Industrials Books

This the single one book you must start with in blacksmithing, and all the others are supplements. Ken

I am new to the art of blacksmithing, This book has realy opened up the world of blacksmithing to me, Would I recommend this book. You bet...I got a good deal from amazon and I feel the money was well spent..Tom

This is a great book to learn beginning blackmisthing.. I've bought or found a dozen or so books and this is the best.

Reading this book makes we want to get out into the shed , stoke up a fire and start pounding metal on the anvil.
It will enlighten you to this art and show you fundamentals of this process.
Excellent book that will open your eyes and let you appreciate the skills that are achieve by these craftspersons.

This is my 1st year to pursue blacksmithing. I have read a number of books on the subject, but I am not a seasoned smith.

I have seen recommendations for this book several places on-line, so I had high hopes. The book starts by identifying the tools, then covers a few basic projects, adds some metallurgy information, then we get a portfolio of beautiful works by Master Craftsmen. The section on performing a spark test using a grinder could have used some color photos. I would have liked a few more projects, and maybe a few more drawings.

The book was good as far as it went, although the edition that I received in 2006 had several awkwardly phrased sentences. It was almost as if the writer was interrupted in mid sentence, or went back to edit a sentence and left extra words in.

For my own library, I will keep this book, but I am still looking ...

I was first introduced to this textbook when a friend took a culinary course in college. Though I never took the course myself I found it to be a great resource and eventually bought it myself. While I use this book more as a reference than a cookbook I have had great success with those recipes I have tried (including puff pastry) and find the instructions to be very detailed. While I have not personally scaled any of these recipes down, my friend has with great success.
What I personally love about this book is that it is a great reference to turn to. When I have questions about a method I am unfamiliar with (i.e. boiling lobster) or am interested in background information about something like an herb, kind of cooking equipment, or technique, I find the answers I get here more detailed than any I've found elsewhere in cookbooks or on the internet.
Also, since I am very interested in cuisine and the restaurant business I really enjoy reading about the history of restaurants and the different positions. I think this is a great reference book for anyone who wants to supplement their cookbook collection, particularly if they have an interest in how things are done in a restaurant kitchen and the history of the industry.

While this is essentially a textbook for culinary students, On Cooking is still very accessible. I would reccommend this book to any amateur wanting to learn more about the concepts behind cooking, rather than just reading and following a recipe.

No doubt, any food lover will continue to reference this book time and time again. Worth its weight in gold!

One of the many neat features of studying at Cornell University is that, even if you're not enrolled in its famous School of Hotel Administration, you can attend one of the cooking and wine tasting classes organized especially for non-Hotel School students, and get at least a flavor of the five star culinary instruction provided by the chefs teaching at that school. (That is, you can do so if you're willing to get up an extra hour or two early on the morning of non-Hotel School student enrollment, and if you're lucky enough to beat the crowds or at least slip in as a substitute participant.) In addition to numerous recipes and pieces of valuable advice, information and memories -- particularly of the last night, on which we had to put together a four-course meal, fine dining style, complete with menu, garnishments and perfectly laid table -- Cornell's "cooking class" has enriched my kitchen by two items I have since found it very hard to do without: A professional grade chef's knife, and Sarah Labensky's and Alan Hause's "On Cooking," which we used as our textbook.

Much more than that, however, "On Cooking" is in fact a near-complete reference on everything related to the culinary arts, from the history of cooking to new foods developed in the 20th century, from sanitation and safety to nutritional values, from recipe writing to menu composition, from knifes and other pieces of equipment to edible kitchen staples, from the principles of cooking to various techniques and food presentation -- and of course, on every conceivable kind of food, from coffee, tea, spices and condiments to dairy products, stocks, sauces, soups, red and white meats, charcuterie, fish and shellfish, eggs, vegetables, potatoes, grains, pasta, salads, fruits, sandwiches, hors d'oeuvres, canapes, breads, pies, pastries, cookies, cakes, custards, creams and frozen desserts. Along the way, numerous tables, diagrams and pictures illustrate and exemplify the given information, making it easy to digest and memorize. The book concludes with an extensive bibliography and recommendations for further reading, and a detailed glossary of essential culinary terms.

Recipes are chosen to match individual chapters, and provide both a practical application and a more profound understanding of the respective chapters' subject matter. They include everything from American and international classics (assorted muffins, scrambled eggs and eggs benedict, focaccia, club, Reuben and other sandwiches, minestrone, French onion soup, gazpacho, New England clam chowder, Cesar, Roquefort, Thousand Islands and other dressings, various mayonnaises, coleslaw, cobb salad, Asian chicken salad, salade Nicoise, potato salad, Thai noodle salad, spanakopitta, grilled portabella mushrooms, carpaccio, lemon curd, hummus, various salsas, guacamole, pesto, hollandaise, bolognese, barbecue, bordelaise, bearnaise, Madeira, mornay, tartar, bechamel and other sauces, various stocks, broths and consommes, polenta, various kebabs, pilafs and risottos, paella, falafel, quiche lorraine, pizza, cannoli alla siciliana, macaroni and cheese, fettuccine Alfredo, clams casino, gravlax, oysters Rockefeller, fillet of sole bonne femme, matzo balls, duck confit, chorizo, chicken cacciatore, coq au vin, chicken curry, pico de gallo, chicken and veal fricassees, osso buco, chili con carne, Swedish meatballs, assorted burgers, meatloaf, T-bone, pepper and other steaks, cassoulet, chateaubriand, tournedos Rossini, beef Stroganoff, entrecote bordelaise, boeuf bourguignon, Hungarian goulash, ratatouille, baked beans, spaetzle, gnocchi, hush puppies, roesti potatoes, gratin dauphinois, baked potatoes, crepes, applesauce, New York cheesecake, sabayon, frangipane, assorted pies, tarts and tortes, various meringues and sorbets, creme brulee, chocolate mousse, chocolate angel food cake, sponge cake, brownies, ladyfingers, Madeleines, toll house cookies, gingerbread cookies, buche de noel, and spiced cider) to more unusual dishes such as:

Chilled cherry soup
Perfumed shrimp consomme
Beet vinaigrette
Shallot curry oil
Walnut pesto
Nopal cactus salsa
Pink peppercorn beurre blanc
Crayfish butter
Zucchini bread
Potato cheddar cheese bread
Salmon and sea bass terrine with spinach and basil
Salmon croquettes
Grilled red snapper burger with mango ketchup
Tex-Mex turkey sausage
Sauted pork medallions with red pepper and citrus
Marinated loin of venison roasted with mustard
Roast pheasant with cognac and apples
Stuffed wontons with apricot sauce
Wild rice and cranberry stuffing
Goat cheese ravioli in herbed cream sauce
Spicy sweet potato and chestnut gratin
Grits and cheddar souffle
Potato-ginger puree
Cilantro puree
Grilled seckel pear with sherry bacon vinaigrette
Balsamic raspberries
Figs with berries and honey mousse
Kirsch mousse
Pistachio citrus cheesecake
Chocolate flourless cake
English muffin loaves
Oatmeal stout ice cream
Quince jam

At 1100+ pages a veritable brick, despite its size "On Cooking" has become as much a key part of my kitchen as my chef's knife, my tea infusers, and various other pieces of equipment. I don't harbor any intentions of becoming a professional chef (nor any aspirations to even remotely that level of culinary skills), but I love to cook, and this is one of the cookbooks I'd be least likely to part with -- ever.

