Enterprise-Value Books

This book demonstrates how difficult it is when a person does not fit into the "mold" of how some churches think a person should live their life. Through many adversities, the author pulled himself up with the help of God and by pulling on his bootstraps. Over and over again his life was shaken by decisions he or others made. I read this book very quickly and shared it with friends who have had
similiar lives and have realized that they cannot give up no matter how difficult things become.

This is an extremely detailed exposition of the need for and implications of a shift from what the authors call offering 'product-centric value' to 'person-centric value'. In plain English, this means moving from seeking to persuade customers that what you have is what they want, to seeking to really know how you can add value for customers by understanding how you can best contribute to their quality of life.

The authors argue - convincingly - that the key to profitable survival is to make this change successfully. The authors are successful in conveying the depth of change required for most companies to achieve genuine partnership of this kind.

The basic principle that the authors propose is simple. They work logically through the many changes that are needed to move from being a product- centric to a people-centric company.
They make the point that this change requires that the company learn a great deal about its customers and that customers supply this information willingly - something that smaller 'niche' companies are likely to find much easier to do than the global giants.

The authors also make a brief excursion into relationships between employer and employee, making related points about the importance of building intimacy, trust and loyalty.

We implemented a values-based approach to managing at my company several years ago. Now we are looking to renew and re-energize around our values. In this regard, Frederick Harmon's book Playing for Keeps has come in handy.

The only drawback is that it came out in 1996 and is now dated in some respects. So much has happened in the past year, with 9-11 and the collapse of Enron, Worldcom, Arthur Andersen and others. Yet the topic is still very timely and he offers a lot of good ideas.

If only there were a new edition with material to catch up on the new landscape.

By the way, I ordered this book "used" through National Book Exchange and it arrived promptly and in good condition! Thanks NBE!

I wish Amazon.com permitted me to give this book 4.5 stars...

If you're looking for all the answers, a complete IT checklist, or the meaning of life, keep looking. Having said that, this book is a 'thought trigger' that will generate a lot of ideas and stimulate the reader to question their prejudices about IT and costs. I like to think of myself as an "outside the box" thinker, and this book stimulated that even more.

I especially like the way this book presents cost of ownership from a more holistic view than the traditional IT view, presenting a way of understanding that impact on the business should be factored into the equation, all the while applying "Occam's Raxor".

I am hoping Drew's "home boss" (as he refers to in the book) keeps him writing and on track so that he will write his next book soon. I look forward to it.

It is worth the money to get this one and read before you start the buying process. However, it does not cover much great details on small business less than $4M.

I bought 2 books on this subject and may have returned the other book had I read this one first. It does not inspire much confidence for the first time, small-fry businesss buyer. The biggest disappointment is that the book claims to cater to businesses between 2 and 50 million dollars in annual sales. In reality, most examples (of the few provided) are at the top end of that scale which is out of my range. The book also spends an inordinate amount of time discussing the benefits of using business intermediaries. Why? I'll give you one guess what the author does for a living when he is not writing books. The best thing that I took from the book were the questions to ask and the financials to analyze during negotiations that I would not have thought of on my own. This information is quite helpful but it is spread across 300 pages of text and there is no summary list of these key points at the end as there are in other texts. If you buy this book it should be with the understanding that it will not be the only book you will need.

I found the contents of this book to be very generic and almost superficial. The comments were at times so generic, they were meaningless. If you are a 7th grader "dreaming" of buying a business some day, maybe this book is good enough. If you are serious about buying a business, and want concrete advice, examples and guidance, than look elsewhere. I found BUYOUT, by Rick Rikertsen much more informative; while it dealt with somewhat larger business transactions than most would be involved in, the advice and examples apply to buying any size business. Spend the little extra and get BUYOUT.

As a would be buyer i bought this book. Good, but unfortunately in desparate need of an update. Much has moved on including the internet as a medium for business sales, the size of businesses adopting his strategy, & the role of business brokers acting on the "buy side".

There arent many more recent books however, & this book is a very useful introduction if you are in the market for a larger sized business.

I work as a business intermediary assisting clients in both selling and buying their business. I always recommend that first-time business buyers purchase and read this book.

