Started the pre-reading..

I am slowly easing my-self into the MBA. I started with the easiest and most basic looking textbook amongst the books in INSEAD’s pre-reading list. “An Introduction to Finance” by Youssef F. Bissada is perfect if you’ve never had any accounting classes or never had to do a single financial statement. I have taken accounting classes more than five years ago during my degree but I still found the book useful to refresh my memory. The book is only focused on how to draw and understand balance sheets, profit and loss statements, and cash flow statements. It comes with a CD (only runs on Windows) that outlines the basic concepts and lets you learn by preparing accounts of an imaginary lemonade business. (Yes I know, this may be as ‘exciting’ as accounting gets: How to build your lemonade tycoon in 10 days) Although I have to confess, I liked the simplicity and the fact that it took less than two hours to finish the whole book! It makes you feel good since you can put a tick besides the big reading list INSEAD loads on you. Anyway, now that I’ve done the basics of accounting, I think I might continue with the other accounting book in the list, though I doubt it will take such short time to go through it this time..