Practice Management Books

I THINK THIS IS IF NOT THE MOST IMPORTANT, ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT BOOKS WRITTEN IN MARKETING EVER!!!!

This book compiles that latest in Training & Development theories with some very practical applications. It's a good book for academicians and practitioners as well.

It's probably the best summary and introduction to understanding howwe go about being creative. It is of general interest beyond the public relations field

As a professional statistician working in the banking industry I highly recommend this book as an invaluable reference for getting an overview of the credit risk management scenario as of today, as well as having an insight into its history and recent developments.

This book fills a long awaited gap for a comprehensive, thorough and complete outlook of the booming area of quantitative credit risk management. Since I graduated and started my professional career in the banking industry I was looking for such a text, both for personal use - as I tried to make a bridge between the academic knowledge acquired in the university and the business world - , as well as a pointer to indicate to colleagues from graduate school or other professionals wanting to start working on the area.

After buying lots of different books and spending hundreds of dollars I can finally say my search is over. This is a sound reference on credit scoring, serving both for the savvy risk professional wanting to brush up his skills as well as for the starter coming from the academy or other professional areas.

The book is outlined in eight thematic sections, which helps delivering the huge amount of information covered in a manageable way. Some of the highlights/weaknesses of the book are the following:

Section A: Setting the scene. This section covers an overview of credit, scoring and credit scoring setting the ground for what is coming next in the book. It glances through the Credit Risk management cycle (CRMC) and the reasons for and against use of scoring in credit retail operations. It also has a chapter on the history of credit as well as an introductory chapter on the mechanics of credit scoring, which summarizes the main technical aspects of scoring in the day-to-day business operation.

Section B: Risky Business. In this section the author contextualizes credit risk into the larger framework of risk management, relating it to the other three primary risks in the banking industry environment, namely business, market and operational risk. A nicely put overview of the philosophies of science on the Chapter on Decision Science is one of the highlights. It ends with a chapter on assessment of enterprise risks, from SME lending to middle and large corporations.

Section C: Stats and maths. This is the densest part of the book, covering in less than 100 pages and 4 chapters a content that spans over a dozen of statistics text-books. Kudos to the author for the extensive research carried but the section also has its shortcomings. Chapter 7 - ZPredictive statistics 101' abuses of mathematical notation and mixes some statistical concepts in its explanation of modeling techniques (specially regarding LPM - Linear Probability Modeling). Nonetheless, the author got the core concepts right and the overall coverage of the statistical methods (such as Logistic Regression and Regression Threes) in the other chapters are very good, with highlights to the definition of information value in terms of the Kullback-Leiber distance. The last Chapter on the section, on software and people resources is also very useful, going into some of the technical aspects for model implementation.

Section D: Data!: Data is the single most important aspect of any statistical analysis, and it is not different for credit scoring and decision automation. So it's not surprising that this is the largest section of the book and it deserves your special attention no matter your background. The chapters in this section cover the most relevant issues with data treatment, quality assessment and preparation that you are faced with in the industry. The chapter on Data preparation is particularly enlightening and discusses important decisions in credit scoring modeling, such as staggered versus static outcome windows, good/bad/indeterminate definitions, observation excludes, sampling considerations and use of external data.

Section E: Scorecard development. This section covers the practical aspects of day-to-day scorecard development, discussing transformation of variables (and statistical methods for it), characteristic selection, segmentation, reject inference, calibration, validation and development management issues. Highlights are its discussions of characteristic selection and reject inference, both comprehensive and filled with examples and references for further reading. It's the section that the scoring analyst will refer to the most while at the development of a new scoring model.

Section F: Implementation and use. A scorecard that's not implemented is useless by itself. This section covers the implementation of one or more developed scorecards, along with all the impacts to portfolio and business, and the monitoring of the implemented model. The Chapter on Monitoring is a highlight of this section, covering all the major issues with scorecard monitoring, such as misalignment, population and score drifts, stability reports, book rates, selection process, policy rules and proper treatment of overrides. It also has a nice chapter on finance (26), which gives insights into how to analyze financial impacts of current and tentative decision processes. There is also a linkage to Basel II model parameters, such as the Loss Given Default (LGD).

Section G: Credit Risk management cycle. This is a brief overview of other components of the CRMC, such as marketing, application processing, account management, collections and recoveries and fraud. The chapters in this section are somewhat concise but it seems to be intentional, as the focus of the book is specifically on credit scoring. Nonetheless, enough of the topics is covered to give the reader a good notion of how scoring fits into the credit cycle and other potential applications of the statistical techniques and process improvement. The chapter on Fraud is fairly comprehensive if you take in account that this is a book about credit risk (and fraud, strictly speaking is a concern of operational risk).

