A comprehensive and cogent exploration of financial principles.
In this financial guide, an investment entrepreneur offers a framework for business wealth creation.
Volk began in banking and took three companies, two of which he co-founded, public. Correctly observing that “shareholder wealth creation is the single most important corporate financial performance metric,” he explores a model that helps entrepreneurs and business leaders learn how to produce that wealth. In what amounts to a polished financial textbook, the author provides historical context regarding monetary concepts as well as specifics for how to proceed, ultimately revealing a useful “Value Equation” that takes into account six key variables. Volk begins with the compelling tale of Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google, to illustrate the wealth creation possibilities of a business based on a winning idea. Volk employs contemporary business cases that dramatize how a strong model can overcome even the most stunning deficiencies. One captivating story, for example, is FUBU, a maker of branded clothing established in Daymond John’s home. Denied a bank loan 26 times, John and his mother used a house mortgage to fund the business. When his company had plenty of orders but was almost broke due to cash flow issues, John was finally able to secure financing, and 25 years later, he turned the operation into a $6 billion business. Compelling anecdotes such as FUBU’s add relevancy and liveliness to a book that otherwise concentrates on financial principles.
In pondering what makes a successful business model, Volk proposes that it basically involves “just Six Variables.” They are: “1. Sales 2. Business investment 3. Operating profit margin 4. Amount of interest costing proceeds (other people’s money) 5. Cost of other people’s money 6. Annual maintenance capital expense.” These variables are discussed in considerable detail in the remainder of the volume. With authority and clarity, the author walks readers through each of them, citing business cases as well as examples from his own experience and offering explanations in the lucid text. The variables are most often accompanied by financial formulas that are more engaging than one might imagine. For instance, “Mort’s Model,” which illustrates cost of capital versus cost of equity, was created by Mort Fleischer, Volk’s business partner; it humorously incorporates a Yiddish term that represents “Other People’s Money.” The author wisely converts the generalized formulas into specifics; he uses a restaurant case study throughout the book because, he says, this type of business model is relatively uncomplicated. The heart of the work is “The V-Formula,” the Value Equation developed by Volk in 1999. He deftly demonstrates the applicability and flexibility of this formula in numerous iterations, using the restaurant case study as well as the example of a real estate financing company he co-founded. The accompanying data tables make it easier to comprehend the formula in action. Volk also includes sound background material, providing a general discussion of how public companies function financially, differences in stock markets, and mergers and acquisitions, liberally referencing experts on these subjects. But this work is primarily an in-depth financial examination of business wealth creation.
A comprehensive and cogent exploration of financial principles.Pub Date: May 10, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-119-87564-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Wiley
Review Posted Online: June 19, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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