Warning: this article contains shameless book-related puns. It’s not one for the spineless.
However, if you’re a CPA who spends your free time reading, we’ve got you covered.
If your idea of a perfect December weekend involves going to a cottage (to read a book by the fire), heading to a cute coffeeshop (to read somewhere cozy), or staying home with a cup of tea (so that you can read while it’s snowing outside), this list is for you.
While reading can be a great opportunity to relax, it can also be a great opportunity to learn and improve your skills. So, don’t turn the page – there’s no need to book any further!
Here’s a list of five great books that can help take your accounting practice start a new chapter!
1. The Grumpy Accountant: One Fed-Up Tax Pro’s Practical Plan to Fix Canada’s Senselessly Complicated Tax System by Neal Winokur
If you’re frustrated with Canada’s tax system, you’ll love this recommendation! If you work for the CRA… well, you should probably skip this one.
This book is an entertaining and easy-to-read book about a practical blueprint to simplify Canada’s irritating overly complicated tax system.
The author shares his frustration with a wildly inefficient, impossibly complex, and heartlessly impersonal bureaucracy that routinely ensnares honest people in its labyrinthine maze.
The Grumpy Accountant tells the story of Jerry, a typical Canadian, and George, his trusted grumpy accountant, who guides him through the tax system at every stage in life.
The Grumpy Accountant offers 29 critical tax tips for navigating the broken system, including:
- How to avoid common mistakes that invite CRA scrutiny
- How to maximize the tax credits, deductions and benefits that you’re entitled to
- Tax saving strategies for every stage in life: college/university, employment/self-employment, marriage, kids, entrepreneurship, and retirement
- How to use online tools to keep organized and stay ahead of the game
With an entertaining and easy-to-read style, Winokur reveals a practical blueprint for change and simplification.
Ready to see what a simpler tax future looks like, while saving serious time, money and heartache? Let The Grumpy Accountant show you the way!
2. Permission to Screw Up: How I Learned to Lead by Doing (Almost) Everything Wrong by Kristen Hadeed
Everybody makes mistakes. Heck, there might even be some typos in this very article!
This book reveals the hidden benefits of messing up through the story of how one woman learned to lead – and how she ultimately succeeded, not despite her many mistakes, but because of them.
Kristen Hadeed built Student Maid, a cleaning company where people are happy, loyal, productive, and empowered, even as they do hard work. This is the story of how Kristen went from being an almost comically inept leader to a sought-after CEO who teaches others how to lead.
Hadeed launched Student Maid largely by accident – from there, Student Maid has grown to employ hundreds of students and is widely recognized for its industry-leading retention rate and its culture of trust and accountability.
But Kristen and her company were no overnight sensation. In fact, they were almost nothing at all.
Along the way, Kristen got it wrong almost as often as she got it right. Giving out hugs instead of feedback, fixing errors instead of enforcing accountability, and hosting parties instead of cultivating meaningful relationships were just a few of her many mistakes. But Kristen’s willingness to admit and learn from those mistakes helped her give her people the chance to learn from their own screw ups too.
Permission to Screw Up dismisses the idea that leaders and organizations should try to be perfect.
Instead, it encourages people of all ages to go for it and learn to lead by acting! Kristen’s story is brutally honest and hilarious. Through her book, she encourages us to embrace our failures and proves that we’ll be better leaders when we do.
We believe in the power of making mistakes! Don’t worry, though – we did still proofread this article. And yes, the puns were left in intentionally. What can we say, TopPrep is proudly Canadian – and proudly punny!
3. Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap … and Others Don’t by Jim Collins
If you’re one of those rare accounting students who has free time, this read is for you. It’s perfect for aspiring business owners!
Built To Last is the defining management study of the nineties which showed how great companies triumph over time, and how long-term sustained performance can be engineered into the DNA of an enterprise from the very beginning.
But what about companies that are not born with great DNA? How can good companies, mediocre companies, or even bad companies achieve enduring greatness? Are there those that convert long-term mediocrity or worse into long-term superiority? If so, what are the distinguishing characteristics that cause a company to go from good to great?
