General Books - Page 3

The Machine That Changed the World: The Story of Lean Production-- Toyota's Secret Weapon in the Global Car Wars That Is Now Revolutionizing World Industry

James P. Womack, Daniel T. Jones, Daniel Roos

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Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

When The Machine That Changed the World was first published in 1990, Toyota was half the size of General Motors. Today Toyota is passing GM as the world's largest auto maker and is the most consistently successful global enterprise of the past fifty years. This management classic was the first book to reveal Toyota's lean production system that is the basis for its enduring success.

Now reissued with a new Foreword and Afterword, Machine contrasts two fundamentally different business systems -- lean versus mass, two very different ways of thinking about how humans work together to create value. Based on the largest and most thorough study ever undertaken of any industry -- MIT's five-year, fourteen-country International Motor Vehicle Program -- this book describes the entire managerial system of lean production.

Nearly twenty years ago, Womack, Jones, and Roos provided a comprehensive description of the entire lean system. They exhaustively documented its advantages over the mass production model pioneered by General Motors and predicted that lean production would eventually triumph. Indeed, they argued that it would triumph not just in manufacturing but in every value-creating activity from health care to retail to distribution.

Today The Machine That Changed the World provides enduring and essential guidance to managers and leaders in every industry seeking to transform traditional enterprises into exemplars of lean success.

Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism

Ha-Joon Chang

Amazon Price: $11.56 List Price: $17.00 Not yet published By: Bloomsbury Press

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Total reviews: 25 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

“Lucid, deeply informed, and enlivened with striking illustrations, this penetrating study could be entitled ‘Economics in the Real World.’ Chang reveals the yawning gap between standard doctrines concerning economic development and what really has taken place from the origins of the industrial revolution until today. His incisive analysis shows how, and why, prescriptions based on reigning doctrines have caused severe harm, particularly to the most vulnerable and defenseless, and are likely to continue to do so.”—Noam Chomsky

Using irreverent wit, an engagingly personal style, and a battery of examples, Chang blasts holes in the “World I s Flat” orthodoxy of T homas Friedman and other liberal economists who argue that only unfettered capitalism and wide-open international trade can lift struggling nations out of poverty. On the contrary, Chang shows, today’s economic superpowers—from the U .S. to Britain to his native Korea—all attained prosperity by shameless protectionism and government intervention in industry. We have conveniently forgotten this fact, telling ourselves a fairy tale about the magic of free trade and—via our proxies such as the World Bank, I nternational Monetary Fund, and World T rade Organization—ramming policies that suit ourselves down the throat of the developing world.

Globality: Competing with Everyone from Everywhere for Everything

Hal Sirkin, Jim Hemerling, Arindam Bhattacharya

Amazon Price: $17.81 List Price: $26.99 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Business Plus Amazon Marketplace: 52 new & used starting at $12.28

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Total reviews: 8 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Globalization is about Americans outsourcing product development and services to other countries. Globality is the next step, where rapidly developing economies from around the world are now competing with us head to head. The authors present a strong case that the economic climate in which we have lived is going to change in unprecedented ways.

"...their insights into the competitive battle in emerging markets are so keen." -William J. Holstein of The New York Times

"Many American chief executives, it turns out, are aiming at emerging markets...And they will find many insights into prevailing in those battles in this book." -William J. Holstein of The New York Times

"...for any corporate strategist pondering the challenges and opportunities of globalization, this book is an indispensable guide." -John Cummings of Business Finance

"While the global economy has been a hot topic for at least two decades, it is in constant need of updating ...GLOBALITY...does the job nicely." - BNET

"[This] vividly detailed tome describes the latest shift in globalization from a one-way street of Western domination to an increasingly competitive global playing field, where businesses from once-discounted nations are solidifying their standing." - CIO Insight

"Whatever the next New World Order turns out to be, the advice in GLOBALITY will come in useful, for multinationals and individual workers alike."-Business Pundit

"A smart discourse on how local companies in developing economies, such
as China, India and Brazil, are bucking tradition and going for broke on
their own terms..."-BNET

"This book is a must-read for leaders of companies in the developed world who want to get into the globality act and stay in it."- Cecil Johnson, McClatchy-Tribune News

