Accountants Get Their Due by Dennis Elam, CPA Everybody is famous for fifteen minutes-Andy Warhol Everybody else has had their fifteen minutes on television. In spite of the huge spate of lawyer jokes, hey, they look great on television (Law and Order). Policemen (NYPD Blue), doctors (ER), even truck drivers (Claude Akins in Movin’ On)…

Regular readers are aware that I am a big believer in the importance of linking design to product success.  And so we turn our attention to the Best Global Design of 2008.  That article links to more ideas on design. We recently discussed  how Target has made design a centerpiece of its marketing strategy.

We study communicaton, fund raising, and ethics among other topics in the classes I am teaching. Here is a very interesting article entitled The College Credit Card Hustle!  No ddoubt you have received an invitation to apply for a credit card possibly from the alum group at a college you have attended. Well, they are…

Whew, the Sunday Dallas Morning News took on School dropout reporting policy, let’s mark to market now Literacy, writing reading, still a problem at the university level Richardson forges ahead We will be discussing these education issues in  EDAD 5610 Monday afternoon. If the link does not work go to http://www.dallasnews.com and click on opinion. …

The saga of internet piracy continues.  Click to read about cafescribe and bitorrent. One prof mentions buying electronic publishing rites, I am unfamiliar with that. Textbooks are a subject of interest to all of us, have you looked at KINDLE? After tries by RCA and others Amazon is betting this will be a go. Sony…

We are studying successful communication strategies in EDAD 5610. One way to do this is to analyze communication breakdowns.  Handily there is no shortage of such failures, oddly few learn from them as these recent examples illustrate. Our two examples here are Hugo Montegegro,  Now the former Arlington ISD Superintendent John Lilley, Now the former…

 At UNT Dallas we believe that education should be fun and interesting. Actual photos from class demonstrate just that. Our latest photo album posted at left on the blog shows actual students participating in classroom presentations.  No doubt there will be protests about hair issues and costumes but until we can arrange for the same…

Ford   reported the largest quarterly loss ever. A closer read of the article reveals that Ford did not actually lose this much cash failing to sell cars and trucks. Rather various asset write downs constitute most of the loss, though there was a loss selling vehicles. The ability to read and process such information is…

Jerry Flint  has reports on the auto industry since the 1950s. In this column he gives as good an explanation of managerial accounting as I have ever read. Once we exceed break even , fixed costs are covered and we can make some real money, that is the point of the entire exercise.  In this…

Demand for accounting majors is still growing. I was a finance major as an undergrad.  But the recent spate of failures at Fannie Mae, CITI, Lehman, has seen even more demand for accountants who can deconstruct statements rather than perhaps wish things would turn out the way they planned.  A tip of the hat to…