Customer Reviews

Demystifying Business With Cookies And Elephants: How to Make Money in Business: How You Can Improve Upon, Invest In And Succeed In Business

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This is a very concise, common sense, and well written book on the basic elements of a business and how they must be integrated in order for that business to be profitable and successful.

As an seasoned executive, I liked this book because of its simplicity. The author states that any business or organization can be broken down into five distinct dimensions ... people, strategy/leadership, internal factors, external factors, and capital. Each of these dimensions are clearly explained with effective examples from the author's experience. These are applied to the metaphors of cookie production and discovering elephants, which the author uses effectively throughout the book as a unifying theme. I found the section on capital particularly valuable as it introduced a number of key financial concepts and tools that many managers not trained in finance may not have been exposed to.

I think that there are several audiences or reader segments for this book. First might be recent college graduates working in a business environment who may not have had any business training (eg, engineers). (I have had my son who is studying engineering in college read this book). A second audience might be for professional development or training of experience business people, e.g., pre-meeting required reading to get all participants looking at their business from the perspective of its fundamentals and what defines success.