economics-times

This is such a simple and easy approach; allowing one to either work at getting things done with the step by step method described in this very motivating book OR by simply jumping to the section which will be of immediate benefit to one. Page layout is simple but effective which is very necessary when one has little time. Simply glance and then act. No long, unnecessary sentences with endless of storytelling - just the essential. To me it is a treasure alleviating the traffic jam in my life. Formerly, I would not have had the time to write this review.

One of the best practical books availble on being more effective in all walks of life.

The book is useful for homeschooling parents who want to plan and help their child keep a portfolio of the high school years. It is also a COURSE for the child to take in time management.
Beyond the wonderful, helpful ideas, the child is taught steps to complete his/her own personal notebook organizer (with plans, calendars, personal goals, etc sheets inside). The book also teaches the child to plan his education and develop life goals.
The last part of the book contains forms for the notebook, project and essay checklists, course planning sheets (a child can plan his own course and have evidence of completion of that course), and many other helpful organizers.
THEN there is a CD free with it. It contains all those sheets in PDF form PLUS a scope and sequence and goals for just about any typical high school course you could think of (no environmental science but yes, even calculus).
I can't say enough good things about the book. I wish I had my oldest going through it last year (he's doing that now) and I plan to have my middle son go through it this summer before he starts 9th grade. My biggest problem is organization. The lack of it causes me to waste so much time. With this book, I'm hoping my children (and I) will learn skills so they (and I) will do better.
Better yet, the book enables the child to take charge and make decisions about his/her education. COOL!

Please send a copy of your book for review. I would like my graduate students to be using this book in their classroom.

Dr. Romulo Macias c/o Mercy College Gruduate Program of Education Second Floor. Office of Dr. Palomini and Sr. Sancher Bronx, New York 10462

Charles Craver is the Leroy S. Merrifield Research Professor of Law at George Washington University (Washington, D.C.) where he teaches negotiating. Through his work at the Law School and in workshops throughout the world, Professor Craver estimates that he has taught negotiating skills to some 60,000 attorneys and businesspersons.
The Intelligent Negotiator is a book that fulfills the promise of its title. Craver provides the reader with the techniques and skills to become a true master of the craft.
Unquestionably, The Intelligent Negotiator will prove invaluable for the beginning negotiator and a solid source for refining the skills of the more experienced practitioner. Refreshingly, in a field in which so much has been written and is often unacknowledged, Craver credits and draws upon the research and findings of its authors. Additionally, although he has a preferred approach to negotiations, the author provides a fundamental negotiating skills book that does not rest upon the adoption of a singular negotiating style.
"Don't even try to adopt just one negotiating style or philosophy," Craver tells his reader in the first sentence of his work, "for there is no single approach that can effectively govern all bargaining transactions" (p.3). The intelligent negotiator, in Professor Craver's view, is a person who is comfortable working within a suite of negotiating styles. The reader who understands that premise is on the way to wisdom.
The experienced negotiator knows that no matter what the hopes, not every negotiation expands the pie. Negotiators come in all stripes and are driven by differing motives. Success in negotiations requires that its participants understand and adapt easily to the reality of functioning with an arena encompassing widely disparate styles.
Craver notes three major approaches that the intelligent negotiator must master. The first of these is the Competitive-Adversarial. This is the stuff of win/lose negotiations, the zero sum game in which the pie is presumed to be fixed and one participant wins more if the other loses more. The second he defines as the Cooperative-Problem-Solving approach. In this style, the parties seek to expand the pie through engaging in a joint creative enterprise and thereby enable the participants to realize a win/win outcome. The intelligent negotiator recognizes that this second style has inherent rewards and significant risks of exploitation depending upon the true commitments of the parties at the bargaining table to the cooperative negotiating style.
Both styles remain predominant in negotiating and Craver introduces the reader to some of the research on the effectiveness of practitioners of these two dominant negotiating styles. It is interesting research.
Craver cites a study of the negotiating styles of practicing attorneys conducted by Professor Gerald Williams of Brigham Young University some twenty years ago that may surprise many readers. According to Professor Williams' research, most practicing lawyers do not use an adversarial style in their negotiations. Two thirds of the attorneys, as viewed by their colleagues, used a cooperative approach and only twenty-five percent of the lawyers were seen as practitioners of an adversarial style of negotiations (p.10).
More importantly, peer assessment concluded that cooperative negotiators fared far better than adversarial attorneys in the negotiating arena. Fifty-nine percent of the cooperative style negotiators were viewed as effective negotiators and only a miniscule 3 percent were considered ineffective. Only 25 percent of the adversarial style negotiators were deemed effective by their peers and a staggering 33 percent were judged to be ineffective. A more recent study reported last year by Professor Andrea Kupfer Schneider, found over half of adversarial style negotiators were considered ineffective by their peers (p.10).
There is much that the negotiator can draw from these findings, not the least of which is that the intelligent negotiator must be able to adapt and operate successfully in an arena of diverse approaches. Reliance on a singular style, as Professor Craver well illustrates is a recipe for disaster.
Given this, Craver offers a third style as the best primary style for the intelligent negotiator. The Innovator approach, as the author calls his preferred style, is a hybrid of both of the preeminent negotiating approaches. Its hallmarks are beginning with principled offers, matching one's counterpart on how much and what is disclosed, relying on objective criteria and recognizing that the primary goal of the negotiator is to obtain beneficial results for themselves and secondarily for the opponent.
The core of the book, however, is far from a discourse on a singular approach, but rather the teaching of the underlying fundamental skills and techniques that every negotiator regardless of their approach requires to succeed in practicing the art. The book, therefore, is an intelligent negotiator's guide to the practice of negotiations.
Craver explores the process thoroughly and leads his reader through the tough issues confronting every negotiator with concise and well-reasoned advice. The author shows the reader the importance of setting high goals, even increasing them before negotiations begin. He gives the reader solid advice on how to construct an opening offer and coaches the negotiator on its critical impact on the psychology and course of the negotiations to follow. The reader learns how an opening offer operates as an anchor, its role in bracketing the negotiating settlement range and its use in framing the other party's perception of gain and loss in the potential agreement. If these concepts are not clear to you, they are clearly explained in Craver's work.
There is far more in this volume. You will find strategies for multiple item negotiations, techniques for handling absurd positions, some careful advice on reading body language and a host of topics that the intelligent negotiator must know. You will find it a valuable negotiating skills guide of value for any style of negotiations.
To complete his work, the author turns his attention to some of the more special types of negotiating situations that all readers encounter. You will find some insightful advice in his concluding sections on negotiating employment agreements, automobile purchases and real estate bargaining.
Highly recommended.
John Baker, Ph.D.
Editor, The Negotiator Magazine

