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A Masterful Analysis of Company, Customer, and Competition Kenichi Ohmae - voted by The Economist as "one of the world's top five management gurus" - changed the landscape of management strategy in "The Mind of the Strategist". In this compelling account of global business domination, Ohmae reveals the vital thinking processes and planning techniques of prominent companies, showing why they work, and how any company can benefit from them. Filled with case studies of strategic thinking in action, Ohmae's classic work inspires today's managers to excel to new heights of bold, imaginative thinking and solutions. "In many ways, Ohmae can be considered the modern reincarnation of a much older guru, Adam Smith." -"Journal of Marketing". "A fascinating window into the mind of one of Japan's premier strategists...full of ideas about how to improve strategic thinking."- Michael E. Porter, Graduate School of Business Administration, Harvard University

This is a 2004 Berry-American Marketing Association book prize finalist! 'This book is an indispensable, step-by-step guide to calculating what works and what doesn't in the notoriously difficult to measure areas of marketing and public relations. When a CEO wants to know what he or she got for their investment in marketing, the processes and formulas presented in Marketing ROI help get to the most credible answer possible. More importantly, marketers can now confidently eliminate waste from their budgets and improve productivity' - Tom Nicholson, Former Director Public Relations and Communications, Sears, Roebuck and Co.A powerful program for making every marketing dollar count by accurately measuring its impact on your company's bottom line Return on investment (ROI) is today's key business tool for measuring how effectively a company uses its assets, yet few marketing managers receive any ROI training at all. "Marketing ROI" changes that, showing marketing practitioners at all levels how to employ ROI and other financial tools to quantify their organizations' strategic marketing decisions and maximize the incremental profits generated by each dollar invested in their marketing programs.The first comprehensive, easy-to-follow guidebook on using ROI to improve the effectiveness of virtually any marketing program, this results-focused book provides step-by-step guidelines on how your organization can: align marketing measurements and goals with operational objectives; track marketing performance and provide feedback for improvements; and, include all decision makers in the success of its marketing program. For far too long, marketing efforts and expenditures have been seen as a world unto themselves that logically and logistically separate from labor, plant, and other more traditional costs. "Marketing ROI" presents a program for removing the veil of mystery from marketing efficiency by measuring the validity and success of marketing investments and dramatically improving the ROI for each dollar spent in your organization's marketing program.' The goal of this book is to serve as a comprehensive guide for effectively using marketing ROI to improve profitability. There is tremendous opportunity to have an impact on profitability at the campaign, customer, and corporate levels. The information presented will provide insight to executives, marketers, financial managers, and research analysts' - From the Introduction."Marketing ROI" presents an idea whose time has come. The idea? That marketing is an integral component of any organization's profitability (or lack thereof), and it is reasonable - in fact, beneficial - for executives to expect a measurable return on marketing investment, just as they expect returns on capital, technology, and other essential expenditures. Built around a straightforward formula that can be adapted and implemented by organizations to match their own operational and financial requirements, "Marketing ROI" follows a three-step process for introducing, understanding, and implementing marketing ROI: Understand ROI Principles - Introduces key concepts for and the rationale behind marketing ROI; Build the ROI Formula - Explains techniques and examples for measuring marketing ROI and aligning measures with decisions; and, Applying Marketing ROI - Provides methodologies and strategic applications for implementing, standardizing, and managing marketing ROI.Today's increasingly intense competitive environment, coupled with constant demands to improve shareholder value, has ratcheted up the pressure on companies to increase spending efficiency whenever and wherever possible. But with traditional paths to profitability more crowded than ever, companies are finding it virtually impossible to gain meaningful ground while using the same concepts and calculations as their competitors. Businesses need an approach that compares virtually every marketing investment with its incremental return, improves the measurements of the financial value of an organization's marketing investments, and ensures that the underlying principles remain valid."Marketing ROI" presents a new and better way to strengthen your competitive position by solidifying the tracking of your marketing expenses. Let it show you a proven path to accurately measure the efficiency and effectiveness of each of your marketing expenses - from targeted price reductions to direct marketing campaigns to revamped distribution channels - and use that data to increase the bottom-line return for every marketing decision you make.

Immigration divides our globalising world like no other issue. We are swamped by bogus asylum-seekers and infiltrated by terrorists, our jobs stolen, our benefit system abused, our way of life destroyed - or so we are told. Philippe Legrain, author of the critically acclaimed OPEN WORLD, has written the first book that looks beyond the headlines. Why are ever-rising numbers of people from poor countries arriving in Europe, North America and Australasia? Can we keep them out? Should we even be trying? Combining compelling first-hand reporting from around the world, incisive socio-economic analysis and a broad understanding of what is at stake politically and culturally, IMMIGRANTS is a passionate, but lucid book. In our open world, more people will inevitably move across borders, Legrain says - and we should generally welcome them. They do the jobs we can't or won't do - and their diversity enriches us all. Left and right; free-marketeers and campaigners for global justice; enlightened patriots - all should rally behind the cause of freer migration, because They need Us and We need Them.

