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Selling Sickness: How the World's Biggest Pharmaceutical Companies Are Turning Us All Into Patients

Ray Moynihan, Alan Cassels

Selling Sickness: How the World's Biggest Pharmaceutical Companies Are Turning Us All Into Patients Ray Moynihan, Alan Cassels Amazon Price: $10.85
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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 27 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Thirty years ago, Henry Gadsden, the head of Merck, one of the world's largest drug companies, told Fortune magazine that he wanted Merck to be more like chewing gum maker Wrigley's. It had long been his dream to make drugs for healthy people so that Merck could "sell to everyone." Gadsden's dream now drives the marketing machinery of the most profitable industry on earth. Drug companies are systematically working to widen the very boundaries that define illness, and the markets for medication grow ever larger. Mild problems are redefined as serious illness and common complaints are labeled as medical conditions requiring drug treatments. Runny noses are now allergic rhinitis, PMS has become a psychiatric disorder, and hyperactive children have ADD. When it comes to conditions like high cholesterol or low bone density, being "at risk" is sold as a disease. Selling Sickness reveals how widening the boundaries of illness and lowering the threshold for treatments is creating millions of new patients and billions in new profits, in turn threatening to bankrupt health-care systems all over the world. As more and more of ordinary life becomes medicalized, the industry moves ever closer to Gadsden's dream: "selling to everyone."

The Oil and the Glory: The Pursuit of Empire and Fortune on the Caspian Sea

Steve LeVine

The Oil and the Glory: The Pursuit of Empire and Fortune on the Caspian Sea Steve LeVine Amazon Price: $18.45
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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 20 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Remote, forbidding, and volatile, the Caspian Sea long tantalized the world with its vast oil reserves. But outsiders, blocked by the closed Soviet system, couldn’t get to it. Then the Soviet Union collapsed, and a wholesale rush into the region erupted. Along with oilmen, representatives of the world’s leading nations flocked to the Caspian for a share of the thirty billion barrels of proven oil reserves at stake, and a tense geopolitical struggle began. The main players were Moscow and Washington–the former seeking to retain control of its satellite states, and the latter intent on dislodging Russia to the benefit of the West.
The Oil and the Glory is the gripping account of this latest phase in the epochal struggle for control of the earth’s “black gold.” Steve LeVine, who was based in the region for The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and Newsweek, weaves an astonishing tale of high-stakes political gamesmanship, greed, and scandal, set in one of the most opaque corners of the world. In LeVine’s telling, the world’s energy giants jockey for position in the rich Kazakh and Azeri oilfields, while superpowers seek to gain a strategic foothold in the region and to keep each other in check. At the heart of the story is the contest to build and operate energy pipelines out of the landlocked region, the key to controlling the Caspian and its oil. The oil pipeline that resulted, the longest in the world, is among Washington’s greatest foreign policy triumphs in at least a decade and a half.
Along the way, LeVine introduces such players as James Giffen, an American moneyman who was also the political “fixer” for oil companies eager to do business on the Caspian and the broker for Kazakhstan’s president and ministers; John Deuss, the flamboyant Dutch oil trader who won big but lost even bigger; Heydar Aliyev, the oft-misunderstood Azeri president who transcended his past as a Soviet Politburo member and masterminded a scheme to loosen Russian control over its former colonies in the Caspian region; and all manner of rogues, adventurers, and others drawn by the irresistible pull of untold riches and the possible “final frontier” of the fossil-fuel era. The broader story is of the geopolitical questions of the Caspian oil bonanza, such as whether Russia can be a trusted ally and trading partner with the West, and what Washington’s entry into this important but chaotic region will mean for its long-term stability.
In an intense and suspenseful narrative, The Oil and the Glory is the definitive chronicle of events that are understood by few, but whose political and economic impact will be both profound and lasting.

