The Accounting Game is more of a workbook than anything else. Built on the premise that you learn best by doing, the book is designed to teach you everything you need to know about creating and understanding financial statements by having you set them up for an imaginary lemonade stand. The whole exercise is based on the highly successful seminars run since the early 1980s by an outfit called Education Discoveries. It's unlikely that the book version can achieve the same energy as the actual seminars, but it's written as a straightforward, interactive, and lighthearted romp through LIFO/FIFO, retained earnings, accounts payable, and the rest of that zany accounting lingo you're dying to learn. As an oversized paperback, it's a great value. Plus, if you work through the book, you really do come away with a basic understanding of accounting fundamentals.
Conflict-of-interest department
The Future and Its Enemies: The Growing Conflict over Creativity, Enterprise, and Progress, by Virginia Postrel
(Free Press, 1998, $25)
Free, Perfect, and Now: Connecting to the Three Insatiable Customer Demands, by Rob Rodin, with Curtis Hartman
(Simon & Schuster, 1999, $25)
Two notable books written by former Inc. staff members are now on the market. In The Future and Its Enemies, former Inc. writer Virginia Postrel (who appeared in the magazine from 1984 to 1986; her name was Virginia Inman then) makes a reasoned and passionate argument that a natural evolution of ideas usually leads to better problem solving in a company than centralized, technocratic planning does. Postrel, now editor of the libertarian magazine Reason, argues that our notions of work and play affect everything we do, from starting a business to running a government. "It is in curiosity, problem solving, and play that we discover who we are," she writes.
Curtis Hartman, a senior editor at Inc. from 1982 to 1990, collaborated with Rob Rodin, CEO of billion-dollar electronics-parts distributor Marshall Industries, to produce Free, Perfect, and Now. Under Rodin's watch, over the past six years, Marshall Industries, founded in 1947, grew from $500 million to $1.7 billion in revenues. But don't let the size of the enterprise scare you off. The book is full of practical, hands-on advice that is as useful for a start-up as it is for a company of Marshall's girth. "If your company's critical capabilities aren't accessible to customers 24 hours a day, you aren't designed to meet the future," Rodin warns.
Most chapters end with a "manager's workbook," and while such a device can seem tired and trite in some books, it's executed with aplomb here. The result is advice that reads like the best of Inc.'s Hands On section . "Experience your own service," Rodin advises at the end of one chapter. "No matter what you sell, you have no idea how your customers feel about your service or product until you order it, buy it, eat it, use it, or call for help with a problem." The rest of the book is devoted to telling his own story at Marshall and offering one management gem after another.
In one section, for example, Rodin observes that information-technology people speak only technobabble because at most companies they're "herded into one isolated department." He argues: "The best IT professionals live with the business units. They spread out across the company and work side by side with the business folks." It's smart advice to make IT truly useful rather than designate it as the place where everyone goes to gripe. Free, Perfect, and Now is a fascinating collection of one CEO's lessons in how to get customers what they want at the lowest cost, at the highest quality, and as soon as possible. Along the way, Rodin and Hartman offer a great deal of hands-on advice about the ways in which any business owner or manager can try to do the same.
Executive reader
William Bridges, author of JobShift: How to Prosper in a Workplace Without Jobs (Perseus Press, 1995, $13), and founder of William Bridges & Associates, in Mill Valley, Calif.
LAST BOOK READ:
Best-selling author Bridges reads all the time--but you won't find a pile of dense business tomes on his desk or next to his bed. He says he looks increasingly to magazines ( Inc., Fast Company, Business 2.0) for novel ideas.
FAVORITE BOOKS READ THIS YEAR:
The classics. Bridges cites icon Peter Drucker and celeb guru Tom Peters as the tops. Heading his list are Drucker's Innovation and Entrepreneurship (HarperBusiness, 1993, $14.50) and Post-Capitalist Society (HarperBusiness, 1994, $13.50). The Peters books he suggests are Liberation Management: Necessary Disorganization for the Nanosecond Nineties (Fawcett Books, 1994, $15) and Thriving on Chaos: Handbook for a Management Revolution (HarperCollins, 1991, $18).
WHAT HE DISLIKES:
"The thing that turns me off pretty fast--and I'm afraid I've fallen into this trap too--is too much advice. What businesspeople need is inspiration, stimulus, examples. That's what Drucker and Peters do, although Peters sometimes gives advice as well. That's one of his bad habits." --Mike Hofman
