Seeing the Big Picture: Business Acumen to Build Your Credibility, Career, and Company

Cope, founder of the training firm Acumen Learning, wants to help readers better understand their business, gain an edge, and move up the ranks. In clear terms, he introduces the five drivers of all companies—cash, profit, assets, growth, and people—with the book’s first half devoted to showing how each driver works and plays off of the others. Throughout, Cope provides context using both fictitious scenarios (a bicycle shop) and actual examples (General Mills, Apple, Google, and others). However, the book reads like little more than an introduction to financial analysis, though Cope offers concepts such as two types of customers (employees as “internal customers” and consumers as “external customers”) and answers to questions such as why good employees leave. Employees (or lower-level management) looking to understand the general contours of a company’s dynamic, the parts that make it up, and the role each plays in the bigger picture, should find this book helpful. However, those looking for more than a watered-down view of the principal drivers and financial workings of a company will have to look elsewhere. (Mar.)