Accounting Books

Abkowitz has compiled an impressive number of high profile case studies to illustrate our need to pay attention to the risks we have in our business operations, and for that matter, our personal lives. But unlike the multiple points of view found in the Harvard Business Review case studies, Abkowitz provides definitive analysis of "what went wrong" and allows us to see clearly what we might do in our own organizations to minimize operational risk.

This excellent book is broken into Four Parts, comprising several chapters each. Those parts are; Man Made Accidents, Terrorist Acts, Natural Disasters, and Success Stories. Then the final chapter brings things together in "Lessons Learned," while the epilogue gives us some ideas on where we might go from here.

Abkowitz notes in chapter one that there are 10 basic risk factors he considered: Design and construction flaws, Deferred maintenance, Economic pressure, Schedule constraints, Inadequate training, Not following procedures, Lack of planning and preparedness, Communication failure, Arrogance, and Stifling political agendas. Based on these, he analyzed many major disasters, summarized the results and gleaned some interesting lessons from the analysis.

There were 12 "Lessons Learned" presented based on the 10 risk factors spelled out in chapter one. The 12 lessons are:

1. Risk factors work together to generate an event with disastrous consequences
2. Communication failure is a risk factor in every disaster, irrespective of whether the event is caused by accident, intentional act, or nature
3. Take planning and preparedness seriously; it should never be short-changed
4. Economic pressure is a chronic problem that appears as a risk factor in most man-made accidents and natural disasters and in some intentional acts
5. Not following procedures is a significant problem in man-made accidents, and is also present in some natural disasters and intentional acts
6. Design and construction flaws are the bane of man-made accidents
7. Co not underestimate the significance of political agendas in creating high-risk situations
8. Arrogance among individuals and organizations is perhaps a far more significant risk factor than previously imagined
9. The lack of uniform safety standards across different nations creates an uneven risk management playing field, conditions ripe for exploitation
10. Regardless of how well risks are being addressed, "luck" can change your fortunes one way or another
11. It usually takes a disastrous event to convince people that something needs to be done
12. Risk cannot be entirely avoided; nothing can be designed or built to perfection, nor last forever

This book will be invaluable for those times when I'm searching for examples of why our organization needs to make a change. It should serve as a warning to all our leadership in private and public organizations that we must pay attention to and encourage proper planning and expenditures to mitigate our organizational risk.

ON POINT! Dr. Abkowitz manages to engage the reader by using real-world examples and insightful analysis while providing an excellent read. This is a MUST for all who work in the field of risk/environmental management and a DEFINITE READ for anyone interested in obatining a "behind the scenes" look at some of the most horrific disasters of our time. Most importantly this book offers some valuable lessons in critical thinking that will assist anyone who must plan to prevent or respond to such risks in the future.

Mark Abkowitz has written a well researched and pertinent book analyzing and assessing different kinds of disasters: man made, natural, and terrorist. He has done an amazing job pinpointing areas that can be changed, what probably can't change and what we as citizens can do to incorporate these ideas into more safety for our country, our community and our planet.

I receommend this book to all who care about the next disaster and how it can be averted.

Mark Abkowitz has produced a truly readable and entertaining guidebook to risk management. By simplifying complex case studies down into causal event chains; Abkowitz has demonstrated the repetitive occurrance of 10 basic risk factors. Knowledge of these 10 basic factors is an excellent starting point for customizing and assessing ones own risk management program. I further would like to say this book is not just for risk managers but for anyone who enjoys history or is unsatisfied with the mass media's shallow sensational coverage of most catostrophic events. Abkowitz ends this story with a useful summary of lessons learned and an epilogue with a punchline point that should seem obvious after reading the book; but somehow has not been adopted by our federal, state, and local governments on any large scale.

Operational risk management follows a case study approach to effective planning and response. The case studies have been categorized into (1) man-made accidents, (2) natural disasters, and (3) terrorist acts. This book is driven by the idea that identifying and learning from mistakes in the past can help minimize or even prevent losses in the future. A couple of risk management success stories (United Flight 232 and Denali Quake- Alaskan Pipeline) are also presented.