"Cookery is become an art, a noble science; cooks are gentlemen." -- Robert Burton, British author (1621).

Also recommended:
Around the World Cookbook
Moosewood Restaurant Cooks at Home: Fast and Easy Recipes for Any Day
Sundays at Moosewood Restaurant: Ethnic and Regional Recipes from the Cooks at the Legendary Restaurant (Cookery)
Madhur Jaffrey's World Vegetarian: More Than 650 Meatless Recipes from Around the World
Joy of Cooking: 75th Anniversary Edition - 2006

One of the many neat features of studying at Cornell University is that, even if you're not enrolled in its famous School of Hotel Administration, you can attend one of the cooking and wine tasting classes organized especially for non-Hotel School students, and get at least a flavor of the five star culinary instruction provided by the chefs teaching at that school. (That is, you can do so if you're willing to get up an extra hour or two early on the morning of non-Hotel School student enrollment, and if you're lucky enough to beat the crowds or at least slip in as a substitute participant.) In addition to numerous recipes and pieces of valuable advice, information and memories - particularly of the last night, on which we had to put together a four-course meal, fine dining style, complete with menu, garnishments and perfectly laid table - Cornell's "cooking class" has enriched my kitchen by two items I have since found it very hard to do without: A professional grade chef's knife, and Sarah Labensky's and Alan Hause's "On Cooking," which we used as our textbook.

Much more than that, however, "On Cooking" is in fact a near-complete reference on everything related to the culinary arts, from the history of cooking to new foods developed in the 20th century, from sanitation and safety to nutritional values, from recipe writing to menu composition, from knifes and other pieces of equipment to edible kitchen staples, from the principles of cooking to various techniques and food presentation - and of course, on every conceivable kind of food, from coffee, tea, spices and condiments to dairy products, stocks, sauces, soups, red and white meats, charcuterie, fish and shellfish, eggs, vegetables, potatoes, grains, pasta, salads, fruits, sandwiches, hors d'oeuvres, canapes, breads, pies, pastries, cookies, cakes, custards, creams and frozen desserts. Along the way, numerous tables, diagrams and pictures illustrate and exemplify the given information, making it easy to digest and memorize. The book concludes with an extensive bibliography and recommendations for further reading, and a detailed glossary of essential culinary terms.

Recipes are chosen to match individual chapters, and provide both a practical application and a more profound understanding of the respective chapters' subject matter. They include everything from American and international classics (assorted muffins, scrambled eggs and eggs benedict, focaccia, club, Reuben and other sandwiches, minestrone, French onion soup, gazpacho, New England clam chowder, Cesar, Roquefort, Thousand Islands and other dressings, various mayonnaises, coleslaw, cobb salad, Asian chicken salad, salade Nicoise, potato salad, Thai noodle salad, spanakopitta, grilled portabella mushrooms, carpaccio, lemon curd, hummus, various salsas, guacamole, pesto, hollandaise, bolognese, barbecue, bordelaise, bearnaise, Madeira, mornay, tartar, bechamel and other sauces, various stocks, broths and consommes, polenta, various kebabs, pilafs and risottos, paella, falafel, quiche lorraine, pizza, cannoli alla siciliana, macaroni and cheese, fettuccine Alfredo, clams casino, gravlax, oysters Rockefeller, fillet of sole bonne femme, matzo balls, duck confit, chorizo, chicken cacciatore, coq au vin, chicken curry, pico de gallo, chicken and veal fricassees, osso buco, chili con carne, Swedish meatballs, assorted burgers, meatloaf, T-bone, pepper and other steaks, cassoulet, chateaubriand, tournedos Rossini, beef Stroganoff, entrecote bordelaise, boeuf bourguignon, Hungarian goulash, ratatouille, baked beans, spaetzle, gnocchi, hush puppies, roesti potatoes, gratin dauphinois, baked potatoes, crepes, applesauce, New York cheesecake, sabayon, frangipane, assorted pies, tarts and tortes, various meringues and sorbets, creme brulee, chocolate mousse, chocolate angel food cake, sponge cake, brownies, ladyfingers, Madeleines, toll house cookies, gingerbread cookies, buche de noel, and spiced cider) to more unusual dishes such as:

Chilled cherry soup
Perfumed shrimp consomme
Beet vinaigrette
Shallot curry oil
Walnut pesto
Nopal cactus salsa
Pink peppercorn beurre blanc
Crayfish butter
Zucchini bread
Potato cheddar cheese bread
Salmon and sea bass terrine with spinach and basil
Salmon croquettes
Grilled red snapper burger with mango ketchup
Tex-Mex turkey sausage
Sauted pork medallions with red pepper and citrus
Marinated loin of venison roasted with mustard
Roast pheasant with cognac and apples
Stuffed wontons with apricot sauce
Wild rice and cranberry stuffing
Goat cheese ravioli in herbed cream sauce
Spicy sweet potato and chestnut gratin
Grits and cheddar souffle
Potato-ginger puree
Cilantro puree
Grilled seckel pear with sherry bacon vinaigrette
Balsamic raspberries
Figs with berries and honey mousse
Kirsch mousse
Pistachio citrus cheesecake
Chocolate flourless cake
English muffin loaves
Oatmeal stout ice cream
Quince jam

At 1100+ pages a veritable brick, despite its size "On Cooking" has become as much a key part of my kitchen as my chef's knife, my tea infusers, and various other pieces of equipment. I don't harbor any intentions of becoming a professional chef (nor any aspirations to even remotely that level of culinary skills), but I love to cook, and this is one of the cookbooks I'd be least likely to part with - ever.

"Cookery is become an art, a noble science; cooks are gentlemen." - Robert Burton, British author (1621).

