Kenneth Merchant

This book is the Italian 2014 version of the 2012 original edition

While the 2017 edition is available on e.g. Amazon https://www.amazon.com/Management-Control-Systems-4th/dp/1292110554/, I decided to read this version as part of my knowledge update (I worked with financial controllers and on management reporting since the late 1980s).

Reason? This Italian version contains not just case studies that are specifically designed for Italy, but other adaptations.

Italy's economy is composed by a large number of small (even tiny) companies.

As remembered by the editors of the Italian edition, the OECD Factbook 2013 showed that just 2.4% companies had more than 50 employees, vs. 84% in the USA.

You can see the current positioning of the Italian economy vs. its peers here: https://read.oecd-ilibrary.org/economics/oecd-economic-surveys-italy-2019_369ec0...

In Italy, most CFOs cover mainly an administrative role, also because most smaller companies do not have access to financial markets, and rely mainly on access to banking facilities, instead of risk-based funding, also to support investments.

Do not expect to find everything in this book- the English version is much longer but, as discussed above, considering the local market, would be an overkill.

Instead, this quite readable (considering the subject) and self-explanatory book could be useful to both local companies, and to foreign companies that have to deal with Italian companies, in order to understand some of the cultural differences.

In my experience on these themes in Italy in various industries mainly in the late 1980s - mid-1990s, I saw "formats" and organizational choices that often were even more straighforward than the ones discussed in this book, except for companies that were to become "pocket multinationals".

In the latter case, what usually I saw back then is that approaches derived from US-based auditing firms imported "cultural implants" that actually exceed the scope of this book (and I worked with few controllers and CFOs who actually had previously been managers in Big-8/Big-5 companies).

Anyway, it isn't simply a matter of "cultural imports": as in any cultural and organizational change, what matters is having a mandate, something that in Italy converts into "continued support" (i.e. Board or CEO adopting a "the buck stops here" attitude).

This book could be a good starting point for smaller companies considering scaling up (which doesn't necessarily imply in size- could be also in relational complexity), before involving external experts that might instead try to "transplant" what eventually would be "rejected" as soon as the enforcing team is disbanded.

[Review 2020-07-03]… (meer)