The case studies are selected from different industries and are analyzed in a clear and concise way. Several risk factors are identified for each case study and the key lessons are summarized. This book is an excellent resource for both common people and risk managers. The book identifies risks, improves risk perception, and provides steps for mitigating risks faced by society today.

This book makes it relatively easy to understand the mathematical principles behind the Black-Scholes theory. The CD guides you through various scenarios and plots everything for you. You don't have to be a mathematician with a PhD from the University of Chicago to appreciate the explanations and diagrams depicted. A "must-have" for every options trader or investor - a definite "keeper"!

Fantastic software!

The book is really a step by step tutorial on how to use the
probability forecasting software that is on the CD.

Excellent learning tool as well as a decision-analysis tool for investments.

Really great. Loved it. Learned a lot!

Many thanks to the author.

One Caution: It doesn't work on a Macintosh
(unless you have PC emulation software for your Mac).

Cheers,
---Freddy

Any student or trainee having to study this topic really should buy this tutorial.

Having a degree in Mathematics and a professional accountancy qualification did not prepare me for the explanations of Black Scholes to be found in most text books.

They may have got a Nobel prize for their option pricing model but Black and Scholes were never going to get an award for clarity of explanation.

Having grappled with this area for a few months, I decided I needed a little more innovative help; hence my purchase of Jerry Marlow's interactive tutorial.

Two days later and I feel I could go for the next Nobel prize myself!

So many things click into place so quickly, it's marvellous.

Jerry gives his email address which I had to resort to for one query. He answered most helpfully within a couple of hours.

I suspect that it helps to have had an overview appreciation of the area before starting the tutorial but this shouldn't deter first timers from starting with this.

The visual presentation the book offers combined with the interactive CD-ROM make this indispensable to anyone who really wants to understand how option pricing works. It's right here on my desk for easy and quick reference - which is my advice to everyone!

I was skeptical to buy it since there were more than 100 different books available on options... but I am glad I choose this book. Its easy and the software developed beats anything I have seen yet... All the free softwares available are excel based but do not offer such insight on the subject as this book.
I would strongly recommend it to anyone. Only hitch is that the software is bit slow to run but it performs...

My wife needed this book for an Astronomy class. She wanted a book with a two cds and not all marked up. I got it for a good price and it looks like a new book with no extra marks. I am very impressed with the quick delivery time, the ease of ordering and the condition of the book. I was also kept posted on the sent date and anticipated delivery date and it was accurate. This was very much appreciated, especially during the holiday season. Good Job!

I received this book through Amazon way before my class started. I saved quite a few bucks and it came in mint condition.

This book is very thorough and not too grotesquely boring. Accounting textbooks can seem to drag on and on but the information in this book seems to all be relevant and pertinent. There are plenty of review questions and problems at the end of each chapter and the chapters do build on each other well, so the further into the book, the more questions from previous chapters. Some other nice things about this book are the continuation problems that utilize the posting of payroll accounts and ledger pages to further help the student grasp the content.
The CDs included are wonderfully useful, too. There doesn't seem to be a relevance issue with this text as I have experienced with textbooks in the past.

Good book, but the problems in the chapter reviews could be more discriptive as to what answer the want.

I have found this book to be very helpful in gaining a practical understanding in the workings of a Payroll function. This book has helped the entire department which has recently started performing the US payrolls for our organisation. I hope that a listing of courses that currently use this book as a recomemded text is included in its next edition.

Cash Flow and Operating Earnings can be made
statisically correct or Hours and Unit Data
will tell you the reasons why not.

I am a retired math teacher who started my own business. I can't believe what some arithmetic calculations within an excel spreadsheet revealed about my business. On a daily basis, I was given everything I needed to know about my sales activity.

As a market executive I could not believe what the bench marks told me about my retail business. It is a must for any company.

Profit and Stock value linked to weekly sales. This is a book with data destined to replace EPS for the entire Financial world.

A practical, simple and revolutionary solution to managing or evaluating any business! The author provides not only a framework for a new, simpler and more effective way of measuring operational performance on a weekly basis but also, provides detailed examples to fit any business model. An easy read and well worth one's time.

