The most influential management book of the past quarter century.A veritable goldmine of analytical concepts and tools to help companies get a much clearer grasp of how they can create and sustain competitive advantage.

Philip Kotler

S.C. Johnson & Son, Distinguished Professor of International Marketing, Northwestern University

Michael Porter has done it again. Having defined the 'what' and 'why' of competitive strategy in his earlier book, he now defines the 'how' in

Competitive Advantage.

Newsday

A sharp, aggressive and cogently reasoned book about competition that

your smarter rivals will try to get to first.

The Washington Post

A brilliant structural analysis of what competitive advantage might

mean.

Antitrust Law & economics Review

A superb guide for business managers but also necessary background study for judges, antitrust agency officials, and economic experts in antitrust cases.

Product Review
Antitrust Law & economics Review A superb guide for business managers but also necessary background study for judges, antitrust agency officials, and economic experts in antitrust cases.

Whether you're an entrepreneur, a manager, a marketer, or a curious Starbucks loyalist, Pour Your Heart into It will let you in on the revolutionary Starbucks venture. CEO Howard Schultz recounts the company's rise in 24 chapters, each of which illustrates such core values as "Winning at the expense of employees is not victory at all." --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal
The author is the entrepreneur behind Starbucks, the coffee-shop chain with a "passion" for quality coffee. Through the voice of Eric Conger, Schultz speaks poetically about the "mystery and romance" of the "coffee experience." Well, to some people coffee is like that. The program is not so much for those who want to learn about business techniques as for those who love Starbucks. Schultz's story is an interesting one, largely a personal narrative about making it big. At one point the narration says, "It's not about me," but to a great extent the tapes really are. Recommended only if Starbucks has a strong presence in your community.?Mark Guyer, Stark Cty. Dist. Lib., Canton, Ohio
Copyright 1997 Reed business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Audio Cassette edition.

Chairman, Wal-Mart Stores, Inc.

Covey's philosophy for creating more meaningful relationships and successes in the workplace is one we should be striving to implement throughout business and industry, in the home and elsewhere, if we expect to be rewarded with happiness and a fulfilling future. I truly believe that the values he stresses in Principle-Centered Leadership are fundamental to developing a total quality environment.

Catherine Crier

CNN News Anchor

The world is in dire need of a paradigm shift in attitudes and values. Stephen Covey gives us the blueprint with which to create a better personal, business, and political environment and produce this fundamental change. All we need do -- is act!

Thomas R. Horton

Chairman, American management Association

As if Covey's first book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, was not enough, his new book Principle-Centered Leadership is a real tour de force.

Phyllis J. Dudenhoffer

International President, General Federation of Women's Clubs

Principle-Centered Leadership gave me new insights into working with and for our volunteers. The ideas are basic, yet as we go through our life's work we sometimes overlook the simple basic truth. This book inspires me to build a better life.

Joshua Hammond

President, American Quality Foundation

We consider Stephen R. Covey to be one of the five most important contributors to shaping America's next level of thinking in quality.

Unless you’re financially savvy, annual reports with all those figures, frustrating footnotes, and fine print are boring and intimidating. However, once you have a fundamental knowledge of finance and its basic terminology, you can find the juicy parts. Reading Financial Reports For Dummies by Lita Epstein, a teacher of online financial courses and author of Trading for Dummies, gets you up to speed so you can:

• Go past the prose that can maximize the positive and minimize the negative and get information in dollars and cents
• Get an overview from the big three—the balance sheet, income statement, and statement of cash flows
• Understand the lingo and read between the lines
• Calculate basics like PE, Dividend Payout Ratio, ROS, ROA, ROE, Operating Margin, and Net Margin

It pays for investors to be somewhat skeptical instead of gullible. Pressured to please Wall Street, companies are sometimes tempted to use “creative” accounting. You’ll discover how to:

• Detect red flags (that, unfortunately, aren’t emphasized in red) such as lawsuits, changes in accounting methods, and obligations to retirees and future retirees
• Understand the different reporting requirements for public companies and private companies with various types of business structures
• Analyze a company’s cash flow, a prime indicator of its financial health
• Scrutinize deals such as mergers, acquisitions, liquidations and other major changes in key assets

Organized so you can start where you’re comfortable and proceed at your own pace, Reading Financial Reports for Dummies helps managers prepare annual reports and use financial reporting to budget more efficiently and helps investors base their decisions on knowledge instead of hype. Whether you’re in business or in the stock market, knowledge is always an asset.