"Get ready for a new wave of challengers, 'bursting their way onto the big stage.' So say the three authors of this smart analysis about the latest developments in global competition" - Andrea Sachs of TIME

Globalizing Capital

Barry J. Eichengreen

List Price: $75.00 By: Princeton University Press Amazon Marketplace: 8 new & used starting at $12.95

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Total reviews: 6 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

The importance of the International Monetary System is evident in the daily news stories about fluctuating currencies and in dramatic events, such as the recent reversals in the Mexican economy. It has become increasingly apparent that one cannot understand the international economy without knowing how its monetary system operates. This volume tells the story of the international financial system over the past 150 years. It is intended not only for economists, but also for a general audience of historians, political scientists, professionals in government and business, and anyone with a broad interest in international economic and political relations. The book demonstrates that insights into the International Monetary System and effective principles for governing it can result only if is seen as a historical phenomenon extending from the gold standard period to interwar instability, then to Bretton Woods and, finally, to the post-1973 period of fluctuating currencies. Eichengreen analyzes the shift from pegged to floating exchange rates in the 1970s, and ascribes that change to the growing capital mobility that has made pegged rates difficult to maintain. However, he shows that capital mobility was also high prior to World War I, yet this did not prevent the maintenance of fixed exchange rates. What was critical for the successful maintenance of fixed exchange rates during that period was the fact that governments were relatively insulated from democratic politics and, thus, from pressure to trade off exchange rate stability for other goals, such as the reduction of unemployment. Today, pegging exchange rates would require very radical reforms of a sort that governments are understandably reluctant to embrace. The implication seems undeniable: floating rates are here to stay. Barry Eichengreen is the author of "Golder Fetters: The Gold Standard and the Great Depression, 1918-1939".

World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability

Amy Chua

List Price: $26.00 By: Doubleday Amazon Marketplace: 39 new & used starting at $0.88

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Total reviews: 90 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Every few years, a book is published about America's role in the world and the changing contest of global affairs that gets everyone thinking in a new way. Amy Chua's WORLD ON FIRE will have exactly that kind of impact on the debate of how the world has changed in light of the events of last September.

Apostles of globalization, such as Thomas Friedman, believe that exporting free markets and democracy to other countries will increase peace and prosperity throughout the developing world; Amy Chua is the anti-Thomas Friedman. Her book wil be a dash of cold water in the face of globalists, techno-utopians, and liberal triumphalists as she shows that just the opposite has happened: When global markets open, ethnic conflict worsens and politics turns ugly and violent.

Drawing on examples from around the world--from Africa and Asia to Russia and Latin America--Chua examines how free markets do not spread wealth evenly throughout the whole of these societies. Instead they produce a new class of extremely wealthy plutocrats--individuals as rich as nations. Almost always members of a minority group--Chinese in the Philippines, Croatians in the former Yugoslavia, whites in Latin America, Indians in East Africa, Jews in post-communist Russia--these "market-dominant minorities" have become targets of violent hatred. Adding democracy to this volatile mix unleashes supressed ethnic hatreds and brings to power ethnonationalist governments that pursue aggressive policies of confiscation and revenge. Chua further shows how individual countries are often viewed as dominant minorities, explaining the phenomena of ethnic resentment in the Arab-Israeli conflict and the rising tide of anti-American sentiment around the world. This more than anything accounts for the visceral hatred of Americans that has been expressed in recent acts of terrorism.

Bold and original, WORLD ON FIRE is a perceptive examination of the far-reaching effects of exporting capitalism with democracy and its potentially catastrophic results.

Inside the House of Money: Top Hedge Fund Traders on Profiting in the Global Markets

Steven Drobny

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Total reviews: 56 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Inside the House of Money lifts the veil on the typically opaque world of hedge funds, offering a rare glimpse at how today's highest paid money managers approach their craft. Author Steven Drobny demystifies how these star traders make billions for well-heeled investors, revealing their theories, strategies and approaches to markets. Drobny, cofounder of Drobny Global Advisors, an international macroeconomic research and advisory firm, has tapped into his network and beyond in order assemble this collection of thirteen interviews with the industry's best minds. Along the way, you'll get an inside look at firsthand trading experiences through some of the major world financial crises of the last few decades. Whether Russian bonds, Pakistani stocks, Southeast Asian currencies or stakes in African brewing companies, no market or instrument is out of bounds for these elite global macro hedge fund managers. Highly accessible and filled with in-depth expert opinion, Inside the House of Money is a must-read for financial professionals and anyone else interested in understanding the complexities at stake in world financial markets.

