Individual investors face a whole new set of challenges in today’s markets. An understanding of p/e ratios and balance sheets is no longer sufficient in the dot.com world, where stock prices sometimes bear little relationship to old-fashioned concepts like sales and profits. Whether you’re a neophyte in the financial world or a more accomplished investor, several new books offer help on negotiating this new territory. Here are four of the best: Investing 101 (Bloomberg, $14.95, ISBN 1576600440) by Kathy Kristof is a reader friendly introduction to the basics of investing and personal finance. Kristof leads investors through assessing a starting point, determining their adversity to risk, building an emergency fund, and determining how to save for such big ticket items as a car or a house and for such long term goals as retirement or a child’s college education. Kristof educates the reader on fundamentals like diversification and assessment of how different investments fit into their goals. One of the best features of the book is a chapter on picking individual stocks. Kristof teaches the reader how to read a financial statement and make some basic calculations to determine whether or not to buy or sell a stock. If I had to suggest a book on investing and personal finance to an absolute beginner, it would be Investing 101.

Victoria Collins combines a doctorate in psychology with years of experience as a financial planner to examine the impact of the Internet on investing and financial markets in Invest Beyond.com: A New Look at Investing in Today’s Changing Markets (Dearborn, $18.95, ISBN 0793138175). Collins explains many basic issues ranging from what the Dow Jones Industrial average is and how it is compiled to what a p/e ratio is and how it is useful to an investor. Collins also tells the reader where to get information and how to establish a relationship with a financial advisor. She examines how markets have changed and why the investment philosophies of such Wall Street gurus as Warren Buffet, Peter Lynch, and George Soros may or may not be applicable in the new Internet-influenced market. Invest Beyond.com is not only a very helpful tool for those interested in making sense of investing since the advent of the Internet, it can serve as an extremely valuable reference for the beginning investor as well.

Former Motley Fool columnist Robert Sheard defines financial independence not as the date when one retires, but the point at which a person has the ability to live indefinitely on the growth of an investment portfolio. In Money For Life: The 20 Factor Plan for Accumulating Wealth While You’re Young (Harper- Business, $25, ISBN 0066620430), Sheard directs the reader to determine how big a portfolio must be for an investor to live on its growth. He then shows what steps to take to reach that financial goal. Sheard’s final step is to teach the reader how to manage a portfolio once the financial goal is reached. Sheard advocates what he calls a "charitable foundation" approach to personal investing. Money for Life is written in a straightforward manner well suited for readers who are beginning to take hold of their financial life, as well as the more experienced person who wants to learn how to maintain his or her finances.

The days when a woman could rely on the man in her life to manage financial decisions are long past. To guide women on how to take hold of their financial futures, personal finance expert Marsha Bertran has written A Woman’s Guide to Savvy Investing: Everything You Need to Know to Protect Your Future (AMACOM, $16.95, ISBN 0814470998). Newly released in paperback this month, this book is an excellent guide for women who want to learn about investing. In this age, investing to most people means mainly stocks and bonds, but Bertrand examines various investment approaches, including buying stocks with puts, calls, shorts, and margins, real estate investment trusts, unit investment trusts, and initial public offerings. One of the best features of the book is that Bertrand holds the reader’s hand as she explains and then demonstrates how to run the numbers on an investment to calculate ratios, gains and losses, investment returns, and income tax ramifications. She also explains where to find public investor information, how to read annual reports, select a broker, and start an investment club. A Woman’s Guide to Savvy Investing is an excellent resource for any man or woman interested in improving their investing skills.

Jeff Morris is CPA in Nashville and has worked with investments and personal finance since 1992.

Cents-able advice for teenagers Don’t let anyone tell you that you’re too young to make money, say two new books for budding teenage millionaires. How to be a Teenage Millionaire offers the young entrepreneur advice on business ideas, start-up funding, even advertising strategies for kids whose marketable ideas can’t wait until after college. StreetWise: A Guide for Teen Investors says kids can invest the money they make. It teaches teens how to pick stocks, handle the ups and downs of the market, covers tax concerns, and even pitches Wall Street careers teenagers might want to tackle someday. For parents who worry these books will turn their kids into money-hungry land sharks, don’t sweat. While both books offer sound small business and investing advice, the real power of these books is to build money-making and spending confidence for teens who may feel they have no monetary power. Teenage Millionaire says babysitting is a surprisingly effective way to earn income and build a business. StreetWise makes age-old investing advice on compound interest sound appealing. Far from luring your teenager with the promise of glittering riches, these books teach teens to earn and save their money. After reading them, teens might be willing to share their newfound financial wisdom with the rest of the family even their parents.

Everyone knows the fable of the slow but steady tortoise and the excitable, ambitious hare. One animal won the famous race, and the other didn’t. Implicitly we know why. Once upon a time lessons were conveyed through stories, passing collected common wisdom from one age to the next without overt preaching.

