As a firm of accountants, at K&H we are always looking out for ways to help our clients understand better what it is that we do for them. We are (quite naturally) convinced that our work is of great value, but sometimes when you don’t fully understand something, it is hard to see the value.

Balance sheets are a good example of this. Most business owners understand their profit and loss account, but few really know why their balance sheet is probably the most important part of their accounts. It is also the hardest thing to get right – it has to balance!

The book also reminded me to be on guard about using jargon, and that ‘jargon’ is not just obscure words and acronyms: words and symbols which we commonly use in the office and are not always understood (in the same way at least) by non-accountants, for example:
- ‘Net’ and ‘gross’
-  numbers in (brackets), red type, or with a dash in front are usually negative
-  ‘accruals’
-  ‘cash’ often means not on credit, rather than notes and coins
-  and of course the old chestnut of ‘debit’ and ‘credit’

If you’re interested in other book reviews that I have done, please have a look at my linkedIn page and follow my reading list there.

I’m planning to run a short informal session to explain balance sheets and cover some of the jargon.  Please let me know if you’d be interested in coming along.

Just as with Wikipedia, the value of having so many people contribute is the vast range of experiences and ideas that you can tap into, including:

• Cyclists have 40% less risk of dying from diabetes, certain cancers etc. (life insurance companies take note)
• Why women cyclists are more likely to be killed than men (although cycling is actually safer than walking and gardening)
• Tips on how to avoid having your bike nicked (e.g. paint it a horrible colour) and tactics used by bike thieves, from an ex-thief
• The legal position of drunk cyclists
• The legal status of cycle lanes
• The great Red Light Debate
• The ’shower in a bottle’
• Avoiding punctures, and imaginative repair ideas
• The world’s worst cycle lanes (www.gu.com/p/2cxn5)

Also (inevitably) lots of slagging off of the enemy (road users with four or more wheels).  One of the more creative suggestions in the book is that cycling should be made a religion, so that abusing cyclists becomes illegal!

The blog/comment format makes it a very easy book to pick up and put down.

Every cyclist, road users especially, should read it.

Attention all cyclists - let’s try to get our own cycling top tips together. Please post a comment below with your no. 1 tip.

The amazing thing is that this is true for even the richest people – i.e. the wellbeing of the (very) rich in unequal societies is less than that of the rich (but not as rich) in more equal countries.

‘Wellbeing’ covers things like: mental illness, obesity, teenage pregnancy, violence, interpersonal trust, self-esteem, life expectancy, literacy and much more.

The reasons are complex but rooted in the deep but conflicting human needs for status and social integration. We measure our self-worth against other people and so want to do better than them. This is stoked up by marketing and media that are designed to set aspirations artificially high, and make us feel inadequate unless we have the latest material goods.

The book talks about how greater equality can be achieved. In countries such as Sweden it is mainly by using fiscal policy (e.g. taxes) whereas in Japan incomes and wealth are more evenly shared to start with.

At K&H we are heavily involved with the Employee Ownership Association and it is interesting that the book focuses on this model as a way to achieve a fairer sharing of wealth. Technology is also likely to provide a levelling off of how resources are shared, and these are very positive signs for the future.

The prizes for more equality are well worth aspiring to. For example in the UK we would have 75% fewer murders and seven weeks more holiday every year if we could get to the position of the more equal societies.

Do you agree with this book, and do you think it should influence our government’s fiscal policy?

To see all the books I have read and recommended over the last few years, see my reading list on my LinkedIn pages.

Michael Gerber’s The E-Myth Revisited should be required reading for anyone thinking about starting a business and for anyone already in business. The book explains why most small businesses don’t work, the people in them do. His view is that your business is there to serve your life not the other way around. 99% of people will see themselves in the book and start to understand the importance of working ON the business not IN it. You don’t need a business degree to understand or follow its suggestions; Gerber takes time to explain buzzwords and complex theories. Written in a clear and well-paced manner. This book has the power to enhance and save your life!

Email Bernadette Brownlie for your free copy.

I don’t usually do book reviews in the conventional sense. I prefer to take the ideas from my recent learning and experiences and weave them into my own thoughts and blog postings. (Is that what some people call plagiarism?)

I am making an exception for this book because we are offering a limited number of free copies to readers of this page (see the end of this posting to see how), and I would not expect anyone to waste their valuable time on a book (free or not) without knowing a bit about it.

What’s in it?
The book contains 176 key messages, with empty boxed-off spaces in the body of the text for the reader to write in their actions. These messages are in categories such as:

• Tough decisions
• Get selling
• Back to basics
• Opportunities
• Invest

I think that the main value of the book is in the last two of these sections. There really are enormous opportunities for anyone prepared to take their blinkers off and take advantage of, for example, the much lower barriers to entry in existing markets that exist in recessionary times.

It was first written in 2008 and then revised and reprinted (twice) in 2009, so its topical credentials are good.

The bits I liked
Whenever I read books I highlight the ‘good bits’.  Here are the things that I highlighted:

1. Recession exposes poor working practices
2. Now more than ever, we need to be brilliant at the basics
3. The way out of recession is innovation
4. Get out of the spiral of price cutting now
5. Use students to get work done cheaply and well
6. Know the facts - measure and manage all the KPIs (Key Performance Indicators)
7. Use adversity to get your team to act like a team
8. Recruit for attitude now more than ever
9. Only sell to FANs (those with Funds, Authority and a Need)
10. Do ‘real marketing’ – targeting, segmenting, adding value at minimal cost etc
11. Communicate simply and effectively. The phone is better and quicker than writing, even if you have to leave a voicemail.

