Download or read book Relevance Regained written by H. Thomas Johnson and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2002-01-15 with total page 413 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Building on his pathbreaking, award-winning bestseller, Relevance Lost, H. Thomas Johnson presents a devastating critique of the top-down hierarchical accounting systems that have dominated American corporations since the 1950s. In Relevance Regained, Johnson shows exactly how "managing by remote control" through results-oriented accounting information has obstructed the real business objective: to reduce process variation and lead times for the purpose of obtaining and keeping satisfied customers. The failure of most American businesses to be competitive and profitable, he contends, is their reliance on management accounting information to control people's actions and productivity. Cost-focused imperatives from on high must be replaced, Johnson asserts, with information systems that link actions with imperatives of global competition. Self-managing work teams, according to Johnson, must own problem-solving information to reduce variation, delays, and excess in processes. Johnson prescribes the necessary changes in management principles that must replace the outdated style associated with the industrial revolution. Responsiveness to customers—not accounting costs—and flexibility—reducing lead times and removing constraints—are necessary for sustained competitive excellence and long-term profitability. Johnson discusses the radical overhauls of companies, such as General Electric's work-outs/"best practices" program and Harley-Davidson's work simplification programs, and shows how these strong commitments to new strategies maximize a company's most important assets: people and time. To be globally competitive, he claims, a company's work must be directed toward selling to customers, not just selling products.
Download or read book The End of Accounting and the Path Forward for Investors and Managers written by Baruch Lev and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2016-06-14 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An innovative new valuation framework with truly useful economic indicators The End of Accounting and the Path Forward for Investors and Managers shows how the ubiquitous financial reports have become useless in capital market decisions and lays out an actionable alternative. Based on a comprehensive, large-sample empirical analysis, this book reports financial documents' continuous deterioration in relevance to investors' decisions. An enlightening discussion details the reasons why accounting is losing relevance in today's market, backed by numerous examples with real-world impact. Beyond simply identifying the problem, this report offers a solution—the Value Creation Report—and demonstrates its utility in key industries. New indicators focus on strategy and execution to identify and evaluate a company's true value-creating resources for a more up-to-date approach to critical investment decision-making. While entire industries have come to rely on financial reports for vital information, these documents are flawed and insufficient when it comes to the way investors and lenders work in the current economic climate. This book demonstrates an alternative, giving you a new framework for more informed decision making. Discover a new, comprehensive system of economic indicators Focus on strategic, value-creating resources in company valuation Learn how traditional financial documents are quickly losing their utility Find a path forward with actionable, up-to-date information Major corporate decisions, such as restructuring and M&A, are predicated on financial indicators of profitability and asset/liabilities values. These documents move mountains, so what happens if they're based on faulty indicators that fail to show the true value of the company? The End of Accounting and the Path Forward for Investors and Managers shows you the reality and offers a new blueprint for more accurate valuation.
Download or read book Creation Regained written by Albert M. Wolters and published by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. This book was released on 2005-11-10 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: with a Postcript coauthored by Michael W. Goheen In print for two decades and translated into eight languages, Albert Wolters's classic formulation of an integrated Christian worldview has been revised and expanded to reach new readers beyond the generation that has already benefited from this clear, concise proposal for transcending the false dichotomy between sacred and secular. Wolters begins by defining the nature and scope of a worldview, distinguishing it from philosophy and theology. He then outlines a Reformed analysis of the three basic categories in human history -- creation, fall, and redemption -- arguing that while the fall reaches into every corner of the world, Christians are called to participate in Christ's redemption of all creation. This Twentieth Anniversary edition features a new concluding chapter, coauthored with Michael Goheen, that helpfully places the discussion of worldview in a broader narrative and missional context.
Download or read book Profit Beyond Measure written by Anders Broms and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2001-05-29 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Waste has plagued almost every industrial-age firm for the past century. In this powerfully argued alternative to conventional cost management thinking, experts H. Thomas Johnson and Anders Bröms assert that any company can avoid the waste that is generated through excessive operating costs in the short run and excessive losses from market instability in the long run. To gain more secure levels of profitability, management must simply change how it thinks about work and how it organizes work. Profit Beyond Measure details how two extremely profitable manufacturers, Toyota and the Swedish truck maker Scania, have rejected the traditional mechanistic mindset of managing by results that generates waste. Johnson and Bröms explain how Toyota and Scania achieve their legendary cost advantage through a revolutionary concept they call managing by means (MBM). Instead of being driven to meet preconceived accounting targets, the production systems of Toyota and Scania are governed by the three precepts that guide all living systems: self-organization, interdependence, and diversity. Amid a wealth of new insights into Toyota's vaunted system, Johnson and Bröms introduce the tools of MBM to show how design, production, and profitability analysis are done to customer order. They demonstrate that by following the principles that emulate life systems, even a lean and profitable company can organize work to greatly lessen its long-term earnings instability and sharply reduce its short-run operating costs. Scania has achieved sixty-five years of financial stability and longevity in the face of fierce competition. Toyota has amassed a market value since 1988 that has rivaled -- or sometimes surpassed -- the American "Big Three" automakers combined. The principles that Johnson and Bröms set forth in Profit Beyond Measure can guarantee the same richer, longer life to any company that applies them.