"The collapse of the Soviet Union was a big opportunity for Big Oil, whose exploits are detailed in this fast-paced work of political and economic reportage by Wall Street Journal energy correspondent LeVine.
Westerners had been sniffing for black gold in Russia and its satellites long before the empire disintegrated, notes the author. Averell Harriman, “the Harvard-trained scion of nineteenth-century robber baron Edward Harriman,” tried his hand at the business before turning to manganese mining, while Armand Hammer “became a money launderer for the Bolsheviks, sneaked cash to secret Bolshevik agents in the United States, and profited handsomely as the representative in Russia of some thirty American companies.” Hammer set the tone for the Americans who flocked to the Caspian in the first years of the Clinton presidency, which maneuvered for the construction of an east-west oil pipeline that, by reversing the old pattern of Central Asian materials going north to Russia and coming back as products for sale, “would favor the West and disfavor Russia.” Not a nice way to treat a fledgling democracy, but the oil scouts, of course, considered Russia a rival for Central-Asian resources second only to Iran, with its heartfelt and long-standing enmity toward the United States in the region and abroad. These scouts–the first among equals being LeVine’s heart-of-darkness antihero, Jim Giffen–kept their distance when Russia still had control over the area, spurning a Gorbachev-era program to allow foreign co-ownership. But they rushed to support separatist movements and encouraged ethnic and political divisions that opened the door to an even bigger share of the wealth. The tale of Giffen’s rise and fall (the latter for perhaps surprising reasons) occupies much of the later pages, but he never loses sight of the bigger picture: namely, Central Asia as oil lamp and potential powder keg in the realpolitik of the next few years.
A complex story rendered comprehensible, with much drama and intrigue."--KIRKUS

Form Your Own Limited Liability Company (book with CD-Rom)

Anthony Mancuso

Form Your Own Limited Liability Company (book with CD-Rom) Anthony Mancuso Amazon Price: $29.69
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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 16 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

A Lot of Information about this new Business Model 5 out of 5 stars.
20 of 23 people found this review helpful.

A limited liability company is a relatively recent addition to the traditional forms of companies. It has some fo the advantages of a corporation, and the tax advantages of a partnership, sole proprietorship or corporation depending on the desires of the owners. It is not suitable for all organizations, but if you are considering one, here is the place to start.

If you go to an attorney to get him to set up an limited liability corporation, he will ask you a bunch of questions, write down the answers and get his secretary or paralegal to type these answers into their standard LLC form on their word processor. She will then press the print button and you get billed for a thousand dollars or so.

Anthony Mancuso is a corporations attorney licensed to practice law in California. He decided to take his standard corporate form and put it out in the form of a book. In the book he will ask you a bunch of questions, taking the time to point out the alternatives (that a lawyer probably doesn't do unless asked. You then take his standard corporation form (supplied on a CD) and fill in the answers. Files these with the appropriate offices and you have a corporation for only the filing fees the state charges.

Well, maybe it's not quite that easy. The LLC is a new form of business. I'd suggest that you read and consider the forms contained here, but then I'd have an attorney in your state review them, just to be sure.

Editorial Review:

Everything you need to form your own LLC!

Limited liability companies provide the most flexible way of doing business: You get both the tax benefits of a partnership, and the personal protection from business debts provided to corporations.

Form Your Own Limited Liability Company provides you with the step-by-step instructions and forms you need to form an LLC in your state, without the expense of hiring a lawyer. This bestseller covers how to:

  • choose an LLC name
  • prepare and file articles of organization
  • decide on the best management structure
  • create an operating agreement
  • take care of ongoing legal and tax paperwork

    The 5th edition has been carefully revised and updated to reflect the latest federal regulations, as well as the most current laws of all 50 states. All the forms you need are included on a CD-ROM.
  • The Reckoning

    David Halberstam

    The Reckoning David Halberstam List Price: $10.00
    By: Avon Books (P)
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    Customer Reviews:
    Total reviews: 21 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

    Relevant even today 4 out of 5 stars.
    3 of 3 people found this review helpful.

    If "The Reckoning" is not a classic then certainly it is an authoritative account of Nissan's assault on the U.S. market (and Ford's subsequent demise). The account of the Big Three's arrogance has been told many times since Halberstam published this book, but Halberstam deserves a lot of credit for so much of his book being so relevant to what American automakers are facing today. Insert big SUVs and big trucks any time Halberstam talks about Big Cars = Big Profits and you've got a pretty good idea of what's going on today with Ford and GM and their reluctance to come out with small, fuel-efficient vehicles in favor of high-margin SUVs. It is necessary to point out, though, that even though American auto executives were truly arrogant and complacent with their market share, Japanese manufacturing (lean production) was a paradigm shift. In order to compete on quality with the Japanese American auto would have had to spend billions of dollars on new plants and capital equipment (in essence, almost "betting the farm" that Demings' TQM was the wave of the future). The Japanese had the distinct advantage of having to start from scratch.

