Executive Fundamentals

Essential Principles for Developing Leaders

Daniel H. Shin & Nicholas A. Fischer

What are the fundamental qualities of an exemplary executive? Do you possess them?

It’s often easy for executives or aspiring executives to know what they need to do. But it’s much harder to actually do what you know you’re supposed to. Executive effectiveness—or success in any endeavor or profession that requires a developed set of skills—is built upon well-developed fundamentals and serious repetitions of those fundamentals to create unconscious competence. Leadership is no different.

If you want to be good at something, you’ve got to earn it. Executive Fundamentals is an important, elegant guide designed to organize executive fundamentals into a general roadmap so that leaders at all levels can guide their development and take command of what they know they need to do—at any point in their careers. Purposefully brief, the book intersperses succinct and powerful quotes and information from stellar business books as counterpoints to the knowledge and experience presented by Fischer and Shin.

The authors include worksheets developed from their years in business that will make it as easy for you to put their advice into action as practicing your favorite golf swing or tennis stroke.

Nick Fischer is a seasoned executive with broad industry experience spanning consumer packaged goods, banking, retail, and business services. Nick has focused a significant portion of his career on redefining the traditional role of corporate finance as a true strategic partner at the center of business performance optimization, a topic he regularly addresses through various publications and public speaking engagements.

Dan Shin is a data-driven executive with a background crossing multiple industries including retail, pharmaceuticals, and business services. Dan's executive management style and his ability to simplify analytics work flow to deploy actionable insights and recommendations has provided continued success in multiple contexts ranging from start-ups to middle-market and Fortune 500 companies.

Nick is a transformational executive with diverse industry experience spanning retail, financial services, and consumer packaged goods. He brings both a strategic & operational perspective with particular strengths in leading change to drive organizational improvement. With his extensive Fortune 500 experience, Nick has significant expertise implementing business management fundamentals and best-practices.

Currently, Nick is both the Co-Founder of Cadilus, LLC and the Senior Vice President & CFO of The Betteridge Jewelers Group, a privately held, mid-market omnichannel retailer with approximately $100M in annual sales. Nick serves as a member of the Betteridge executive team with functional responsibility of corporate strategy, accounting, treasury, and FP&A. Nick is responsible for rebuilding and repositioning the finance team as a strategic capability, leading the development of both a winning business strategy and the management disciplines to turn three years of consecutive performance degradation into sales growth & margin expansion.

Prior to joining Betteridge, Nick was a Director of FP&A for Nordstrom where he served as the executive finance leader to the marketing organization. Nick led a 15-member finance team, providing strategic decision support to the $3.5B top-line program while managing a $650M enterprise-wide budget. Nick is credited for leading a significant transformation that resulted in substantially improved return-on-marketing-investment through an evolution to information-based marketing.