"The ruminations of supposedly hush-hush hedge fund operators are richly illuminating." --New York Times

Eat the Rich: A Treatise on Economics (O'Rourke, P. J.)

P. J. O'Rourke

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Total reviews: 108 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

How to Get Rich: Write a Book that Says Nothing but Makes People Laugh 2 out of 5 stars.
2 of 15 people found this review helpful.

P.J. O'Rourke manages to dizzy his audience with a tautological series of stories, comparsions, and self-defacement and then nauseatingly spews empty paragraphs. Don't know what a tautology is? Read this book, you'll figure it out.

An author either takes pride in his ignorance or banks on his authority. O'Rourke attempts to do both, the former almost always shining through the latter. Coming away, you'll feel like you learned something. Of course you did! It just took him 10 angles, 5 anecdotes, and 8 less-than-appropriate similes to convey a Macro 101 principle. If you want a good laugh, read this book. If you want someone who knows what they're talking about, keep looking

Editorial Review:

In the tradition of his contemporary classic Parliament of Whores, the man who The Wall Street Journal calls "the funniest writer in America" is back with Eat the Rich, in which he takes on the global economy. P. J. O'Rourke leads you on an hysterical whirlwind world tour from the "good capitalism" of Wall Street to the "bad socialism" of Cuba in search of the answer to an age-old question: "Why do some places prosper and thrive, while others just suck?" With stops in Albania, Sweden, Hong Kong, Moscow, and Tanzania, P.J. brings along his incomparable wit and finds hilarity wherever he goes.

Business Its Legal Ethical and Global Environment

Marianne M. Jennings

List Price: $33.95 By: Thomson South-Western Amazon Marketplace: 12 new & used starting at $0.94

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 6 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Overall, I recommend it. 4 out of 5 stars.
6 of 6 people found this review helpful.

This book was assigned to one of my MBA classes. The book itself was a good source of reference not only for my business law class but also to other two classes. The book's language is simple and easy to understand. The only flaw I found about this this book was that some cases were complex and I had to refer to actual law books and regulations. Overall, I recommend this book.

Editorial Review:

This highly effective text provides superior legal, ethical, and regulatory coverage while fully integrating practical business practices for tomorrow's business managers. Legal topics are explored and explained through real-world business examples (over 300 references to business are made in the text). In addition to a solid foundation in the law, students learn valuable legal and ethical reasoning skills through a variety of critical thinking exercises. Readers receive -- and appreciate -- practical advice on when it is necessary to call a lawyer, how best to use legal aid services and how to avoid legal trouble in the first place. This text fulfills current curricular and AACSB accrediting standards.

Business Its Legal Ethical and Global Environment

Marianne M. Jennings

List Price: $33.95 By: Thomson South-Western Amazon Marketplace: 12 new & used starting at $0.94

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Subjects -> Business & Investing -> Business Life -> Ethics
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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 6 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Overall, I recommend it. 4 out of 5 stars.
6 of 6 people found this review helpful.

This book was assigned to one of my MBA classes. The book itself was a good source of reference not only for my business law class but also to other two classes. The book's language is simple and easy to understand. The only flaw I found about this this book was that some cases were complex and I had to refer to actual law books and regulations. Overall, I recommend this book.

Editorial Review:

This highly effective text provides superior legal, ethical, and regulatory coverage while fully integrating practical business practices for tomorrow's business managers. Legal topics are explored and explained through real-world business examples (over 300 references to business are made in the text). In addition to a solid foundation in the law, students learn valuable legal and ethical reasoning skills through a variety of critical thinking exercises. Readers receive -- and appreciate -- practical advice on when it is necessary to call a lawyer, how best to use legal aid services and how to avoid legal trouble in the first place. This text fulfills current curricular and AACSB accrediting standards.