the deterministic, rules-based work that should stay conventional software
"Consulting is largely constrained by people and time" and why that pushed her to SaaS instead of another consulting firm
The four eras of accounting: paper, spreadsheets, ERP, and AI-assisted decision-making
Whether the Big Four look the same in 2035, and why she thinks firms evolve rather than disappear
Nigeria rewards technical skill, the UK rewards relationships, and what that cost her to learn
Why she no longer believes progress is linear, and what experimentation replaced it with
Rapid fire: the biggest misconception about AI, the biggest misconception about accounting, and the technology she is watching
Her legacy test: not to be remembered for building software but for helping build better businesses
Hosted by Ademola Odewade — chartered accountant, author of Human-Led, AI-Powered Finance (foreword by Professor Dave Ulrich), and Founder of K-Dems Consulting.
The King Dems Podcast. Growth Mindset, Leadership, AI and Business Insights. Ranked in the global top 2% of podcasts.
Diary of a CFO. Finance leadership, unfiltered. Ranked in the global top 2.5% of podcasts.
This description contains paid links. We may earn a commission at no extra cost to you.
Change fluency — why transformation is not a project with a start date and an end dateThe "inner game": why a fintech's people-first programme stalls because the tension is giving leaders their identity
Three signals that tell you inside a week whether a culture is healthy — quality of disagreement, speed of bad news, and the gap between the official story and the underground story
Diagnosis before prescription: the first 30 days run across Ken Wilber's four quadrants, not a rush to launch programmes
Three types of values — declarative, conscious, unconscious — and which layer actually decides
Why Meta making AI token consumption a performance metric produced engineers burning tokens instead of better decisions
WEF Future of Jobs: 170 million roles created against 92 million displaced — recalibration, not replacement"AI is electricity with intelligence" — why this is an electricity moment rather than an internet one
The 4D Compass for building trust: self, soul, soft, spiritWhy engagement surveys measure compliance — a purple, tribal culture scores high on engagement and low on trust
What she protects if the HR budget is halved: leader development, and a culture diagnosis every year
The mistake founders make at 100 employees — still leading as though there are 20Zhanna's recommendation for every CEO is Spiral Dynamics by Don Beck and Christopher Cowan.
Her conscious leadership programmes — including Lila, the transformational game she has adapted for leaders and runs offline and online — are at: https://awake-play.co.uk/
Hosted by Ademola Odewade — chartered accountant, author of Human-Led, AI-Powered Finance (foreword by Professor Dave Ulrich), and Founder of K-Dems Consulting.
The King Dems Podcast. Growth Mindset, Leadership, AI and Business Insights. Ranked in the global top 2% of podcasts.
Diary of a CFO. Finance leadership, unfiltered. Ranked in the global top 2.5% of podcasts.
This description contains paid links. We may earn a commission at no extra cost to you.
- FARM — why people work for Fun, Achievement, Recognition, then Money, in that order
- Selling to strangers, and why referrals cannot scale a business
- What AI actually changes about client acquisition and KPI monitoring
- Realistic exit timelines: 12 to 30 months, not six
Mark's book is Making Your Mark: How I Built a Fortune From £1.50 — and You Can Too.
He offered listeners a free signed copy — email him at mark@mark.co.uk with your address and he'll send one out.
More from Mark: www.mark.co.uk · linkedin.com/in/markrichardmills
Hosted by Ademola Odewade — chartered accountant, author of Human-Led, AI-Powered Finance (foreword by Professor Dave Ulrich), and Founder of K-Dems Consulting.
The King Dems Podcast. Growth Mindset, Leadership, AI and Business Insights. Ranked in the global top 2% of podcasts.
Diary of a CFO. Finance leadership, unfiltered. Ranked in the global top 2.5% of podcasts.This description contains paid links. We may earn a commission at no extra cost to you.
Dr. David Rock is Co-Founder and CEO of the NeuroLeadership Institute and the originator of the term neuroleadership. His work applies cognitive science to leadership, organisational behaviour and human performance. He is the author of Your Brain at Work and the forthcoming Good with Humans, which explores the neuroscience behind human motivation and the SCARF model.
How executives can build authority through ideas rather than virality
Ashley explains that her TEDx experience became a major catalyst for her new career and showed her the commercial and professional power of developing a signature message.
And on AI, her message is especially important: AI still requires strong prompts, strategic thinking and people who understand how to deploy it effectively.
If you are a CFO, finance leader, executive, entrepreneur or ambitious professional wondering how to remain relevant as AI transforms work, this conversation is for you.
🎧 Diary Of A CFO explores the strategies, technologies and leadership principles shaping the future of finance and business.
Follow Diary Of A CFO for financial strategies, AI insights and practical leadership lessons for smarter business growth.
What is the biggest barrier preventing organisations from achieving a return on their AI investments?
He holds an MBA from NYU Stern and has spent almost 20 years working across investment banking, hedge funds and public company finance. His experience includes senior roles developing and financing data centre platforms across Asia.
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