As a CPA in Public Practice, I found that the "Value Performance Framework" laid out in Alexander's book very adaptable to the small business perspective. It's a very good read and I often refer back to it during my small business engagements.

Public Company CFO - I have made this a must read for each of my direct reports. This book takes what many have made overly complex and turns it into a real tool to use within the company in driving improved performance. Logically outlines the concepts in terms that are easily understood by both finance and non finance managers. The use of detailed examples, defining key terms and providing working/tailorable templates enables the reader to accelerate real value creation. For a public company it is a valuable enabler for the finance team and it allows functional managers to see the connections between their actions and building value for our shareholders

I am a mid level manager in a Fortune 500 company. I found Jack's book to be an excellent resource for understanding Value Creation and how to quantify Value Creation to non-finance people within the organization. Jack does a great job of explaining the concepts in an easy-to-read style. It's a "must read" for lower and mid level managers in today's business environment.

I've used this book repeatedly since I purchased it a couple of months ago. It is both an excellent reference source and, more importantly, a mechanism for action for all managers that contribute to a company's performance.
The dashboard concept provides easily understood and asimilated performance data for every level of management. The book provides a step by step approach that if implemented corporate wide, must increase awareness and forms the platform for sustained value creation.
The spreadsheet examples on the attached disk are easy to customize to your own situation and take all the pain out of getting started.

All vehicles have dashboards and those manufactured in recent years have dashboards with gauges which measure more than engine temperature, miles driven, available fuel, etc. Those within the dashboard in my wife's Honda Pilot, for example, measure tire pressure, the temperature outside, and the current percentage of oil efficiency. It also has a built-in compass. I thought about all this as I recently read Wayne Eckerson's Performance Dashboards and Jack Alexander's Performance Dashboards and Analysis for Value Creation. If viewed as vehicles, all organizations need means by which to measure, accurately, performance at all levels and in all areas of operation. Burn rate is analogous with consumption of fuel, as are the costs of replacing customers and valued employees analogous with the costs of repairs necessitated by neglect of scheduled (preventive) vehicle maintenance. Comparisons can also be made in terms of alignment and torque. The performance of organizations as well as of vehicles can be measured accurately; only then is it possible to minimize or, better yet, eliminate waste of available resources.

In Performance Dashboards and Analysis for Value Creation, Alexander does a brilliant job of introducing and then explaining what he calls the "Value Performance Framework" (VPF) which will enable those who execute it effectively to link and then drive both performance and value. Within his crisp and eloquent narrative, he focuses on performance dashboards and Excel models which are included in a companion CD-ROM. They are identified in the book with a CD-RM logo. As Alexander explains, the dashboards and spreadsheets are intended as working examples for use after appropriate modification to each reader's own circumstances (i.e. resources, needs, and objectives). I hasten to add that the VPF can be of substantial value to any organization, whatever its size and nature may be.

After discussing "the single greatest challenge in creating an effective measurement system" in Chapter 1, Alexander carefully organizes his material as follows:

Part One (Chapters 2-4): Creating Context and Covering the Basics

Excerpt: "Typically, more can be learned by understanding why firms differ on key [valuation] measures than by selecting a peer group that shares common characteristics. A much richer picture is framed by comparing [and contrasting] your firm to market averages and several best-practice companies in addition to a peer group. Further, the use of a broad set of [valuation] measures, with appropriate benchmarks, would help to avoid the level of valuation errors that were made in the recent stock market bubble." (Page 58)

Part Two (Chapters 5-10): Linking Performance and Value

Excerpt: "There are hundreds of potential measures to choose from to measure different aspects of operating effectiveness. Great care must be exercised in selecting the measures that are most appropriate to a firm at a specific point in time. The performance dashboards must reflect key business priorities. The measures should be evaluated periodically and revised to reflect ever-changing priorities and conditions. It is also critical to provide balance to ensure that a focus on efficiency is not achieved at the expense of quality, customer satisfaction, or growth." (Page 142)

