Transforming the Bottom Line: Managing Performance With the Real Numbers

Rating:
Summary: distills to one book many on subject
Review: Although the critic that complains of lack of originality is perhaps correct, this book is of great use to the small business owner. Through this book one may convey the writtings of Porter, Kaplan, Drucker, Copeland, Urich and many others to the layman employee that neither has the interest, time, nor perhaps even the capacity to to inculcate the writtings of the aforementioned authors. It delivers the spirit and meaning of value adding/non-value adding activity and its relavance for every business.

Rating:
Summary: Heavy on Cases Light on Content
Review: Apply the cost of this book to the purchase of Robert S. Kaplan's "The Balanced Scorecard" and, perhaps, "Cost & Effect." (I'm assuming that almost every reader already has a copy of Michael Hammer's and James Champy's "Reengineering the Corporation.") The author's tend to quote the leading authorities in activity based costing, balanced scorecards, and process reengineering liberally and follow each quote with an endless stream of supporting cases. Outside of these celebrity quotes and the mind-numbing quantity of cases, there is a surprising lack of content -- I'm almost tempted to write the authors to request a refund.

(Believe me, this two-star rating is extremely generous!!!)

Rating:
Summary: Good background material but not at all actionable
Review: I'm familiar with this book as it was an assigned textbook for a graduate level accounting course I taught. Where is succeeds is in pointing out the flaws of traditional accounting as a management tool and traditional cost reduction efforts as a response. Their material on finding and retaining profitable products and finding and retaining profitable customers are especially good. However, there isn't much in here on implementing the ideas and some ideas, especially managing with the real numbers, may be difficult to impossible to implement.

So, what's here is a good to great source of ideas in financial aspects of general management. There's just not much on how to take action on the ideas.