Strategy

If you enjoy working with university textbooks, you'll appreciate this book. It feels like a college text. It looks like a college text. It's filled with graphs and charts like a college text. It's seasoned with case studies in call out boxes. There are endnotes, as well as a bibliography. The index is so full of references, a smaller type was used-perhaps to save space.

The authors' message is that the secret to developing a creative and effective rewards strategy is based on a combination of Money, Mix, and Message. The Money aspect addresses the value of the reward(s) to the employee. The design of the plan, constructed to meet employer and employee needs, is the Mix. The Message deals with what the employer wants to communicate to its employees about appropriate values and the company's expectations. The authors describe their approach as "M3," emphasizing the need for a good balance between the three factors.

Readers will explore more than a hundred practical tools for building what they call the M3 Reward System. Financial rewards are integrated with non-financial rewards. Application of the step-by-step strategy promoted by the authors is a CD-ROM that is loaded with tools, exercises, and techniques to equip readers to tailor their own strategies to be consistent with company needs.

The authors are consultants with considerable experience in serving dozens of Fortune 500 companies. The orientation of the book, understandably, is toward larger companies. Smaller firms will still get a lot out of this text, but may have to invest some serious study time to get the full benefit of the package. The stories relating the authors' experiences are illuminating and add value for the reader who wants to gain the deeper understanding of how customized corporate reward programs are put together and managed.

Hefty price, but fully loaded.

This book is an excellent resource for HR professionals, compensation specialists, and line managers alike.
Well written, with great models and thought processes, yet pragmatic in its approach, this book provides a great fresh look at how to motivate employees to achieve business results.

This book is an absolute must-purchase!...
Compensation and HR professionals in general can derive great insight and value from this work. I recommend it strongly as a cornerstone of every business person's professional library.

It is a thorough analysis of the technological advances of our era and the depth of the internet industry. I was particularly interested in the implications for Latin America and the technological transfer from liberalization. It is a useful book for practictioners and for more academic minds.

Creative Destruction presents a fascinating revival of an old concept in the context of recent technological developments and innovation. It offers a brilliant account of how information technologies accelerate the process of creative destruction today and helps understand how information society articulates with in a wider framework of economic history. Those interested in Latin America will appreciate, in particluar, the recent developments in the telecommunications industry in the region.

This is an outstanding collection of articles. These papers combine scholarly depth with usefulness for practitioners. They will help you understand where we've been and forecast where we are going with the Internet. I teach courses on Internet Business Strategy and will use this collection next year. My favorites are Baumol's "Innovation and Creative Destruction; McKnight's "Internet Business Models: Creative Destruction as Usual" and Lehr's "A New Theory of the Internet Firm." They provide a solid conceptual basis for understanding the implications of the Internet economy. One thing truly unique about this book is the thoughtful and detailed discussions of the implications of the Internet on international business. There are six papers that focus on these issues. I have not seen this anywhere else. In a world where people publish books peddling derivative nostrums about the network economy, it's a pleasure to finally find one that deals with these issues in a serious, thoughtful and, most of all, useful way.

This is quite possibly the finest tactical instruction manual on the market. Despite regional variences in tactics, this book will expand your understanding of your current SOP's and allow you to try something new with a proven record. Masterfully written and not the boring text you're used to in textbooks. This is a must read for anyone wishing to advance in the fire service...truly a new essential.

Firefighting... you never learn it all.
John Norman and I have come from different firefighting backgrounds. Most of his book reflects his experience in larger metropolitan areas. His book's chapters on ladder companies and high rises raise issues which are seldom used in smaller, semi-rural communities like the one in which I live. Likewise he does not address wildland fires or oil well fires such as the ones which we deal with here in East Texas.
However I appreciate our differences and it here that I learn how to become a better firefighter than I am. When I was first taught scene size-up, I was taught four basic questions: What do I have? What do I need? What do I want? and Who's in command? Norman prefers the acronym COAL WAS WEALTH. (Pardon me if I refer to page 17 of Norman's book at this time.) The last of my four questions should reflect my adherrence to the Incident Command System which is something that Norman's index cites only on page 70.
You never learn it all. Norman includes chapters on ventilation, search and rescue, forcible entry, firefighter survival, etc. Even though Norman writes for larger metropolitan areas, all firefighters can learn from it. Every page of my copy has something highlighted.