This book is excellent because it is well organized and maps out the negotiation process. Instead of just giving tips about various tactics, this book gives the reader a roadmap, which makes preparation for negotiation much easier. In my opinion, this book is second only to G. Richard Shell's, "Bargaining for Advantage."

I got more out of this video than I have out of many expensive seminars and conferences I have attended. It's a terrific guide to dealing with change and turning it into opportunity. Drucker and Senge offer insightful observations about the how to prepare for the future. I showed it to a group of colleagues at a company off-site and it helped generate a great discussion. There's a workbook that I used to guide the discussion, and a lot of really good insights throughout the video.

Peter Drucker and Peter Senge explore how each leader can "make the future." Their conversation covers many of the Drucker themes his readers will recognize: the need to abandon the old, the need to build on successes, and the value of leading knowledge workers as if they were volunteers. Peter Senge is a skillful moderator, adding his own comments about the need to focus on creating rather that solving problems. The video package comes with a useful Viewer's Workbook and Notes for Facilitators. This video package is an inexpensive way to bring a provocative conversation into your organization.

This book should be required reading for anyone in management, or aspiring to a management position.
The book outlines common-sense rules for suceeding during volatile times, but sadly common sense is often lacking in the real world. The authors describe strategies for creating organizations with committed cultures, partnering with customers, practical problem-solving and effective communication. The authors use of case studies from very different types of companies, from FedEx to non-profit hospitals, effectively illustrates how principles from this book can be applied to any organization.
Following the principles in this book would help to create a more effective organization and a more positive work life for both managers and staff.

Why is it that some executives are succeeding in this post-9/11, post-Enron economy while others are left scratching their heads as their companies collapse? This book shows you why, in a way that's gripping, insightful, and highly engaging. This is one of the best business books I've read.

This book is also fresh-the authors address Enron and 9/11, and give us insight into executives from companies like IBM, Nike, Wal-Mart, Solectron, Cisco, Yahoo, EMC, Campbell's Soup and dozens more.

