Finance

Financial Intelligence: A Manager's Guide to Knowing What the Numbers Really Mean

Companies expect managers to use financial data to allocate resources and run their departments. But many managers can’t read a balance sheet, wouldn’t recognize a liquidity ratio, and don’t know how to calculate return on investment. Worse, they don’t have any idea where the numbers come from or how reliable they really are.

In Financial Intelligence, Karen Berman and Joe Knight teach the basics of finance—but with a twist. Financial reporting, they argue, is as much art as science. Since nobody can quantify everything, accountants always rely on estimates, assumptions, and judgment calls. Savvy managers need to know how those sources of possible bias can affect the financials—and they need to know that sometimes the numbers can be challenged.

While providing the foundation for a deep understanding of the financial side of business, the book also arms managers with practical strategies for improving their companies’ performance—strategies such as “managing the balance sheet” that are well understood by financial professionals but rarely shared with their nonfinancial colleagues.

Accessible, jargon-free, and filled with entertaining stories of real companies, Financial Intelligence will help nonfinancial managers be smarter and more confident in their everyday work.

Strategy Maps: Converting Intangible Assets into Tangible Outcomes

More than a decade ago, Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton introduced the Balanced Scorecard, a revolutionary performance measurement system that allowed organizations to quantify intangible assets such as people, information, and customer relationships. Then, in The Strategy-Focused Organization, Kaplan and Norton showed how organizations achieved breakthrough performance with a management system that put the Balanced Scorecard into action.

Now, using their ongoing research with hundreds of Balanced Scorecard adopters across the globe, the authors have created a powerful new tool-the "strategy map"-that enables companies to describe the links between intangible assets and value creation with a clarity and precision never before possible.

Kaplan and Norton argue that the most critical aspect of strategy-implementing it in a way that ensures sustained value creation-depends on managing four key internal processes: operations, customer relationships, innovation, and regulatory and social processes. The authors show how companies can use strategy maps to link those processes to desired outcomes; evaluate, measure, and improve the processes most critical to success; and target investments in human, informational, and organizational capital.

Providing a visual epiphany for executives everywhere who can't figure out why their strategy isn't working, Strategy Maps is a blueprint any organization can follow to align processes, people, and information technology for superior performance.

Finance for Managers (Harvard Business Essentials)

Harvard Business Essentials

Your Guide and Mentor to Doing Business Effectively

Finance for Managers
Calculating and assessing the overall financial health of the business is an important part of any managerial position. From reading and deciphering financial statements, to understanding net present value, to calculating return on investment, this book provides the fundamentals of financial literacy. Easy to use and non-technical, this helpful guide gives managers the smart advice they need to increase their impact on financial planning, budgeting, and forecasting.

Reinventing the CFO: How Financial Managers Can Transform Their Roles and Add Greater Value

On the heels of a decade of scandals and the new pressures brought on by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, corporations expect far more from their CFOs than simply managing the numbers.

They expect decision-making support and performance insights that can improve bottom-line results. Unfortunately, the complexity and detail inherent in CFOs’ jobs keep them shackled to budgeting and transaction-processing systems that leave little time for value-adding activities.

Grounded in extensive research, Reinventing the CFO outlines seven critical roles—from streamlining redundant processes to regulating risk to identifying a few key measures—that CFOs must take on in order to successfully transform the finance operation.

Expectations Investing: Reading Stock Prices for Better Returns

Expectations Investing is well worth picking up.

-Financial Executive

Expectations Investing offers a fundamentally new alternative for identifying value-price gaps, built around a deceptively simple and obvious tool: a company's stock price. The authors walk readers step-by-step through their breakthrough method, revealing how portfolio managers, security analysts, investment advisors, and individual investors can more accurately evaluate established and "new economy" stocks alike-and translate shareholder value from theory to reality.
AUTHORBIO: Alfred Rappaport directs Shareholder Value Research for L.E.K. Consulting and is a Professor Emeritus at Northwestern's Kellogg School. Michael J. Mauboussin is Credit Suisse First Boston's Chief U.S. Investment Strategist and an adjunct professor at Columbia University.

Origin of Wealth: Evolution, Complexity, and the Radical Remaking of Economics

In the Origin of Wealth, Eric Beinhocker offers a thorough and convincing new way to think about economic growth and business management. The author begins by exploring the roots of modern economic theory and ultimately declares it outmoded and wrong. Instead, he suggests, markets and growth can best be explained by drawing on the emerging field of complexity economics: the study of markets and social systems as complex adaptive systems. Although biological metaphors in business have become familiar (i.e., organizations are living organisms), Beinhocker moves beyond metaphor to explain the revolutions in science that will inevitably change the way we think about economics, competition, and business. The Origin of Wealth raises important questions such as: How can one create strategy in uncertain and fast moving environments? Why is it hard for large organizations to be innovative and how should we organize for better results? What role should governments play in this new era?

Here's what peer reviewers have to say:

"a tour de force....The value in this book is not novelty per se, but rather that it combines, synthesizes,a and (wonderfully) elucidates important ideas....The title is very ambitious but the book lives up to the challenge."

"an impressive body of work. very well written and engaging....offers a more sophisticated and better informed perspective...than provided in earlier popular accounts."

Beyond Budgeting: How Managers Can Break Free from the Annual Performance Trap

The annual budgeting process is a trap. Pressured by fixed targets and performance incentives, managers focus on making the numbers instead of making a difference, meeting set goals instead of maximizing potential. With their compensation at stake, managers often resort to deceitful-even unethical-behavior. In the end, everybody loses-the employee, the company, and ultimately the customer.

