BSBAALJR's financial accounting training veers off into Buffett-isms
Financial accounting is not a subject highly emphasized by BSBAALSR, the incarnation of the combination of alleged-quality and quantity in MBA bestowing B-schools. Financial accounting comes in in a tie for eigth in terms of emphasis-put-on-subject be BSBAALSR, after Strategy, Marketing, Operations Management, Financial Management, Financial Analysis, Finance. BSBAALSR emphasizes financial accounting about as much as he emphasizes management accounting.
BSBAALJR's (BSBAALJR is the incarnation of MBA producing B-schools regardless of alleged-quality) approach to financial accounting, shows the same characteristics as his approaches to other areas of business administration. His focus gets derailed by his obsessive interest in aspects such as the the most famous success story, and investment banking.
Out of all books that are in the field of "financial accounting" or are at least in the eyes of the book-world are supposed to be in the field of "financial accounting"--books that are either on the periphery or at the center of the "financial accounting" subject--the one that he pays the most attention to is "The Essays of Warren Bufett", ( http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0966446119/002-6320582-2337641 ) which is a collection of excerpts from essays written by celebrity zillionaire super-CEO Buffett to accompany the financial statements in annual reports produced by Buffett's company, which specializes in poring over the financial reports of other companies to decide whether they are worth investing in.
BSBAALJR's second favorite books amongst books that really are in the "financial accounting" subject or at least are supposed to be in the "financial accounting" subject according to large numbers of well-heard people, is "the Analysis and Use of Financial Statements" by Gerald White ( http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0471111864/002-6320582-2337641 ), which talks about all the great insights that investors owners and operators can derive from studying financial statements.
Coming in a weak third is BSBAALJR's basic how-to financial accounting text, "Financial Accounting" by Weygandt ( http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0471072419/002-6320582-2337641?v=glance ).
BSBAALJR's emphasis on basic accounting texts such as that by Weygandt is miniscule, when you look at how he pays more attention to other books at the periphery of the financial accounting sphere, and when you look at how little attention he pays to financial accounting compared to other subjects.
The amount of attention BSBAALJR pays to the actual software-related tasks that should be of most concern to modern "space-age" financial accountants, is less than the miniscule amount of attention he pays to the basic how-to essentials of being a traditional pre-computers-era accountant who can produce financial statements and filled-out forms that satisfy the law.
BSBAALJR pays ten times as much attention to any one of a number of pop-psychology-type books as he does to fundamental how-to of accounting.
What BSBAALJR's approach to financial accounting is missing, is emphasis on instruction in the skill of efficiently integrating financial reports data from several different companies, and-or from several different time-periods, into a database which can be manipulated so as to draw together information from several different sources into data tables.
Management should be able to re-arrange the data in these tables, management should be able to create data tables they want to create using the database.
In focusing on Buffett so much more than on the construction of integrated databases, BSBAALJR shows how he tends to obsession with the ultra-famous zillionaire success stories and with the the investment-banking perspective.
Buffett's publicly available wisdom regarding financial statement interpretation from the vantage point of a potential investor, sheds little light on the interpretation of data describing privately held companies that are not required to produce the publicly available financial statements that public companies are required to produce. Buffett's publicly available wisdom does not teach us how to integrate data describing privately held companies with data from publicly held companies into one database.
BSBAALJR is wrong to think what he apparently thinks, which is that there is next to nothing to be learned about financial accounting from firms and individuals who have unlike Buffett enjoyed merely moderate success, or that have been average, or that have failed.
BSBAALJR seems to think that essays that accompany financial statements in annual reports, are important in the field of "financial accounting" simply because they accompany financial statements. In reality if such essays are produced by a CEO such as Buffett whose publicly voiced emphasis has not been on using financial accounting data describing his own and other companies, to improve the performance of his own company, in ways that have nothing to do with investing in companies other than his own, the lesson becomes of limited relevance for companies that do not specialize in investing in other companies. There is a limit to the number of investment banking corporations that the market can sustain, but BSBAALJR carries on as if we could all specialize in investment banking.
BSBAALJR's second favorite text amongst books the book-world considers to be financial accounting books, is the White text on analyzing financial statements. This text emphasizes detailed study of individual financial statements in isolation, in an attempt to gain an understanding of the prospects of the company being studied. It emphasizes the study of financial statements from the angle, "what can we learn about this company by looking at just this financial statement and nothing else?".
What BSBAALJR's text by White ignores is, "what can we learn about investing in other companies, and about running our own company, by looking at this financial statement, in a database that integrates this financial statement with financial statements made by this company in previous years?... what can we learn from integrating it into a database that combines it with info from financial statements of other companies? How do we go about integrating this company's financial statement data with financial statement data from other companies and previous years?"
BSBAALJR's favorite "financial accounting" book, the one about Buffett's essays, concerns the public face of a CEO, Buffett, what this CEO's public face says regarding the meaning of numbers in financial statements produced by this CEO's company, and regarding how financial statements of outside companies are analyzed by his company from an outside investment-banking perspective.
The public statements of this super-CEO Buffett, give the world the impression that his company approaches investments basing its decisions primarily on under-the-microscope analysis of the financial statements and other related aspects of a given individual company. That is, basically, "we looked at this company and our decision is based not on how this company compares to other companies but on how things add up subtract multiply and exponentialize at this particular company".
BSBAALJR uncritically swallows such public teachings of this CEO Buffett, even though Buffett tells the world that the best kind of competition an investment banker such as himself can have, is, competition that "cannot think". And it seems BSBAALJR fulfills this role, of being the kind of competition Buffett wants, a competition that "does not think".
BSBAALJR's two favorites White and Buffett focus on a one-by-one, "how various factors to be deduced from a given financial statement add up to paint a picture of a given company" approach. This approach tends to ignore the "Wise deductions are made from looking at this company in a database that combines this company's statements with other company's statements for this and previous years" approach.
Yet at the same time, BSBAALJR's favorite gurus, (his favorite ones are outside the field of financial accounting), who he pays ten times as much attention to as he does to his favorite financial accounting gurus, keep pounding home ideas that inescapably and obviously lead to the conclusion, that a company should be able to integrate financial statements of various years and various companies into data-table "spreadsheets" in computerized databases.
BSBAALJR focuses on the company-by-company detailed analysis of financial statements investment and management technique, because he is impressed by Buffett's investment-banking-oriented company, which is a company with 38,000 employees, and which is able to set thousands of employees to work, putting the financial statements of companies under a microscope. By way of contrast, most individuals and organizations are not in a position to unleash thousands of financial-statement-inspectors who put financial statements under microscopes.
BSBAALJR's "financial accounting" heroes, expound an approach wherein, so to speak, a given company is put under a microscope by an expert, who compares how many nuts it has to how many bolts it sold to how many screws it has in inventory, and thereby astounds us by using such internal comparisons to predict the company's future.
Whereas, what my own individual "common sense" declared to me before I read the words of BSBAALJR's gurus, and what his favorite gurus vaguely point in the direction of prescribing, is that we must learn to compare how many bolts company A sold to how many bolts B sold to how many bolts C sold, and how many screws company A has in inventory compared to how many screws B has in inventory compared to how many screws C has in inventory, and so forth.
BSBAALJR mixes up subject definitions for subjects such as "financial managment", "financial analysis", "finance", "management accounting" and "financial accounting"; as a result he is prone to fill up the various subjects with readings in a way that produces over-emphasis on areas that should be relatively unimportant, and under-emphasis or complete non-emphasis of areas such as database integration in financial accounting, that should be relatively important.
@2005 David Virgil Hobbs
These are my opinions at the current time which may not necessarily exactly conform with fact
BSBAALJR's (BSBAALJR is the incarnation of MBA producing B-schools regardless of alleged-quality) approach to financial accounting, shows the same characteristics as his approaches to other areas of business administration. His focus gets derailed by his obsessive interest in aspects such as the the most famous success story, and investment banking.
Out of all books that are in the field of "financial accounting" or are at least in the eyes of the book-world are supposed to be in the field of "financial accounting"--books that are either on the periphery or at the center of the "financial accounting" subject--the one that he pays the most attention to is "The Essays of Warren Bufett", ( http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0966446119/002-6320582-2337641 ) which is a collection of excerpts from essays written by celebrity zillionaire super-CEO Buffett to accompany the financial statements in annual reports produced by Buffett's company, which specializes in poring over the financial reports of other companies to decide whether they are worth investing in.
BSBAALJR's second favorite books amongst books that really are in the "financial accounting" subject or at least are supposed to be in the "financial accounting" subject according to large numbers of well-heard people, is "the Analysis and Use of Financial Statements" by Gerald White ( http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0471111864/002-6320582-2337641 ), which talks about all the great insights that investors owners and operators can derive from studying financial statements.
Coming in a weak third is BSBAALJR's basic how-to financial accounting text, "Financial Accounting" by Weygandt ( http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0471072419/002-6320582-2337641?v=glance ).
BSBAALJR's emphasis on basic accounting texts such as that by Weygandt is miniscule, when you look at how he pays more attention to other books at the periphery of the financial accounting sphere, and when you look at how little attention he pays to financial accounting compared to other subjects.
The amount of attention BSBAALJR pays to the actual software-related tasks that should be of most concern to modern "space-age" financial accountants, is less than the miniscule amount of attention he pays to the basic how-to essentials of being a traditional pre-computers-era accountant who can produce financial statements and filled-out forms that satisfy the law.
BSBAALJR pays ten times as much attention to any one of a number of pop-psychology-type books as he does to fundamental how-to of accounting.
What BSBAALJR's approach to financial accounting is missing, is emphasis on instruction in the skill of efficiently integrating financial reports data from several different companies, and-or from several different time-periods, into a database which can be manipulated so as to draw together information from several different sources into data tables.
Management should be able to re-arrange the data in these tables, management should be able to create data tables they want to create using the database.
In focusing on Buffett so much more than on the construction of integrated databases, BSBAALJR shows how he tends to obsession with the ultra-famous zillionaire success stories and with the the investment-banking perspective.
Buffett's publicly available wisdom regarding financial statement interpretation from the vantage point of a potential investor, sheds little light on the interpretation of data describing privately held companies that are not required to produce the publicly available financial statements that public companies are required to produce. Buffett's publicly available wisdom does not teach us how to integrate data describing privately held companies with data from publicly held companies into one database.
BSBAALJR is wrong to think what he apparently thinks, which is that there is next to nothing to be learned about financial accounting from firms and individuals who have unlike Buffett enjoyed merely moderate success, or that have been average, or that have failed.
BSBAALJR seems to think that essays that accompany financial statements in annual reports, are important in the field of "financial accounting" simply because they accompany financial statements. In reality if such essays are produced by a CEO such as Buffett whose publicly voiced emphasis has not been on using financial accounting data describing his own and other companies, to improve the performance of his own company, in ways that have nothing to do with investing in companies other than his own, the lesson becomes of limited relevance for companies that do not specialize in investing in other companies. There is a limit to the number of investment banking corporations that the market can sustain, but BSBAALJR carries on as if we could all specialize in investment banking.
BSBAALJR's second favorite text amongst books the book-world considers to be financial accounting books, is the White text on analyzing financial statements. This text emphasizes detailed study of individual financial statements in isolation, in an attempt to gain an understanding of the prospects of the company being studied. It emphasizes the study of financial statements from the angle, "what can we learn about this company by looking at just this financial statement and nothing else?".
What BSBAALJR's text by White ignores is, "what can we learn about investing in other companies, and about running our own company, by looking at this financial statement, in a database that integrates this financial statement with financial statements made by this company in previous years?... what can we learn from integrating it into a database that combines it with info from financial statements of other companies? How do we go about integrating this company's financial statement data with financial statement data from other companies and previous years?"
BSBAALJR's favorite "financial accounting" book, the one about Buffett's essays, concerns the public face of a CEO, Buffett, what this CEO's public face says regarding the meaning of numbers in financial statements produced by this CEO's company, and regarding how financial statements of outside companies are analyzed by his company from an outside investment-banking perspective.
The public statements of this super-CEO Buffett, give the world the impression that his company approaches investments basing its decisions primarily on under-the-microscope analysis of the financial statements and other related aspects of a given individual company. That is, basically, "we looked at this company and our decision is based not on how this company compares to other companies but on how things add up subtract multiply and exponentialize at this particular company".
BSBAALJR uncritically swallows such public teachings of this CEO Buffett, even though Buffett tells the world that the best kind of competition an investment banker such as himself can have, is, competition that "cannot think". And it seems BSBAALJR fulfills this role, of being the kind of competition Buffett wants, a competition that "does not think".
BSBAALJR's two favorites White and Buffett focus on a one-by-one, "how various factors to be deduced from a given financial statement add up to paint a picture of a given company" approach. This approach tends to ignore the "Wise deductions are made from looking at this company in a database that combines this company's statements with other company's statements for this and previous years" approach.
Yet at the same time, BSBAALJR's favorite gurus, (his favorite ones are outside the field of financial accounting), who he pays ten times as much attention to as he does to his favorite financial accounting gurus, keep pounding home ideas that inescapably and obviously lead to the conclusion, that a company should be able to integrate financial statements of various years and various companies into data-table "spreadsheets" in computerized databases.
BSBAALJR focuses on the company-by-company detailed analysis of financial statements investment and management technique, because he is impressed by Buffett's investment-banking-oriented company, which is a company with 38,000 employees, and which is able to set thousands of employees to work, putting the financial statements of companies under a microscope. By way of contrast, most individuals and organizations are not in a position to unleash thousands of financial-statement-inspectors who put financial statements under microscopes.
BSBAALJR's "financial accounting" heroes, expound an approach wherein, so to speak, a given company is put under a microscope by an expert, who compares how many nuts it has to how many bolts it sold to how many screws it has in inventory, and thereby astounds us by using such internal comparisons to predict the company's future.
Whereas, what my own individual "common sense" declared to me before I read the words of BSBAALJR's gurus, and what his favorite gurus vaguely point in the direction of prescribing, is that we must learn to compare how many bolts company A sold to how many bolts B sold to how many bolts C sold, and how many screws company A has in inventory compared to how many screws B has in inventory compared to how many screws C has in inventory, and so forth.
BSBAALJR mixes up subject definitions for subjects such as "financial managment", "financial analysis", "finance", "management accounting" and "financial accounting"; as a result he is prone to fill up the various subjects with readings in a way that produces over-emphasis on areas that should be relatively unimportant, and under-emphasis or complete non-emphasis of areas such as database integration in financial accounting, that should be relatively important.
@2005 David Virgil Hobbs
These are my opinions at the current time which may not necessarily exactly conform with fact
posted by David Virgil at 11:46 PM
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