Stories give us possibilities. In them we travel down the same path traveled by the person telling the story. We see what he saw and heard and felt. We don’t need scientific explanations of the event or statistics to tell us what happened. A story is short-hand to an experience. It is also a lesson.

Three recent business books rely on the short-hand of parables to help business executives consider approaches to leadership challenges. Some things can’t be communicated with statistics; their nature is most clearly revealed with stories. Leadership is one of those illusory qualities.

The Art of Possibility: Transforming Professional and Personal Life is an energetic new book that beautifully illustrates this idea. Written by Boston Philharmonic Orchestra conductor Benjamin Zander and his wife, Rosamund Stone Zander, a family therapist, The Art of Possibility whisks together a collection of stories, psychology, and references to classical music for an unusual illustration of the Zanders’ unique personal approach to developing leadership potential. One of the unusual steps they recommend is "Giving an A" individually telling every employee he or she is the most important member of a firm to promote risk-taking and allow team-building. Rule Number 6 don’t take yourself too seriously encourages team members to have fun with work and erase calculating personal competitiveness that destroys goal reaching. As anyone who has been on a team (or even a PTA committee) knows, almost everyone who attends a meeting brings along personal issues. Good leaders, say the Zanders, help people find the possibilities to be the best at whatever they do.

The Zanders’ steps to leadership possibility rely on common sense. We all know the things they say are true, but it’s the stories that best illustrate how to implement positive leadership changes in our own workplace. Like any good parable, it’s that little kernel of the unsaid in Zanders’ stories that allows this book to impart real wisdom. The Zanders tell this story: when he retired from the Supreme Court, Justice Thurgood Marshall was asked to name his proudest accomplishment. He replied, "That I did the best I could with what I had." Zander says Marshall gave himself an A. He gave himself infinite possibilities for success. Through this story the Zanders convey the short-hand message that everyone has the possibility of success.

Learning Journeys: Top Management Experts Share Hard-Earned Lessons on Becoming Great Mentors and Leaders, edited by Marshall Goldsmith, Beverly L. Kaye, and Ken Shelton, shares the Zanders’ enthusiasm for story-telling. More than 35 American business executives relate the hard knocks, mistakes, and plain old-fashioned good luck that made them successful executives.

Written in narrative style, Learning Journeys accomplishes in 37 short chapters what a whole volume of MBA texts cannot tell you: leadership is a life-long process. In Learning Journeys, recognizable names in leadership literature share intimate tales of growth and learning. These journeys may be short stories but all share lessons of found personal truths. Executive trainers recognize stories are the foundation for creating an "aha!" moment for employees.

Collective voices, the authors say, will allow almost everyone to find a resonant personal voice.

Elizabeth Pinchot, author and executive coach, says sometimes it takes an elbow in the ribs to make leadership potential appear. Attending a conference, she relates, noted anthropologist Margaret Mead entered the conference hall, sat down in the chair next to her, and fell asleep. Pinchot says the conference turned toward debunking the ecological agricultural issues Pinchot had studied, but Pinchot was too nervous to raise her voice above the crowd. She started to talk to herself in hushed tones, arguing her point. From Mead’s chair a quick elbow was dispatched to Pinchot’s ribs. "Stand up and make yourself heard," Mead hissed. Yes, it’s true; sometimes we all need a mental elbow in the ribs.

The Leadership Investment: How the World’s Best Organizations Gain Strategic Advantage Through Leadership Development, by Robert M. Fuller and Marshall Goldsmith, follows a more traditional business case-study model. The theme of this new book is that companies which develop outstanding leadership within their ranks can weather any business storm. Companies as different and diverse as computer-maker Hewlett-Packard or the World Bank identify key leadership problems and solve those problems to ensure long-term success. The Leadership Investment puts the parables of possibility to the test.

One of six organizations profiled, the World Bank recently restructured its leadership training program to include a Grass Roots Immersion Program. GRIP requires bank employees to live for a week in a poor area potentially served by World Bank programs. Hewlett-Packard developed ethnic and gender diversity programs to attract and retain the best and brightest people to run the company’s many units. Both companies play out the parables of possibility on the real-life playing field.

The Leadership Investment identifies leadership potential at a company-wide level, and the stories of change are macro-level parables. What can happen to an organization when fresh bold thinking emerges? The Leadership Investment tells you. Sharon Secor is a business writer based in Nashville.

Author Deborah J. Swiss spent a year conducting interviews with 52 successful men to determine how they think and act in the workplace. The results are revealed in The Male Mind At Work: A Woman’s Guide to Working With Men, a provocative guide for women to the way male co-workers approach the workplace and what they think about their female counterparts. For any woman who thought swinging a golf club might help her chances to succeed in the marketplace, Swiss offers a different remedy: learn to promote women’s unique strengths. Far from male-bashing, Swiss offers inside information for women serious about their careers and gives tools to bridge the gender gap at work.

Sharon Secor is a business writer based in Nashville.