Business Systems Books

A brilliant review. All the moreso since I wrote it. My question persists: Do I get any morey from the sales of this article? I believe I should, especially considering I was unceremoniously fired from IIE so many years ago. Still sour about that, you ask? Why of course I am. Not because I liked the company - clearly, it sucked - but beacuse they fired me for being out sick too much. I mean, I almost died in the hospital, and yet all the editors cared about was the fact that I missed crucial deadlines. I just have a real issue with crass corporate fascism. So should you. Now get back to work, you corporate slave, and stop reading the bitter ruminations of an otherwise euphorically happy public school teacher!

I wrote this article, before I dropped my last name, Wimsatt. I used to work for the Institute of Industrial Engineers in their publications department.

What the hell is my article doing on Amazon, and do I get any money from the sales of the article?

These are questions that will probably never be answered.

This book was written by a number of famous finance professors including several Novel Prize winners. Each chapter was written by the world class academics and this contains comprehensive topics relating to international finance and governance system. This book is not expensive at all but you can learn a lot.

As admitted in the book there is an overemphasis on American governance systems due to the many high quality research papers available by leading US academics. The strong point of this book is that the research has been condensed into concise short papers easily understood by corporate accountants (like myself). It gives a broad view of Agency Theory and the associated costs and benefits of various governance models and real life examples. As I am working in Japan, my interest was in the comparision of systems between Japan & US (as an Australian I was dissapointed at no analysis of the Australian perspective). However, the rapid change in the Japanese corporate environment in the last 1-2 years makes some of the discussions marginally out of date. A lot of the analysis though is so fundamental it is unlikely its basis will change much in the next 10 years. A good read and very thought provoking.

I am a Field Applications Engineer (FAE).
My knowledge needs to be as broad as possible. My expertise is limited in a very specific narrow area. I felt like a "handicapped" when I talk to my customers on the project details they work on. After reading Success By Learning, it gave me a better insight on hardware, firmware programming, Internet, Ethernet, networking. As a result, it helps me sell my products easier and I get more respect from my customers.

This book is designed to assist sales personnel to understand the electronics industry in layman's term. It is extremely easy to read and contains most up-to-date information. I recommend this book to all the new employees who have no knowledge of the electronics field as a bible to understand the terminology of this vast industry. All of my trainess have been instructed to read this book as a beginning of their career.

Inspiring description of what visioning is, the value added of it and the power it gives to organizations to change for the better.

This book provides an overview of vision, visioning, leadership and examples of successful leaders but the authors warn us that little or no learning can be transferred from one organization to another because each requires its own distinct approach. Of all strategic management tools, visioning is usually rated first but satisfaction with its use receives a lower rating because a sound platform on which to grow a vision was missing. Visioning is the process by which leaders can articulate the future directions they wish to pursue, focusing on the future of the organization and its role in society. Forming a vision is a complex procedure involving a sophisticated process of discerning and equally sophisticated negotiations with all key stakeholders who need to be involved in achieving the vision. A motivating vision or one that produces "creative tension" implies innovation, departure from past practice and different organizational capabilities. In order to overcome indifference and resistance that major innovation provokes, a champion is required to identify the idea as his own, to promote it actively through informal networks and to risk his position and prestige to ensure the innovation's success. The champion must have the capacity to inspire and enthuse others with his vision of the potential of an innovation. A good place to start is to agree on what has been done well and what the group wants to continue to do well. A well-prepared vision should spontaneously help individuals to take decisions and free people to take initiative. The authors provide guidelines for promoting a shared perspective and generating a corporate vision.