Now, finance experts Jeremy Hope and Robin Fraser reveal the results of an intensive study aimed at fixing the broken budgeting process. They argue that companies must abandon traditional budgeting contracts in favor of a radical new model that links performance measurement to evolving competitive benchmarks-and shifts the firm's focus from controlling employee behavior to delivering customer value.

The Beyond Budgeting model is built on the best practices of companies that have successfully revised their centralized planning and budgeting processes. It combines a leadership vision that devolves more authority to operating managers and a finance vision that enables fast decision making through appropriate tools and accessible information. Through vivid examples, Hope and Fraser illustrate how companies can implement these shared visions-and the long-term benefits that accrue from embracing them.

Offering a compelling case for breaking free from the budgeting trap, this book paves the way toward making organizations better places to work for, invest in, and do business with.

Done Deals: Venture Capitalists Tell Their Stories

"Until a few years ago," notes journalist-consultant Udayan Gupta, "venture capitalists were hardly on anyone's radar screen." That's not the case these days, as financiers who used to work behind the scenes now regularly set markets afire with their public support of high-profile technology and Internet stocks. In Done Deals, Gupta allows 35 of the brightest stars in what has become a $30-billion-a-year business to tell their own stories in their own words. We get to see exactly what they were thinking when they backed such endeavors as Intel, eBay, Excite, Genentech, and 3Com. Gupta's intention is to demonstrate how the industry has changed over the past half-century and how it differs today among its various forms. He achieves this beautifully by dividing the first-person accounts into thematically attuned sections that focus on dealmakers of the future (such as Mitch Kapor of Accel Partners), early pioneers (including the late Benno Schmidt of J.H. Whitney & Co.), West Coast veterans (such as Don Valentine of Sequoia Capital), past and present East Coast practitioners (like Charles Waite of Greylock Management), and visionaries (including John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers). Some of the stories are more detailed than others, but taken together, they provide a well-rounded view that will interest anyone who must deal with this often intertwined yet still individual world. --Howard Rothman

The Inside Story of the Venture Capital World as Told by the Industry's Elite Players

Arguably today's hottest industry, venture capital is a dynamic engine of wealth creation that has contributed both to America's soaring economy and to its undisputed technological dominance. Yet, in spite of the significant media attention the venture capital world has attracted, an air of mystery still surrounds the industry and its kingmakers.

In Done Deals, journalist Udayan Gupta provides a revealing history of this phenomenal industry as told through first-person accounts of its most influential players. Organized into five parts, the book chronicles the industry's humble beginnings and extraordinary present, highlights the key differences between West Coast and East Coast firms, and presents a vision of the future as told by industry veterans.

Throughout, the voices of more than thirty leading venture capitalists--from early pioneers such as Eugene Kleiner and Arthur Rock to current top players like Geoff Yang and John Doerr--reveal insights gleaned from their personal experiences in successful deal making. From how today's hottest deals--like Yahoo! and Amazon.com--got done, to what VCs look for in a business proposal, to how they set up partnerships and hand select top management teams, the collective wisdom of this elite group becomes an invaluable primer on exactly what it takes to succeed in this high-stakes world.

In Done Deals, journalist Udayan Gupta provides a revealing history of the venture capital industry as told through first-person accounts of its most influential players. Organized into five parts, the book chronicles the industry's humble beginnings and extraordinary rise, highlights the key differences between West Coast and East Coast firms, and presents a vision of the future as told by industry veterans. Throughout, the voices of more than thirty leading venture capitalists--from early pioneers such as Eugene Kleiner and Arthur Rock to current top players like Geoff Yang and John Doerr--reveal insights gleaned from their personal experiences in successful deal making. From how today's hottest deals--like Yahoo! and Amazon.com--got done, to what VCs look for in a business proposal, to how they set up partnerships and hand-select top management teams, the collective wisdom of this elite group becomes an invaluable primer on exactly what it takes to succeed in this high-stakes world.

Cost & Effect: Using Integrated Cost Systems to Drive Profitability and Performance

Two of the most innovative thinkers in the field present a work that represents the single best resource for understanding and implementing activity-based cost management. Kaplan and Cooper reveal that most companies don't know how to measure accurately, influence, or understand the fundamental cost drivers in their businesses. They then provide a detailed and comprehensive blueprint that will enable managers to make better decisions and to promote organizational learning and improvement.

Cost and Effect takes the management, finance, and accounting fields to an entirely new level, as the authors demonstrate how the principles of activity-based costing and other advanced cost management techniques, such as target and kaizen costing, can drive business performance. Using lively examples from a variety of leading companies worldwide--including Siemens, Hewlett-Packard, AT&T, the Swedish wire manufacturer Kanthal, Kirin Beer, and Procter & Gamble--they show how to create integrated, knowledge-based systems that provide meaningful information on current and past performance.

The innovation systems described in Cost and Effect will help you:
* Determine where improvements in quality, efficiency, and productivity will have the highest payoffs.
* Assist front-line employees in their learning and improvement activities.
* Make better product mix and capital investment decisions.
* Negotiate more effectively on price, product features, quality, delivery, and service to promote win-win relationships with your customers.
* Choose low-cost suppliers who are truly low cost, not just low price.
* Design products and services that meet customers' expectations-and that can be produced and delivered at a profit.
* Integrate your activity-based cost system into reporting and budgeting processes to reveal the sources of excess capacity.

Everyone involved in running a business-from general managers and strategic planners to financial executives, IT professionals, and operations managers-must read this book to learn how innovative cost and performance measurement systems can enhance their organizational profitability and performance.

Understanding Finance: Expert Solutions to Everyday Challenges (Pocket Mentor)

This book explains the essential concepts of finance--budgeting, forecasting, and planning--to managers who are not financial managers. Understanding Finance contains relevant information on how to: