Managerial Accounting Quotes

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Fame requires every kind of excess. I mean true fame, a devouring neon, not the somber renown of waning statesmen or chinless kings. I mean long journeys across gray space. I mean danger, the edge of every void, the circumstance of one man imparting an erotic terror to the dreams of the republic. Understand the man who must inhabit these extreme regions, monstrous and vulval, damp with memories of violation. Even if half-mad he is absorbed into the public's total madness; even if fully rational, a bureaucrat in hell, a secret genius of survival, he is sure to be destroyed by the public's contempt for survivors. Fame, this special kind, feeds itself on outrage, on what the counselors of lesser men would consider bad publicity-hysteria in limousines, knife fights in the audience, bizarre litigation, treachery, pandemonium and drugs. Perhaps the only natural law attaching to true fame is that the famous man is compelled, eventually, to commit suicide. (Is it clear I was a hero of rock'n'roll?) Toward the end of the final tour it became apparent that our audience wanted more than music, more even than its own reduplicated noise. It's possible the culture had reached its limit, a point of severe tension. There was less sense of simple visceral abandon at our concerts during these last weeks. Few cases of arson and vandalism. Fewer still of rape. No smoke bombs or threats of worse explosives. Our followers, in their isolation, were not concerned with precedent now. They were free of old saints and martyrs, but fearfully so, left with their own unlabeled flesh. Those without tickets didn't storm the barricades, and during a performance the boys and girls directly below us, scratching at the stage, were less murderous in their love of me, as if realizing finally that my death, to be authentic, must be self-willed- a succesful piece of instruction only if it occured by my own hand, preferrably ina foreign city. I began to think their education would not be complete until they outdid me as a teacher, until one day they merely pantomimed the kind of massive response the group was used to getting. As we performed they would dance, collapse, clutch each other, wave their arms, all the while making absolutely no sound. We would stand in the incandescent pit of a huge stadium filled with wildly rippling bodies, all totally silent. Our recent music, deprived of people's screams, was next to meaningless, and there would have been no choice but to stop playing. A profound joke it would have been. A lesson in something or other. In Houston I left the group, saying nothing, and boarded a plane for New York City, that contaminated shrine, place of my birth. I knew Azarian would assume leadership of the band, his body being prettiest. As to the rest, I left them to their respective uproars- news media, promotion people, agents, accountants, various members of the managerial peerage. The public would come closer to understanding my disappearance than anyone else. It was not quite as total as the act they needed and nobody could be sure whether I was gone for good. For my closest followers, it foreshadowed a period of waiting. Either I'd return with a new language for them to speak or they'd seek a divine silence attendant to my own. I took a taxi past the cemetaries toward Manhattan, tides of ash-light breaking across the spires. new York seemed older than the cities of Europe, a sadistic gift of the sixteenth century, ever on the verge of plague. The cab driver was young, however, a freckled kid with a moderate orange Afro. I told him to take the tunnel. Is there a tunnel?" he said.
Don DeLillo
We can quibble about what precise percentage of performance it accounts for, but no one can seriously question that smartness—the intellectual ability to do the job—is one of the primary determinants of whether someone succeeds or fails at managerial work.
Justin Menkes (Executive Intelligence: What All Great Leaders Have)
I hold it perniciously false to teach that all cultural forms are equally probable and that by mere force of will an inspired individual can at any moment alter the trajectory of an entire cultural system in a direction convenient to any philosophy. Convergent and parallel trajectories far outnumber divergent trajectories in cultural evolution. Most people are conformists. History repeats itself in countless acts of individual obedience to cultural rule and pattern, and individual wills seldom prevail in matters requiring radical alterations of deeply conditioned beliefs and practices. At the same time, nothing I have written in this book supports the view that the individual is helpless before the implacable march of history or that resignation and despair are appropriate responses to the concentration of industrial managerial power. The determinism that has governed cultural evolution has never been the equivalent of the determinism that governs a closed physical system. Rather, it resembles the causal sequences that account for the evolution of plant and animal species.
Marvin Harris (Cannibals and Kings: Origins of Cultures)
The divorce of control, or power, from ownership has been due in large part to the growth of public corporations. So long as a single person, family or comparatively small group held a substantial portion of the common shares of a corporation, the legal “owner” could control its affairs. Even if they no longer actually conducted the business, the operating managers were functioning as their accountable agents. But when the enterprise became more vast in scope and at the same time, the stock certificates became spread in small bundles among thousands of persons, the managers were gradually released from subordination to the nominal owners. De facto control passed, for the most part, to non-owning management.
