Page 21 - Finance for Non-Financial Managers
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                                      Finance for Non-Financial Managers
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                               been alive for the past 10 or 15 years, you also know that there
                               are unprecedented opportunities to create new wealth, new
                               products, new companies, and new fortunes that never before
                               existed. It’s unlikely that our forefathers could have imagined for-
                               tunes being made, and lost, as quickly as they were in the ’90s.
                                   So it’s hard to argue that times are more challenging now.
                               The question is: what can you do about it? The answer: not
                               much about the times, but a lot about how you prepare for
                               them. And that’s what this book is all about.
                                   When I was a young boy, my father owned and ran a small
                               grocery store that supplied the neighbors with their daily house-
                               hold needs, long before supermarkets killed the mom-and-pops
                               that then existed in every neighborhood. When school was over,
                               I went to the store to help out, because mom and dad were both
                               working there. My first job was opening cases of packaged
                               goods, pricing the packages, and stocking the shelves. Then I
                               packed groceries and delivered them to customers, sometimes
                               after taking their order over the phone and personally filling it.
                               (Yes, that was how many small stores did business back then.)
                               Then I graduated to cutting meat in the fresh meat department.
                               By the time I was in junior high school, I was checking out cus-
                               tomers, opening the store in the morning, and finally running
                               the store when my parents went on a rare vacation. By the time
                               I was in high school, I had run every aspect of a small business,
                               including opening and closing the cash register and doing the
                               bookkeeping at the end of the day.
                                   In today’s business terms, I had worked in shipping/receiv-
                               ing, warehousing and inventory control, production, sales, deliv-
                               ery, billing and collection, accounting, and management.
                                   Uncommon today? Yes, and yet that diverse background is
                               exactly what is being demanded more and more of today’s up-
                               and-coming professionals. Managers in companies large and
                               small, including directors, vice presidents, and general man-
                               agers, are finding their particular specialties aren’t going to
                               carry them to the finish line as they might once have.
                                   Their first clue might have been the arrival of the personal
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