Also recommended:
Around the World Cookbook
Moosewood Restaurant Cooks at Home: Fast and Easy Recipes for Any Day
Sundays at Moosewood Restaurant: Ethnic and Regional Recipes from the Cooks at the Legendary Restaurant (Cookery)
Madhur Jaffrey's World Vegetarian: More Than 650 Meatless Recipes from Around the World
Joy of Cooking: 75th Anniversary Edition - 2006

This is the Basic Skills text book at the Culinary Institute of Las Vegas, and it is GREAT! It breaks down the basics of cooking by food item (poultry, starches, breakfast, etc.), but then each chapter is subdivided into cooking methods (braising, roasting, etc). There are handy tables for cooking times, properties and suggested cooking methods as well. The recipes are tried and true, but they also work extremely well as the foundation for anything you want to create! The beginning of the book gives good information on the history of chefs that have molded modern cuisine as well as kitchen equipment, knives, basic knife skills and seasonings.

Highly reccomended by this die-hard culinry student!I often refer back to this book when looking for alternate recipes in my current classes as this is, by far, the most outstanding book I've purchased for school.

I am an avid reader of both fiction and nonfiction. Interesting topic with cleverly communicated ideas. Thumbs up!

Thank you Moshe Yudkowsky for providing an innovative approach to . . . innovation. The Pebble and the Avalanche gives readers a new and exciting view of and approach to finding new products, systems and processes in their business. Not only did this book give me new tools to use for innovation, it inspired me to find new approaches to the challenges in my own business.

A genius sees an ordinary events and formulates an extraordinary theory. An engineer applies theory into practical business. An educator explains profound thoughts with simple language. Dr. Moshe Yudkowsky is all of the above.

The book, The Pebble and The Avalanche, is brilliant. The theory even applies to China, from the huge tight boulder-like society into pebbles of entrepreneurs. We can all feel the energy that released from the phenomena that Dr. Yudkowsky described in the book. A must read for anyone from the high tech, high society to the emerging entrepreneurs.

I thought this was a great book to read; it was also and easy read. This book was very creative with its views and points. I recommend everyone to read this book.

The Pebble and the Avalanche is a wonderful book. Moshe Yudkowsky's ground-breaking concepts regarding Disaggregation are both thought provoking and practical. I found myself putting the book down to apply his concepts across a wide range of business challenges. His book has helped me see technology innovations in a new light.

It should be mandatory for every M.B.A. student in the world.

For nearly half a century Peter Ferdinand Drucker (1909- ) has inspired and educated managers-and influenced the nature of business-with his landmark articles in the Harvard Business Review. Here, gathered together and framed by a thoughtful introduction from the Review's editor Nan Stone, is a priceless collection of his most significant work.

One of our leading thinkers on the practice and study of management, Drucker has sought out, identified, and examined the most important issues confronting managers, from corporate strategy to management style to social change. Through his unique lens, this volume gives us the rare opportunity to trace the evolution of the great shifts in our workplaces, and to understand more clearly the role of managers in the ongoing effort to balance change with continuity.

Now, these important articles and essays are strategically presented here to address two unifying themes: the first examines "The Manager's Responsibilities" while the second investigates "The Executive's World". Accompanied by an interview with Peter Drucker on "The Post-Capitalist Executive", as well as a thought-provoking preface by Peter Drucker himself, a complete picture of management theory and practice emerges, both as it was and as it will be.

Infused with a perspective that holds new relevance today, these essays represent Drucker at his best: direct, wise and challenging. Peter Drucker on the Profession of Management, sure to be studied, debated, and enjoyed by everyone concerned with management, everyone concerned with management, is a timely offering from one of the most respected and prolific authors to appear in the Harvard Business Review.

At 90, Peter Drucker is, by all accounts, the most enduring management thinker of our time. Born in Vienna, educated in Austria and England, he has worked since 1937 in the United States, first as an economist for a group of British banks and insurance companies, and later as a management consultant to several leading companies. Drucker has since had a distinguished career as a teacher, including more than twenty years as Professor of Management at the Graduate Business School of New York University. Since 1971 he has been Marie Rankin Clarke Professor of Social Science and Management at the Peter F. Drucker Graduate School of Management, Claremont Graduate University in California, where he still teaches in the fields of management and business policy. He is the founder of The Peter F. Drucker Foundation for Nonprofit Management, and has counseled numerous governments, public service institutions, and major corporations.

Drucker is a writer, teacher, and consultant with a long-term business perspective second to none. His twenty-nine previous books have been published in more than twenty languages and span sixty years of modern history beginning with The End of Economic Man (1939) and Managing in a Time of Great Change; Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices; Innovation and Entrepreneurship; The Effective Executive; Managing for Results and The Practice of Management. Nan Stone is the editor of the Harvard Business Review.

Peter Drucker has 60 years of experience teaching and writing about management. This collection of essays, first published in Harvard Business Review, outline Drucker's views on managerial responsibility. Among other things, this book also includes his insights on making more effective decisions, improving staffing choices, locating innovative opportunities, and aligning your theory of business.

Drucker outlines the five essential management principles:

1. Management is about human beings. Your task as a manager is to make people capable of working together.
2. Management is embedded in culture. You must be able to use parts of your history, tradition and culture as building blocks for a common corporate culture.
3. Management is responsible for growing an organization. Integrate training and development into your organization at all levels.
4. Use yardsticks like market standing, innovation, productivity, human development, quality and financial results to measure and improve performance.
5. Look for results outside of your company, in the products and services you deliver, not relative to internal processes within the company.

Drucker also outlines six steps to guide decision-making:

1. Classify the problem. Is the problem unique to your company, or the beginning of a more general problem?
2. Define the problem. Make sure the definition explains all the observable facts.
3. Define the boundary conditions, like objectives or goals, that your decision must satisfy. When the conditions change, your decision must change with them.
4. Decide. Usually you will have to compromise eventually. Decide what is right.
5. Take action. Make sure your employees know what the decision involves, and who is expected to do what.
6. Get feedback. Gather information on the effectiveness of your decision. Make sure your decision is still relevant to current conditions.

This is one of the most, thought provoking books, I've read this year. In the first part of the book, Business philopher, Peter Drucker protrays and verbally the business model of today, and highlights the necessary interactions of managers with the model. In the second part of the book, Drucker breaks away and reveals a series of startling revelations about today's business.

The theory of business is what Drucker, defines as "what a company gets paid for." Drucker states when big companies get in trouble they blame "complacency, arrogance, mammoth bureacracies", as a plausible explanations. However, the problem's root causes are rarely identified and the prevously stated explanations are rarely right. Most companies fail, to perform well, at what they get paid for.

