A thoroughly informative—and surprisingly gripping—manual for cleareyed money management.
A comprehensive overview of all aspects of finance and cash management in business.
Kingma, a financial expert, acknowledges the long shadow cast by the Covid-19 pandemic, which not only shut down many of the world’s economies but also highlighted how elongated and interconnected the global supply chain has become. Kingma acknowledges that businesses deal with many complicated factors, like supply-chain issues, product design and advertising, market competition, interest rates, and so on, but from his experience and research, he derives a very simple truth: “It takes cash to address market shocks.” This simple truth has a vast and complicated network of realities underpinning it, which the author explores by means of an ongoing fictional device: an electrical equipment company called Owens Electrical, run by a man named Bob. Owens does mostly business-to-business commerce, and since Bob rose through the company’s ranks to become its CEO, his perspective gives Kingma the perfect vehicle to explain the intricacies of cash management in a successful company that does all of that managing in-house. The author goes over every aspect of order-to-cash (OTC) mechanics: gaining customers, taking their orders, invoicing and billing them, and receiving their cash in the bank. Along the way, Kingma dispenses a great deal of technical advice on all levels of finance, usually revolving around "days sales outstanding," or the number of days on average required to collect money from a particular customer.
The author’s experience is obvious on every page. His ability to get to the heart of the many complicated subjects he raises is exemplary, as is his skill at dissecting those subjects in ways that will be immediately accessible to non-specialists (up to a point, anyway; the book clearly targets those in the business/finance world). Document, document, document, he advises: “Be very clear in how you manage credit and risk so that any deviation can be seen and approved in the proper chain of command.” He reminds readers who may be overly inclined to delegate and compartmentalize responsibilities that, much like those over-stressed supply chains, everything is connected. Kingma is an invaluable guide to his subject, but the biggest and most pleasing surprise of his book is the fact that he’s also a decent writer of fiction. His hypothetical company of Owens Electrical convincingly grows and becomes more complicated as it faces each new issue he wants to illustrate. At times, his characters sound like business seminar transcripts instead of people: “We had to challenge our assumptions regarding talent and whom we needed in key roles,” says one android to another. “We modified our metrics and incentives and transformed operations reviews.” But most of the time, readers will find themselves at least as involved with the narrative as with the concepts. They’ll cheer on Makayla, a surgeon raised by an immigrant mother in rural Missouri; they’ll appreciate the fact that visionary Caesar likes to have new hires around him, to guard against the complacent thinking of the old guard; and they’ll be just as surprised as Annette’s co-workers when the steely, no-nonsense woman unexpectedly cracks a joke. Readers will come for the financial know-how, but some of them may very well stay in order to root for a company that isn’t even real.
A thoroughly informative—and surprisingly gripping—manual for cleareyed money management.Pub Date: May 7, 2024
ISBN: 9781119983354
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Wiley
Review Posted Online: July 25, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2024
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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