Mihir Desai Knihy

Longlisted for the FT & McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award 2017Finance is shrouded in mystery for outsiders, while many insiders are uneasy with the disrepute of their profession. How can finance become more accessible and also recover its nobility?Harvard Business School professor Mihir Desai takes up the cause of restoring humanity to finance. With deft wit, he draws upon a rich knowledge of literature, film, history, and philosophy to explain finance's inner workings. Through this creative approach, he shows that outsiders can easily access the underlying ideas and insiders can reacquaint themselves with the core values of their profession. This combination of finance and the humanities creates unusual and illuminating pairings: Jane Austen and Anthony Trollope are guides to risk management; Jeff Koons becomes an advocate of leverage; and Mel Brooks' The Producers teaches us about fiduciary responsibility. In Desai's vision, the principles of finance also provide answers to critical questions in our lives: bankruptcy teaches us how to react to failure, the lessons of mergers apply to marriages, and the Capital Asset Pricing Model demonstrates the true value of relationships.The Wisdom of Finance is a wholly unique book, offering an enlivening new perspective on one of the world's most complex and misunderstood professions.

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.--