BOOKS
Not Mad Men
Bull’s Eye! The Ultimate How-To
Marketing & Sales Guide for CPAs
AICPA; $125 for members, $156.25 for nonmembers
For all those who’ve been watching Mad Men
and getting excited about the potential for
alcohol, cigarettes and sexism to help them
market their firms, we’ll point out that the
show is about advertising, not marketing. To
learn about marketing, take a look at
Bull’s-Eye!, a new guide from the American Institute
of CPAs and the Association for Accounting
Marketing. It puts together processes, best
practices and case studies from close to 40
leaders in accounting firm marketing to
give you a blueprint to create an organized
marketing and sales program that delivers
measurable results. You’ll have to find a different excuse for smoking, drinking and discriminating.
a fascinating rarity, on a
number of counts: It moves
easily between the airy abstractions of philosophy
and the practical considerations of corporate accounting; it manages to make both
accessible and interesting;
and, for a book with a case
to argue, it’s admirably even-handed in its discussion of
opposing viewpoints. Its
author, a former accounting
professor from the U.K., wants
to propose a radical new purpose for accounting — to aid in
the “distributive justice” of the
title, by which he means, more or
less, spreading the wealth. To do
this, he first offers a clear, concise summary
of a wide variety of economic theories on
the purpose of business, covering everyone
from Marx to Milton Friedman. His eventual choice of preferred theory may not
convince you (it didn’t us), but the tour of
theories is worth the price of admission, and
the rest of the book,
which is dedicated
to explaining how
he would change
accounting to serve
distributive justice,
is notable for its attempt to reconcile
the demands of theory with the mundane
complexities of daily
accounting.
call and ask
why the KPI
isn’t better.)
Having defined a KPI, the
book goes on
to show how to
identify them for
a particular business, and more important, how to use
them, with plenty
of case studies and
specific examples.
There’s also advice for
KPI facilitators, and
guidelines to help small
and nonprofit businesses implement KPIs. All in all, it’s a very handy reference for making sense of something people
think they already know — but don’t.
The executive washroom
Power Bites: Short and to the Point
Management, Leadership and Lifestyle
Advice I Give My Clients!
iUniverse; $16.95
There’s an important man-
agement perk to being a CPA
business advisor, and that’s the
ability to get a firsthand look at
how lots other businesses are
managed (or mismanaged, as
the case may be). If you’re pay-
ing attention, you can learn a lot
— and Ed Mendlowitz has been
paying attention. A CPA and part-
ner at WithumSmith+Brown, he’s
been working with clients (and his
own staff ) for 40 years, and the result
is this collection of short, valuable pieces of
advice. Power Bites is less about
making your business better, and
more about making you better,
as both a manager and a person.
When we say that the short, eas-
ily digestible entries make this
the best kind of bathroom read-
ing, we mean it in a positive way
— not least because the bathroom
in question is the executive wash-
room.
The right I’s
Key Performance Indicators:
Developing, Implementing, and
Using Winning KPIs
Wiley; $39.96 (with WebCPA discount)
You know a business term has gone mainstream when people use its acronym in casual conversation, and don’t bother to spell
out what they’re talking about. Following in
the footsteps of ROI, FTE and P&L, KPI has
achieved this kind of nomenclatural success
— though Key Performance Indicators makes
the claim that this widespread acceptance
is accompanied by an equally widespread
misperception as to what, exactly, KPIs are,
and are not. The book makes an important
distinction that separates performance indicators from
results indicators (like
profits, market share percentages, or
customer satisfaction numbers), and gives
an intriguing list
of characteristics
for identifying a
KPI in the wild.
(Hints: They’re not
expressed in dollars
and cents, they’re
measured frequently, and they tie to the responsibility of a specific person or team, so you can
Nonprofits
not excused
Achieving Clarity and Value from
Nonprofit Financial Reporting, Ratio
Analysis and Benchmarking
Lorman Educational Services; $159.20
(with WebCPA discount)
Rare and intriguing
Accounting and Distributive
Justice
Routledge; $110
Accounting and Distributive Justice is
More and more, the only way nonprofit or-
ganizations are allowed to be different from
regular businesses is in not making a profit
— they are now expected to operate just
as efficiently, using the same cutting-edge
financial tools, with the same (or greater)
transparency in financial reporting. This
CD and reference manual package aims to
help nonprofits learn how to do just that,
helping them create financials that are clear
and substantial, and contribute to the orga-
nization’s mission.