Over five years, Jim Collins and his research team have analyzed the histories of 28 companies, discovering why some companies make the leap and others don’t. The findings include:
- Level 5 Leadership: A surprising style, required for greatness.
- The Hedgehog Concept: Finding your three circles, to transcend the curse of competence.
- A Culture of Discipline: The alchemy of great results.
- Technology Accelerators: How good-to-great companies think differently about technology.
- The Flywheel and the Doom Loop: Why those who do frequent restructuring fail to make the leap.
Whether your company has good bones, bad bones, old bones or no bones (yet), you’ll definitely learn a skele-ton from this recommendation!
4. Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
This recommendation isn’t only for business students or aspiring business owners – dealing mainly with psychology, it’s great for anyone who has a brain! Sorry, robots, this one isn’t for you.
According to Daniel Kahneman, there are two systems that govern our actions: System One is fast, intuitive, and emotional; System Two is slower, more deliberative, and more logical.
This book examines how both systems function within the mind. Throughout, Kahneman exposes the extraordinary capabilities as well as the biases of fast thinking, and how intuitive impressions pervade our thoughts and our choices.
Kahneman engages the reader in a lively conversation about how we think. Ultimately, ways that we can learn to trust our intuitions through slow thinking are shared, as the author contrasts the two-system view of the mind with the standard model of the rational economic agent.
This singularly influential work transformed cognitive psychology, and launched the new fields of behavioral economics and happiness studies.
In this path-breaking book, Kahneman shows how the mind works, and offers practical and enlightening insights into how choices are made in both our business and personal lives – and how we can guard against the mental glitches that often get us into trouble.
Remember: you need your brain for accounting work! Why not take care of your noggin by reading this fantastic book? It’s sure to give you something to th(ink) about!
5. Making Numbers Count: The Art and Science of Communicating Numbers by Chip Heath
We can’t say that we saved the best for last, but only because every book on this list is so great. Still, as this recommendation deals largely with numbers – the building blocks of accountancy – it holds a special place in our hearts, and on this list. Plus, it has a play-on-words in the title. What’s not to love?
This book is a clear, practical, first-of-its-kind guide to communicating and understanding numbers and data from bestselling business author Chip Heath. And, it illustrates concepts through interesting questions. For example:
How much bigger is a billion than a million?
Well, a million seconds is twelve days. A billion seconds is…thirty-two years.
Understanding numbers is essential—but, as Heath explains, humans aren’t built to understand them. How can we translate millions and billions and milliseconds and nanometers into things we can comprehend and use?
In Making Numbers Count, Heath outlines specific principles that reveal how to translate a number into our brain’s language. This book is filled with examples of extreme number makeovers, vivid before-and-after examples that take a dry number and present it in a way that helps people say “Wow, now I get it!”
You will learn principles such as:
- Simple Perspective Cues: researchers at Microsoft found that adding one simple comparison sentence doubled how accurately users estimated statistics like population and area of countries.
- Vividness: get perspective on the size of a nucleus by imagining a bee in a cathedral, or a pea in a racetrack, which are easier to envision than “1/100,000th of the size of an atom.”
- Convert to a process: capitalize on our intuitive sense of time (5 gigabytes of music storage turns into “2 months of commutes, without repeating a song”).
- Emotional measuring sticks: frame the number in a way that people already care about (“that medical protocol would save twice as many women as curing breast cancer”).
Whether you’re interested in global problems like climate change, running a tech firm or a farm, or just explaining how many Cokes you’d have to drink if you burned calories like a hummingbird, this book can help math-lovers and math-haters alike translate the numbers that animate our world—allowing us to bring more data, more naturally, into decisions in our schools, our workplaces, and our society.
We hope that these books can help take you to the next level as an accounting and business professional, and that the copious puns didn’t cause any lasting damage. For more book recommendations, sign up for our newsletter!
