Malea Fashion District: How Successful Managers Use Financial Information to Grow Organizations, 2 Edition

This book is a black and wide edition of the original book. It is written for entrepreneurs starting organizations that will change the world, for managers who want to become more effective, and for students learning about management. A crucial aspect of management is the tools available to assess the economics of organizations. These tools are the purpose of this book. To be effective, you need to understand the numbers. Once you are comfortable with them, then you can build on the insights that will make your organization unique. Too many good ideas to create value for society fail because the people at the helm could not interpret the numbers. You don’t have to be an expert, but you need to feel comfortable with the basics. Relying on finance and accounting guys is good, they will give you more depth; but blindly relying on them is risky. They do not have the whole picture or your vision. So, they cannot interpret the numbers within the right context. The best way to work with these numbers’ people is to have a solid base to ask the right questions and understand the answers. When we wrote the story of Malea, we did so because we could not find a book that did what we wanted our students to know. Books that explain tools to run the economic side of organizations are very similar. They focus on the technical aspects. Some of them give the basic techniques, others go more in depth, and still others go into excruciating detail. But all of them teach the math. So if you want to know the details, you have plenty of options! Because of the number focus, they are boring. By the second chapter you are bored. You keep on reading because you believe that the ideas are important, but their relevance fades in the detail of the technique. What these books are missing is the intuition. They are missing answering questions such as why is a technique important, what is it telling me, when should I use it? The story of Malea is about intuition and relevance. It tells you why tools to understand the economic side of organization are relevant and what the intuition is for using them. It presents the various tools within the context of the birth and growth of Malea’s organization. Malea and her team use these tools because they have a question that needs an answer. The story makes the reading more enjoyable and easier to capture and retain the reasons why these tools are needed and how they work. In this book you will learn about the economic side of organizations. You will learn the basic techniques, but more importantly you will learn why they are relevant and when to use them. If you want to get more detail, there are dozens of books that will give you as much depth as you can take. But Malea Fashion District will teach you when and why to use these tools. It will do it through a story engaging you much more than a technical book.