James Burnham (The Managerial Revolution: What is Happening in the World)
Human labor, in general, is still divided into two exclusive categories: the first—solely intellectual and managerial—includes the scientists, artists, engineers, inventors, accountants, educators, governmental officials, and their subordinate elites who enforce labor discipline The second group consists of the great mass of workers, people prevented from applying creative ideas or intelligence, who blindly and mechanically carry out the orders of the intellectual-managerial elite This economic and social division of labor has disastrous consequences for members of the privileged classes, the masses of the people, and for the prosperity, as well as the moral and intellectual development, of society as a whole.
Mikhail Bakunin
...obscurantist feature in social scientists trying to combine pluralism with environmentalism. They are so preoccupied with the role of prejudice in creating hostile environments that they perpetually deny the obvious, that stereotypes are rough generalizations about groups derived from long-term observation. Such generalizations are usually correct in describing group tendencies and in predicting certain collective actions, even if they do not adequately account for differences among individuals. Nonetheless, as Goldberg explains, the self-described pluralist and prominent psychologist Gordon Allport went out of his way in The Nature of Prejudice (1954) to reject stereotypes as factually inaccurate as well as socially harmful. For Allport and a great many other social Scientists, nothing is intuitively correct unless it is politically so.
Paul Edward Gottfried (After Liberalism: Mass Democracy in the Managerial State.)
Managerial abilities, bureaucratic skills, technical expertise, and political talent are all necessary, but they can be applied only to goals that have already been defined by military policies, broad and narrow. And those policies can be only as good as strategy, operational art of war, tactical thought, and plain military craft that have gone into their making. At present, the defects of structure submerge or distort strategy and operational art, they out rightly suppress tactical ingenuity, and they displace the traditional insights and rules of military craft in favor of bureaucratic preferences, administrative convenience, and abstract notions of efficiency derived from the world of business management. First there is the defective structure for making of military decisions under the futile supervision of the civilian Defense Department; then come the deeply flawed defense policies and military choices, replete with unnecessary costs and hidden risks; finally there come the undoubted managerial abilities, bureaucratic skills, technical expertise, and political talents, all applied to achieve those flawed policies and to implement those flawed choices. By this same sequence was the fatally incomplete Maginot Line built, as were all the Maginot Lines of history, each made no better by good government, technical talent, careful accounting, or sheer hard work. Hence the futility of all the managerial innovations tried in the Pentagon over the years. In the purchasing of weapons, for example, “total package” procurement, cost plus incentive contracting, “firm fixed price” purchasing have all been introduced with much fanfare, only to be abandoned, retried, and repudiated once again. And each time a new Secretary of Defense arrives, with him come the latest batch of managerial innovations, many of them aimed at reducing fraud, waste, and mismanagement-the classic trio endlessly denounced in Congress, even though they account for mere percentage points in the total budget, and have no relevance at all to the failures of combat. The persistence of the Administrator’s Delusion has long kept the Pentagon on a treadmill of futile procedural “reforms” that have no impact at all on the military substance of our defense. It is through strategy, operational art, tactical ingenuity, and military craft that the large savings can be made, and the nation’s military strength greatly increased, but achieving long-overdue structural innovations, from the central headquarters to the combat forces, from the overhead of bases and installations to the current purchase of new weapons. Then, and only then, will it be useful to pursue fraud, waste, and mismanagement, if only to save a few dollars more after the billions have already been saved. At present, by contrast, the Defense Department administers ineffectively, while the public, Congress, and the media apply their energies to such petty matters as overpriced spare parts for a given device in a given weapon of a given ship, overlooking at the same time the multibillion dollar question of money spent for the Navy as a whole instead of the Army – whose weakness diminishes our diplomatic weight in peacetime, and which could one day cause us to resort to nuclear weapons in the face of imminent debacle. If we had a central military authority and a Defense Department capable of strategy, we should cheerfully tolerate much fraud, waste, and mismanagement; but so long as there are competing military bureaucracies organically incapable of strategic combat, neither safety nor economy will be ensured, even if we could totally eliminate every last cent of fraud, waste, and mismanagement.
Edward N. Luttwak
The statement of cash flows shows how the company’s cash increased and decreased during the period.
