economics-schools

It's short, clearly written, to the point, and filled with basic templates. A book designed for the professional who wants to understand and be able to use standard project methodologies from information technology (IT) projects to construction projects, to planning a trip, or preparing a research grant. We are using it in all of our business areas.

I am an experienced project manager, and recommend this book to anyone who wants to approach life in an organized, measurable manner. Project Management is not just for IT.

This is an ace book that will unfortunately only appeal to those wanting to bring all areas of professional health care into a commercial but patient focused new paradigm.

My firm has created a business operating system (all the non clinical stuff) for dentists in Australia - we do everything from the tools to assist them to credibly advise of pharmacy level home care products, to FactSheets on complex services for better and higher levels of compliance to treatment plans, and to achieve all those economies of scale that small businesses can never secure.

It is a well structured book and presents a (psudeo Porter)value based way of looking at health care in a readable and logical way.

If you want to make a branch of healthcare work and you have the energy to think your way through the issues (and to overcome the existing Luddites), this book will assist you greatly.

This resource is invaluable for any high school or college student seriously researching and considering a health professions career. It's great for the "pre-med" student who isn't "pre-med" anymore, but still wants a career in health care. It's a library MUST-HAVE for their career/academic advisor as well! I find the most valuable information is the easy reference to all the most important websites on each career for the student's and advisor's further research, plus the comprehensive by state listing of all the accredited programs for each career. How did I survive without this guide?!

For anyone interested in conducting research that will be used, this is an absolutely essential resource. A lot of claptrap has been written about knowledge use. In contrast, this is an extremely solid, scientific, helpful volume.

When I read "The Hidden Classroom" by Judith G. Margulies I had my eyes opened much wider to the problems of - and possible solutions to - teaching in the American classroom. The author has been remarkably candid in detailing her agonies and triumphs as a public school teacher. This is a book any teacher would identify with, as well as discover inspirational ideas for truly educating our children.

Getting close to graduation and wondering how to pay for college? High School Senior's Guide to Merit and Other No-Need Funding provides a handy list of references for financial aid which are based on merit rather than need: chapters cover the various organizations which award such scholarships and grants, defining eligibility and the financial information needed to apply.

This one of the volumes in the new Harvard Business School Essentials Series. Each offers authoritative answers to the most important questions concerning its specific subject. The material in this book is drawn from a variety of sources which include a Peter Cappelli article on market-driven retention in the Harvard Business Review and various other articles published in Harvard Management Review Update as well as the hiring module found in Harvard ManageMentor®, an online service. Each volume is indeed "a highly practical resource for readers with all levels of experience."

Peter Cappelli served as subject advisor to Richard Luecke, writer of this and other books in the Harvard Business School Essentials Series and author or developer of more than 30 other books as well as several dozen articles. As Luecke notes in the Introduction, Bradford Smith completed a study of 54 U.S. companies and learned that the average managerial "mis-hire" costs a company 24 times the individual's base compensation. How can that be possible? "Smith points to all the usual suspects" (the mis-hire's compensation and cost of maintenance, the initial hiring costs, severance expenses, the costs associated hiring and training a replacement," etc.) but the biggest cost...is the cost of the mistakes, failures, and missed opportunities that result from having the wrong person in a management position over several years."

The material in this volume is carefully organized within seven chapters, followed by three appendices which provide a sample job description and targeted interview questions as well as discussion of various "legal landmines" in hiring. Each chapter is introduced by a list of "Key Topics" to be covered in it and concludes with a brief Summary. For example, in Chapter 5, the essential strategies for "Keeping the Best" reflect why retention matters and why it is now so challenging, the special challenges of a diverse work force, and why people stay -- and why they leave. Examples are provided of two companies which successfully retain their best employees (e.g. Southwest Airlines and SAS) and then the reader is provided with several "tips" on managing retention.

Throughout this book, several check-lists are included. One of the most informative is Figure 3-3 ("What Managers Are Looking For") which lists the attributes rated by executives who participated in a survey conducted by McKinsey & Company in 2000. Here are the five rated highest: Interesting, challenging work (59%), Company is well-managed (48%), Work I feel passionate about (45%), Good relations with my boss (43%), and two tied for fifth place (39%): I like the culture and values, and, Recognized, rewarded for my individual contribution.

Ken Blanchard once observed that feedback is "the breakfast food of champions" and I agree. An excellent indication of that is the exit interview which many companies do not conduct and few of those who do do it well. In the final chapter, "When All Else Fails," the reader is provided with some excellent advice which includes but is not limited to exit interviews. Ernst & Young is cited as a company which made a special effort "to re-recruit excellent employees who had defected to now-defunct dot-com companies. It even set up a national Alumni Relations Office to manage this important aspect of its human resource business." (Readers wishing to know more about those initiatives are directed to "Alumni Relations During a Downturn," Daily Deal, 27 September 2001.) In this final chapter, several specific suggestions are offered to help increase the number and quality of re-hires. Obtain feedback which reveals the root causes of defections and then eliminate those causes. This information can be obtained during exit interviews and by direct investigation.

Those who share my high regard for this book are urged to read Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman's First, Break All the Rules and Coffman and Gabriel Gonzalez-Molina's subsequently published Follow This Path. In the former, the authors introduce the Gallup Organization's "Q12"; in the latter, the authors examine it in much greater depth. Briefly, "Q12" consists of a series of questions (yes, 12 of them) which elicit from respondents information needed to attract, focus, align, and thereby keep the most talented employees.