He is one of the world's most accomplished figures of modern finance. As chairman and chief executive officer of Citigroup, Sanford "Sandy" Weill has become an American legend, a banking visionary whose innovativeness, opportunism, and even fear drove him from the lowliest jobs on Wall Street to its most commanding heights. In this unprecedented biography, acclaimed Wall Street Journal reporter Monica Langley provides a compelling account of Weill's rise to power. What emerges is a portrait of a man who is as vital and as volatile as the market itself. Tearing Down the Walls tells the riveting inside story of how a Jewish boy from Brooklyn's back alleys overcame incredible odds and deep-seated prejudices to transform the financial-services industry as we know it today. Using nearly five hundred firsthand interviews with key players in Weill's life and career -- including Weill himself -- Langley brilliantly chronicles not only his success and scandals but also the shadows of his hidden self: his father's abandonment and his loving marriage; his tyrannical rages as well as his tearful regrets; his fierce sense of loyalty and his ruthless elimination of potential rivals. By highlighting in new and startling detail one man's life in a narrative as richly textured and compelling as a novel, Tearing Down the Walls provides the historical context of the dramatic changes not only in business but also in American society in the last half century.

A fascinating biography of the visionary behind the shareholder activist movement"Bob Monks is a truly rare creature, not only a businessman turned political activist, which is rare enough, but an activist in and on behalf of business, which makes him virtually unique." –Nelson W. Aldrich, Jr. author, Old Money: The Making of America′s Upper Class."A Traitor to His Class is a fascinating account of an idealistic visionary in action." –Ben Makihara, Chairman, Mitsubishi Corporation."A superbly written book that provides a fascinating and candid insight on the brilliant but complex Bob Monks. A must read for any director, corporate shareholder, or employee of a public enterprise." –L. Dennis Kozlowski, Chairman and CEO, Tyco International Ltd."One of the most interesting players in the development of corporate governance has been (the often controversial) Bob Monks. This well–written and lively biography puts him and his role in perspective–scholars, for information, and CEOs, for survival, ought to read it." –John Biggs, Chairman, President and CEO, TIAA–CREF."An interesting story of one of the early proponents of changes in corporate governance and a formidable personal opponent in several corporate battles." –Martin Lipton, Esq., Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz.Ask anyone who knows Robert Monks to describe him, and words such as "visionary," "determined," and "passionate" will surface. He is, in fact, all this and much more. At six–foot–six, he is a formidable presence, but the respect he demands has less to do with his physical stature than with his influential status as a driving force behind the shareholder activist movement – an initiative that began as a self–proclaimed "mission" to improve corporate governance and accountability, and that is now an integral part of contemporary business and investing. Now, the remarkable history of the movement and one of its pioneers is told.Though born into a wealthy and powerful Boston family whose roots were established in New England before the Revolution, Robert Augustus Gardner Monks was never intent on simply leading a life of privileged luxury. Driven by a deep desire to make himself "useful to the world," he took steps to meet this end. He graduated from Harvard University –Phi Beta Kappa, magna cum laude–and Harvard Law School, and subsequently joined Boston′s second largest law firm where he became one of its youngest partners ever. Monks then embarked on a new path which led him towards his ultimate goal of far–reaching public service.Vividly tracing his extraordinary journey, A Traitor to His Class follows Monks′s experiences as businessman, corporate attorney, venture capitalist, regulator, and finally, shareholder activist. Written with exclusive access to Monks himself, as well as his collection of notes, speeches, and correspondence, it covers his numerous accomplishments –as well as a few defeats. Included are his term as the Department of Labor′s pensions administrator; his bid for the Sears board of directors, a run that won him recognition as "the leader of the battle to reform American corporate governance"; and his three attempts at the Senate, all of which were invaluable training for the guerrilla war he would wage on big business.Instrumental to his battle is his brainchild, Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS), which today handles voting for hundreds of corporate and government pension funds and represents a deciding factor in many contentious proxy votes at large companies both here and abroad. A Traitor to His Class intricately details ISS′s growing impact, as well as that of the Lens Fund, whose forays into poorly managed corporations have set new precedents for shareholder activism.The biography of a man who dared to demand that Corporate America be answerable to both its owners and society, A Traitor to His Class is an engaging and enthralling look at one of today′s hottest, most controversial movements in business.