Drucker defines the parts of the business environment, as: environment (society and its structure and the market), mission (customer ), (core competencies) and technology. Why is this important? The assumptions about environment, mission, and core competencies must fit together. Drucker drives home the point by contrasting the sucess of non-profit organizations with profit organizations, stating we can learn from the success of non-profit organizations, namely: well define mission, lack of deep management hierarchy, individual responsiblity, a deep understand of individual roles and purposes, and cohension between expectations and results. Secondly, the theory of business must be known and understood through out the business. Drucker stresses the importance of learning from the non-customer. And Lastly, the theory of business must be tested constantly.

The Effective Decision process involves the follow sequence of steps: 1. Classify the problem 2. Define the problem 3. Specify the answer to the problem 4. Decide what is right rather than what is acceptable 5. Build into the decision the action to carry it out 6. and test the validity and effectiviness of the decision against the actual course of events. This is an high level sketch outlining a model for effective decision.

Drucker provides two methods, to help make, people decisions. The two creative approaches are: determine if the right people has right qualifications, perceptions, and talents; and make sure the individual understands the job. The first approaches advocates careful selection of the individual, by determining, how well the candidate fits the job assignment. The second approach measures the new manager's understanding of the job. The process requests, the new manager to write on paper, what they think will make them sucessful, in their job. Senior management reads the paper to determine, if the manager has grasped an understanding, of the job, and revalidates their decison about the individual being the right person, for the job.

The discipline of innovation encourages managers to separate the reasons for successful management, into two groups: systematic and non-systematic innovation. Both systematic and Non-systematic opportunies exist within an company or industry because of unexpected occurences, incongruties, process needs, and industry and market changes. Systematic innovation begins by analyizing the sources of opportunity. Innovation is perceptual and conceptual by definition and innovators must go out look, ask, and listen. Effective innovations start small. Small Innovations can lead to large implementations. Without innovation the company will go out of business. Innovation keeps a company competitive in the market and capable of meeting customer needs.

Technology has created a great diversity of information. In order for a manager, to be effective, managers need to identify the information they need to effective perform their jobs.

The world is moving to a society of organizations. Companies are moving to global economies of scale. People interact with various organizations to achieve results. Because of this new organization theory, outsourcing is preferred when no direct management hierarchy exists to a Vice President. Outsourcing provides high skill specialist, management, and senior management. Companies are achieving better results organizationally by outsourcing business process where possible.

Management is responsible for creating the knowledge worker. Historically, significant increasing in productivity were the result of a management core build established. Management is responsible for building the skilled worker. Organizations are made up of individuals, who have a high degree of technical skill and knowledge. Information must be convert into knowledge and manager's communication ability dictates the level of effectiviness in using the skilled worker's knowledge. Organizations represent a network of specialists, rather than a strong command and control heirarchy. However, technology of itself does not increase productivity.

How do managers increase productivity? Managers increase productive by helping the knowledge worker to work smarter - not harder. Management creates the knowledge worker by empower them with specialized skills and knowledge. Productivity gaps are closed through training. Management must decide who gets trained. Training the right people increase the worker's capability, compensation, and productivity. Performance can only be achieved by the worker working smarter not harder. Only ten percent of the work is effectively and producing ninety percent of the productivity and profit. Thus, over ninety percent of the work is ineffective. It is management's responsibility to reduce this inefficiency. Drucker will later introduce his activity oriented decision model to help managers reduce the amount of inefficiency.

Managers are responsible for creating and maintaining their carreer path. Receiving a higher education degree and employment, in a large company does not guarentee retirement, with the company. Managers are responsible for designing and maintaining their career. Fragmentation of purpose and thought must be overcome to reduce confusion and losses. Knowledge workers must learn how to produce. This requires the knowledge work to remain current, with changes, in the business environment. Their contribution in large part depends on the knowledge workers ability to adapt and learn smarter ways to produce.

Activity Oriented Decision model prevents loses and failures. Activity Oriented decisions combine value analysis, risk analysis, quality analysis, and process analysis, into one. Decisions resulting from managers who follow the activity oriented decision model don't risk losing capital. The combination of the various information sources, associated with the activity oriented decision helps the manager understand the potential value of the venture, the potential value, the risks of failure, and the cost of modifying or implement new processes, and the long term affects on quality in the organization.

The activity oriented decision model is a conceptually definition and the practical discipline proposed exciting possiblities. Activies are analyzed, defined, and sequenced. Resources are allocated to the activity. The activity outcomes are measured to determine, if they are meeting requirements. Managers weight the risks by asking "what are the benefits of the activity?","What are the fallout impacts for failure to implement the activity?", and "what are the impacts to the organization long term by implementing the activity?"

Analysis of the process, results in time and budget allocation estimates. Schedules provide time lines and sequences linked to a resources. Managers must coordination various organizations to gain access to a resource. A resource represents a individual in a specialize field of knowledge. Communication and coordination are necessary to effectively manage various resources, so each individual understands, what is expected and what to produce. Budgets and time provide the boundary of the activity problem. Its possible to have a budget or schedule which exceeds the boundary of the problem, making the activity unfeasible. To avoid this problem, the manager must provide clear objectives to be developed and maintained. The objectives scope must stay within a predefined problem boundary.

Peter F. Drucker is known as the "management guru's management guru". The articles in this book explain the reason. Each article is a landmark in the field of management.

In the preface Drucker shows why he has become so famous. He shows his strength of recognising trends and how these trends will affect business, people, and society. This preface is followed by a short introduction from the editor.

The book consists of two Parts, The Manager's Responsibilities and The Executive's World, with each consisting of 6 Harvard Business Review-articles (out of 32 articles and growing). The book also includes an interesting preface, an introduction by Harvard Business Review-editor Nan Stone, and an interview with Peter Drucker.

In Part I - The Manager's Responsibilities, the articles discuss the managerial responsibilities of the manager, although Drucker prefers the term "executive". The articles discuss general management such as the decision-making process, effective management, strategic management, and innovation.

Part II - The Executive's World, Drucker discusses the history of management, the transformation from the traditional command-and-control model to knowledge-based organizations, information technology, and non-profit management.

The book concludes with an interview with Peter Drucker, which is based on his 1995-book 'Post-Capitalist Society'.

The book deserves the five-star rating since each article is fantastic. Perhaps some of them overlap, but it is amazing that some of the articles written in the 1960s are still very valid today. Drucker's writing style is simple US-English.

An amazingly thorough but extremely depressing book on the Military Industrial Complex in the US. This book suggests that the American political-economic system is totally submitted to the Military Industrial Complex, and that there is no easy way out. To anyone familiar with Seventh Day Adventist teachings about the US as the second beast of Revelation 13, the one that looks like a lamb but speaks like a dragon, this book will ring true.