Download or read book Brand Relevance written by David A. Aaker and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2011-01-25 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Branding guru Aaker shows how to eliminate the competition and become the lead brand in your market This ground-breaking book defines the concept of brand relevance using dozens of case studies-Prius, Whole Foods, Westin, iPad and more-and explains how brand relevance drives market dynamics, which generates opportunities for your brand and threats for the competition. Aaker reveals how these companies have made other brands in their categories irrelevant. Key points: When managing a new category of product, treat it as if it were a brand; By failing to produce what customers want or losing momentum and visibility, your brand becomes irrelevant; and create barriers to competitors by supporting innovation at every level of the organization. Using dozens of case studies, shows how to create or dominate new categories or subcategories, making competitors irrelevant Shows how to manage the new category or subcategory as if it were a brand and how to create barriers to competitors Describes the threat of becoming irrelevant by failing to make what customer are buying or losing energy David Aaker, the author of four brand books, has been called the father of branding This book offers insight for creating and/or owning a new business arena. Instead of being the best, the goal is to be the only brand around-making competitors irrelevant.
Download or read book Sacrifice Regained written by Roger Crisp and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-09-03 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Does being virtuous make you happy? Roger Crisp examines the answers to this ancient question provided by the so-called 'British Moralists', from Thomas Hobbes, around 1650, for the next two hundred years, until Jeremy Bentham. This involves elucidating their views on happiness (self-interest, or well-being) and on virtue (or morality), in order to bring out the relation of each to the other. Themes ran through many of these writers: psychological egoism, evaluative hedonism, and—after Hobbes—the acceptance of self-standing moral reasons. But there are exceptions, and even those taking the standard views adopt them for very different reasons and express them in various ways. As the ancients tended to believe that virtue and happiness largely coincide, so these modern authors are inclined to accept posthumous reward and punishment. Both positions sit uneasily with the common-sense idea that a person can truly sacrifice their own good for the sake of morality or for others. This book shows that David Hume—a hedonist whose ethics made no appeal to the afterlife—was the first major British moralist to allow for, indeed to recommend, such self-sacrifice. Morality and well-being of course remain central to modern ethics, and Crisp demonstrates how much there is to learn from this remarkable group of philosophers.
Download or read book The Lost Art of Reading written by David L. Ulin and published by Sasquatch Books. This book was released on 2010-06-01 with total page 89 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reading is a revolutionary act, an act of engagement in a culture that wants us to disengage. In The Lost Art of Reading, David L. Ulin asks a number of timely questions - why is literature important? What does it offer, especially now? Blending commentary with memoir, Ulin addresses the importance of the simple act of reading in an increasingly digital culture. Reading a book, flipping through hard pages, or shuffling them on screen - it doesn't matter. The key is the act of reading, and it's seriousness and depth. Ulin emphasizes the importance of reflection and pause allowed by stopping to read a book, and the accompanying focus required to let the mind run free in a world that is not one's own. Are we willing to risk our collective interest in contemplation, nuanced thinking, and empathy? Far from preaching to the choir, The Lost Art of Reading is a call to arms, or rather, to pages.
Download or read book Regine s Book written by Regine Stokke and published by Zest Books ™. This book was released on 2014-01-01 with total page 373 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Regine’s blog about living with Leukemia gained a huge following, and eventually became this book. She writes openly about emotional and physical aspects of her 15-month struggle to recover, and explains how her disease impacts her life. In the course of her illness, Regine has photography exhibits, goes to concerts, enjoys her friends ? and the lessons she learned have relevance for all of us. She died at home on December 3, 2009 with her family and cat by her side.
Download or read book What Is the What written by Dave Eggers and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 2009-02-24 with total page 563 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What Is the What is the story of Valentino Achak Deng, a refugee in war-ravaged southern Sudan who flees from his village in the mid-1980s and becomes one of the so-called Lost Boys. Valentino’s travels bring him in contact with enemy soldiers, with liberation rebels, with hyenas and lions, with disease and starvation, and with deadly murahaleen (militias on horseback)–the same sort who currently terrorize Darfur. Eventually Deng is resettled in the United States with almost 4000 other young Sudanese men, and a very different struggle begins. Based closely on true experiences, What Is the What is heartbreaking and arresting, filled with adventure, suspense, tragedy, and, finally, triumph.