Part Three (Chapters 11-13): Driving Performance and Value

Excerpt: "The single most important factor for achieving success with a [Performance Measurement Framework] is to create context for the measurement system. This is achieved by creating linkage among strategy, performance management, process and quality initiatives, financial performance, and shareholder value. It is also critical to integrate and link operating measures to financial measures and then to shareholder value measures. The time spent in establishing this linkage will improve understanding and ultimately the effectiveness of the framework." (Page 232)

Those who share my high regard for this brilliant book are urged to check out the aforementioned Performance Dashboards written by Wayne Eckerson as well as Joseph Bower and Clark Gilbert's From Resource Allocation to Strategy, Jeanne Ross's Enterprise Architecture as Strategy, Henry Chesbrough's Open Business Models, Dean Spitzer's Transforming Performance Measurement, and Ram Charan's Know-How.

Learn continuous time finance from this book: you won't be disappointed. I have read almost all the most famous finance books and I must say that this is by far the best one of them. Although somewhat limited in scope, it is masterfully written: everything is explained clearly and carefully. All statements are rigorously proved. I would say it is suitable both for beginners, having a minimum exposure to measure-theoretic probability and willing to spend some time on it, and for advanced students. Personally, I first read the book as a beginner and found it extremely useful, but even now, that I understand and know most of the material, I find it to be an invaluable reference. The level of mathematical sophistication is quite high, so don't expect anything like Neftci, Baxter and Rennie, Mikosch or Bjork. The level is the same of Duffie, but, while Duffie presents a lot of material and most of the time he doesn't provide proofs and explanations (which, personally, I find irritating), this book is limited to few selected topics, but they are explained at length.
Unfortunately, the perfect finance book has not yet been written (finance professionals seem to be too busy and well paid to write good books), but this one is almost perfect. If you really want to understand quantitative finance, I strongly recommend that you invest a good amount of hours in studying this book. Two good books to acompany this one might be Resnick's book on probability and Steele's book on stochastic calculus.

Nielsen has written a virtually self-contained treatise on the subject. Reading this book was a beautiful learning experience: The author's clarity of thought was striking; the examples made particular points transparent; and the exercises made invaluable contributions to understanding.
The three appendices (on measure and probability, the Lebesque integral, and the heat equation), and the first three chapters make the book as self-contained as is possible.
Synopsis: I do not know of a better book on this subject.

This book is excellent. As anyone interested in this field knows, there is a lot of high-level math. The author has included several appendices which cover the required background, and he only includes proofs that are helpful to overall understanding. All theorems without proofs have references to the standard math texts.

In comparison to other texts, it does not leave many important ideas to intuition like Neftci's book. Baxter & Rennie is better than Neftci, but not as good as Elliot & Kopp or Lamberton & Laperyre. All of the above I have studied to some extent, and Nielsen's book seemed to include all that these did AND to fill in the gaps. This is the first book I have seen to actually define 'numeraire'.

Make no mistake, to truly understand this material one has to make an investment in learning a good amount of math. The texts I recommend for real analysis are Royden (tops among all for ease and clarity) and Folland (more comprehensive, but very well written); for probability I recommend Resnick's new book which includes a good chapter on discrete-time martingales (much more readable than Chung) and the legendary text by Billingsley.

If you are willing to learn about 4 chapters of Royden and keep Resnick at your side, then this is the only book you need. If not, then start with Baxter and Rennie.

I read it with Rudin's"Principle of Mathematical Analysis" & Royden's "Real Analysis" by self-study.In my view,you can replace Lamberton & Lapeyre with it.It is rigorous yet accessible for non-math major who is interested in derivatives pricing but frustrated with the high-level mathematics.Buy it and read it with your patience.It won't make you disappointed.

This is an excellent textbook on financial mathematics. It is quite mathematical, but self contained, clearly and carefully written. The appendices are very well written condensed reviews of basic technical facts. The book also contains discussions of a topics that I've never seen anywhere else, such as "Arbitrage and Admissibility" and "The doubling strategy". As mentioned in the preface, the book is based on a doctoral-level course, and the author clearly had the benefit of a large amount of feedback from students. Reading it, one can't help notice the presence of a very large number of extra remarks and hints, inserted on every page in order to clarify what must have been a denser original text. Finally, I have to mention the excellent editorial work done by Oxford University Press in producing this book, as compared to similar books published by Wiley.

