Wang Books

Ann Majchrzak is Professor of Information Systems at the University of Southern California Gordon S. Marshall School of Business, while Qianwei Wang was a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Southern California when this article was published in the September-October 1996-issue of the Harvard Business Review.

"Thousands of businesses have endured the trauma of reengineering only to discover that their performance in is no no better - and in some cases even worse than before. So, what caused things to go wrong?" In this article the authors report on their study of US electronics manufacturers. Their study suggests that the success of business-process reengineering depends on how well managers create a collective sense of responsibility. It indicates that companies are better off leaving their functional departments intact and can reap greater benefits by strengthening the ties among their functions than by creating process-complete departments that lacks a collaborative culture. The authors focus on the impact of the four critical means of building a collaborative culture: (1) Make responsibilities overlap; (2) Base rewards on unit performance; (3) Change the physical layout; and (4) Redesign work procedures. But they stress than there is no single cookie-cutter design for achieving a collective sense of responsibility. Managers should be asking their own employees what they would need in order to work well together. In addition, managers should consider the constraints and possibilities provided by technology, the work process, the existing organizational culture, and the organisation's strategic mission. The authors conclude restructuring by process can have positive effects, but only if the organisation has a collaborative culture.

Nice article on the results of study into reengineering at various US electronics manufacturers. This study showed some shocking results, whereby some foregone conclusions are proven wrong. There are some more up-to-date articles on this subject available, such as Michael Hammer ('How Process Enterprise Really Work', 1999). Recommended to people in management positions and thinking about an improvement project. The authors use simple business US-English.

The book doesn't do the exhibit justice but the still shots of the video art are worth owning the book as the videos aren't available online.

The perfect book for any person obsessed with folk tales.
This book contains poetry, ballads, songs, sea-myths and legends; and as I mentioned before, folklore. Most of the stories range from two to five pages, and have a celtic or norse feel.
Wether you are just curious about the life seafaring men led, and their superstitions, beliefs, and ballads; or a devourer of folklore and the like, I would most definitely recommend this book for you.
Oh yes, there are also a few illustrations, and scrawls here and there every few pages or so.

The book's subject is one of increasing importance to China and indeed to the rest of the world. As China's amazing economic expansion continues unabated, a serious question arises. Where will the energy come from, to power this expansion?

A significant portion of the book discusses rural development. Most Chinese still live on farms and small villages. Many still lack electricity. Even though the rural population is expected to decrease, due to migration to cities, some 700 million are still expected to be rural in 2020.

The book looks at various possible sources of energy. Especially renewable sources for the countryside. Social fairness is a big theme here, as rural areas have seriously lagged the cities in jobs and income. Wind energy looks promising in many areas. In part by reducing the need to extend the electric grid by large distances.

Numerous other sources include nuclear, clean coal exploitation and hydroelectricity. But for the transport sector, there is no serious alternative to oil. This has implications for global oil prices. As China increasingly competes in that marketplace as a major consumer.

The book is a serious and sober analysis of trends that may well happen.

I think this book contains a lot of nice recipe, however, some of the herbal medicines are probably hard to find in oversea. It's not something you would have bought typically and you will have to buy a few types. At the end, you end up not trying to cook the dishes as much.

This book is a well-chosen cross-section of Chinese Zen poetry. It also supplies one of my favorite items in translations of foreign poetry - the original text. The strength of this book is the broad stretch of time covered, as indicated by the organization of the index: pre-T'ang dynasty, T'ang, Sun, Yuan, Ming, Ch'ing. This breadth also means, however, that not all the poetry is of the quality one find's in more focused collections ephasizing the masters Wang Wei, Han Shan, Li Po... Several of these collections appear as "selected sources" in this book.

My favorite in this volume is The Flow and Seed Sequence, a series seven poems written by the Zen Patriarchs beginning with Bodhidharma (d. 536) with poems added to the series nearly 2 centuries later. The translations do an excellent job of retaining the concrete imagery typical of Zen poetry e.g. from Liu Chang Ching "All along the trail of moss, / I follower your wooden shoeprints". We find inventive descriptions of concret images in Liu Fang-Ping "The Big Dipper slopes; / the Great Bear bends down". There are also unusual mentions of doubt from Wang An Shih "Often I doubt the Buddhist way, / that nothing truly exists".

Despite its many good attributes, this collection failed my ultimate test: rarely was I enticed to read and reread a poem. I would still recommend A Drifting Boat or Cold Mountain first. But to even be worthy of comparison to those volumes is strong praise.

Strindberg records his most intimate details, unveiling the tumultuous life of writer-as-artist and how this is affected by the married life. This novel is tragically humorous. Anyone interested in the struggles of man, his art, and women will love this book.

The papers in this book summarise the ways in which computers are used these days in pharmaceutical research. If nothing else, the sheer accrued volume of published research necessitates sophisticated information analysis. So some sections deal with what you might call the library science issues.

But the book goes much further. A new field of bioinformatics has emerged, and some chapters of the book attempt to explain it. Sitting at the intersection of computing, biology and chemistry. Specifically within biology, it deals with genomics and cell biology. A key idea is the making available of large databases, for efforts like predicting the 3 dimensional structure of a molecule. And for finding targets for theraputic intervention. How to describe this data in a way useful to others to avail themselves of it? The text shows progress along this front.

Some parts of the book are really just describing the state of the art of crystallography. Where the challenges are in finding or predicting the structures of large biologically significant molecules.

This thorough book will help anyone concerned with CAD/CAM related technology stay in touch with a fast changing world. It covers a wide range of topics from product design to manufacturing control. All of the major CAD/CAM topics are included as well as chapters on automation, numerical control and robotics. This is a serious tool for the dedicated engineering professional.

A fascinating transcript of conversations, circa 1962-64, with my literary hero. Algren discusses his life, his books, the literary establishment and the world at large with his usual combination of humor, swagger and keen insight.