This book is an exercise in fuzzy thinking. Kennedy is totally confused about what shareholder value is. He is confusing shareholders' legitimate desire to get a meaningful return on their capital (enough to compensate for the risk they assumed) with management's unscrupulous attempts to increase reported EPS over the short term. Whatever contributes to the former creates shareholder value. Whatever contributes to the later, doesn't necessary do so. The puruit of shareholder value has nothing to do with unscrupulous management. But that's not all.
He doesn't understand the mechanics of a modern capitalist economy nor does he understand the interactions among different groups in society and the fundamental principals of business valuation and corporate finance.
I should also mention his constant misinterpretation of facts: Kennedy is idealizing the 19th century entrepreneurs as men who started their businesses only for the sake of the common good. Wealth, according to him, was only a byproduct of their charitable attempts to improve society. I doubt if that was true. Being open about one's own greed was not an acceptable social behavior in 19th century. Subsequently, men of wealth tried to come up with noble excuses for their profit seeking.
Kennedy argues that maximizing shareholder value ignores employees, customers, suppliers, communities and the government. If that was true then everything we know about modern Economics must be wrong!
Let's start with employees. Do they really suffer from shareholders' attempts to maximize their own profit? If shareholders didn't care about profit, they wouldn't start the business to begin with and without the business, employees would have nowhere to work. Conclusion: profit seeking (maximizing shareholder value) creates value for workers. The alternative would be a centralized communist economy where government runs all businesses. Business ventures are not evaluated by the profits they could generate but by the amount of people they would employ (more is better).
What about governments? The purpose of government is to serve the people. Government has no other purpose. Therefore we can not say that corporate behavior harms government unless that behavior harms Society. Harm done to a government by a corporation that doesn't harm Society is no harm at all. An example would be any legal attempt to minimize taxes. It harms government because it decreases the amount of funds available to expand bureaucracy but it benefits Society because businesses can allocate capital more efficiently than governments.
What about suppliers? Are they being harmed by the "shareholder value menace"? Suppliers are also businesses with shareholders of their own. Each and every company is both a buyer and a supplier. If a company is being squeezed by its customers, it can always attempt to do the same to its suppliers.
It is true that many communities, many local and national governments, and many workers end up abused by businesses (big and small). It is also true that many businesses are being endlessly abused by militant labor unions and governments. It doesn't follow that business owners should be prevented from seeking lawful ways to increase their wealth.
Kennedy even goes as far as to argue that increasing shareholder value harms shareholders. Here logic fails him completely. The discussion of GE is an illustrative example. Although Kennedy admits that GE's cost cutting initiatives increased value for current shareholders, he claims that the inflated stock price at the end of 1999 will prevent those who buy today (1999) to realize similar gains. True. So what? No one is being forced to buy overpriced common stock. People suffer their own ignorance about corporate valuations. Do we need to hold CEOs responsible for holding their stock prices low so that anyone, who buys a share of common stock at any time, can have a decent return?
Wall Street does not hold CEOs responsible for the stock price of their companies (low or high). It does hold them responsible for the operating results. Stock prices take care of themselves.
His recommendations for change are even sillier then his criticisms. He suggests to replace the pursuit for shareholder value with...building shareholder wealth!!! If I were a Boston snob I could probably see the difference but I am not. It sounds all the same to me. Arguing about the usage of words and terms (among vs. between; many vs. a lot; shareholder value vs. shareholder wealth; etc.) is intellectual no more challenging then collecting stamps or baseball cards. If the Boston snobs think otherwise then I would let them have it their way.

Kennedy bases his assumptions on Benjamin Graham's and David Dodd's classic, SECURITY ANALYSIS, and argues that as he was writing his book, the stock indexes were as crazed as the tulip craze of the 1630s when tulip bulb values were run to more than $20,000. (See Mackay's EXTRAORDINARY DELUSIONS for an excellent early recounting of the tulip and other crazes.) Kennedy's book looks not just at the Internet stock run-up but also the P/E values of other companies, such as GE, which he argues are also over-valued based on their earnings. His picture painted is a bleak one and his question of whether the leaders of the dot-com movement such as amazon.com will ever have enough margins to boast any profits are especially prescient given the dot-com downturn that followed the publication of his book. (See Geoffrey Moore's LIVING ON THE FAULT LINE for an opposing view of shareholder value.)

In The End Of Shareholder Value: Corporations At The Crossroads, Allan Kennedy persuasively maintains that managing businesses solely to get the stock price higher is bad for workers, customers, suppliers, and ultimately bad business for the stock holders as well. While for the few who hold the stock, and the fewer still who manage the company and then cash out when the stock price is high, the style of managing for stock price benefits, will invariably result in an erosion of company value with employees and shareholder being adversely affected under a short-term management practice and perspective. The End Of Shareholder Value is "must" reading for anyone seeking to build a successful stock portfolio through buying shares in any corporation regardless of size, past performance, or managerial reputation.

I'm not an economist and I don't have an MBA, but for the most part, I found this book to be easily understood and informative. I especially enjoyed the study of the three phases of the evolution of large companies, from family-derived to the greed merchants of the 1990's. Because I "cheated" and read the last couple of chapters first, I was concerned that Mr. Kennedy appeared to have a somewhat anti-business view of how to correct things (power to the people and all that). But I have to admit that his remedies do make a great deal of sense, and that it will take some real revolutionary changes to get us out of this mess we're in.