The only flaw is that it seems to omit the role of international finance in fomenting wars. Nations will go into almost unlimited debt to pay for wars that they view as matters of life or death, and the bankers exploit this and finance both sides of the conflicts.

Here is an excerpt from a letter sent to a local Congressman about this very problem:

Dear Representative Miller,



.... Finally, ever since watching Aaron Russo's 2006 documentary, America: From Freedom to Fascism, I have been studying the history of the Federal Reserve Banking system (FRBS). This has enabled me to attain a level of understanding that was withheld from me when I studied economics at Harvard in the late 1970s. Now I am very concerned that Congress has relinquished its control over our nation's monetary system to a private cartel of secretive international financiers called the "Federal Reserve". (This was perhaps the first - and most fateful - act of privatization in US history, and patently against the Constitution.)



Of particular concern is that the FRBS collateralizes our money supply with interest bearing Treasury Bills. This means that all annual increases in our GNP are forfeited to pay interest on money that the FRBS prints "for us." The consequence of this is that the average US citizen realizes no increase in his or her personal prosperity, since all growth in the national economy must be surrendered to pay the T-bills held by the private banking elites who run the FRBS. Indeed the inexorable laws of compound interest mandate that this system actually guarantees the constantly increasing pauperization of our society. One does not have to be a PhD in Economics to perceive this. A proficiency in high school level mathematics will suffice to enable you to comprehend the appalling reality that each year a constantly increasing percentage of our national wealth is diverted from the private citizen to pay the mounting debt burden held by the FRBS as reward for monetizing "our economy."



Along with millions of other patriotic Americans, I demand that Congress dismantle the FRBS and resume its Constitutionally mandated authority over our monetary system! In our opinion, the FRBS is the root of our current economic crisis, and indeed of every economic crisis that has faced this country since the FRBS's inception in the early 20th century. In fact, many of us believe that the FRBS is responsible for virtually every social upheaval that has afflicted not only our nation but the world in the last 100 years. We do not believe it is a mere "coincidence" that, since the authorization of the FRBS by US President Woodrow Wilson in 1913 (a decision he later lamented was the worst decision of his political career), the world was plunged into two catastrophic world wars, a great depression, an economically ruinous arms' race and cold war, proliferation of conflicts globally, and the current economic disaster facing the US along with the entire global economy.



Wars, and huge military budgets such as is required by the US Pentagon, are avidly promoted by the FRBS because countries will go into virtually unlimited debt in order to finance wars that they perceive are vital to their national interests. The evidence proves that the international banking system, of which the FRBS is just one part, finances both sides of every conflict. Like a casino, the banking houses always win, regardless of which side prevails in any particular war.



Many of us believe that the US ceased to be a sovereign country when it surrendered control of its monetary system to the FRBS. Ever since Woodrow Wilson's fateful decision, the US has functioned as a corporation, that has to borrow its "own" money from private usurious bankers, rather than as a free and independent nation-state.



If you really are serious about saving America , it is imperative that you act immediately to shut down the FRBS, exactly as President Andrew Jackson did so valiantly 177 years ago to the National Bank, which he called a den of vipers intent on devouring the fruits of our nation's labor. Otherwise no economic recovery plan, no matter how ingenious, possibly can restore our nation's dignity, integrity, and prosperity.



But if you are not willing to take these steps, then perhaps we simply should dissolve our democratic institutions and revert to a military dictatorship. That at least will save us all time, expense, and the heartache of having our "representatives" mislead, deceive, and ignore us. And if Congress willingly has subverted the Constitution by turning a blind eye to the FRBS, then America de facto no longer exists anyway and already has become a dictatorship of the international bankers, which means that your mailings are simply an eloquent but ultimately futile waste of time.



Sincerely,





Michael Korn

I loved it. It's packed with explicit information on the tight relationship and revolving door between war profiteers and government officials--they're often one and the same--naming names and providing dollar amounts and sources of information. When you study this book, you will gain an understanding of what motivates the neocons to start wars. Money makes the world go around: you will learn a great deal about why the current US administration bombed Afghanistan, then Iraq, and now appears to be aimed at Iran. Why would anyone want never-ending war?

Hossein-zadeh points out that it is the industrial part of the military-industrial complex that is most problematic because it is driven by the profit motive.

I happen to disagree with Hossein-zadeh in that I think the oil transnationals also want wars in the Middle East. (He says these entities prefer stability.) This difference in views detracts nothing, however, from his analysis of the military-industrial aspect of these conflicts.

I'm a writer and use this book as a reference.

I hope it comes out in paperback so more people can afford it.

Professor Hossein-zadeh takes over where the late Seymour Melman left off, showing the absurdity & perils of military spending. Those of you familar with Melman, who was a professor of industrial engineering at Columbia University know that time & time again in his many books, he demonstrated how ludicrous defense spending had become through numerous examples. The money spent on "overkill", the cost overuns, the many uneeded military projects, expensive quality control problems coupled with system & hardware failures are just several he often reiterated.
Dr. Hossein-zadeh takes the subject a bit further & in a new direction. He is backed by irrefutable statistics, documents & history itself to prove his case against excessive & unwarrented military spending. All of it very comprehensible, even to someone with no background in economics & a minute knowledge post WW2 history. By reading this book, one can gain some insight into the modus operandi of the military-industrial complex & its the effect it has on the economy,political establishment & both domestic & foreign policy.

This book brings together lots of individual facts, statistics, and citations that those with a concern about US militarism who attentively follow current events and recent US history will have come upon in disparate locations.

The genius of the book is that it puts all of this information in one place and presents it in a coherent structure. It is also very clearly written. The citations and bibliography are useful starting points for those wishing to delve more deeply into the economic underpinnings of the military-industrial complex.

most comprehencive ,well documented,well researched book exposing the essence of our heartless government subserviant to the demands of giant corporations sacrificing the ones it is elected to protect.

It is a very useful reference book for anyone interested in power generation. It contains general mechanical and electrical theory, design approach, operation and maintenance concepts. It has practical value as it contains broad information about steam turbines, gas turbines and auxiliaries. It is a very valuable desk reference.

I think this is a great reference book. The book is very easy to read, and to understand. I have found the book's content to be highly relevant to the field and could be used every day for anyone interested (or working) in power generation.

Power Generation Handbook is very comprehensive, covering all aspects of steam and gas turbines and generators, combined cycles and many other topics. This is a very valuable desk reference.