One chapter is devoted to Allen Sheppard and GrandMet where the goal was to take a successful company, ensure it continued to be successful, and make it even more successful. Often this situation is more difficult than a typical turnaround, because people do not see the need to change. The top group developed a set of criteria for a vision statement that was so far reaching that it could not be publicized for two years but it led to the sale of 25 companies and the acquisition of Pillsbury. Another chapter presents the remarkable success story of Toray Industries and the role visioning played in its transformation in the decade from 1987. Describing the way in which vision works, H. Maeda said, "We keep the image in our minds at all times when we take decisions on various business matters. Keeping the picture of our company in say, ten year's time, we decide on management strategy and business policy. In a company of this size, the leadership of the president is absolutely crucial. He must be able to exercise his leadership at a fairly practical level, and have a management philosophy as well as an ability to manage. Another important quality he needs is the ability to win the hearts and minds of all employees and to inspire them to focus on the shared goal. I believe that a CEO must be prepared to hear everyone's views, let them discuss thoroughly matters that are important to management, and get totally involved in the process of building up consensus among directors. This will ensure that the future direction of the firm will become firmly established on shared values, but the important point is that there must be constant effort on the CEO's part to create and maintain a forum at which all directors can express their views freely to the CEO. There are many facets to leadership, but to put it simply, it is the ability of the leaders to anticipate what is coming, and the possession of the sense of balance in their judgement." Few people will read this book and not come away with ideas for improvement.

If you follow the principles outlined in this excellent book, you will realize that you need not be immersed in long winded "Guru" secret techniques. This man has done it from nothing to multimillionaire by followint these techniques. He is the real deal. Buy this book. Keep it with you. Have fun getting rich.

Watch Video Here: http://www.amazon.com/review/R3V0KC4M707G0Y This is a review from the book signing with Mr. Tycoon!

I am not an HR professional, but being the VP of Marketing and Communications at a small company, I often deal with HR related issues. It is very difficult having to make a decision that positively changes the company and negatively affects the employees and vice versa. Being able to build employee morale and loyalty is one way to increase the overall efficiency and productivity of a company. This book guides you to that stage and the many models and examples only make it easier to attain. Fantastic reading for anyone in a leadership position.

Finally, a book that not only focuses on the goals of an organization but also the goals and needs of its backbone, the EMPLOYEES. Managing a small company isn't any easier than managing a large one when the issues that face our HR department are the same. Meeting company Sales or employee Promotions? Training or Repositioning? Very helpful and easy to use. Fill in your current issues and goals, follow the models and explanations, and you are ready to start with "Creating your People as a Competitive Advantage." A must have for any company, big or small.

Haines has literally Reinvented Strategic Planning into a 21st Century Strategic Management System using the Systems Thinking Approach that is the natural way the world works. He uses a simple and clear, yet comprehensive ABCs Methodology that anyone can quickly learn and use. Yet most Planning that is taught even today still starts with a Current State Assessment (SWOT Analysis) instead of "beginning with the end in mind" as Steven Covey states in his Best Seller on the 7 Habits of Highly Successful People.
Define your Ideal Future Vision and desired outcomes within the context of the Future Environment at the future year of your Vision is how to begin. Then, Haines has you use "Backwards Thinking" to today to be able to close the gap from today to the future. The problem with most planning that starts with today as there is no gap to close to take you to the future because you have not defined your desired outcomes first.

Sustaining High Performance is strong in providing organizational managers a step-by-step foundation for dealing with any change project--big or small--using a systems thinking overlay.

The book outlines systems thinking clearly, and shows how it can be applied to virtually any multi-level change.

Haines makes managers see how the natural laws of his systems thinking approach can easily fit their planning models for viable strategies and desired solutions within the complexities of a new millenium.

Swords Into Market Shares: Technology, Economics, And Security In The New Russia is an invaluable and authoritative examination of the problems Russia is experiencing as it tries to transform from an economic system of centrally controlled economic despotism to one of private enterprise based, technologically impacted system of production, distribution, and consumption. This transformation has resulted in catastrophic and often unintended consequences. Glenn Schweitzer surveys the different visions of prosperity held by Russian entrepreneurs, technologists, and government officials, Russia's economy and its research and development infrastructure, and the impact of the Soviet Legacy that continues to complicate and impede Russian economic and financial recovery. Swords Into Market Shares is highly instructive and recommended reading for students of contemporary Russian society, economic conditions, and international relations.

