Today on the Consumerism Commentary Podcast, Jay Frosting speaks to Joe Knight, co-author of Financial Intelligence: An Illustrated Guide to Knowing What the Numbers Really Mean.
They discuss why and how employees in non-financial roles should learn to read financial statements, largely because accounting relies on a lot of educated guesses and biases.
Table of contents
[00:00] Introduction from Jay Frosting
[00:34] Interview with Joe Knight
– [00:48] Get a good working knowledge of how to read statements
– [02:29] Why approach financial statements education through a comic book?
– [03:53] Teaching through story-telling, including the fraud at WorldCom
– [09:33] Accounting relies on guessing and biases (“cooking the books”)
– [15:24] Many companies fail a basic finance test
– [17:10] Three things that improve companies: training, access to financial data, and profit-sharing
– [19:25] What is and isn’t in the graphic novel version
– [20:02] Why Wall Street is increasingly focused on cash flow
[22:12] End
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Published or updated April 15, 2012. If you enjoyed this article, subscribe to the RSS feed or receive daily emails. Follow @flexo on Twitter and visit our Facebook page for more updates.
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Luke Landes founded Consumerism Commentary in 2003 and has been building online communities since 1990. Luke, also known as Flexo, has contributed to PC World Magazine, US News, Forbes, and other publications. 
