Name: How Finance Works
ISBN: 9781633696709

How Finance Works

If you're not a numbers person, then balance sheets and financial jargon can be intimidating and easy to ignore. But if you want to advance in your career, it's crucial that you are able to make smart financial decisions and develop the confidence to clearly communicate those decisions to others. In How Finance Works, Mihir Desai--a professor at Harvard Business School and author of the widely praised book The Wisdom of Finance--guides you into the complex but endlessly fascinating world of finance and demystifies it in the process. Through entertaining stories, interactive exercises, full-color visuals, and a conversational style that belies the topic, Desai tackles a broad range of subjects that will give you the skills and knowledge you need to finally understand how finance works. These include: The ins and outs of balance sheets, and how different financial levers can affect a company's performance How companies fund their operations and investments in different ways Why finance is concerned with cash flow versus profits How value is created, measured, and maximized The importance of capital markets in helping companies grow Whether you're a student or manager, an aspiring CFO or entrepreneur, How Finance Works is the colorful and interactive guide you need to help you start thinking more deeply about the numbers.

What Hacker News says

lansteinMar 2023

Advice to Founders and CEOs

- Dear Founder (Maynard Webb) - The Hard Things About Hard Things (Ben Horowitz) - Straight Talk for Startups (Randy Komisar and Jantoon Reigersman) - The Founders’ Dilemmas (Noam Wasserman) - The Entrepreneur’s Daily Nietzsche (Brad Feld and Dave Jilk) - Build (Tony Fadell) - Zero to IPO (Frederic Kerrest) - The Great CEO Within (Matt Mochary)

Finance

- Wharton's Introduction to Financial Accounting course: [https://www.coursera.org/learn/wharton-accounting](https://w... - How Finance Works: The HBR Guide to Thinking Smart About the Numbers (Mihir Desai) - Financial Intelligence for Entrepreneurs: What You Really Need to Know About the Numbers (Karen Berman and Joe Knight)

Open-Book Company (Employee Ownership, Financial Literacy, Goal-setting)

- The Great Game of Business (Jack Stack and Bo Burlingham)

Legal

- Acceleration (Ryan Roberts) - The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Law and Strategy (Constance Bagley and Craig Dauchy)

Company Strategy and Direction (post-product/market fit)

- Crossing the Chasm (Geoff Moore) - Zone to Win (Geoff Moore) - Only the Paranoid Survive (Andy Grove) - Blitzscaling (Reid Hoffman and Chris Yeh) - The Innovator's Dilemma (Clayton Christensen) - Good to Great (Jim Collins) - Playing to Win (A.G. Lafley and Roger Martin) - Tape Sucks (Frank Slootman) - Strategy vol. 1&2 (Harvard Business Review)

Pricing

- Monetizing Innovation (Georg Tacke and Madhavan Ramanujan) - Confessions of the Pricing Man (Hermann Simon)

Startup Phase

- The Lean Startup (Eric Ries) - The Four Steps to the Epiphany (Steve Blank) - Zero to One (Peter Thiel)

Management/Leadership

- The Effective Executive (Peter Drucker) - Managing Humans (Michael Lopp) - The Art of Leadership (Michael Lopp) - High Output Management (Andy Grove) - Managing Oneself (Peter Drucker) - Essentials: Management (First Round Capital) - The Making of a Manager (Julie Zhuo) - The Powell Principles (Oren Harari) - Radical Candor (Kim Scott) - Leading Matters (John L. Hennessy) (fantastic book list in the coda) - Turn the Ship Around (L. David Marquet) (this is THE book on delegation) - Principles (Ray Dalio)

COO/Succession Planning

- Riding Shotgun (Nathan Bennett and Stephen A. Miles)