A widespread misunderstanding concerning leveraged buyouts (LBOs) is the belief that they accomplish little but the ruin of companies and the loss of employment. How else could it be? Until recently, journalists, including much of the business press, have depicted LBO specialists as generally greedy, if not sinister, forces whose activities compound the dislocations of modern American economic and social life. This kind of criticism reached a crescendo in the press and in Congress at the end of the 1980s, and Kohlberg Kravis Roberts found itself in the middle of the controversy. Based on interviews with partners of the firm and on unprecedented access to KKR's records, George P. Baker and George David Smith have written a definitive account of how KKR has approached LBOs in a book that will appeal to the specialist and general reader alike. The authors focus on KKR's founding, evolution, and innovations as ways to understand issues in modern American business. In examining KKR as a unique form of enterprise--one that subscribes to a set of alternative perspectives on business and value creation--the book bridges the gap between public perception and academic knowledge of how financial innovation impacts economic life. The firm's approach to leveraged buyouts was an important aspect of the corporate restructuring and governance reforms in the American economy from the mid-1970s through 1990 (the years of what some have called the "leveraged buyout movement"). KKR and other companies fundamentally altered the prevailing perception of the role of debt in the modern American corporation and established an alternative model for organizing and managing corporate enterprises. KKR financed the companies it acquired with high levels of debt, while linking their ownership to management. It then imposed rigorous monitoring by the board of directors over the companies in its portfolio. This combination of factors forced managers to concentrate not on growth but rather on how to achieve value through whatever means was most appropriate to the company's circumstances. The purpose of the leveraged buyout was to realize, or "create," value in companies by reforming their management systems. KKR's approach to restructuring the relationship between owners and managers in a highly leveraged firm rested on a basic principle: Make managers owners by making them invest a significant share of their personal wealth in the enterprises they manage, and they will have stronger incentives to act in the best interests of all shareholders.

The New Manager's Guide and Mentor "The Harvard Business Essentials" series is designed to provide comprehensive advice, personal coaching, background information, and guidance on the most relevant topics in business. Whether you are a new manager seeking to expand your skills or a seasoned professional looking to broaden your knowledge base, these solution-oriented books put reliable answers at your fingertips. Decision making is a critical part of management, and bad choices can damage careers and the bottom line. This book offers the tools and advice managers need to avoid common biases and arrive at and implement decisions that are both sound and ethical.

The book, 'Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything’ is an interesting book that combines the theories of economics with everyday issues and topics and presents a series of fascinating exercises that are engaging. Written by Stephen J. Dubner and Steven Levitt, this book provides a unique take of various things that we face every day. It has been published by William Morrow publications in the year 2013. This book became popular thanks to its unique narration style that presented the complex economic concepts using conventional humour and everyday wisdom.This book is written in the format of essays that cover economic issues and dissect how they are connected with everyday life. There are total 6 essays in the book. The first chapter deals with the issue of cheating and uses the example of sumo wrestlers. The second chapter deals with real estate agents and their practice of information control. The third chapter is about drug dealing which has been explained in an unconventional manner. It talks about the life and earnings of cocaine dealers and the low wages that they earn. The fourth chapter deals with the topic of abortion and talks about how abortions have helped in reducing crime rates. The fifth chapter is about parenting and education. The sixth chapter sheds light on the issue of naming children and the socioeconomic patterns related to it. The book uses interesting methodologies to put forward its teachings and often takes unconventional stands.About the authorSteven Levitt is a famous economist who is popular for his work on crime and abortion. He was included in the Time magazine's list of '100 People Who Shape Our World' in 2006. He was also with the John Bates Clark Medal, which is offered by the American Economic Association for being the most promising U.S. economist under the age of 40. Stephen J. Dubner is a popular journalist and is well known for his work on pop-economics books. He completed his education from the Appalachian State University and Columbia University. He was one of the short-listed candidates for the Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award.The book, 'Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything’’ is a very interesting read for anyone who wants to know about the complex principles of economics. This book is easily available online for convenient shopping.You can bag this book from Amazon.in today by following a few easy steps.

Our world is as much about cooperation as it is about conflict; as much about collaboration as competition. Yet our knowledge of collective behavior is still relatively slim. Leaders who have been trained in the command-and-control mode of management are realizing that it often fails to truly engage people; in response, management thinkers have proclaimed the advent of a new, participatory model. But why should there be only two modes of collective behavior?For the past two years Deloitte has invested in a major global initiative, the As One project, to study effective collaborations. The project has discovered that there are many modes of "As One behavior" and that all are effective in certain contexts. As One defines eight archetypes of leaders and followers. Taking more than 60 cases of successful collective behavior, the authors define the characteristics for each model and show how you can apply them to your organization. As One will show you a new way to lead, and to get your team working to reach all your goals. Imagine what we could accomplish if we could unlock the power of As One on a global scale.