Back Cover Copy
Simple strategies for measuring a company's financial health

Decipher the jargon and read financial reports like a pro

Whether you're a serious investor or hold a few shares in the company you work for, reading financial reports is a vital way to keep tabs on a company's performance. This clear and friendly guide will help you wade through the numbers to see what's really going on — so you can make smarter and more profitable investment choices.

Discover how to:

• Make sense of balance sheets
• Find the figures that tell the tale
• Test the numbers with simple formulas
• Recognize red flags in the footnotes
• Understand deceptive accounting practices

But your very first small-business decision may be to admit that you’re not ready for this career – at least not yet. If you’re straddling the fence, Small business For Dummies will uncover whether this career works for you. You’ll also gain insight into getting your personal finances in order before exposing yourself to the risk of a new business, and discover how to draw a roadmap to reach your career destination. This easy-to-understand guide is also for those who want to

• Write a gang-buster business plan
• Create the right legal framework for your business
• Locate financing that suits your needs
• Develop and market your product
• Hire the right employees for the right jobs
• Build your business

You’ll also gain understanding of the tactical side of running a small business, from pricing, budgeting, business expansion, and complying with government regulations to operational issues including:

• Managing your time
• Collecting accounts receivable
• Understanding your financial statements
• Taking good care of your customers
• Locating new financing or revising existing financing

You don’t need to be a genius to run a successful small business, but you do need some help. And that’s exactly what this book is, a guide into the stimulating world of small business ownership and management.

Book Info
Shows readers how to get their small business off the ground but also how to nurture its growth and ensure its survival. Softcover.

The world of accounting can be intimidating. But, more often than not, there's no way to avoid it - even non-financial jobs venture into financial jargon and concepts. For those trying to get more done at the office, organize the dollars and cents in a small business, or just in need of a refresher, there's no reason to turn to the average number-crunching class again.

The Accounting Game presents financial information in a format so simple and so unlike a common accounting textbook, you may forget youre learning key skills that will help you get ahead!

This book uses the world of a kid's lemonade stand to teach the basics of financial language and records. You'll run your own lemonade stand and make it grow by creating signs to advertise it, borrowing money from Mom, buying lemons and sugar and selling to the whole neighborhood. As you run your stand, you'll begin to understand and apply financial terms and concepts like assets, liabilities, earnings, inventory and notes payable, plus: --Know the difference between accrual vs. cash accounting methods
--Create and understand an income statement and balance sheet
--Track inventory using LIFO and FIFO
--Create cash statements and understand cash flow and liquidity
--Apply your new knowledge to real-life situations

The revolutionary approach of The Accounting Game takes the typically mundane subjects of accounting and business finance and makes them something you can easily learn, understand, remember and use!

"The game approach makes the subject matter most understandable. I highly recommend it to anyone frightened by either numbers or accountants." --John Hernandis, Director of Corporate Communications, American Greetings

The Accounting Game is produced by Educational Discoveries, the training industrys leader in accelerative learning technology. More than 70,000 people have graduated from The Accounting Game, the world's most successful one-day financial seminar.

Excerpted from The Accounting Game : Basic Accounting Fresh from the Lemonade Stand by Darrell Mullis and Judith Handler Orloff. Copyright © 1998. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved
From the Introduction of The Accounting Game.

How do people really learn? The answers and theories are endless. They include ideas ranging from genetic imprinting to osmosis and modeling and emotional intelligence. Brain research is voluminous as we enter the 21st century. A later book in this series will deal with the scientific basis of that research and how Educational Discoveries, Inc. uses that research to work with corporations to achieve extraordinary results.

For now, though, please ask yourself: How do I learn?

