This book is an invitation to study managerial uses of accounting information and how accounting information is used in the management of an organization. Three themes run throughout the book. First, the accounting system is thought of as a library of financial statistics. Answers to a variety of questions are unlikely to be found in prefabricated format; but valuable information awaits those equipped to interrogate the library. Second, the information in the accounting library is not likely to be the only information at the manager's disposal. So knowing how to combine accounting and nonaccounting bits of information is an important, indeed indispensable managerial skill. Finally, the role of a professional manager is emphasized. The book also makes demands on the reader. It assumes the reader has had prior exposure to financial accounting, to economics, to statistics, and to the economics of uncertainty. A modest acquaintance with strategic, or equilibrium, modeling and linear programming and the ability to take a simple derivative is also presumed.