    Editorial Review:

    Award-winning author David Halberstam's The Reckoning gives a riveting account of the most decisive economic confrontation of this century--between Detroit's Ford Motor Company and Japan's Nissan. Here are young Ford, renegade Iacocca, visionary Katayama--everyone needed to reveal the crucial nuances behind two nations competing for commercial supremacy. HC: Morrow.

    Profit from the Peak: The End of Oil and the Greatest Investment Event of the Century (Angel Series)

    Brian Hicks, Chris Nelder

    Profit from the Peak: The End of Oil and the Greatest Investment Event of the Century (Angel Series) Brian Hicks, Chris Nelder Amazon Price: $18.45
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    Customer Reviews:
    Total reviews: 20 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

    Well researched yet very readable 5 out of 5 stars.
    2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

    Most of time while reading this book I was thinking, "Why didn't I know that?" I would recommend this well written and easy-to-understand book to everyone who wants to gain a broad understanding about what is going on with energy and oil. The target market appears to be the intelligent layman with helpful hints on how your investing strategy might benefit. Suddenly, when watching the talking heads you will spot the horrible, over-simplified, childish thinking that we are bombarded with every day, especially from the silver bullet types. It is well researched and referenced, and I highly recommend it.

    Editorial Review:

    Profit from the Peak contains the information you need to successfully navigate the end of our oil-based economy. It takes a hard look at the future of oil and gas, examines how you can effectively invest in these resources, and profit from energy alternatives that are poised to power the years ahead. Along the way, this book also explores the potential, and possible limitations, of each major energy source, while carefully cover the investing angles of each one.

    Guide to Analysing Companies (Economist (Hardcover))

    Bob Vause

    Guide to Analysing Companies (Economist (Hardcover)) Bob Vause Amazon Price: $19.77
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    Customer Reviews:
    Total reviews: 5 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

    Detailed knowledge volume 4 out of 5 stars.
    13 of 17 people found this review helpful.

    Rather than giving a bunch of formulas to use in Excel, this book actually tries to impart you some knowledge of real world.
    While the knowledge maybe old hat for experienced stock analysts, it is NOT for new comers to the field.
    And for the Excel script MBAs who try to reduce everything to an equation, sorry dudes.
    This book attempts to make u first understand the purpose, goal, and results you would get in a analysis, and then goes about teaching you that analysis.

    Editorial Review:

    A clear and well informed guide for investors, analysts, and students, this newly revised 4th edition answers many questions and challenges in analysing companies and results including: How can anyone tell how well a company is managed and performing? What ratios and indicators are truly useful in assessing performance? How does one decode the real story in a company's reported results? How can companies operating n different sectors—or different countries—be compared? How can danger signs on the corporate horizon be spotted?

    The Partnership Charter: How To Start Out Right With Your New Business Partnership (or Fix The One You're In)

    David Gage

    The Partnership Charter: How To Start Out Right With Your New Business Partnership (or Fix The One You're In) David Gage Amazon Price: $11.90
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    Subjects -> Business & Investing -> Management & Leadership -> Decision-Making & Problem Solving

    Customer Reviews:
    Total reviews: 20 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

    Editorial Review:

    For the 30 million business partners and co-owners, the essential guide for building, launching, and sustaining successful ventures.

    In The Partnership Charter, psychologist and business mediation expert David Gage offers a comprehensive guide to the art of establishing and maintaining a business partnership. The centerpiece of his approach is the Partnership Charter, a document that clearly outlines the goals, expectations, responsibilities, and relationships of the principals. The charter identifies potential sources of conflict and how they will be resolved, while addressing such sensitive issues as personal styles, values, money, and power. Illustrating every principle through engaging stories drawn from Gage's front-line experience consulting to business partners, as well as interviews with the founding partners of such successful businesses as Progressive Insurance Company and Manpower, Inc., The Partnership Charter dispels common myths and presents a practical framework for launching, building, and sustaining a thriving business partnership.