This is the first fire service manual that I have ever read that does a good job of putting all of the pieces together. Mr. Norman talks the talk after obviously having walked the walk. The book is very well laid out and won't bore you to death. Includes plenty of real life examples to support the strategies and tactics being presented. A very good read for anyone involved in the fire service at any level.

I read this work will reading Mahan (whom Huges is very critical of) and found them to both contain the part the other lacks. Mahan, focusing on national policy, neglects the importance of tactics and their evolution. Hughes, however, states that tactics have universal pillers that remain despite the evloution in technology.

Hughes shows that the most curcial part of tactics is the situtation; his analsis that Nelson's strength was knowning his foe and his own abilities led to victory more than mere luck smacks of Sun Tzu's know thy enemy. He shows that what worked in one place does not always work everywhere.

Also, he shows how tactics changed with tech (from the sailing age to mondern times) and still kept their truths. his five pillers of sea power are just as vital today as they were for Cromwell.

As an aspiring Naval officer, I found his work both intellectally intreasting and at the same time well writen with theroy backed by pratice; Hughes shows how these princples played out on the battlefield.

Although written as a text book. A person can read this book and get an appreciation of the problems of naval warfare particularly involving fleet. Many historical problems that I have heard. Such as why the German's in WW1 did not use their fleet much more and why the Japanese kept splitting their fleet in WW2 are explained here very well.

I have learnt a lot from this book.

The book is a very good summary about five principles of naval tactics (Scouting, Command, Doctrine, Information, Training ) that could apply almost wherever there are forces in conflict or complex actions integrated by several people. These principles are clarified with historical battles and their results. It also include the evolution of naval tactis with techology.

We picked up this book after our first board actually became a liability! It was only after the failure of original the board (which failed for exactly the reasons the book outlined as primary reasons boards fail!) that this book was recommended to us. The five founders all read it and discussed it.

Since we were in the midst of a reorg, it was exceedingly helpful in reshaping the new board into a more effective and cohesive part of the company. We did a much better job of first creating the criteria to evaluate candidates and a lot of the politics went out of the process.

I don't agree with all of the authors assertions about what a strong board can do for a company. I still think much of that is up to the people doing the actual work. However, since a board is a critical element of any modern company, read this first and do it right the first time.

This is a must read for every board director. Newly-electeds will find a treasure trove of important material; experienced directors will find data to either support or challenge their beliefs on corporate governance.

Bruce R. Ellig
Corporate Vice President HR (retired)
Pfizer, Inc.

In my role advising mid- and senior-level management of Fortune 100 companies, I found this book by Conger, Lawler and Finegold to be of immediate value.

"Corporate Boards: New Strategies for Adding Value at the Top" is positioned towards people who are perhaps on boards or who are executives dealing with boards. The authors are extremely credible, having dealt with and advised senior leadership from nearly every Fortune 100 company.

This book really brings together in one source all you need to know about building a more effective board - it is filled with real and practical guidelines and actionable how-tos. At the same time, it challenges the current governance approaches, arguing that despite all the "best practices" available, we still have a relatively simplistic understanding of how to build a great board. This book gives the reader more sophisticated insights into what it takes to have an effective board.

The authors also raise a number of issues that are critical given today's environment. For example, are boards solely responsible to shareholders or are there other, equally critical groups to which boards need to be accountable? Finally, the authors discuss the implications of the Internet for the boardroom.

In short, I strongly recommend this book, particularly for those who deal with senior leadership, corporate boards and governance issues.

The person with the cash in hand is the real boss, according to Harvey Thompson, proponent of Customer Value Management (CVM). You can make your company more customer-driven using CVM, which he developed at IBM and then implemented at other U.S. and international companies. Thompson identifies the customer's vision of ideal value, and tells businesses to use that as their guiding star. If you can integrate the best customer value in every system, your company can retain customers, sell more and increase profits. This is not a new theme, but Thompson takes it a little deeper than most as he discusses ways to strategically incorporate CVM, from top management to the front desk. If we were telling him about his reading customers, we'd ask him to shake some dust off the dense, academic language, but otherwise we... recommend to most business leaders this solid book about strategic customer management.

A very solidly written look at the Customer Value Management system-- complete with explanation, examples, and exercises that can be applied by the reader. Thompson makes the critical and, in my experience, all-too-misunderstood point that while using customer input in product development has long been a fact within companies, positioning the things a customer values at the center of developing services and processes is not standard in most industries. And it should be.