Download or read book Attunement written by Alberto Perez-Gomez and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2016-02-26 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How architecture can move beyond the contemporary enthusiasms for the technically sustainable and the formally dazzling to enhance our human values and capacities. Architecture remains in crisis, its social relevance lost between the two poles of formal innovation and technical sustainability. In Attunement, Alberto Pérez-Gómez calls for an architecture that can enhance our human values and capacities, an architecture that is connected—attuned—to its location and its inhabitants. Architecture, Pérez-Gómez explains, operates as a communicative setting for societies; its beauty and its meaning lie in its connection to human health and self-understanding. Our physical places are of utmost importance for our well-being. Drawing on recent work in embodied cognition, Pérez-Gómez argues that the environment, including the built environment, matters not only as a material ecology but because it is nothing less than a constituent part of our consciousness. To be fully self-aware, we need an external environment replete with meanings and emotions. Pérez-Gómez views architecture through the lens of mood and atmosphere, linking these ideas to the key German concept of Stimmung—attunement—and its roots in Pythagorean harmony and Vitruvian temperance or proportion. He considers the primacy of place over space; the linguistic aspect of architecture—the voices of architecture and the voice of the architect; architecture as a multisensory (not pictorial) experience, with Piranesi, Ledoux, and Hejduk as examples of metaphorical modeling; and how Stimmung might be put to work today to realize the contemporary possibilities of attunement.
Download or read book Light After Darkness written by Lee Gatiss and published by Christian Focus. This book was released on 2019 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Protestant Reformers of the sixteenth century regained, retold, and relied on the gospel of grace -- and we can learn from their tragedies and triumphs, their dark deeds and noble heroics. The stories of Ulrich Zwingli, William Tyndale, Martin Luther, John Calvin and Thomas Cranmer remind us of the glorious truths which warmed the hearts and fired the souls of passionate and imperfect people, and how they tried to share the good news of Jesus Christ in their generation. Will it strengthen and inspire passionate and imperfect Christians today to emulate their clarity, their courage, and their compassion for the lost?
Download or read book My Stroke of Insight written by Jill Bolte Taylor and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2008-05-12 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Transformative...[Taylor's] experience...will shatter [your] own perception of the world."—ABC News The astonishing New York Times bestseller that chronicles how a brain scientist's own stroke led to enlightenment On December 10, 1996, Jill Bolte Taylor, a thirty-seven- year-old Harvard-trained brain scientist experienced a massive stroke in the left hemisphere of her brain. As she observed her mind deteriorate to the point that she could not walk, talk, read, write, or recall any of her life-all within four hours-Taylor alternated between the euphoria of the intuitive and kinesthetic right brain, in which she felt a sense of complete well-being and peace, and the logical, sequential left brain, which recognized she was having a stroke and enabled her to seek help before she was completely lost. It would take her eight years to fully recover. For Taylor, her stroke was a blessing and a revelation. It taught her that by "stepping to the right" of our left brains, we can uncover feelings of well-being that are often sidelined by "brain chatter." Reaching wide audiences through her talk at the Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED) conference and her appearance on Oprah's online Soul Series, Taylor provides a valuable recovery guide for those touched by brain injury and an inspiring testimony that inner peace is accessible to anyone.
Download or read book Worldwide Financial Reporting written by George J. Benston and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2006-04-13 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: International accounting standards tend to converge, as do auditing, enforcement and corporate governance, whereas trading of equity shares remains essentially national. The book provides a thorough analysis of what information investors really need, how financial accounting systems developed and their current requirements in major commercial countries, and examines current issues, particularly the benefits and costs a single or multiple accounting standards, the bases for accounting standards, and limitations to accounting disclosure in financial statements.
Download or read book Cost Effect written by Robert S. Kaplan and published by Harvard Business Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cost and Effect is written for the general manager, and explains activity-based costing systems. It focuses on creating integrated, knowledge-based systems that provide managers with meaningful information, not just data.
Download or read book Information Orientation written by Donald A. Marchand and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents the results of an international research project designed to evaluate how effectively people use information and IT to improve business performance. In particular it looks at three dimensions - information behavior and values; information management practices; and IT practices - and their relationship to business performance. The book combines a focus on business relevance with strong empirical research.
Download or read book Road of the Lost written by Nafiza Azad and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2023-10-17 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Croi is compelled by a summoning spell leave her home in the Wilde Forest and travel into the Otherworld, where the enchantment that made her into a brownie begins to break, revealing her true identity, her hidden magick, and her forgotten heritage.
Download or read book The Adventure of Relevance written by Martin Savransky and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-06-16 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At a time where the relevance of the social sciences is under threat, this innovative book offers a speculative experimentation on the philosophy and methodology of the social sciences to rethink what 'relevance' is, and to cultivate a new ethos of knowledge-making for an eventful world. Engaging a diverse a range of thinkers including Alfred North Whitehead, Gilles Deleuze and Isabelle Stengers, as well as the American pragmatists John Dewey and William James, Martin Savransky challenges longstanding assumptions in the social sciences and argues that relevance is an event that is part and parcel of the immanent and situated processes by which things come to matter. He develops new conceptual tools for cultivating an empiricist ethos of inquiry that is attuned to the question of how things come to matter– an ethics that turns social inquiry into a veritable adventure. The result is an original and rigorous book that infuses knowledge-practices in the social sciences with new sensibilities, creative possibilities, and novel habits of thinking, knowing, and feeling.