I must say that, for the most part, big corporations (and I've worked with quite a few, as a customer, employee and supplier) do take advantage of the "other" stakeholders (employees, suppliers and customers!) and that, often, senior management is much more concerned with feathering their own personal nest than in doing the job that they're paid a lot of money to do. That's pretty frightening, because it's in the hands of these managers that the future of corporate America rests. I just hope that somehow we can get them to listen.

I'd sure like to buy about fifty copies of this book and send it to some senior managers I know (anonomously, of course!)

In The End Of Shareholder Value, Allan Kennedy persuasively maintains that managing businesses solely to get the stock price higher is bad for workers, customers, suppliers, and ultimately bad business for the stock holders as well. While for the few who hold the stock, and the fewer still who manage the company and then cash out when the stock price is high, the style of managing for stock price benefits, will invariably result in an erosion of company value with employees and shareholder being adversely affected under a short-term management practice and perspective. The End Of Shareholder Value is "must" reading for anyone seeking to build a successful stock portfolio through buying shares in any corporation regardless of size, past performance, or managerial reputation.

I believe some of the option logic to be flawed. But as a basis for how to create dollar values for players its the only solid full explanation source I know of.

For those of you that have wrestled with the issue of dollar values, position scarcity and valuing a player's future value in preparation for your rotisserie draft, this book is for you. McGee outlines a step-by-step method to set up his insightful valuation method in a spreadsheet. It really makes sense and it works too! I have been using the McGee method for the past two seasons and it has noticeably improved my draft performance. With all the information readily available to fellow owners it is much more difficult to find an edge at draft day. My spreadsheet gives me that edge.

It took me an hour or two to set up the spreadsheet the first year, but since then, I just plug and play.

If you have ever read up on the physics behind the principles of combustion, force, and friction to be able to fix your car's motor, then this book is for you. If, however, you trust that the people publishing roto projections and dollar amounts can't be too far apart on their methodology, then take a decent average of the amounts given in various magazine publications and leave this one on the shelf. This book has a high level of research that you'll have to do to make use of it's contents, and you'll need a computer spreadsheet for the data entry and calculations required, but if you've got the time (and no wife...) it's a winner.

The book is great for beginners and for experienced roto guys. McGee lays out a simple way to value players as well as a more complicated option theory approach. The only drawback I see is that the baselines he uses are a little dated (1996) because of the home run explosion and expansion. Overall, a great book.

I bought this book to give myself a thorough education on derivatives. And, I got it. It is very readable, yet it covers all the topics in adequate technical detail, so you can hold your own in the company of derivatives traders and the like. I often refer to this book, to refresh my memory on the different structure of option models, or how to value an interest rate swap. This is the sort of stuff you will not remember unless you use these concepts on a weekly basis. But, with this book, it does not matter, it is easy to refresh your knowledge.

I also use this book as part of the Masters course in Sydney and I cannot remember the last time I picked it up to read as I have better things to do with my time than try and work through the glaring errors in formulae, graphs and general commentary. The presentation is verbose and circumlocutory and to add to the frustration often wrong. I feel obliged to warn potential buyers not to make the same mistake that I have. Gallitz on Financial Engineering is a far more interesting and accurate text and for the rigours of applied financial maths Mastering financial calculations teaches you more in 200 pages than Smithson could in a lifetime of trying to improve on this first edition. If anyone would like my copy of Smithson I'm happy to give it away for fear further sales may encourage McGraw Hill to continue publishing the book.

The book is written in a complex way. For example, a simple future contract, was explained in long and complex way. It is not able to show the point directly. Anyway, it is not a bad point. It has some quite excellent practical example. It is the most valuable parts of the book.

I had to buy this book as it was the text book for one of the subjects that I am studying.

Dated: e.g. Many examples that deal with European currencies that were replaced by the Euro.

Errors: In the illustrations, there are some calculations that take incorrect parameters to derive the results (obviously yielding wrong results). This is misleading and time consuming.

Verbosity: The book explains in twenty pages something that can be explained in five.

No good.

For those of you who may not be aware, Charles Smithson is the "father" of the building-block approach to making derivatives understandable, showing a linked, family-tree approach, rather than each explaining each one separately with no clear connections. He is both a top practitioner with many years of senior-level experience, as well as an academic for more theoretical work.

I am amazed at some of the negative reviews. I can only think that is because there aren't enough partial differential equations and complex pricing/hedging models (there really aren't any, but that doesn't make this a simplistic book). I also teach finance at the Masters level, as well as teaching practical applications of derivatives to various bank clients.

