review

1. General: Orderly recall of past information in summary form for its reexamination.

2. Accounting: Financial data analysis that provides less assurance than a full audit, but more than a compilation (which provides no assurance). In a review, an auditor expresses limited assurance that the firm's financial statements do not require any material modification for them to be in conformity with the provisions GAAP.

In 1960, a professor at the Harvard Business School named Ted Levitt published an article in the Harvard Business Review entitled "Marketing Myopia." In the article, Levitt suggested that the most important question for any marketer is, "What business are you really in?" Levitt had examined a long list of successful, profitable sectors, such as the railroad industry in the early 1900s and the motion picture industry in the late 1940s, that had been blindsided by new competitors and run into severe financial problems as a result. His conclusion: Many of these industries simply misdefined the business they were in. The railroads thought of themselves as being in the railroad industry instead of transportation, and motion picture studios saw themselves in the movie business instead of entertainment.

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