Section H: Regulatory environment. As the author poses, since the 1960s there has been an increasing regulation of financial institutions, and retail consumer credit did not escape it. This section of the book covers issues such as the Equal Credit opportunity Act (ECOA) in the US and other Fair Lending related legislation, as well as data privacy, capital adequacy and anti-discrimination. Of particular interest for practitioners worldwide are the comparisons of such legislation against a set of English-speaking countries, such as the US, Canada, Australia, UK and the Republic of South Africa. Although it does not cover the country I'm working on currently (Brazil), its broad coverage and analysis gave insights into understanding Brazil's current legislation on the matter and implications on credit risk model development.

I believe the author has done an excellent job on assembling all this information together in this format and highly recommend it for beginners and practitioners alike. The list price is somewhat above average but it's definitely worth it, as the only other option I have found so far to acquire the information covered by the book is to work in a retail credit area of a big player in the financial industry.

I would recommend this book for all mental health professionals who are interested in obtaining an in-depth look on how the supervisory process evolves. Nicholas Ladany is considered one of the leading clinicians/researchers in the field of clinical supervision. This book provides case examples on an events-based understanding of the supervisory process including heightening multicultural awareness, negotiating role conflicts, and working through countertransference.

Antill and Woodhead clearly expose the step-by-step development of PERT/CPM in a way that the technique can be easily understood. Classic examples such as the construction of Sidney Opera House highlight the applicability. The chapter devoted to acceleration is a must.

As any book from the 60s, computational tools are not addressed, but it is not a problem. The point is that this highly recommendable book is to be read to those who want to master the fundamentals of CPM.

Introduction

It is amazing farmers can grow anything -- crops can be destroyed by drought, wildfire, flood, insects, birds, snails, rodents, fungi, bacteria, viruses, hail, frost, lack of vital nutrients, too much pesticide, and so on.

But that's only half the story -- once a crop has successfully been harvested, how do you keep it from being destroyed by all of the above plus spoilage and silo explosions? Civilization exists because our ancestors figured this out.

Before fossil fuels initiated the Industrial Revolution, 90% of the population was rural, unlike now, where over 80% of the population in the United States is urban. People preserved perishable food like meat, vegetables, and fruit by drying or with preservatives such as salt and alcohol.

Most people have gotten, and still get, the majority of their calories and nutrition from durables such as grains and beans.

Brian Fagan, in The Little Ice Age 1300-1850, describes how hard it was to store a harvest to last beyond one bad harvest and for the next planting, even if barns were stuffed to the eaves and local lords and religious foundations also stored crops.

During this period of climate change, crops failed often from blazing hot summers, excessive cold, or torrential rain. Two or more bad years in a row happened every ten years.

In the 20th century, post harvest food technology was developed and enormous granaries were built that can store grain for many years. These modern granaries keep rodents and other pests out. Durables are fumigated or sprayed with pesticides to kill insects at all stages of their life cycle. Grain elevators keep durables cool and dry, vastly extending their storage life.

Post harvest technology preserves food after harvest and before delivery. Although transportation isn't part of the discussion, it's important to mention that the main reason famines stopped was the invention of the railroad. Areas with good crops could send their surplus to regions where crops had failed.

The length of time and amount of durables that can be stored with fossil-fuel built and controlled food storage technology is amazing. This technology has also made food safer to eat. Fossil fuels allow produce just harvested from the field to be cooled immediately, and kept cool throughout the supply chain, which makes it possible for us to enjoy fresh food year round -- often produce that's come thousands of miles before reaching our plates.

Golob et al's Crop Post-Harvest volumes 1-3 are heavy textbooks that provide an in-depth look at the continuing war to get perishables to market and to preserve durables. Both the old methods, still used in developing countries, and the amazing energy-intensive modern technology we've developed, are explained in great detail.

Humans are now using nearly all of the arable, ranch, and forested land on the planet, so preserving as much harvested food for as long as possible is our main hope of increasing food supplies in the future.

Why does good food go bad? How durables like grains and beans are destroyed.

High temperatures and moisture are the enemies of harvested crops. In places with both grain can spoil in months.

Temperature affects how quickly insects, mites, fungus, and mycotoxins develop and germination qualities are lost. The biological activity of insects, mites, fungi, and the grain itself doubles for every eighteen degree Fahrenheit rise in temperature. At low temperatures, insect breeding stops.

It's hard for insects and microorganisms to survive if there's no water, so low moisture is critical as well. This is why it's so hard to preserve fresh food for a long time -- fresh food has a very high water content, i.e. on average, the percent of water in apples is 84%, turnips 92%, pork 56%, Beef 58%, and fish 81% .

Damage and cleanliness

Produce that isn't stored sterilely is bound to be degraded by some biological agent. Damaged produce provides a point of entry for secondary pests and saprobic fungi. Attack usually begins with one or a few species followed by the invasion of a broad range of non-specific microorganisms and secondary insect pests. Primary pests can also lead to quality losses since some insects feed on the germ region of seed, leading to a loss of nutrition or viability if planted.