Swords Into Market Shares: Technology, Economics, And Security In The New Russia is an invaluable and authoritative examination of the problems Russia is experiencing as it tries to transform from an economic system of centrally controlled economic despotism to one of private enterprise based, technologically impacted system of production, distribution, and consumption. This transformation has resulted in catastrophic and often unintended consequences. Glenn Schweitzer surveys the different visions of prosperity held by Russian entrepreneurs, technologists, and government officials, Russia's economy and its research and development infrastructure, and the impact of the Soviet Legacy that continues to complicate and impede Russian economic and financial recovery. Swords Into Market Shares is highly instructive and recommended reading for students of contemporary Russian society, economic conditions, and international relations.

This book is aimed at the system engineer who is involved in product design and engineering or involved in government contracting and must produce system engineering management plans (SEMPs). It is also applicable to organizations who have or are planning to use the capability maturity model (CMM) to improve their effectiveness. For the intended audience this book is both comprehensive and complete. There are eight chapters, each followed by case studies, questions and problems, and six appendices.

It starts with a foundation of the basics, such as definitions, system engineering life cycle, analysis and concurrent engineering. It then builds upon this foundation by addressing all of the elements of a well-managed system engineering program: integrated product and process development, TQM, configuration management, support and logistics. Each element is discussed in detail and placed into the context of a total system engineering environment.

The chapter on system design requirements is particularly complete and covers every facet of this discipline, including reliability, maintainability, safety, software, etc. There is a lot of good material here, which is reinforced by the next chapter that covers design tools and methods. The design process is concluded by a chapter on design review and evaluation, which is a foundation of good quality practices as well as a well-written SEMP.

The real heart of the book starts in chapter 6, which covers SE program planing. It covers program requirements, the SEMP itself and provides a statement of work. It then provides a complete work breakdown structure for implementing system engineering functions and tasks. This chapter provides a risk management plan that is well thought out and serves as an excellent template. It also addresses the CMM for systems engineering. Much of this material has been superseded by the Software Engineering Institute's CMMI that now covers system engineering, software engineering and integrated product and process development. This is not a problem because the book's coverage of the CMM-SE is consistent with the material in the CMMI.

The final two chapters, addressing system engineering organization and supplier/sub contractor management are to the point and contains a lot of valuable information.

Had the author provided this book in soft copy on an accompanying diskette or CD ROM it would be a best seller on the Beltway because of the time it would save in developing a company-wide system engineering procedure manual.

Consulting companies and IT departments would also greatly benefit from this book because of the structured approach it provides for planning and managing system integration. Unlike their cousins in the government contracting and CMM domains, they generally approach system engineering and integration in a loose fashion that too often results in cost and schedule overruns, or project cancellation. By following the approach outlined in this book consulting companies and IT departments would find that technical, cost and schedule risks would be identified early and controlled, and that the design, integration and implementation of complex systems would enjoy a higher rate of success. This is especially true when multiple vendors are involved in an integration project - the material in chapters 1 (integrated process teams) and 8 (subcontractor management) provides a foundation for managing cross-functional teams. Therefore, I strongly recommend this book for engagement and project managers, and program management offices run by consulting companies and/or IT departments.

This book (or something similar) really should be required for anyone graduating with an engineering degree who intends to work in industry.

Systems engineering is essentially the function that oversees any design effort to ensure that the resulting design does what it's supposed to. As such requirements are the bread and butter of systems engineering. The most visible job of the system engineer then is to turn the customer's desires into functional requirements, and then turn those requirements into something that can be designed to based on the system architecture the designers / system engineers prefer.