People Performance/HR/Culture

- Powerful (Patty McCord) - No Rules Rules (Reed Hastings and Erin Meyer) - Netflix culture deck - The Five Dysfunctions of a Team (Patrick Lencioni) - Work Rules! (Laszlo Bock) - It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work (DHH and Jason Fried) - The Culture Map (Erin Meyer) - The Talent War (Mike Sarraille and George Randle) - Great People Decisions (Claudio Fernández-Aráoz) - The Holloway Guide to Technical Recruiting and Hiring (Ozzie Osman) - Punished by Rewards (Alfie Kohn)

Purpose, Passion, and Self

- Start with Why (Simon Sinek) - What You Do is Who You Are (Ben Horowitz) - Drive (Daniel Pink) - Mindset (Carol Dweck) - Grit (Angela Duckworth) - The Almanack of Naval Ravikant (Eric Jorgenson)

Fundraising/VC

- Secrets of Sand Hill Road (Scott Kupor) - Venture Deals (Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson) - Raising Venture Capital (Andy Sparks) - The Business of Venture Capital (Mahendra Ramsinghani) - Done Deals (Udayan Gupta) - The Power Law (Sebastian Mallaby) - VC (Tom Nicholas)

Board

- Boardroom Excellence (Paul Brountas) - Startups Boards (Brad Feld and Mahendra Ramsinghani)

M&A

- Winning (Jack Welch) - M&A chapter - Connecting the Dots (John Chambers) - M&A chapter

Marketing

- Data-Driven Marketing (Mark Jeffery) - Positioning (Al Ries and Jack Trout) - Scientific Advertising (Claude Hopkins) - Traction (Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares) - Behind the Cloud (Marc Benioff and Carlye Adler) - Ogilvy on Advertising (David Ogilvy) - Marketing High Technology (William Davidow)

Psychology

- Influence (Robert Cialdini)

Negotiation

First, read Influence (under Psychology), then, in order

- Thinking in Bets (Annie Duke) - Getting to Yes (Roger Fisher and William Ury) - Never Split the Difference (Chris Voss) - The Bald Truth (David Falk)

Self

- The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (Stephen Covey)

Design and UX

- Creative Confidence (Tom Kelley and David Kelley)

AI (Machine Learning, Deep Learning/Neural Networks)

- Andrew Ng's AI for Everyone course: [https://www.coursera.org/learn/ai-for-everyone](https://www....

Growth (Data Science, etc.)

- Hacking Growth (Sean Ellis and Morgan Brown)

Graph Theory

Product

- Inspired (Marty Cagan) - Joel on Software (Joel Spolsky)

Customer Loyalty/Customer Success

- Delivering Happiness (Tony Hsieh) - Setting the Table (Danny Meyer)

Finding a Startup Job

- Entering StartupLand (Jeffrey Bussgang)

CIO as ICP

- The CIO Paradox (Martha Heller) - Be the Business (Martha Heller)

Stories

- Made in America (Sam Walton) - Shoe Dog (Phil Knight) - The Everything Store (Brad Stone) - Built from Scratch (Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blank) - Hard Drive (James Wallace) - Steve Jobs (Walter Isaacson) - Elon Musk (Ashlee Vance) - Creativity, Inc. (Ed Catmull) - The Ride of a Lifetime (Bob Iger) - Valley of Genius (Adam Fisher) - The Idea Factory (Jon Gertner) - Dealers of Lightning (Michael Hertzik) - Idea Man (Paul Allen) - Pour Your Heart Into It (Howard Schultz)

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cdbyrJul 2020

I can’t recommend How Finance Works by Mihir Desai enough.

There are a few cool things about it:

1. You get the feeling that the author has developed a deep sense of how learning works, and is using the same teaching methods in the book that have been honed over a lot of in-person classes. For example, having you puzzle out which balance sheet belongs to which company early on in the book, and it being surprisingly doable.

2. There are different levels of abstraction discussed in close proximity - the math, then the account from a cfo.

3. It’s concise. That lets it cover a pretty wide range without feeling like a textbook, and I think that helps a lot for developing an early understanding.

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