Teaches how to "keep score" in business by reading and interpreting company financial reports, including balance sheets and income statements, and how to use this information for lucrative investing.

"Every quality-conscious organization needs to measure critical data, but many businesses waste time tracking and reviewing non-essentials. This innovative book shows how to concentrate on the few key measures that indicate a firm's true performance. It focuses on the areas considered vital in the Baldrige Quality Award criteria, the premiere model for evaluating overall quality. Readers will learn to select and use the right metrics for measuring financial, operational, and quality efforts, as well as longer-term measures such as customer and employee satisfaction, supplier performance, product/service quality, and environmental compliance. This guide will help them: * evaluate their current approaches to measurement * select the right metrics * collect and report data more efficiently and usefully * use the information to promote teamwork and strategy"

In How to Keep Score in Business, Second Edition , long-time CEO Robert Follett shows you exactly how to "keep score" in business by reading and interpreting company financials. Step by step, Follett helps you capture crucial insights buried in balance sheets, income statements, and other key reports. Follett shows how to apply core tools for analyzing financial reports and investment opportunities, and demystifies key accounting terms every business decision-maker and investor needs to know. You'll learn how to uncover a company's true financial position through its balance sheet and income statements-and identify crucial information those documents may not be showing. Follett demonstrates how to use modern ROI tools to evaluate performance or analyze potential investments; how to track ongoing changes in a company's financial position; how to build cash flow budgets for more effective planning; and how to use common analysis ratios (without misusing them). Practical from start to finish, this fully updated book won't transform you into an accountant-but it will help you work more confidently with financial professionals, make smarter business decisions, and choose better investments.

Entrepreneurs believe nobody else understands what they are going through. They are hard-working individuals who feel like nobody gets it; but Shawn Burcham has been there. His experience in growing his company, Pro Food Systems, Inc., into a national success is the perfect primer for his debut book on how others can achieve the same kind of achievements for their own companies. Keeping Score with GRITT: Straight Talk Strategies for Success is for the CEO, the small-business owner, the manager, or the employee who feels stuck. Shawn's leadership lessons are geared toward those who know they want to be more efficient, have more fun, make more money, and have less stress--those that want to be more successful, yet can never seem to get ahead. Using Shawn's GRITT system, readers can transform those frustrations and challenges into positive growth and results. Praise for Keeping Score with GRITT "Shawn has captured the essence of today's entrepreneur His straightforward, detailed account of the development of PFSbrands illustrates each aspect of the leadership needed to successfully start, grow, and sustain a major business ..." --Gary Phillips Retired Chief Executive Officer, Associated Wholesale Grocers, Inc. "... Keeping Score with GRITT: Straight Talk Strategies for Success describes Shawn's leadership style perfectly ... I've always sought Shawn's advice on how to obtain success. It's great that he has finally written this book " --Brett Horn "Keeping Score with GRITT: Straight Talk Strategies for Success is a fun and no-nonsense approach to business and life. Shawn's straight talk about his hard-earned lessons and successes distill the daunting challenges faced by today's entrepreneurs, business owners, leaders, and employees down into simple, actionable items that everyone can relate to and implement ..." --Jair Drooger CT Assist

Baseball Hacks isn't your typical baseball book--it's a book about how to watch, research, and understand baseball. It's an instruction manual for the free baseball databases. It's a cookbook for baseball research. Every part of this book is designed to teach baseball fans how to do something. In short, it's a how-to book--one that will increase your enjoyment and knowledge of the game. So much of the way baseball is played today hinges upon interpreting statistical data. Players are acquired based on their performance in statistical categories that ownership deems most important. Managers make in-game decisions based not on instincts, but on probability - how a particular batter might fare against left-handedpitching, for instance. The goal of this unique book is to show fans all the baseball-related stuff that they can do for free (or close to free). Just as open source projects have made great software freely available, collaborative projects such as Retrosheet and Baseball DataBank have made great data freely available. You can use these data sources to research your favorite players, win your fantasy league, or appreciate the game of baseball even more than you do now. Baseball Hacks shows how easy it is to get data, process it, and use it to truly understand baseball. The book lists a number of sources for current and historical baseball data, and explains how to load it into a database for analysis. It then introduces several powerful statistical tools for understanding data and forecasting results. For the uninitiated baseball fan, author Joseph Adler walks readers through the core statistical categories for hitters (batting average, on-base percentage, etc.), pitchers (earned run average, strikeout-to-walk ratio, etc.), and fielders (putouts, errors, etc.). He then extrapolates upon these numbers to examine more advanced data groups like career averages, team stats, season-by-season comparisons, and more. Whether you're a mathematician, scientist, or season-ticket holder to your favorite team, Baseball Hacks is sure to have something for you. Advance praise for Baseball Hacks: "Baseball Hacks is the best book ever written for understanding and practicing baseball analytics. A must-read for baseball professionals and enthusiasts alike." -- Ari Kaplan, database consultant to the Montreal Expos, San Diego Padres, and Baltimore Orioles "The game was born in the 19th century, but the passion for its analysis continues to grow into the 21st. In Baseball Hacks, Joe Adler not only demonstrates thatthe latest data-mining technologies have useful application to the study of baseball statistics, he also teaches the reader how to do the analysis himself, arming the dedicated baseball fan with tools to take his understanding of the game to a higher level." -- Mark E. Johnson, Ph.D., Founder, SportMetrika, Inc. and Baseball Analyst for the 2004 St. Louis Cardinals