    The Toyota Way: 14 Management Principles from the World's Greatest Manufacturer

    Jeffrey Liker

    The Toyota Way: 14 Management Principles from the World's Greatest Manufacturer Jeffrey Liker Amazon Price: $18.48
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    Customer Reviews:
    Total reviews: 83 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

    To understand this company's success, first understand its DNA 5 out of 5 stars.
    3 of 3 people found this review helpful.


    I read this book when it was first published in 2004 and recently re-read it, curious to know how well Jeffrey Liker's explanation of Toyota's management principles and lean production values have held up. My conclusion? Very well.

    No good purpose would be served by merely listing the 14 management principles, out of context. Liker devotes a separate chapter to each, carefully explaining not only what it is but also how it guides and informs everyone at all levels and in all areas of the Toyota organization. What Liker also accomplishes, and what cannot be adequately summarized in a review such as this, is to explain how all 12 principles are interdependent. Together, they serve as the company's DNA. In the Preface, he recalls asking Fujio Cho (President of Toyota Motor Company) what was unique about his company's remarkable success. His answer was quite simple: "The key to the Toyota Way and what makes Toyota stand out is not any of the individual elements...But what is important is having all the elements together as a system. It must be practiced every day in a very consistent manner." To understand Toyota's success, therefore, it is important to understand that lean production is not a methodology, it is literally a way of life.

    The 14 principles are divided into four sections:

    Having a long-term philosophy that drives a long-term approach to building a learning organization

    Absolute faith that the right process will produce the right results

    Adding value to the organization by developing its people and partners

    Continuously solving root problems to drive organizational learning

    As Liker points out, it is important to understand that the Toyota Production System is not the Toyota Way. TPS is the most systematic and highly developed example of what the principles of the Toyota Way can accomplish. The Toyota Way consists of the foundational principles of the Toyota culture, which allows the TPS to function so effectively.

    How does lean improvement differ from traditional process improvement? "Briefly, wheras the traditional approach to process improvement focuses on local efficiencies, in a lean improvement initiatuve, most of the progress comes from a large number of non-value steps being squeezed out. For example, overproduction, delays, and wasted motion. In fact, the ultimate goal of lean manufacturing is to apply the ideal of one-piece flow to all business operations, from product design to launch, order taking, physical production, and shipment."Some of the differences are subtle but no less significant.

    To repeat, anyone can read this book and then uncerstand what the Toyota Way is. Possessing a gourmet chef's recipe, however, does not ensure that a gourmet meal will be prepared. Toyota has its own way. Other companies must develop theirs based on their own "roots." In other words, lead from their traditional strengths but not be limited by them. In fact, companies may need to re-invent themselves, not once but several times. That is what Toyota did...and continues to do. Use operational excellence as a strategic weapon and the rewards and results will far outweigh the great effort required.

    That said, Liker does provide 13 "general tips." The first is to begin with action in the technical system and then follow quickly with cultural change. Other suggestions include learning by doing first and training second, using value stream mapping to develop future state visions to help "learn to see," and being opportunistic in identifying opportunities for big financial impacts. They are provided with brief but precise explanations on Pages 302-307.

    It remains for each person who reads this book to determine which of the 14 management principles are most relevant to her or his own enterprise, and then to determine how to translate each into effective action. Presumably Liker agrees with me that most companies have 3-5 areas in which "lean" initiatives are urgently needed. Developing an execution plan can be tricky, however, because all business transaction involve a process of some kind and improvement of one process inevitably has a direct impact on several others. Here's one possibility, suggested to me by a COO to whom I gave a copy of this book: Read the final chapter, Chapter 22, first. It's title is "Build Your Own Lean Learning Enterprise, Borrowing from the Toyota Way." He thinks that will provide an appropriate framework within which to proceed from Gary Convis' Foreword and Liker's Preface to the conclusion of Chapter 21. That suggestion is worth consideration.

    Those who share my high regard for this book are urged to check out Liker's Toyota Culture: The Heart and Soul of the Toyota Way as well as Matthew Mays' The Elegant Solution: Toyota's Formula for Mastering Innovation, David Magee's How Toyota Became Toyota: Leadership Lessons from the World's Greatest Car company, and What Is Lean Six Sigma? co-authored by Michael L. George, David Rowlands, and Bill Kastle.

