economics-times

My tip for time management is to skip this book. Assuming that one reads at about one page per minute, it's difficult to believe that one could recoup the five hours invested in reading this book in saved time. As in other time management books, the author borrows liberally from Stephen Covey's far superior '7 Habits of Highly Effective People', particularly in prioritizing tasks as urgent/not urgent and important/not important. The author also annoyingly tries to infuse some dull story about a couple trying to manage time more effectively by writing page after page about them to illustrate EACH AND EVERY POINT made. I HIGHLY recommend skipping this one and getting '7 Habits' or Brian Tracy's 'Eat That Frog' -- a short (113 page), easy-to-read book that gives better information, but can be read in an hour or so.

I ordered this book to try to help the people in my office become more effective managing goals. My co-workers and I have tried some of the author's suggestions, but they have been unsuccessful. Rather than buy this book and read about goal management at work, your time would be better spent communicating with your co-workers. The book does not talk enough about the crucial aspect of communication, and focuses too much on how cognitive abilities affect goal management. Goal setting is extremely important, but Hilgermann's book fails to acknowledge how multidimensional goal setting tends to be.

Note this book was written nearly 10 years ago now and it's discussion of business process and technology is woefully out of date.

Most of the companies praised here for their "leading edge" processes have fallen off their pedestals for horrendous breakdowns in supply chain management -- see Xerox's SEC punished manipulations and Compaq's [bum] kicking by Dell.

This book was probably interesting in 1993 but is no longer.

The book has deficiencies that I am sorry to report in the following.
The book is about heterogeneous beliefs. Therefore, a discussion of the
relevant literature would have been appropriate. Unfortunately, the au-
thor does not mention important contributions. I highlight a few omissions.
Mordecai Kurz and his coauthors (1997) have developed a fascinating theory
of heterogeneous, yet rational beliefs. This approach should be part of a
book about the economic implications of heterogeneous beliefs. Stochastic
volatility, to mention just one point that plays also a role in Ziegler's book,
has been shown to arise endogenously in the literature on rational beliefs.
Another approach to heterogeneous beliefs is provided by the recent liter-
ature on 'ambiguity', see Gilboa and Schmeidler (1989), Dow and Werlang
(1992), Epstein and Chen (2002). There, agents are uncertain or ambiguous
about the exact distribution of asset returns. Therefore, they use a whole
class of possible priors and maximize the expected utility under the worst be-
lief. The home bias puzzle, e.g., can be explained by ambiguity, see Epstein
and Miao (2003). Both Kurz's approach as well as the ambiguity literature
have the advantage of having a sound decision theoretic foundation whereas
the assumption of heterogeneous priors is somewhat ad hoc.
Chapter 2 of Ziegler's book has been published before { but not by the
author. In fact, it is the sad reviewer who has published not only that chap-
ter (Riedel (2000a)) but related work earlier(Riedel (2000b), Riedel (2001)).
Parts of Chapter 5 are easy corollaries to Chapter 1 in Riedel (2000b). Un-
fortunately, Ziegler has not read these contributions.

References
Detemple, J. (1986): Asset Pricing in a Production Economy with Incomplete Information," Journal of Finance, 41, 383-391.
Detemple, J., and R. Kihlstrom (1987): Acquisition d'Information
dans un Modle Intertemporel en Temps Continu," L'Actualite Economique,

63, 118-137.
Dothan, M. U., and D. Feldman (1986): Equilibrium Interest Rates
and Multiperiod Bonds in a Production-Exchange Economy," Journal of
Finance, 41, 369-382.
Dow, J., and S. Werlang (1992): Uncertainty Aversion, Risk Aversion,
and the Optimal Choice of Portfolio," Econometrica, 60(1), 197-204.
Epstein, L., and Z. Chen (2002): Ambiguity, Risk and Asset returns in
Continuous Time," Econometrica, 70, 14031443.
3
Epstein, L., and J. Miao (2003): A Two-Person dynamic Equilibrium
under Ambiguity," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, 27, 1253-
1288.
Gilboa, I., and D. Schmeidler (1989): Maxmin Expected Utility with
Non-Unique Prior," Journal of Mathematical Economics, 18, 141{153.
Kurz, M. (ed.) (1997): Endogenous Economic Fluctuations: Studies in the
Theory of Rational Beliefsvol. 6 of Springer Series in Economic Theory,
Heidelberg, New York. Springer.
Riedel, F. (2000a): Decreasing Yield Curves in a Model with an Unknown
Constant Growth Rate," European Finance Review, 4, 51-67.
(2000b): Imperfect Information and Investor Heterogeneity in the
Bond Market. Physica, Heidelberg.
(2001): Existence of Arrow{Radner Equilibrium with Endoge-
nously Complete Markets under Incomplete Information," Journal of Economic Theory, 97, 109-122.

The book is 142 pages, and 80+ pages are blanks to fill in schedules, or have one quote, or are really blank. The rest of it is even more useless than that. If I could have given it minus stars I would have.

Much, much better than "Cats"

Wow. This is truly the worst book I've ever read! The intended audience is unknown. It delves into managerial as well as engineering topics.

The biggest problem is that the book is merely a collection of bullets (notes, really). There is no point to any one page of the entire book.

These are merely a collection of rambling notes about too many subjects. And there's no underlying theme or point.

As a matter of fact, I couldn't get through any chapter, as I wasn't learning a damned thing along the way. If I wanted to learn about computers, I'd get a book on that subject.

It seems that Hassab wanted to be able to tell himself "Hey, I've written a book on systems."

See for yourself. I challenge *anyone* to get anything useful from this "book."

One redeeming quality: the books in the bibliography are good.

In this book you will find a review of software and office equipment. If this is what you are looking for, great. It's not what I was expecting. I have all the software I need, I just need time management and to stay focused. I didn't find it in this book.