BOOKS
Nicer nightmares
Managing Your Tax Season
American institute of CPAs; $75 for members,
$93.75 for non-members
Useful delusions
Being the Boss: ;e ;ree Imperatives
for Becoming a Great Leader
Harvard Business Review Press; $25.95
Tax season will always be a nightmare, but
it doesn’t have to be a wake-up-scream-ing-in-a-cold-sweat nightmare; instead,
with some preparation and the right guidance, it can be more like one of those mild
naked-in-a-public-place nightmares. Ed
Mendlowitz, a partner at cutting-edge ;rm
WithumSmith+Brown and a noted consultant to CPAs in his own right, has written
Managing Your Tax Season for the AICPA
to help you improve your nightmare, with
valuable advice on analyzing your current
tax season system and targeting problems.
Covering everything from sta;ng and setting fees to maintaining morale, assigning
work and cross-selling beyond tax season,
it’ll help you get through April 18 with much
less sweating and screaming.
what make this biography well worth a look:
Despite being written by Bloch’s son, former
Block CEO Tom, Many Happy Returns is more
than willing to describe the Bloch brothers’
business mistakes and missteps, if only because they almost always overcome them.
Henry emerges as a
man whose phenomenal success is
based not so much
on brilliant innovation (though some
is involved), but on
sound principles and
a keen willingness to
try, fail, and learn from
his mistakes, as well as
a certain fundamental
decency.
Sales tax
standards
Current Issues in Sales
and Use Tax Reserves
Lorman Education Services; $175.20 (with
Accounting Today.com discount)
New economy.
Like many a recent book on being a business
leader, Being the Boss
starts with the premise that most bosses
and managers are
thoroughly unprepared for their new
positions. ;ey have
no idea of how hard
they’ll have to work,
or how much they’ll
have to change the
way they think, to be a
successful boss. Based
on decades of research,
Being the Boss offers
some insightful ideas on
business leadership, built
around a framework of
three imperatives for bosses: managing themselves,
managing a network, and managing a
team. It should help clear up some delusions
about what it means to be a boss — but on the
other hand, if people didn’t have those delusions, would they agree to become bosses in
the ;rst place?
New rules.
New people.
With the holiday shopping season behind
them, retailers across the country will be facing all sorts of sales and use tax issues, not
least whether their reserve practices are up to
snu;. Proposed changes to the standards, as
well as aggressive state enforcement actions,
are making it harder and harder to tell; this
recorded teleconference and manual focus
on the applicable standard, as well as potential future changes.
A new way
to learn.
Professional hazing
How to Bring in New Partners
Rosenberg Associates; $95
Our process for on-boarding important sta;
involves a painful tattooing ritual and an all-night vigil on a mountaintop surrounded by
wolves, but professional ;rms may prefer a
more professional approach. Firm management expert Marc Rosenberg’s How to Bring
in New Partners o;ers up the latest thinking
and best practices for adding partners at your
;rm, starting with what, exactly, a partner is
these days, and moving on to compensation,
buy-in, voting, capital
arrangements and
much more.
A giant
in tax
Many Happy
Returns: ;e
Story of Henry Bloch,
America’s Tax Man
Wiley; $29.95
Too big to
shelve
Barron’s Finance and
Investment Handbook
Barron’s; $39.99
Log On & Learn
www.institute.accoun-
tingtoday.com
Henry Bloch, the co-
founder and long-time
public face of tax prep giant
H&R Block, didn’t want to go into tax
prep originally — he and his brother were
nudged into it by a classi;ed ad salesman who
wanted to run ads for the business. ;ey soon
recognized the potential, though, and began
building their empire. Details like that are
If you have Barron’s Ac-
counting Handbook (see our
December issue), you know
what a valuable reference it
is; on the other hand, if you
have that gargantuan tome,
you probably don’t have room
for its similarly sized companion,
De;ation
Management? It’s Not What You ;ink!
Amacom Books; $22
At the risk of devaluing the Books Department, we here at New Products are willing
to admit that an unhealthy proportion of the
books that cross our desks do so on a current
of hot air, with a few useful ideas in;ated to
the bursting point with meaningless jargon.
No one can accuse Management? It’s Not
What You ;ink! of that. It’s a collection of
short, opinionated, often-funny pieces from a
wide variety of sources that throws cold water
on a lot of fashionable management theory
with a bracing dose of reality. Perfect reading
for the executive washroom.
Also in print
The Risk Management Association has released the 2010-11 edition of its Annual Statement Studies of benchmarking data, with ;-
nancial data on hundreds of thousands of
private companies in hundreds of industries.
It’s available in print, and in a Web-based format as eStatement Studies.