P. Kiameh's "Power Generation Handbook" has been an invaluable addition to the materials I need to sucessfully execute my job. I work in the electrical power industry and Mr. Kiameh's simple and practical approach has provided that extra assistance that allows for easy solution to our every day problems. More importantly, Mr. Kiameh has managed to complile useful and important principles relating to the Power industry in one handbook. I highly recommend this book for technical personnel involved in the Power Generation Industry.

This is an excellent, practical handbook on power generation. It contains clear descriptions of how power generation components are constructed, how they work and how to maintain them. Points in the text are illustrated through numerous detailed photographs, drawings and graphs. Topics include steam turbines, governing systems, valves, lubrication systems, gas turbines, bearings, seals, combined cycles, cogeneration, electrical components, etc.

I have attended two courses taught by Philip Kiameh at the University of Toronto's Professional Development Centre, one on power generation equipment and the other on mechanical equipment. Philip was an excellent teacher and his text books are similarly excellent and I highly recommend them. This text book is a valuable reference to the power generation course material.

As described on the cover page, this book is cookbook style so I went through the programs on the CD before reading the chapters. I like this book for two reasons.

First, the book is easy to read. A bunch of equations may not always be helpful to understand a problem. What confuses readers most is how an implementation/program corresponds to those equation(s). This book explains the image processing techniques in a plain language and gives you an hand-on experience with those techniques.

Second, to practice image processing, clicking a button on windows or just calling a built-in function, e.g. process(image), will not be enough. When you go to the directory of programs on the CD, you may find out every details. Each program is relatively independent to each other. You will not be stuck by a function call, which you never know or find. Each program is well commented and can be easily modified and incorporated into your program.

This book is good for those who are new to image processing, because it helps you understand what image processing does. It is also good for an experience practicer, because you can find well-organized stuff to build your own applications. It is a must-have book for your shelf of image processing.

Searching for an easy plug & play solution for simple imaging tasks?
No time for programming & debugging things yourself?
No interest in crawling through literature to figure what & how you should program "the methods that solves all your problems"?

Here's a book that deals with most of the elementary - and most used - approaches in image enhancement and analysis. The CD offers a collection of ready-to-play-with programs, both in C source as in executables.

I appreciated the book set-up: each section describes one single task, describes the problem, gives an example, discusses a solution given in literature, and presents the input / output / options for the C code.
- If you want to know more: get the recommended references.
- If you want to modify the program: why not? (well, perhaps because the code is good enough!)
- If you don't care about the scientific background and/or programming: just plug & play!

I have found this book to be extremely useful as a reference for my class on document image analysis. The book discusses (with software which is a bonus!) a whole bunch of image processing techniques that are very useful.

Students can now find in one place- a reference for techniques such as gabor wavelet analysis, convex hulls, moments, fourier descriptors, thinning, hough transform, and chain coding. This allows me as an instructor of an advanced document recognition course to let the students self-study these image processing techniques while I can focus on the recognition topics.

The authors have done a great job of picking examples from a wide range of applications such as outdoor scenes, fingerprints, and documents. The book is "easy to read" and requires just basics of linear algebra to follow.

I already knew image processing when I bought this book, so I am not sure how it would appear to the novice seeking a textbook on the subject of image processing and analysis, but I imagine it could be somewhat confusing. I always recommend Gonzales and Wood's "Digital Image Processing" for those seeking a clear read on image processing and analysis from the ground up. Where Seul's book comes in is with clear descriptions and working code for many basic - and some not so basic - image processing and image analysis algorithms. The book is also very good at explaining the applications of the various transforms. One of the little things that the author of this book does that authors of other books similar to it don't bother to do is to realize that when you are working in image processing you likely have an image as an input and you want an image as an output. Thus the author has built his code libraries so that they work that way. You are not left with arrays of pixels that you have to figure out how to store and manage. In the end you have a nice functional toolbox of working image processing and analysis subroutines that you can chain together and make just about any type of image transform tool you could think of. I'm mainly interested in image effects, and I know this book has been useful to me. The accompanying CD-ROM contains all of the C source code for the algorithms so that you can port them to another language or tinker with them if you so desire. Highly recommended.

The title of this book corresponds to its content, the tutorial gives an excellent overview of basic key points to those readers who are unfamiliar with the subject (as I was). The book can not be used for rigorous study of even simple things but rather kicks you with essentials that are easy to understand with high-school background. This book, written for non-specialists in "image field", gives them techniques for their practical needs and concentrates exactly on image analysis, not on image processing. If you have no time to go through more complex (and deeper) books, take this one to discover basic principles in short form with no attempt to explain the fundamentals. The authors just put you into the facts, so that is why I would characterize the "Practical Algorithms" book as being "handbook". The good point is that the areas of applicability of these facts are explained, the drawback: you have to go to other books to get more details on image processing roots, e. g., to R. Gonzalez and R. Woods' "Digital Image Processing". I bought both, and use them as good annex to each other. The "Practical Algorithms" has lack of some significant areas, like snake algorithm and image binarization (thresholding) techniques but e.g., the cellular processing is quite well highlighted.
Surprisingly, the CD that comes along with this book gave me almost 80% examples that I was able to recompile instantly, and only several examples have failed, mainly due to image file format issues. The source code is not both elegant and bugless, but it is very transparent and portable and can easily fit, e.g., a 16-bit microcontroller.
Overall, this is good book for fast start. You can get real output and pick up ideas on practical side of image analysis. Just remember, the most book examples came from the medicine world, so they are quite specific and may not be implemented directly in your particular application.

This is the best management book I have read. It includes topics as how to measure performance and how the indicators are linked to specific lean objectives, how to organize your business, how to determine costs using target costing, how to allocate (or not allocate) indirect costs, how to boost improvements, how to elliminate waste, how to measure value and how to focus on cash. Additionally, it has useful tips to "bridge" lean accounting to traditional accounting in easy and innovative ways...Each page contains something to get you thinking...

I have never seen such a practical approach, the book contains tables, charts, box scores, etc. as well as a suggested way and timing to calculate each indicator. You will find some alternatives for different types of organizations, but it also explains you the underlying principles, so that you can best adapt the ideas to your specific circumstances. Additionally, it contains also a "maturity path" for lean accounting, mentioning what should be in place in the shopfloor in order to elliminate a specific accounting transaction or control and how lean accounting data can help the lean production floor during each of its own maturity stages.

This book will change the way you think about costs (specially standard costs), management, opportunity, relevance, and much more. Another reviewer mentions that the book does not explain lean concepts; I think it was not intended as an introduction to lean manufacturing, but really as a guide for managers and cost accountants. Don't underestimate this book's value because of the lacking concepts; if you would like to understand lean manufacturing concepts you might want to read an introductory book first. You could start with The Gold Mine: A Novel of Lean Turnaround and Lean Thinking : Banish Waste and Create Wealth in Your Corporation, Revised and Updated. The approach of the first one was a bit more appealing to me. Once you decide to give lean accounting a try, take this book and let it guide you.

