Stephen J. Kobrin: Does every manager really need to understand financial data? Don’t they have finance and accounting staffs to handle that?
Richard A. Lambert: They often do have finance and accounting staffs to handle some of it, but managers have a different job than they do. The job of the finance and accounting staff is to produce the information; the job of a manager is to use it. To use it well, you have to understand what is in the numbers, what is not in the numbers and what the terms mean.
Kobrin: What’s the biggest mistake that managers make when they try to use finance and accounting data?
Lambert: There are two extremes. One is, I don’t know what this is, so I’m not going to pay any attention to it. The other is the exact opposite: They fixate on the bottom line so much that anything that makes the bottom line higher must be good and anything that makes the bottom line lower must be bad. Both of those are mistakes.