The distinction in the Kano framework between basic expectations, satisfiers, and attractors is very well explained here and put in the kind of way that should make consultants and managers alike understand its relevance to their clients and companies. I've far too often seen clients trying to overperform on aspects of service where they just should be looking for parity and the requirements of most projects do not have a good way of seeing the difference between what their customers find simply nice to have and between the aspects of service that will truly drive the decision to buy from or remain a customer of the company in question.

Highly recommended.

Mr. Thompson really shows us the whole meaning of Customer Value, teaching about the linkages between customer targeting, process, organization and technology. The way he drives us in the real world while he focus on what is important (high ROI) and what is less important, is a very valuable driver to the correct use of the scarce resources (human, assets and dollars) to sustain and growth the business dramatically. This metholodogy, applied with success in IBM and in many other companies around the world, demostrates that is not a mere theory but a real life experience. Strongly recommended to be used as an educational material and as a base in a your methodological project approach. World class reading.

Having gone through most of the book, I find the way it's set out very easy-going.
Nice intro explaining the ideas behind the moves for both Black and White. All variations can be found through the index but they are laid out in a very logical manner.
The author keeps things simple and straight forward.
If you're interested in playing an active game, this variation is your pick and this book can help you out.
My experience has been that White will try to avoid the Sveshnikov unless he has studied it (typically I encounter: 1.e4,c5;2.Nf3,Nc6;3.Bb5 or Bc4 or d3, etc.)thoroughly.

This book is a worthy successor to Krasenkov's 6-year-old book. It is not as "complete", especially when it comes to early divergences, but has all the latest moves (of course) and is much easier to find your way around. To the credit of a young writer, Aagaard lays his opinions on the line with plenty of exclamation marks, so that one doesn't have to get right to the end of lines to see which one is preferred. This is better than the usual run of opening books.

This book pefectly illustrates how a chess opening book should be written. It starts with a chapter that explains typical plans and structures arising from the Sveshnikov. The best part of this introductory chapter is the explanation by the author on where the different pieces are best placed ,what piece exchange to be avoided and what piece exchange is favorable. For example, the chapter states that black should generally avoid an opposite colored bishop positions; and it si favorable for black to exchange her dark colored bishop for a knight. Needless to say, reading this chapter alone will significantly improve your knowledge of the Sveshnikov.

The next chapters give enough theories and grandmaster games. If you read the introductory chapter and grasp the ideas, memorizing the variations becomes a lot easier. Of course, the author continues to give the ideas behind the variations which also help a lot to retain the variations in your head.

If you feel that you are comfortable playing positions with structures like f7,f6,e5,d6, with the king uncastled, then Sveshnikov may be a good opening choice to be added to your opening repertoire, and if you do decide to play the Sveshnikov, this book is a must. This is better than the chessbase training program with the same subject.

I bought this book for my son 12 year old to compose a career report and so he could understand this area of interest. The writing is clear and simple. Sections of the book need more development and updating. That aside the book provided a clear picture of what is required to start a career and what is possible. If you know little about the industry this is a great place to start. The material is basic but the book does contain good references for follow up and more detailed reading.

Judy's upfront approach and honest opinion gives her readers an advantage not given by others. Not only does she instruct you on how to become successful in your aviation career, she also helps you to avoid the MANY pitfalls made by other aspiring pilots before you. Also included were valuable references to related services, publications, and other tools used in the airline industry. If you only buy one book about a career in aviation, let it be this one!

I am considering a career in aviation, and Ms. Tarver's book was the perfect place to start. She's realistic, practical and encouraging at the same time. No one should consider a career in aviation before reading this book through at least two times. Thanks for the help, Ms. Tarver.

I have seen amazing changes in my father who is being mentored by Mr. Hamilton who is mentored by Pastor Watkins. I can't believe it. Well, yes I can. This Strategy is breaking the mold of what the world's idea of a man is. My father is a better husband and father because of this. His heart talks and his ears listen. This is for all MEN of every creed! And wives too, for a better understanding of the change that is taking place!

This is the greatest book I have ever read that gives true and tried strategies to change the men in the local church. Your church will grow exponentially by applying God's plan given to the Pastor. All the principles are biblical and sure to work.

Finally the church is getting back to God's original plan for us. I found this book very insightful, and full of God's word.