Well structured and very clear concepts, It help me to have a deep understanding of how to develop a value stream mapping. I really recommend it.

I have to think that the other reviews of this book must have been written by friends of the author because this book really is pretty poor. Lack of organization is a particular problem.

To begin the book, the authors fail to give any meaningful discussion of lean to frame the discussion for the rest of the book. Then they jump right in discussing lean MANUFACTURING, rather than lean ACCOUNTING. While "accounting for lean" receives significant discussion in the book, "lean accounting" receives only a single chapter.

Particularly troubling is how the authors constantly use terms without defining what they mean. For example, by page 41, they have used the terms "takt," "cell," "heijunka," and "5S" without telling us what they mean. None of these words are part of the vocabulary of accountants, the presumed target audience of the book.

Troubling as well is the lack of discussion of lean accounting outside of a manufacturing environment.

While the authors of this book may have considerable experience in lean, they lack the skills to effectively teach the rest of us much that is meaningful.

I've seen it (and lived it) multiple times. An Exec kicks off a Lean Initiative and the company creates a Lean Enterprise. At first, its all about training, Kaizen Blitz, 5S, prototype cells and Kanbans. The focus is about 95% shop floor processes. But after a while, the program starts to stall. Folks start seeing two sets of rules (traditional MRP and Lean), but none of the traditional goes away. So Lean start sounding and feeling like just a bunch of extra paperwork and steps without any obvious benefit to those who "live it" every day. In the end, the program fails or the Lean Enterprise is reorganized to try again, usually with similar results. This book clearly explains what is happening. It also provides a different perspective to the initial Lean implementation strategies that will help pull the organization through that first big stalling out and propel the initiative into true effectiveness. A "must read" book for anyone that is or is going to be dealing with a fledgling Lean initiative.

"Who's Counting" and "Practical Lean Accounting" are two great books on lean accounting. I wondered some time ago, which one to read and I am glad that I could not decide, so I bought and read them both. They complement each other extremely well and each one conveys the lessons of lean accounting from a different angle.

"Practical Lean Accounting" is a well structured textbook, approaching lean accounting in a systemized way. Starting from straight-forward shop-floor measurements, like the day-by-the-hour report, it gradually immerses the reader into more demanding topics, like value stream costing or lean performance measurement, culminating in the thorough description of the Sales, Operations and Financial Planning (SOFP) process, which is the way, how an entire lean enterprise is planned, controlled and measured. Lean practitioners looking for specific answers to particular questions will find it easy to navigate through the book. People with the luxury of time for reading it cover to cover will also like it, due to the gradual increase in the complexity of the topics and the many references to other chapters.

"Who's Counting" focuses more on the human side of turning the vision of lean accounting into reality. The novel format is the best way to illustrate, how strong the resistance against change will be and from how many corners of the organization it will attack back. Knowing what to do and knowing why is not enough, the issue is not capturing people's brains. The real challenge is conquering their hearts, while tearing down decades worth of wrong beliefs, bad trade-offs and political game-playing. Mike, the hero of the book teaches us through his own mistakes, that patience, tactfulness and respect for people is more helpful, then acting like a bull in a china shop. The reward is the enthusiastic desire of fellows to go his way and take ownership of the new processes. He even manages to turn Fred, a CFO who has to recognize, that most of what he built during his career was wrong, to use the 3 years until his retirement for becoming the most enthusiastic advocate of change!

Both books provide the reader with insight and incite self-reflection about "the way, we do things". There is hardly any chapter without a sacred cow being slaughtered, however this will strike the reader as plain common sense, due to the thorough description of the reasons. Deeply engrained management practices, such as approval routings, full absorption overhead allocation, standard costing or departmental budgeting will seem ridiculous, once the reader starts to open the eyes to see their fundamentally wrong assumptions.

These books will make You hate many of Your current processes!

As a manager, I thank Peltier for giving me a full array of scientifically solid techniques and theories for understanding the roots of human behavior, motivation, and communication. And for the pragmatic brevity of his chapters.

As an individual aspiring to develop into a professional coach, I thank him for providing me with the very best place to start studying: An academically solid, fully referenced, dense review of the diverse disciplines in modern pschycology. With recommended readings to guide my exploration further.

Enjoy.

This is an introduction to a specialized area of professional practice in psychology that is underemphasized overall. For those who like working with Type A folk and who have experience or want to have experience in corporate settings this book will be a great overview and more. I would recommend it as an accompaniment to other books that address career options in professional psychology without hesitation.The Psychology of Executive Coaching: Theory and Application

This book should be the first book read after a Life Coach finishes the basic training. Corporate America represents the motherlode for coaching since that is where the real money is. This book brings together in one place useful and understandable information to equip the coach reagardless of experience to completetly work with executives. There are many useful tools and strategies that can be "cookbooked" to the betterment of the client.

"The Psychology of Executive Coaching" is a very useful book on executive coaching which suggest sensible and sensitive processes that should lead to successful outcomes. Bruce Peltier wrote a breathlessly intellectual book on executive coaching whilst retaining a centred approach to the research of his topic at hand. He expertly wove carefully placed threads of awareness into a coherent and comforting blanket of understanding and he uncovers truly helpful and practical applications.

The author's writing is rich and intricate. He draws on a variety of experts and research to come up with well thought out theories and pragmatic tips on their effective application. You will marvel at the fluidity with which he combines the concepts so as to make them completely accessible to everyone wishing to follow his reasoning throughout this important book.

This is a highly readable guidebook that provides a solid theoretical framework for applying executive coaching skills that is very useful for executive coaches, psychology professionals and management consultants or any therapist and is therefore highly recommended for the targeted audience.

Peltier's book is my favorite assigned during a two-year professional executive program. Beginning with a significant chapter on Assessment, it aptly combines theory (actually 8 different theories) with practical application advice and tools to use. Occasionally there are even checklists provided for specific types of assessment and interventions.

With 20 years of business consulting experience behind me, I found this book to be particularly useful in translating academic theory to readable and useful frameworks, pragmatic tips and case studies. This will help me to cross the bridge from business consulting to executive coaching.

Originally, I was reluctant to purchase yet another business book for my MBA coursework. But, as I got into Sheth's "Self-Destructive Habits of Good Companies," I appreciated the look into many corporate examples across an array of industries. A running theme that leads to destruction is denial, and granted this is not a "how to" book by any means, but it opens the mind to various scenarios that all business execs, middle managers and entry-level individuals should consider, if they wish to be successful in their endeavors.

