The Three Financial Styles of Very Successful Leaders: Strategic Approaches to Identifying the Growth Drivers of Every Company.

• Author: Marshall, Jeffrey
• Position: BookSHELF - Book Review

The Three Financial Styles of Very Successful Leaders: Strategic Approaches to Identifying the Growth Drivers of Every Company. By E. Ted Prince. McGraw-Hill, 324 pages. $29.95.

There's more than a germ of genius in this book, assuming that the labels work as advertised and the concepts aren't overly simplistic. That may be in the eyes of the reader. Certainly, author Prince--CEO of the Perth Leadership Institute, which offers consulting services to companies on leadership improvement--makes a highly readable and intriguing case for his theories.

From nine "financial signatures," or propensities for fundamental financial strategies, Prince develops three different types of financial styles, which he labels Surplus, Puzzler and Deficit. Simply put, Surplus leaders are highly effective, Puzzlers are middling and Deficit leaders can lead their companies down the garden path to ruin. Former Tyco International CEO Dennis Kozlowski, for instance, fits into Prince's Deficit category.

What's most useful here--and not that Prince is a psychologist who can divine behaviors--is his observation that different companies have different financial signature requirements for leaders, and that those signatures may change...