One truly refreshing and unique aspect of this book is that it's based on an study of 18,000 leaders; not hearsay or opinions. The authors bring you inside the minds of this economy's best executives and show the strategies they use to turn chaos into competitive advantage. And not only do they give you the rules to follow, they show you how to implement them. There's even a test in the back to measure your leadership readiness.

The 10 rules they provide (taken from the book)...

1. Make Haste Slowly. To survive in this volatile economy, leaders must move with greater speed and precision than ever before. This "need for speed," however, does not mean that leaders should act without first taking time to think. In fact, just the opposite is true-if ever there was an economy that punishes sloppy thinking, this is it.

2. Partner with customers. In times like these, many leaders become insular, ignoring customer partnerships to focus solely on internal operational challenges. As a result, they disconnect themselves from the best source of current revenue and future success.

3. Build a culture of commitment. Times of volatility will stress a culture to its limits. But if you can build a culture of commitment, one where employees passionately pursue the organization's mission, you can emerge not only intact, but better positioned for success.

4. Put the right person, in the right place, right now. Exceptional leaders know they will have to assemble and align the right collection of talent to face the challenges that lie ahead.

5. Maximize knowledge assets. In a knowledge economy, an organization's ability to harness and maximize information plays the dominant role in creating competitive advantage.

6. Cut costs, not value. In a turbulent economic environment, any company can experience lowered earnings and overall weakened financial health. There's no shame in having to cut costs, but there is grave danger in doing it incorrectly.

7. Outposition your competitors. In a rapidly changing business environment, competition intensifies for an often elusive and sometimes shrinking market. Success goes to those who can understand and develop sources of competitive advantage.

8. Stir, don't shake. Successful leaders understand that the stress of living in chaotic times can cause an organizational panic attack that can stop progress in its tracks. They reduce anxiety and inspire hope by stirring employees to higher levels of achievement, not shaking them with negativity and fear.

9. Cut through the noise. Benchmark leaders understand that chaos and "noise" rise in tandem with volatility, undermining a leader's ability to communicate. Without the ability to communicate effectively, a leader's other skills are worthless.

10. Focus or fail. To manage all the challenges that emerge in volatile times, leaders need a blueprint for action. Highly effective leaders follow a carefully structured process that focuses their energies and prioritizes opportunities for success.

11. Epilogue: When Bad Things Happen To Good Corporations. Even for great leaders and their companies, crisis is sometimes inescapable. The Epilogue provides a process for understanding, planning for, and adapting to crisis, including the special threat of terrorism.

This book is filled with practical ideas for making the most of our time. It explains in plain English not just how to achieve what we set out to achieve but how to recognise what adds value to our lives and what's important to us. Thanks to Part 3: How to become more efficient, which is filled with handy hints, I'll never have to say "I didn't have time" again and I'm already better organised. The book is peppered with great quotations from famous people and cute cartoons, and the way the pages are set out make it inviting and easy to read. I got a lot out of it and highly recommend it.

Kris Cole has another winning book here. Like her Complete Idiot's Guide to Clear Communication, Make Time is an easy, enjoyable read that actually shows how to do something practical - in this case, use our time sensibly so that we can achieve what we want to achieve. The sub-title says it all - Practical Time Management that Really Works! It's filled with useful and realistic ways to work smarter not harder, and offers pain-free ways to set goals that you will really want to achieve. The final section on how to harness the power of your subconscious mind is a real mind-blower!

This is terrific introduction to Tibetan Buddhist ideas that are easier to understand because they are expressed in the anecdotal situations of running a printing business in the 90's. The author is candid and unpretentious, speaking clearly about the ups and downs of applying some ancient wisdom to his work, ideas that have come from a genuine buddhist master, but still had to be applied by someone who, despite considerable experience in business, was still a student of applied Buddhism. I like the genuineness of the author, and the feeling of the relationship with the teacher...this book is fun for those of us convinced there is something in Buddhism of great value, but not sure how to bring that something directly into our daily lives.

This is a great book because of how it brings together ideas that are usually kept in separate compartments. The author is the student of a Tibetan Buddhist teacher, and about ten or twelve years ago he and some other students started a printing business. The idea was to use Buddhist teachings in the business, especially some principles that they call "skillful means," and to see if they could make the business more successful.

It seems like it worked. The business did really well, even though they started with a few strikes against them, and they had a good time too (not fun exactly, but a sense that their work had real value and was part of their spiritual path.)

