How Finance Works: The HBR Guide to Thinking Smart About the Numbers, reviewed

How Finance Works, reviewed

By @SimonCocking, review of How Finance Works: The HBR Guide to Thinking Smart About the Numbers by Mihir Desai

Based on a popular class taught by a Harvard Business School professor.

If you’re not a numbers person, then finance can be intimidating and easy to ignore. But if you want to advance in your career, you’ll need 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 Wisdom of Finance–guides you into the complex but endlessly fascinating world of finance, demystifying it in the process.

Through entertaining case studies, interactive exercises, full-color visuals, and a conversational style that belies the topic, Professor Desai tackles a broad range of topics that will give you the knowledge and skills you need to finally understand how finance works. These include:

• How different financial levers can affect a company’s performance
• The different ways in which companies fund their operations and investments
• Why finance is more concerned with cash flow than profits
• How value is created, measured, and maximized
• The importance of capital markets in helping companies grow

Whether you’re a student or a manager, an aspiring CFO or an entrepreneur, How Finance Works is the colorful and interactive guide you need to help you start thinking more deeply about the numbers.

This book certainly has the feel of a textbook walk through the concepts. One thing that really works against it is the landscape rather than portrait layout of the pages, ie spread across your lap from left to right. This makes it quite messy to read as it keeps falling off your lap. But maybe it’s intended to be read at a desk, it doesn’t that the images within the book need to be landscape either?

With this UX issue to one side, the book is actually a great intro primer into these topics. The book follows a logical and well laid out structure, uses visual illustrations well, and does a good job of explaining complex concepts to the new and general reader. We found it well written and not slipping into jargon or dry academic language. You can imagine it may well end up on the first year intro reading list, and no bad thing too. There are helpful worked through examples too, to walk you through the concepts, what they mean, and how to then analyse them.

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