You don’t have to have an MBA to understand the basics of accounting and finance, although it helps. This short book is a primer that will give you and those in your organization some basic tools for making smarter business decisions. Like many of my senior team colleagues at the time, many people believe that finance is the responsibility of the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) and perhaps a few staff accountants. Over the years, I have learned that we all need to understand some of the principles of accounting and finance, as well as some best practices.

In our experience, most strategic leaders do not have formal training in accounting and finance. This is not their fault; it is just reality. The terminology and financial jargon tend to make it an intimidating subject to understand. Sometimes, people mistakenly believe that the accounting and finance field involves complicated math. We’ll let you in on a secret: If you can add, subtract, and divide, that is all you really need - welcome to the club! Understanding financial statements is sometimes compared to learning a foreign language, but it is really not that difficult. In this book, we take the mystery out of the numbers and the accounting jargon out of the language to equip you with the financial knowledge you need to be a strategic leader.