Isn't that an interesting question? And, what do you learn? Do you learn information from reading, watching videos, using computers? Can you learn "people skills" without interacting with other people? Can you change behavior without a model of what the ideal behavior should look like? Feel like? Are there people you meet in your daily travels that you want to emulate? Do you emulate them? How does it work? Can you remember the words of the songs from childhood, but not the ones you listened to last week or even this morning? Questions and questions. More than any other thought process, questions help us learn.

Remember what we heard about a baby's first year of life? babies learn more in that year that in all the years combined afterwards. Yet, in that first year, babies cannot pose questions in the way they will once they learn language. So, how do babies learn? And what can we take away from that to help adults learn more quickly, retain new information longer, and apply it immediately in their lives?

So, what does this have to do with you and this book? Good question.

The Accounting Game is written in a way that creates a specific learning experience for you as well as teach you the basic skills of accounting. We call the learning method accelerative learning. What do you think that means? It is a learning methodology that uses all of your senses as well as your emotions and your critical thinking skills. If you can remember your kindergarten or elementary school classrooms, you will see many colored maps, letters and numbers, bold (even raw) drawings by each child, etc. You learned the alphabet by singing. You learned the multiplication tables by saying them out loud with each other. You laughed a lot. You were creative.

Then, how you were taught began to change when you entered middle school or high school. Learning became more lecture, more black and white, more rote. You studied before tests and probably did well or maybe not. Yet, for all the endless homework and "cramming," most of the information you learned in high school you don't remember now. That's because it went into your short-term memory so that you could pass the tests and move on to the next grade.

Yet, look at all the things you remember from early childhood! While in elementary school, much of the information you learned went directly to your long-term memory, because it was peppered with music, color, movement, smells, emotional experiences, and lots of play and fun.

The methodology we use in this book in many ways parallels how you learned in grade school. We do this by accessing the part of your brain where long-term memory lives. Now, the way to reach your long-term memory has to include emotion, because they reside in the same place in your brain - the limbic region.

The truth is, because of the way we humans learn, we have to discover something ourselves to really learn it. This book, based on Educational Discoveries' flagship seminar, is designed so you make dozens of discoveries. In short, you will learn a college semesters worth of accounting in the time it takes you to interact with this book.

This is quite a reversal, because business people and students have over the years found the subject of accounting quite difficult to master. Many have simply given up in frustration, others have decided to leave accounting to the "experts." This book is for all of you who have hated accounting, had difficulty learning it, or ever thought you didn't really "get it."

We think that most attempts to teach accounting fail because of too much attention to details and a failure to present the big picture framework of how it all works and fits together. In this book, we promise not to overburden you with details and to focus on what are really the key concepts of accounting that any businessperson needs to know.

You will learn the structure and purpose of the three primary financial statements - the balance sheet, the income statement, and the cash flow statement. You will learn how these fit together and their interrelationships. You will also learn the basic language of business-concepts like cost of goods sold, expenses, bad debts, accrual vs. cash methods of accounting, FIFO and LIFO, capitalizing vs. expensing, depreciation, and the difference between cash and profit.

Our promise is that you will get all this information in a fun and easy way that allows you to participate, interact, and discover all that you need to know. Many people need to have understanding and confidence in working with financial concepts, but are not ever going to be doing accounting details. If that is you, then this book fits that need, too. It is set up so that you can actually do financial statements as you are learning them. We invite you to "play the game" as you interact with this book.

Understanding all this information is nice, but what do you do with it? The final chapter will give you some tools for analyzing financial information and making better decisions for your company and your career.

As mentioned, the information in this program has been developed by Educational Discoveries, Inc. since the early 1980s in our one-day seminar, The Accounting Game. The program was originally created by Marshall Thurber at the Burklyn business School in the late 1970s. Nancy Maresh, a student at Marshalls school, then took the program and developed The Accounting Game seminar. We offer our heartfelt thanks for their original genius and commitment to bringing this extraordinary program to life. We also want to thank all of the somewhere between 75,000 and 100,000 people who have attended our public and private seminars for the fun they have been and for the insights and suggestions that have helped us improve the teaching of this information. Thanks to them, The Accounting Game is the most successful financial seminar in the world.

So, enjoy! Because if you enjoy this book, you'll learn more in a brief time than you ever imagined possible.