Conclusion
The book is subtitled ‘A blueprint for business survival’. Personally, I would have chosen something a bit more direct,  e.g.  ’Everything you should have been doing in your business anyway, and which the downturn will not force you to do’.

I think that if you are just setting out on your business development journey, or if you are already on the way but risk being blown off course by all the negativity around at present, this book is a great way to (re)focus on the right path.

Get a free copy
If you are a client of Kirkpatrick & Hopes and you would like a free copy, please contact Bernadette Brownlie or any of your contacts at the office.

We also have 10 copies that we are offering free of charge to non-clients on a first come, first served basis.  Please email mail@kandh.co.uk asap if you’d like one.

Once you have read it, please post a comment here to tell us your views.

Raving Fans! is about the need to turn your customers into fanatics who will rave about your business. The book is written in the parable style of Ken Blanchard and follows a newly appointed manager. What the manager learns is that there are three steps to creating a “Raving Fan” culture within a business:

Step 1 – Decide what you want. You do this by creating vision of perfection centred on the customer.

Step 2 – Discover what the customer wants. It is crucial you have the flexibility to adapt your own vision if necessary to fill the gaps and meet the needs of the customer. But you also need to accept that sometimes the customer wants something you can’t give them, something that falls outside the limits of your vision. Be prepared to let them buy these things elsewhere.

Step 3 – Deliver the customer’s vision, plus one percent. There are two elements to this. First, you have to deliver, consistently, all the time. Second, you need to promise 100% but deliver 101%.

The key messages that Kirkpatrick & Hopes are using to help us are:

• Consistency really is crucial and the only way you can guarantee consistency is by having great systems. System Builder software is helping us and can help you
• Beware of how dogmatic you are in applying systems. They are guidelines, not rules. Use systems to guarantee delivering to customers the minimum standard of service consistently; use the ‘Raving Fan’ mindset in your team to deliver even more than that (the extra one percent).
• Don’t limit your ‘Raving Fan’ ambitions to customers. You should look at everyone who comes into contact with your business as a potential ‘Raving Fan’, including your own team.
• Complaints are a golden opportunity to find out what the customer wants and to create a new ‘Raving Fan’.

Raving Fans is a great book, you can read it in a couple of hours. It has many examples of how different businesses have created Raving Fans. I am sure these will inspire lots of ideas about how you can do the same in your business.

Anyone who has visited K&H’s offices in the last few months may have noticed a large (10′ by 4′) painting on the wall of one of our meeting rooms. The painting shows a landscape on which there is a road. The road represents a time line covering the modern era at K&H, from about 1995, and goes through to the present and into the future. At various points on the road are different buses – each representing K&H at that particular point in time: a run-down, worn-out bus struggling uphill in 1995 and a super hi-tech multi-decker going into the future. The purpose of the mural is to provide a powerful, metaphorical focal point for the changes that K&H has been through and is still going through. The future bus represents the Vision that makes the discomfort of the present worth going through. Creating and communicating a Vision for the future are essential components of any effective business strategy.

The inspiration for the mural was partly the latest Harry Potter film (Prisoner of Azkaban) and but mainly the “First Who…. Then What” chapter of Jim Collins’ book, Good to Great.

Good to Great is the result of a 5-year research project by 21 people from about 1996 onwards which looked at 1,435 companies. The objective was to find out why some of those companies went from being merely good to being great – outperforming the competition by 4 to 6 times.

Crucially, however, they only looked at companies that had already been around for at least 15 years before making the leap, and that had sustained that greatness for at least 15 years afterwards.

The result was that only 11 companies met the criteria set. Those 11 companies showed some significant similarities in the causes of their greatness, and the book examines these detail. The characteristics that were found to be common were:

• Level 5 leadership – the people who led the company through the transition from good to great were not the stereotypical, larger-than-life charismatic bosses that you might expect. Instead they were quiet and humble but very determined and focused individuals
• First who …then what – Here’s where the bus comes in: getting the right people “on the bus” was done before formulating the business strategy
• Confront the brutal facts (yet never lose faith) - tough decisions have to be made and acted upon. Don’t compromise
• The hedgehog concept - focus on the one thing that you can be the best in the world at and which you are passionate about and can make you money
• Culture of discipline – If all your people are committed to your vision and consistent in their commitment, you don’t need hierarchy, bureaucracy or excessive controls
• Technology accelerators – Technology does not drive success, but the good to great company uses carefully selected technologies to facilitate it
• The flywheel and the doom loop – The good to great transition does not happen overnight, and no single act or event is decisive. Instead it is like trying to get a huge steel flywheel turning: it will hardly move at all to start with no matter how hard you push. But once it does start moving, it has massive momentum

Good to Great is one of the most powerful business books you will ever read. It is one of the few business books that is based on solid evidence and experience, no just ideas.

His recommendation is that you read with a highlighter to hand, to mark the ideas that seem currently most relevant to your needs. I feel sure this collection of old, new and wacky ideas will have something for everyone to mark.

There are some gems in the book. For example, under ‘Keep in touch with your customers’ (idea 218), one suggestion is to lend them something. I can see how that would work – though maybe borrowing something might be even more effective.

Another interesting revelation comes in idea 211 – the power of words. Apparently two words were sold to a shampoo manufacturer in 1941 for £100,000. What the two words were you will have to buy the book to discover.

Review by Jim Ewan

Habits, 4, 5 and 6 follow on. When you are truly independent you have the foundation for effective interdependence. You have the character base to start working on ‘public’ victories of teamwork, cooperation and communications. Habit 7 is the habit of renewal – it circles all the other habits.

A profound read and something that doesn’t promise overnight relief but a deep understanding of life and the role you play.

Starting from the assumption that people are every company’s most important resource, this book sets out three simple steps to getting the best from them and making every company run more efficiently.