Cow Three Ways
Suppose you wanted to butcher a cow. Here are three ways to look at a cow. To be clear; say you are a butcher and you want to butcher a cow into cuts of meat from the cow.
The first approach is to look at the cow as one big thing and then butcher the cow. The disadvantage with this approach is that you cannot really identify and work with the parts of the cow in a standard way because no standard terminology has been defined which you could use to refer to the specific parts of a cow.
The second approach to working with a cow is to have standardized the parts of a cow, here we are focused on the cuts of meat that come from a cow. You could have also focused on the different organs of the cow, but we are focusing on something else. So, say, when a butcher refers to "chuck" other butchers understand because of the standard name "chuck" which is assigned to a specific part of a cow.
The third approach to working with a cow is to have the different terms for the parts of a cow but view the parts without context. This might be comparable to "the atomic approach". You know the individual atoms of a cow but you don't really know how the different atoms fit together.
You can look at a financial report the same way. You can look at the financial report only as one big thing because you did not take the time to break the report into different pieces. You can name the different pieces of a financial report by creating a standard and organize those pieces into a model. Or, you can break down the individual pieces and try and use those pieces without the model and see how that goes.
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