Williams (Financial & Managerial Accounting)
eigenvalue of a factor is the sum of correlations (r) of each variable with that factor. This correlation is also called loading in factor analysis. Analysts can define (or “extract”) how many factors they wish to use, or they can define a statistical criterion (typically requiring each factor to have an eigenvalue of at least 1.0). The method of identifying factors is called principal component analysis (PCA). The results of PCA often make it difficult to interpret the factors, in which case the analyst will use rotation (a statistical technique that distributes the explained variance across factors). Rotation causes variables to load higher on one factor, and less on others, bringing the pattern of groups better into focus for interpretation. Several different methods of rotation are commonly used (for example, Varimax, Promax), but the purpose of this procedure is always to understand which variables belong together. Typically, for purposes of interpretation, factor loadings are considered only if their values are at least .50, and only these values might be shown in tables. Table 18.4 shows the result of a factor analysis. The table shows various items related to managerial professionalism, and the factor analysis identifies three distinct groups for these items. Such tables are commonly seen in research articles. The labels for each group (for example, “A. Commitment to performance”) are provided by the authors; note that the three groupings are conceptually distinct. The table also shows that, combined, these three factors account for 61.97 percent of the total variance. The table shows only loadings greater than .50; those below this value are not shown.6 Based on these results, the authors then create index variables for the three groups. Each group has high internal reliability (see Chapter 3); the Cronbach alpha scores are, respectively, 0.87, 0.83, and 0.88. This table shows a fairly typical use of factor analysis, providing statistical support for a grouping scheme. Beyond Factor Analysis A variety of exploratory techniques exist. Some seek purely to classify, whereas
Evan M. Berman (Essential Statistics for Public Managers and Policy Analysts)
CHARACTERISTICS OF MANAGEMENT ACCOUNTING INFORMATION
Williams (Financial & Managerial Accounting)
The integrity of accounting information is enhanced in three primary ways. First, certain institutional features add significantly to the integrity of accounting information. These features include standards for the preparation of accounting information, an internal control structure, and audits of financial statements. Second, several professional accounting organizations play unique roles in adding to the integrity of accounting information. Finally, and perhaps most important, is the personal competence, judgment, and ethical behavior of professional accountants. These three elements of the accounting profession come together to ensure that users of accounting information—investors, creditors, managers, and others—can rely on the information to be a fair representation of what it purports to represent.
Williams (Financial & Managerial Accounting)
The income statement is a summarization of the company’s revenue and expense transactions for a period of time. The income statement is particularly important for the company’s owners, creditors, and other interested parties to understand.
Williams (Financial & Managerial Accounting)
introduce three primary financial statements:
Williams (Financial & Managerial Accounting)
the income statement is a separate financial statement that shows how the statement of financial position changed as a result of its revenue and expense transactions.
Williams (Financial & Managerial Accounting)
window dressing —measures taken by management to make the company appear as strong as possible in its financial statements.
Williams (Financial & Managerial Accounting)
Hewlett-Packard (HP) was founded by Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard in 1939 in a garage. Over the years, HP grew to be become a multinational information technology company, with revenues and assets of well over $100 billion. HP has often grown in recent years by acquiring other companies. Just as an individual is making an investment when he or she buys shares of stock, a corporation is
Williams (Financial & Managerial Accounting)
Revenues are increases in the company’s assets from its profit-directed activities, and they result in positive cash flows.
Williams (Financial & Managerial Accounting)
In the United States, three organizations are particularly important in establishing accounting principles—the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB), and the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB).
Williams (Financial & Managerial Accounting)
communicate
Williams (Financial & Managerial Accounting)
Dave Packard in 1939 in a garage. Over the years, HP grew to be become a multinational information technology company, with revenues and assets of well over $100 billion. HP has often grown in recent years by acquiring other companies. Just as an individual is making an investment when he or she buys shares of stock, a corporation is making a much larger investment when it buys an entire company. And, just as reliable financial information is critical to individuals when making investment decisions, it is equally important when one company is considering
Williams (Financial & Managerial Accounting)
The statement of financial position , or balance sheet , is a financial statement that describes where the enterprise stands at a specific date. It is sometimes described as a snapshot of the business in financial or dollar terms (that is, what the enterprise “looks like” at a specific date).
Williams (Financial & Managerial Accounting)
Expenses are decreases in the company’s assets from its profit-directed activities, and they result in negative cash flows.
Williams (Financial & Managerial Accounting)
Cash flows from operating activities are the cash effects of revenue and expense transactions that are included in the income statement. 4 Cash flows from investing activities are the cash effects of purchasing and selling assets, such as land and buildings. Cash flows from financing activities are the cash effects of the owners investing in the company and creditors loaning money to the company and the repayment of either or both.
Williams (Financial & Managerial Accounting)
Transactions that did not affect cash are called noncash investing and
Williams (Financial & Managerial Accounting)
current assets, denoting that they either are cash or will soon become cash.
Williams (Financial & Managerial Accounting)
The relationship of current assets to current liabilities is called the current ratio.