We have used the concepts outlined in John Daly's book to develop an activity based costing model. In fact, it has proven to be so useful that we are in its third revision. It is has been a critical tool for us to remain profitable during these difficult economic times. I do not know how we got along with out it!

Mr Daly's writing style is smooth and casual, and the book is loaded with common sense. His discussion of overhead allocation problems certainly makes the point that GAAP accounting practices lead to serious errors in cost accounting.

Full disclosure: I personally prefer an engineering model or standard cost approach, reality-checked with what might be called sampled-ABC: old fashioned time and motion studies.

John Daly came up with a well written book that is interesting and informative on activity-based pricing. This book complements my knowledge and expertise on activity-based costing and I now know how to develop my prices based on a disciplined methodology for fixing the price.

John Daly avoids the mistake of focusing of maximizing revenue, advocated by some marketing professionals but rather puts the focus where it belongs namely maximizing profitability and ultimately shareholder value.

Any manager with responsibility for pricing will benefit immensely from reading this book.

Pricing for Profitability has allowed our company to intelligently quote new projects and answer a critical question during price negotiations - "Should I walk?". We have also found the activity based pricing concepts useful for evaluating the countless cost down requests we get from our customer and understanding what we can and cannot do. I would recommend this book to anyone in a highly competitive, tight margin business.

John Daly has written an excellent book with important insights into the desirability and mechanics of using Activity Based Pricing to achieve a profit-driven pricing model.

Why is this important?

If you really understand and properly allocate your costs and use that understanding to develop an Activity Based Pricing model for your products and/or services then you are pretty well assured of profitability, particularly as you increase unit volume. Of course, this assumes you can sell at a price higher than your fully loaded, properly allocated costs.

As Mr. Daly clearly describes, traditional cost allocation methods (not to mention back of a napkin allocations) result in problematical cost distortions and lead to potentially serious pricing errors.

Anyone with profit and loss responsibility, or who would like to get there, would be well served to buy this book, read it and take it to heart. It is well written, coherent and was a pleasure to read. Daly has struck an excellent balance in that the book is not so filled with technical accounting/finance detail it is inaccessible to a non-accountant and yet it has sufficient substance to be of interest to accounting and finance specialists.

As investment bankers we receive financing requests from many companies seeking capital that are not profitable or not as profitable as they could be. Activity Based Pricing is one of the disciplines we are introducing to our clients and prospective clients to help them achieve profitability or become more profitable in order to better position them to compete for capital.

Many organizations struggle with the implementation of the balanced scorecard. It is rumoured that about 70% of these projects fail. There are many reasons given for this, like wrong timing, no commitment of the organization, inadequate IT etc. These failures are a shame because, as the book Quest for Balance shows, the use of a good PMS helps organizations obtain better results! So we should concentrate more on the reasons for PMS-failure and the things we can do to make these successful. This book concentrates on the human factors which influence this success. These factors are still too often ignored, probably because humans are so hard to deal with. Based on case study research the author has discovered which factors are the most important, like visible commitment of top management and a firm belief in performance management. Also management styles are discusses. With this book the failure rate of BSC-implementations surely must go down.

Many organizations struggle with the implementation of the balanced scorecard. It is rumoured that about 70% of these projects fail. There are many reasons given for this, like wrong timing, no commitment of the organization, inadequate IT etc. These failures are a shame because, as the book Quest for Balance shows, the use of a good PMS helps organizations obtain better results! So we should concentrate more on the reasons for PMS-failure and the things we can do to make these successful. This book concentrates on the human factors which influence this success. These factors are still too often ignored, probably because humans are so hard to deal with. Based on case study research the author has discovered which factors are the most important, like visible commitment of top management and a firm belief in performance management. Also management styles are discusses. With this book the failure rate of BSC-implementations surely must go down.