Dozens of companies are used as case studies to highlight the seven 'self-destructing habits' that can inflict even good, successful companies, that lead to their decline or even demise.
Engaging style of writing, a constant stream of companies with sometimes fascinating nuggets of information that most would be unaware of, and a succint boxed list of bullets at the end of each chapter that lists the "Things that lead to ...", "The Warning Signs of ...", and "How to break the habit of ..." should be useful enough in its own right.

One of the major points that the author makes is that functions in a company need to be better integrated and functioning cohesively to avoid the (seven) self-destructive habits. While working as independent, self-contained units may have been the fashion some time back, and even provide a sense of independence and success, and may indeed work in some cases, some of the times, in many others it may breed a sense of fiefdom, inertia, and paralysis, and more so in not-so-good times when the need is to revisit old assumptions, this silo-ed setup can actually hamper progress.

The seven habits listed are:
Chapter 2. Denial: The Cocoon Of Myth, Ritual, And Orthodoxy
Chapter 3. Arrogance: Pride Before The Fall
Chapter 4. Complacency: Success Breeds Failure
Chapter 5. Competency Dependence: The Curse Of Incumbency
Chapter 6. Competitive Myopia: A Nearsighted View Of Competition
Chapter 7. Volume Obsession: Rising Costs And Falling Margins
Chapter 8. The Territorial Impulse: Culture Conflicts And Turf Wars

While it is true that companies could suffer from more than one self-destructing 'habit', these habits are sometimes used in a loose manner. Does Detroit suffer from design dependence, or denial, or a mix, or a third, fourth, fifth trait too? Not clear.

The style of the book is not academic. There is no grand theory of failure that is sought to be built here. Rather, the author lists habits that he states can and do mostly lead to companies failing, and then parades dozens of companies in support. The narrative style is somewhat similar to Ram Charan. While Ram Charan uses personal anecdotes from his numerous consulting engagements with companies and CXOs, Sheth in this book describes companies and how they stumbled, or in some cases declined all the way to extinction, as a way of illustrating these habits.

IBM, Microsoft, Motorola, (Encyclopedia) Britannica, GM, AP, Merck, Sony, Singer, Nutrasweet/Equal, Lego, DeBeers, USPS, AT&T, Boeing, Enron, Worldcom, Sony, Timex, Xerox, ... - makes you wonder if a second edition of this book may have some newer, familiar names like Toyota, Google, VMWare (which is already struggling), Salesforce.com, Facebook.

If you write about companies in a time set too much in the past, the lessons have been mostly taught (not necessarily learned), there is not much new that can be presented, and the context too much in the past to interest the average reader. Just how many times do you want to be taught about the Dutch Tulip mania? If you write about companies in the present, you run the risk of getting things horribly wrong, or basing your analysis on facts that are not completely known at the time of writing. The same is somewhat the case with this book. The discussion on Boeing and Airbus is a case in point, where the fortunes of these two companies have been oscillating between success and failure for more than 10 years now. Airbus' taking the lead from Boeing, Airbus' success with the A380, then the failure with numerous delays and technical and manufacturing glitches, to Boeing's success with the Dreamliner project, and then its miseries over ethics scandals....

Of particular interest to many people would be the several pages devoted to GM, especially given the near-death throes that the American auto industry seems to be in these days. These pages are hugely informative and readable in themselves, and may well prompt the reader to wonder in exasperation, several times, how could these companies have been so oblivious to fast-approaching disaster!

************ Excerpts:
From Chapter 2:
"What he (Jack Smith, in the early 1980s) found was that GM needed more than twice as many people as Toyota to build the same number of cars. But when he presented his findings to GM's executive committee, they reacted with total disbelief and dismissed his report."
...
"The editorial (Seattle Times in the 1980s) asked prophetically, 'How many Detroit workers will lose their jobs when oil prices soar again and gasoline rockets past a dollar a gallon?' ... Then, to reinforce its own bias, Detroit built crummy small cars. When nobody wanted them, the automakers could say, 'We told you so.'"
...
"According to (BMW CEO) Panke, if you removed all their labels and badges, 'you would have a hard time recognizing who's who, what is what.'"
...
"... in April 2005, Dan Neil, the auto writer for the Los Angeles Times, gave a negative review to GM's new and much-hyped Pontiac G6. ... Looking at all 11 brands (including those offshore), he concluded that GM's overall strategy must be to remove any unique characteristics in its automobiles for the sake of global efficiencies. ... GM's response to the article? The company pulled all its advertising from the Los Angeles Times until further notice."
...
From Chapter 3:
In case you have any doubts, consider the fact that GM actually nurtured Japanese imports in its own dealer showrooms...
"it made the strategic blunder of allowing its own dealers--Pontiac, Buick, and Olds--to carry Honda, Toyota, and Nissan."
******

Also read:
Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't
Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done

A lot of it is common sense, but you won't notice it until you read about it.

Very practical, trustworthy, hand on insight. Gives you a lot to think about, and unfortunately also some "deja vu" experiences. Should be mandatory reading for all managers in companies doing well!

During the early 1980s, Tom Peters and Robert Waterman penned a business classic named In Search of Excellence. In it, they cited 62 "excellent" companies. Many, including Sears, Xerox, IBM and Eastman Kodiak, have faced serious problems since.

Some recovered; some struggle to recover. Some are dead; others soon will be. Although the word "institution" implies permanence, Jagdish N. Sheth argues the average life span of a corporation is plummeting. The genius of Joseph Schumpeter's "Creative Destruction," is becoming widely understood.

The author, a business professor at Emory University, argues that companies that rise to the level of great often sow the seeds of their own destruction. He argues the following kernels soon blossom sapping the "great one's" potential:

1. Volume Obsession - rising costs and falling margins.
2. Denial - substituting myths, rituals and orthodoxy for vision and insight.
3. Arrogance - Need I say more?
4. Complacency - success breeds failure.
5. Competency Dependence - the curse of incumbency.
6. Competitive Myopia - a nearsighted competitive view.
7. Territorial Impulse - culture conflicts and turf wars.

The careful reader is forced to shine a light into every corner of his or her organization. Using insightful illustrations, Sheth urges business leaders to identify their self-destructive behaviors before they lead are destroyed. I particularly enjoyed the description of a company in his chapter on the Territorial Impulse described as "complex of 50-story office towers, connected only by common areas at the bottom and the top."

This is an entertaining and insightful book. Management and executives will ignore its lessons at their own peril.