Management consultant, executive, educator and author in corporate finance and strategy,  Erich A. Helfert is currently devoting most of his activity to executive development at Fortune 100 corporations, by providing client-specific management seminars in corporate finance/economics and shareholder value creation.  Born in the Sudetenland (a former province of Austria), he came to the United States as an exchange student in 1950, graduated from the University of Nevada in 1954, and received an MBA (with High Distinction) and a DBA (Ford Foundation Doctoral Fellowship) from Harvard University in 1956 and 1958.

Dr. Helfert served on the faculty of the Harvard Business School for eight years, developing business cases, teaching corporate financial management and controllership, and consulting with various companies.  In his business career of twenty years (1965 to 1985) with Crown Zellerbach Corporation, a major forest products company headquartered in San Francisco, he was first Internal Consultant to the President, then Assistant to the President, a position which also included responsibilities for man-agement development in finance and strategy; after serving as Director of Corporate Planning for several years he was appointed Vice President, Corporate Planning.  Since 1985 he has been engaged in management consulting and executive development in financial/economic decision-making with a wide variety of corporations, both as Helfert Associates and in collaboration with the Strategic Decisions Group, the Boston Consulting Group, Hewitt Associates and SCA Consulting.

Among his professional publications is a best-selling book on financial analysis and management, Techniques of Financial Analysis,  Irwin/McGraw-Hill, 2000, first published in 1963 and now in its tenth edition, with over 500,000 copies in print. The latest edition is accompanied by optional advanced financial analysis software. The book has been translated into Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Chinese, and Indonesian, with a Russian, Armenian and a new Chinese translation in process.   It was recommended in INC magazine’s "Books that Transform Companies—The Smart CEO's Reading List", in 1991, and was twice a main selection of the Fortune Executive Book Program.  Investor Relations Quarterly featured Dr. Helfert’s white paper on “Investor Relations and Value-based Management” in its spring 1998 issue.  Dr. Helfert also was author of  an earlier book on Valuation (Wadsworth), co-author of Controllershipin Department Stores  (Harvard University), and a contributing author to several financial handbooks.  His first literary work, Valley of the Shadow, a factual historical novel, was published in 1997. A frequent public speaker, he addresses business and professional groups, and lectures at universities and corporations in the United States and abroad, in both English and German.

Dr. Helfert is co-founder and chairman of Modernsoft, Inc., developers of Financial Genome™, an advanced knowledge-based software application for financial analysis and business modeling. He has served on the advisory boards of two high-technology start-up companies.  His professional memberships include the Institute of Management Consultants, Inc.;  the Association for Corporate Growth, San Francisco (past president); the Harvard Business School Association of Northern California (past board chairman and president, now a member of advisory committee to the board); the Dean's Advisory Council of the College of Business at San Francisco State University; the Advisory Council of Golden Gate University School of Finance; and the Board of Trustees of Saybrook Institute, San Francisco.  He is listed in Who's Who in America, Who's Who in Finance and Industry, and Who's Who in the World.