Williams (Financial & Managerial Accounting)
A strong statement of financial position is one that shows relatively little debt and large amounts of liquid assets relative to the liabilities due in the near future. A strong income statement is one that shows large revenues relative to the expenses required to earn the revenues. A strong statement of cash flows is one that not only shows a strong cash balance but also indicates that cash is being generated by operations. Demonstrating that these positive characteristics of the company are ongoing and can be seen in a series of financial statements is particularly helpful in creating confidence in the company on the part of investors and creditors. Because of the importance of the financial statements, management may take steps that are specifically intended to improve the company’s financial position and financial performance. For example, cash purchases of assets may be delayed until the beginning of the next accounting period so that large amounts of cash will be included in the statement of financial position and the statement of cash flows. On the other hand, if the company is in a particularly strong cash position, liabilities due in the near future may be paid early, replaced with longer-term liabilities, or even replaced by additional investments by owners to communicate that future negative cash flows will not be as great as they might otherwise appear.
Williams (Financial & Managerial Accounting)
Since I entered the business world, conglomerates have enjoyed several periods of extreme popularity, the silliest of which occurred in the late 1960s. The drill for conglomerate CEOs then was simple: By personality, promotion or dubious accounting — and often by all three — these managers drove a fledgling conglomerate’s stock to, say, 20 times earnings and then issued shares as fast as possible to acquire another business selling at ten-or-so times earnings. They immediately applied “pooling” accounting to the acquisition, which — with not a dime’s worth of change in the underlying businesses — automatically increased per-share earnings, and used the rise as proof of managerial genius. They next explained to investors that this sort of talent justified the maintenance, or even the enhancement, of the acquirer’s p/e multiple. And, finally, they promised to endlessly repeat this procedure and thereby create ever-increasing per-share earnings.
Warren Buffett (Berkshire Hathaway Letters to Shareholders, 2023)
Women tend to fall into a vicious circle when it comes to talking about emotional labor. We get overwhelmed and finally bring it up by asking for help. Then we get tired of asking, because delegating is a managerial job that requires a lot of brainpower. And we must also pay close attention to how we ask for help, always keeping a sunny disposition and taking into account the emotional state of the person we are interacting with; it’s often easier to just do things ourselves. So we start taking on everything until we reach the next breaking point, and then we have another frustrating fight over emotional labor—somehow never reaching the root of the problem. Ad nauseam.
Gemma Hartley (Fed Up: Emotional Labor, Women, and the Way Forward)
In 1995, as governor of Texas, Bush revamped education in the state with Senate Bill 1. Running for governor, he promised more charter schools, more accountability, and more money for school vouchers. The goal of Bush’s model was for school districts to abandon state regulations and create competition among schools that demonstrated high standardized test scores. Charter schools would be the incubator of this competition. Senate Bill 1 also replaced the traditional school governance model with a corporate structure that stripped most managerial and regulatory power away from the state board of education.46
Bettina L. Love (Punished for Dreaming: How School Reform Harms Black Children and How We Heal)
The primary test of managerial economic performance is the achievement of a high earnings rate on equity capital employed (without undue leverage, accounting gimmickry, etc.) and not the achievement of consistent gains in earnings per share. In our view, many businesses would be better understood by their shareholder owners, as well as the general public, if managements and financial analysts modified the primary emphasis they place upon earnings per share, and upon yearly changes in that figure.
Warren Buffett
commonality of operational values, priorities, and preferences—how an organization works together—is a must if the progression in managerial style is to occur. Without that commonality, an organization can become easily confused and lose its sense of purpose. Accordingly, the responsibility for transmitting common values rests squarely with the supervisor. He is, after all, accountable for the output of the people who report to him; then, too, without a shared set of values a supervisor cannot effectively delegate.
Andrew S. Grove (High Output Management)
Over the past thirty years the orthodox view that the maximisation of shareholder value would lead to the strongest economic performance has come to dominate business theory and practice, in the US and UK in particular.42 But for most of capitalism’s history, and in many other countries, firms have not been organised primarily as vehicles for the short-term profit maximisation of footloose shareholders and the remuneration of their senior executives. Companies in Germany, Scandinavia and Japan, for example, are structured both in company law and corporate culture as institutions accountable to a wider set of stakeholders, including their employees, with long-term production and profitability their primary mission. They are equally capitalist, but their behaviour is different. Firms with this kind of model typically invest more in innovation than their counterparts focused on short-term shareholder value maximisation; their executives are paid smaller multiples of their average employees’ salaries; they tend to retain for investment a greater share of earnings relative to the payment of dividends; and their shares are held on average for longer by their owners. And the evidence suggests that while their short-term profitability may (in some cases) be lower, over the long term they tend to generate stronger growth.43 For public policy, this makes attention to corporate ownership, governance and managerial incentive structures a crucial field for the improvement of economic performance. In short, markets are not idealised abstractions, but concrete and differentiated outcomes arising from different circumstances.
Michael Jacobs (Rethinking Capitalism: Economics and Policy for Sustainable and Inclusive Growth (Political Quarterly Monograph Series))