For example, consider if you have a city with a river through it and the local government wants to develop a system to carry cars across the river. The system engineer would first turn that desire into functional requirements. These would include requirements like: No. of cars per hour that can transit, can't interfere with riverborne ship traffic, growth in traffic that can be absorbed etc. From this you have something that you can verify design concepts against to see if they satisfy the customer desires, but actually can't pull out the ruler and calculators just yet. Systems engineers / designers would then consider options like a suspension bridge, a ferry system, or a tunnel beneath the river. Each of these system options would have their own architectures and the functional requirements would have to be translated into different design requirements for each. The bridge would have to be so high to allow ship traffic and have so many lanes and bear so much live weight. The ferry system would need so many ferries of such and such a carrying capacity. The tunnel would have to have so many lanes, would require such and such a ventilation capacity, etc. The systems engineer would be involved in determining which of these architectures would best suit customer needs, and then turn the functional requirements into the design to requirements so design work can begin in earnest.

Of course as design work continues and large components are broken down into smaller and smaller design components the systems engineer continues to guide the choice of how to configure the lower tier of design components, and to allocate design to requirements for them. If the system engineer has done their job right when all the design components are integrated into each other the resulting system really does what it was intended to do and meets the functional requirements.

This book tells you in a very clear, completely comprehensive, and extremely well laid out manner how to do this. It also tells you why you should do this, and how it is beneficial. The writing is straightforward, always to the point, and easily understood. The topic is pertinent and can help you understand how systems are actually engineered in the real world, a very rare and very appreciated breath of fresh air in engineering textbooks.

The author also covers all the aspects of systems engineering planning, including scheduling, budgeting, contracting, and system verification / validation, etc. Systems engineering is largely a management function so this information is interesting and necessary for the subject.

This book will be extremely helpful for engineers of any stripe who want to put their work into context, systems engineers for how to do what their supposed to do, and for contractors and government purchasers to implement processes to guarantee that they get a system that does what they want. (Provided what they want is feasible of course!)

Certainly recommended and a book that I use frequently for reference.

When I was thinking about writing the history of a professional society, I was urged to do some reading on professions. It was discouraging. The authorities had been going in circles for years, until Abbott came along and clarified the topic. His book was well-received; as I recall he was a visiting professor in New Jersey before it was published, and a full professor at Chicago soon afterwards.

Actually, there are several new ideas. One them is that professions restrict their markets when they attempt to raise their fees by adding barriers to entry. Since demand is stable or rising, this creates opportunity for other groups to move in "below." As physicians' time becomes ever more valuable, RNs achieve the status of practitioners and LPNs fill in. Aides are now certified, and so on. This seminal idea was published in 1988. Almost ten years later, Clayton Christensen described in his well-regarded Innovators' Dilemma how a corporate fixation on upselling existing customers assured that less lucrative markets would be neglected, providing rich opportunities for new entrants. The parallel is striking.

Whether you have any interest in his topic, Abbott's exposition is worth studying as a model of effective rhetoric. And the writing is vivid; he worked for years in a large mental hospital, "After five years, . . . I had helped administer several tons of thorazine, mellaril and their cousins . . ."

When academic writings in social science have largely become fastfood (i.e., you can finish a book in a few hours and then summarize it in 2-3 sentences), you can barely find a book that is both original and systematic to some substantial extent. Andrew Abbott's The System of Professions is an extraodinary exception.

In this book, Abbott argues that each profession is bound to a set of tasks by ties of jurisdiction, the strengths and weaknesses of these ties being established in the processes of actual professional work. The central thesis of the book is that the professions make up an interdependent system, in which each profession has its activities under various kinds of jurisdiction. Jurisdictional boundaries are perpetually in dispute. Professions develop through competitions for jurisdictions over work.

Abbott's focus on professional work and interaction is clearly an ecological perspective along the line of the famous Chicago tradition in sociology. If you are interested in knowing more about this tradition, another book by the same author - Department and Discipline - would be a good place to start from.

As I said, you could not finish the book in one night without missing some really fascinating stuff. You'd probably also be amazed by the incredible coherence in Abbott's theory. For the sociology of professions, this book is both revolutionary and devastating - the field has been dead for more than 15 years since it was published in 1988!