In my oppinion, this is the single best book on derivatives for non-specialists that I have seen (and I have seen most of the derivatives books around). Even people on the trading floor would benefit from the clear forest-for-the-trees approach. This is not an easy book, though it doesn't require any more than school algebra (with the exeption of one chapter on option pricing, contributed by Cliff Smith and, even there, the calculus could be skipped over lightly). This book will give the reader a very good understanding of the most important aspects of derivatives and their applications. This is something that is often woefully lacking in banks, where the focus is on the minutiae of quantitative models, treated almost as an exercise in math, without a very clear understanding of the finance that the math is there to model. The treatment is broad and balanced, from pure product knowledge to issuer applications to investor applications and to banks managing their own market risk. This breadth is very rare in derivatives books.

My only criticisms are that there are some mistakes (as in most technical books that are not textbooks, benefiting from the review of many students, if you look hard enough for them) and there is insufficient emphasis now on credit derivatives and the management of credit risk, though I feel sure Charles Smithson will address that in the next edition - he has written a separate book "Credit Portfolio Management."

Perhaps someone should take up the offer of a free copy from a previous reviewer - a real "free lunch." I highly recommend this book to relative beginners, as well as to experienced practitioners who want more breadth.

Arrival time is good, just the content of the book is not very useful for me.

Professor Helfert's graphic presentations have caused concepts to gel that were amorphous in my mind for years despite an investment banking background. I would recommend this book as a first book to anyone interested in quickly obtaining a bird's eye view of the business entity from a "business systems" approach. Helfert's position is that of an engineer or a scientist: Every business has a structure that can be indentified, analyzed, and then manipulated to increase shareholder value.

Every new issue refers back to the Investment, Operations, Financing structure Helfert lucidly charts out in the introductory chapter. If this is old hat to you, and you've read Corp. Fin. by Brealy & Meyers (sp?), maybe you don't need this book. All others: BUY IT!!!

I read russian translation of this book. There are only 8000 examples in russian and this book became a deficit in 1996 (when it was published in Russia). Now I want to read the English (original) version of this wonderful book. The most impressions are from the detailed (comprehensive) theory with detailed exercises and notes.

Let say my Great Thanks to author for his excellent book.

With regards, Sergey Krupin

This may be a great book if you already know everything about finance. I've taken MBA level Finance courses, and quite honestly, I found this book difficult to understand. The author casually mentions financial concepts without defining them and expect you to understand complex financial theories he hasn't covered.

I tried to do the questions at the end of each chapter, and while there is an answer guide, it does nothing to explain how the answer was derived. How you get the answer is the important part, but this text won't give you any assistance. Plus, some of the answers were just plain wrong (I checked with several experts).

There are better texts out there - your time is better spent elsewhere.

If you read a financial text w/o checking the numbers, you wouldn't find the mistakes. This book has had too many, because I am checking the numbers. I had to cross reference this book with a Financial Accounting text b/c I kept thinking I was incorrect.

All I have to say is take a look at pages 100, 101, 102 for great examples of the many mistakes. I am not happy.

By the way, I picked up this book from a friend in order to gauge whether I would buy the new version. Guess what I am not going to buy?

i was hoping for a book that would provide me with evidence and examples from the bible that would help me to decide for myself where i stood on christianity and drinking, but instead i felt that this book was too biased and provided the opinions of the author without supporting them with biblical evidence or making me believe that the author was interpreting what God intended for us. I was very disappointed by this purchase.

This book tells the truth. This book has provided all the information I will ever need to back up my statements that drinking is wrong. Until I read this book I was unable to combat some of the silly arguments I hear about the Bible and drinking. This book clearly shows the reasons a Christian shouldn't drink. It is clear that drinking is not an ambiguous issue in the Bible. Fisher does a great job presenting the facts. Very well done.

Finally, a preacher who isn't afraid of an off-limit subject in today's Church! If you want to keep believing in family traditions and "I think the Bible says" comments, then don't open this book. Truth is a powerful thing, and it won't be ignored. If you are a Christian and really want to know what God has to say about drinking, this book is a "must read." Fisher's honest and no-punches-pulled look at Christians and drinking will change the Church as we know it today, if we want to embrace the truth.

I found the book to not only be poorly researched but also poorly written.The book takes a very legalistic view of Christians that believe it is okay to drink a glass of wine or drink a beer. The Bible has as much to say about drunkeness as it does about gluttony but it is quite a leap to think that God views drinking a glass of wine the same as He does getting drunk. I have to side with John MacArthur when he says there will be more people in hell because of legalism than alcoholism and a Christian needs to decide what they will do with the issue of drinking and how it will impact their witness for Christ. P.S. For the young man that killed Crystal in that tragic accident...I am thankful you came to Christ.

Fisher hits the nail on the head with this one. He gives a detailed fact based informative account of the devastating effects of alcohol. He masterfully uses scriptures, scientific facts, and common sense to outline how the church has dropped the ball on this important subject. This is a great read for Christians struggling with understanding what the Bible says about drinking alcohol. Most Christian writers avoid controversial issues but Dan Fisher has guts to deal with the truth.