Buckingham and Coffman obtained performance data from 2,500 companies and punched in the opinion data from 105,000 employees. "This is what we found. First, we saw that those employees who responded more positively to the twelve questions also worked in business units with higher levels of productivity, profit, retention, and customer satisfaction. This demonstrated, for the first time, the link between employee opinion and business unit performance, across many different companies. Second, the meta-analysis revealed that employees rated the questions differently depending on which unit they worked for rather than which company. This meant that, for the most part, these twelve opinions were being formed by the employee's immediate manager rather than by the policies or procedures of the overall company."

I also recommend Bruce Tulgan's Winning the Talent Wars, David Sears's Successful Talent Strategies, and The War for Talent co-authored by Ed Michaels, Helen Handfield-Jones, and Beth Axelrod.

This essay by Ludwig von Mises was published in 1969. It is an informative and opinionated overview of the historical background behind the Austrian School of Economics. The Austrian School began in the 1870s with the pioneering work of the Austrian Carl Menger. The School was focused in Vienna, which at the time was the head of the "multi-cultural" Austro-Hungarian Empire. (I imagine it wouldn't qualify as multi-cultural in the eyes of today's leftists because of its allegiance was to the crown and Christianity, rather than PC ideology). Although its focus was in Austria, there were significant followers in Germany, as well as some Czechs.

The Austrian School was on the side of liberalism (which at that time meant less government) and its central opponents were members of the German Historical School, which supported statist economic policies and was allied with the Prussian monarchy. A good part of this essay is focused on this dispute.

The philosophical underpinning of the School was the rationalist philosophy of Kant and Leibniz, with the influence of philosophers such as Brenanto (who influenced Husserl).

Certainly Ludwig von Mises was the right man to write this essay. He was acquainted with Menger and was a student of Bohm-Bawerk. He was involved in the controversies that this work addresses. Von Mises wrote it near the end of his incredibly productive life, and I found interesting the pessimism that pervades the work.

There are scads of good books on state and Federal government, but few on local government. William Fischel's The Homevoter Hypothesis is an exception and is an apparent classic on local government. Fischel's book advances more than an "hypothesis." It is a "correlation" that convincingly describes from case studies and case law how real estate economics drives local government. Fischel reports that housing equity in the U.S. is eleven times as large as liquid assets among all homeowners. Home equity value is the largest asset of private wealth. But this equity value is constantly under threat from external forces ("externalities") beyond the control of property owners except by government intervention. Homes are an immovable asset whose value can't be insured against a wipeout of equity. Homeowners will consent to the impositions of municipal and school district financing, zoning, growth controls, and environmental regulations only to the extent that they protect home values, or can be "capitalized" (converted) into higher property values. Fischel advances what he calls the "Tiebout Hypothesis" (from Charles Tiebout) that "people vote with their feet" by moving or shopping for a locality to maximize their wealth. Actually, because real estate is an immobile asset, Fischel's theorem might be more accurately restated as "people put their feet to the vote" or "stake their home value to the vote."
Fischel sometimes uses elegant terms ("homevoter," "unlovely land uses"), classical phrases ("people who buy houses are more careful about it than almost any other transaction, save perhaps getting married"), and even employs a reverse golden rule of sorts ("municipalities will foist disamenities on their neighbor that they would not do unto themselves"). Sometimes Fischel uses blunt summarization such as when he writes that the "Smart Growth Movement" and growth controls "seem to act more like a cartel for those already in possession of suburban homes than as a rationalizer of metropolitan development patterns." Fischel includes helpful subheadings in each chapter, reminiscent of Machiavelli's classic The Prince, that succinctly tell you what he is driving at. Unlike most economics texts, there are no obfuscating "supply and demand" tables in this book.
My only disappointment with the book is that Fischel did not go far enough. For instance, what just compensation is to be provided to landowners whose property has been downzoned for environmental preservation by local government, then acquired by a state or federal agency, or a non-government organization (NGO), for the same preservation use for which it was downzoned? When local government downzones a property to buy it on the cheap it is typically considered a confiscatory taking. What is the difference when two levels of government act in concert to accomplish the same thing, both in response to the same incumbent home voting constituency? Moreover, such interference with real estate markets often results in a situation where there no longer is available any land sales market data from which to determine the value of a property, except government and non-government organization sales that can not be considered under government real estate appraisal standards (see reviewer's "Valuing Nature Land in 'Extinct' Markets," Appraisal Journal, 1998). Another example would be toxic waste site cleanup policies that are less concerned with the "health effects" than "wealth effects" to surrounding property values (see reviewer's "But is it Market Value?" Appraisal Journal, 1999 and "The Externality Principle: Value Transfers from Toxic Waste Site Cleanups as a Basis for Regulatory Takings," Environmental Claims Journal, 2001). How can "people vote with their feet" when growth controls are meant to put one's feet in cement so to speak? Perhaps Fischel will follow up with a sequel that can address such dilemmas in greater depth? The Homevoter Hypothesis is an indispensable book for city managers, local politicians, zoning and school boards, and the legal and real estate professions. I give it an unqualified highest rating.
Wayne Lusvardi
The opinions expressed above are solely those of the reviewer.

If you are young, and want to earn cash, but dont know how to get started, this is the book for you. Well written and concise, with actual realistic gameplans on how to get started. It also teaches the value of money, and the thrill it is to earn substantial amounts of money all on your own.