Many organizations struggle with the implementation of the balanced scorecard. It is rumoured that about 70% of these projects fail. There are many reasons given for this, like wrong timing, no commitment of the organization, inadequate IT etc. These failures are a shame because, as the book Quest for Balance shows, the use of a good PMS helps organizations obtain better results! So we should concentrate more on the reasons for PMS-failure and the things we can do to make these successful. This book concentrates on the human factors which influence this success. These factors are still too often ignored, probably because humans are so hard to deal with. Based on case study research the author has discovered which factors are the most important, like visible commitment of top management and a firm belief in performance management. Also management styles are discusses. With this book the failure rate of BSC-implementations surely must go down.

Andre de Waal manages to prove the importance of the human element as a critical success factor for using performance management systems (PMS). In this book he gives a clear overview which factors are important and how managers can use them. He uses very interesting case material to support his views. This book is not only for managers that want to set up a new PMS but also for managers that already use a PMS and struggle with it. A book that every manager needs to read and use in practice!

In every implementation project the most difficult part is dealing with the human factor. It isn't so difficult to technicaly implement a balanced scorecard but getting people to actually use it always turns out to be the most difficult part. This book researches which elements we have to take into account to make sure that managers will use the balanced scorecard. Seeing that the scorecard is one of the most popular management tools of the last decade this is very important. The book provides useful advice as well as proof that using the scorecard indeed helps a company get better results. This is good news for everybody.

Janet Lowe's book delivers. Want to know what a genius of finance thinks about investing, the stock market and economics? Buy this book. Each time I read it, I discover a new insight which previously eluded me. Truly a great book and I recommend it to all investors of any level of investment sophistication.

I've profited handsomely in a real-time portfolio over less than 6 months from ideas accumulated from my reading of this nice collection of articles. Before picking up this text, I expected it would contain mainly writings from Graham's earliest years --writings destined to be melded into the first edition of "Security Analysis." There are a couple of such pieces, but I was most taken with the pieces written towards the end of his life. Some of these are interviews. Graham generated financial ideas for the individual investor until the very end of his life, and this book is currently the only published repository for these. I'm not sure if someone just coming to Benjamin Graham will derive the greatest benefit from this book, but anyone who has a passiing familiarity with "Security Analysis", "The Intelligent Investor" and "The Interpretation of Financial Statements" will derive great pleasure and a goodly number of valuable insights from this collection.

Janet Lowe has done an outstanding job collating and introducing each section of this book of previously unpublished articles, lectures, and interviews from the father of value investing. I believe anyone reading this book will get a huge value out of it. This book is a great addition to Mr. Graham's books. It is also a great book to read for those new to Graham's teachings of buying good stocks when their prices are below intrinsic value. Graham's methods of finding good stocks at fair prices by examining their equity to asset ratios, book value, and P/E multiples brought the Graham-Newman partnership over a 20% annual return on equities for 20 years. Followed by his pupil Warren Buffet using and refining his techniques to return over 20% a year for 40 years and eventually lead Warren Buffett to be worth $40 billion thanks to using his value investing for the holding company Berkshire-Hathaway. I sit up and listen to anything these two great men have to say. I also recommend reading Graham's Intelligent Investor and Security Analysis, and "The essays of Warren Buffett" by Cunningham.

For anyone interested in getting to the heart of Benj. Graham and value investing, this is a great source. I only wish it would have been published a few years earlier; I would have saved countless hours searching for the same documents in my college library. Now, if Janet Lowe would only do a similar work with Graham's prized pupil, Warren Buffett as the subject...

This book give a concrete two factor formula for buying below market value investments without needing the more extensive balance sheet analysis as used in the "Intelligent Investor" or "Security Analysis".

The book hasn't been used yet for our group discussion at work, but I've looked through it and I'm excited about the book. Its easy to read and understand.

It provided me with the guidelines I was searching for. I needed a model for structure.

I used this book to teach financial management of restaurantes to pupils in a culinary school. It was very usefull and I highly recommend it, especially the chapter where you find the different forms of calculating the price of a dish.

I am an accountant and this books gives me great ideas to share with my restaurant clients

This is an excellent book that must be a part of your business library. As essential as any cookbook