All that makes for interesting reading. But the real point of the book is to share some of the lessons they learned. That's the part that seemed really rewarding. Skillful Means involves a whole approach to time and to taking responsibility for your life and for getting the results you want, in your work or anywhere else. I'm already experimenting with some of the ideas, and they make good sense, and have an immediate impact.

I don't know if all this will translate well into everyone's job, but I can see the benefit, and I feel like I've just scratched the surface. The author is really excited about the ideas in this book, and I am too.

This is (still) an excellent book, ahead of its time when published in 1986. One of the issues he dealt with was the possible modifications to option pricing models (black-scholes type) that could be made to account for trending markets. This was before the crash of '87 and the subsequent wide-spread adoption of skewed volatility smiles and risk-reversals into option pricing.

This book is probably out of print permanently, but the author is working on a new book, the provisional title of which is "Asset Price Dynamics and Prediction" Target Date of March 2004. The chapters are loosely based on subjects covered in Modelling Financial Time series.

Chapter headings for Modelling Financial Time series:

1. Introduction
2. Features of financial returns
3. Modelling price volatility
4. Forecasting standard deviations
5. The accuracy of autocorrelation estimates
6. Testing the random walk hypothesis
7. Forecasting trends in prices
8. Evidence against the efficiency of futures markets
9. Valuing options
10. Concluding remarks
Appendix : a computer program for modelling financial time series

The first edition was published in 1986. It is EXCELLENT. Taylor rigorously studies the use of nonlinear time-series (Box-Jenkins) methods to trade a variety of financial markets, including individual stocks, stock indices, currencies, metals, and agricultural commodities, finding that there is a small trend component in most markets that can be profitably traded. Taylor performed testing of time series back in the early 1980s, when computer power and financial data was much scarcer and more expensive. I am excited to see what he has come up with, now that computers and data are a zillion times cheaper.

Every time I read one of Michael's books, I feel inspired for greatness, and this book is no exception. Michael has a gift of taking things that are familiar and looking at and applying them in unique ways. In this book, Michael talks about the importance of creating mistakes in a safe environment and using them to accelerate learning to become a better leader, coach, parent, or person. He makes it feel safe to venture out into new territory by teaching that success means pursuing your goals and dreams with much childlike passion that success and failure become irrelevant. I especially love how he frames examples throughout the book with expert quotes that provide meaningful and often thought-provoking context. The quote by Dr. Glenn Doman, Institute for the Achievement of Human Potential, provoked a great family discussion about how important it is for a child to view learning as fun and the positive impact a person can have to help inspire that belief. In the last section of the book, Michael takes a unique approach to teaching juggling, in which he applies all the principles in the book. I never would have thought that dropping balls on purpose would help me learn to juggle, but it did. And it gave me a new confidence that I can do anything!

Michael Gelb has captured the metaphor of the millennium in juggling. It is something that jugglers and non-jugglers alike can relate to at a gut level, because most of us have anything but time on our hands. A single issue of the New York Times is said to contain more information than the average person in the Middle Ages was exposed to in a lifetime. And it just starts there. MORE BALLS THAN HANDS gives you more than just the metaphor, but stories and testimonials from the workplace, as well as practical coaching on how to juggle. The book is readable and doable, and can be enjoyed on many levels. The only thing that could make it even better would be illustrations for the tips on the advanced juggling beyond 3 balls. ...

Let me speak here in law teacher mode: if you wanted to read just one book as background for law school, I think perhaps this should be the one. It's a model in terms both of substance and of presentation. In substance, the authors have done an admirable job of summing up the best available knowledge about the economy and how it came to be. In presentation, what they've done is to take an array of technical or specialized studies and to make them accessible to the determined non-specialist.

I remember it in terms of so many wonderful anecdotes. There are the farm girls from Vermont who staffed the mills in Massachusetts until the great Irish immigration drove them back to the farm. There are the restless young men from the prairies who rode the rafts down river to New Orleans, and then set off to see the world. There are the canals that lost all their capital value with the coming of the railroads - but then kept operating anyway, because it was more worthwhile to use them than to tear them up.

This is not, of course, precisely a law book. But it is a book about issues for the law: about slavery, about public land policy, about the structure of industry and finance. The chapters on the Great Depression alone would make a sufficient background for any course in constitutional or administrative law. For the authors, only two words: new edition.

This is an incredible introduction to economic history. It is clearly written, and it is easy for the non-economist to read and enjoy. If you have any interest in economic history, then this is a must read.