    Editorial Review:

    This is the first book that explains the business philosophy behind Toyota's success.

    Innovation Nation: How America Is Losing Its Innovation Edge, Why It Matters, and What We Can Do to Get It Back

    John Kao

    Innovation Nation: How America Is Losing Its Innovation Edge, Why It Matters, and What We Can Do to Get It Back John Kao Amazon Price: $17.16
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    Customer Reviews:
    Total reviews: 11 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

    Editorial Review:

    Not long ago, Americans could rightfully feel confident in our preeminence in the world economy. The United States set the pace as the world's leading innovator: from the personal computer to the internet, from Wall Street to Hollywood, from the decoding of the genome to the emergence of Web 2.0, we led the way and the future was ours. So how is it, bestselling author and leading expert on innovation John Kao asks, that today Finland is the world's most competitive economy? That U.S. students rank twenty-fourth in the world in math literacy and twenty-sixth in problem-solving ability? That in 2005 and 2006 combined, in a reverse brain drain, 30,000 highly trained professionals left the United States to return to their native India?

    Even as the United States has lost standing in the world community because of the war in Iraq, Kao warns, the country is losing its edge in economic leadership as well. The future of our prosperity, and of our national security, is at serious risk. But it doesn't have to be this way. Based on his in-depth experience advising many of the world's leading companies and studying cutting-edge innovation "best practices" in the most dynamic hot spots of innovation both in the United States and around the world, Kao argues that the United States still has the capability not only to regain our competitive edge, but to take a bold step out ahead of the global community and secure a leadership role in the twenty-first century. We must, though, take serious and concerted action fast.

    First offering a stunning, troubling portrait of just how serious is the erosion in recent years of U.S. competitiveness in innovation, Kao then takes readers on a fascinating tour of the leading innovation centers, such as those in Singapore, Denmark, and Finland, which are trumping us in their more focused and creative approaches to fueling innovation. He then lays out a groundbreaking plan for a national innovation strategy that would empower the United States to actually innovate the process of innovation: to marshal our vast resources of talent and infrastructure in the particular ways that his studies of innovation have shown lead to transformative results.

    Innovation Nation is vital reading for all those Americans who are troubled by the great challenges the United States faces in the ever-more-competitive economy of our twenty-first-century world.

    Entertainment Industry Economics: A Guide for Financial Analysis

    Harold L. Vogel

    Entertainment Industry Economics: A Guide for Financial Analysis Harold L. Vogel Amazon Price: $42.74
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    Customer Reviews:
    Total reviews: 9 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

    Insightful! 4 out of 5 stars.
    6 of 8 people found this review helpful.

    Author and entertainment industry analyst Harold L. Vogel sheds valuable light on the growing importance of fun in the American economy. His book shows surprising versatility, sometimes reading like an economics textbook, and other times providing an engaging and easily readable overview of the entertainment business. Vogel provides exhaustive sources and an authoritative perspective, linking the entertainment industry's technology-driven increase in productivity to the public's increased expenditures on music, movies, sports, games, theme parks and other forms of entertainment. The relatively modest attention he pays to the performing arts reflects their unfortunate status as a poor stepchild we find this book's breadth and depth impressive, and strongly recommends it to analysts, scholars and students who seek a clear picture of the economic role of entertainment.

    Editorial Review:

    In this newly revised book, Harold L. Vogel examines the business economics of the major entertainment enterprises: movies, music, television programming, broadcasting, cable, casino gambling and wagering, publishing, performing arts, sports, theme parks, and toys and games. The seventh edition has been further revised and broadened and differs from its predecessors by restructuring and repositioning the previous Internet chapter, including new material on the economics of networks and advertising, adding a new section on policy implications, and further expanding the section on recent theoretical work pertaining to box-office behaviour. The result is a comprehensive up-to-date reference guide on the economics, financing, production, and marketing of entertainment in the United States and overseas. Investors, business executives, accountants, lawyers, arts administrators, and general readers will find that the book offers an invaluable guide to how entertainment industries operate.

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