Infection after harvest often occurs at the site of wounds from insect feeding or mechanical injury during the harvest. The main insect pests in stored food are Coleoptera (beetles) and Lepidoptera (moths), as well as diptera, psocoptera, and dictyoptera. There are also some bacterial infections of stored foods that can be serious, poisonous even, especially for those who are old, young or sick.

Rodents

There are over 200 species of rodents that damage crops while they're growing, but rodents haven't coevolved with grain storage long enough yet - only 40 species of rodents prey on food stores. Rodents can eat 10% of their body weight every day. They reproduce quickly, so if even two of the opposite sex get in, it won't be long before exponential growth begins. Rats live about a year, can get pregnant at 3 weeks with litters of four to eight, and reach adulthood in two to three months. You've got to go for 100% rat mortality or they'll quickly come back. Rodents do even more damage by contamination with urine and feces than the food they eat.

Rodents can cause extensive damage to storage structures. They almost impossible to keep out - they can climb smooth surfaces, walk along wires, ropes, electric cables, etc. They're also good at digging and tunneling, can gnaw through anything less than 5.5 on the Mohr hardness scale, i.e. lead, aluminum, tin, etc, so structures need to avoid edges rodents can get purchase on to gnaw. Some species of rats can jump five feet high, squeeze through 1/5th of an inch cracks, and swim long distances.

Birds and Insects

Birds not only eat grain directly from bins, but they'll peck bags open. Twenty pigeons eat as much as a human does. Birds contaminate food and spread pathogens like salmonella and zoonoses.

Insects not only eat grain, but can affect the quality and taste of grain, affect the ability of making dough, and ruin the flavor. In the USA, some areas are more likely to succumb to insects than others. The highest risk area are the southernmost states, the lowest risk area are the states of South & North Dakota, Montana, Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Montana.

In developing countries, termites can devour wood storage structures.

Fungi, mold, and microorganisms

Fungi flourish when moisture is over 22%. They can cause blemishes, blights, discoloration, and even wreak revenge in the next generation, when the fungi-damaged seed produces a diseased plant or reduced germination rates.

Moulds can produce toxic myco and aflatoxins making them unsafe to eat and of poor quality.

If rodents, birds, insects, mites, fungi, and mold don't harm the stored grain, then bacteria, viruses, yeasts, nematodes, anthracnose, blight, blotch, brown rot, canker, scab, dry rot, hyperplasia, hypertrophy, leaf spot, mildew, mould, mosaic virus, rust, smut, vascular disease, wet rot, soft rot, and toxins are still a peril.

And more...

In addition to all the pests and diseases, grain can suffer from mechanical damage at harvest, threshing, or any point thereafter -- while being hauled to market, and careless handling at the market.

Grain can be damaged if drying is done incorrectly, or through temperature extremes at any point. Moisture over 10-14% will lead to deterioration from fungi and biological degradation.

If grain is harvested too early, it will be green and therefore have high moisture content, causing it to rapidly deteriorate in storage. If harvesting is too late, the mature grain may be attacked by insects and microorganisms, or cracked from repeated rain and dry weather, making it easier for microorganisms to attack in storage.

Fresh produce

However hard it is to store durables like grain and beans, it's much easier than fruits or vegetables, which must be delivered to the consumer quickly, often within days. The new, high-yield varieties of produce have higher nutrition, but they also have greater likelihood of spoilage in storage. Lack of plant nutrients in the soil affects the quality at harvest and the ability of the produce to store. Nitrogen may be good for growth, but it can lead to problems in some produce in storage.

For example, ideally lettuce is picked when the temperature is less than 60 degrees Fahrenheit and cooled within two hours. If kept cool, it won't spoil for nine and a half days. But if lettuce is picked when it's over 75 degrees Fahrenheit and isn't cooled down until ten hours later, spoilage will begin in two and a half days.

Produce is pre-cooled by evaporative cooling, positive ventilation with ice banks, ice cooling, forced air cooling, hydro-cooling, and vacuum cooling.

Both durables (grains, legumes) and perishables are sprayed with chemicals to keep biota from attacking.

Fumigants can be essential to killing insects as well. Since Methyl Bromide causes ozone depletion, there's a race on to invent a new fumigant, but this isn't easy because there are so many essential properties. Fumigants must be a gas at room temperature, good at diffusing, kill all stages of pests, not be greatly heavier than air, and not leave harmful chemical residues. So other, costlier, methods of controlling insects are being tried, such as airtight storage, vacuums, and carbon dioxide atmospheres.

This is a very small subset of what's covered in these three textbooks, which go in depth into the details of plant physiology, how to measure important storage parameters, detect pests, a long list of specific pests and the damage they do, how to build storage structures, manage pests, preserve food, the chemical structure of plants and oils, milling grains, trade and international agreements, applied research and dissemination, food systems, how food is preserved in developing countries, and much, much more.

Conclusion - Energy descent implications

If you've ever driven through the Midwest, you've seen enormous grain elevators from miles away.

These are built to protect against theft, rodents, birds, and insects. They're designed to keep the durables stored within as dry and cool as possible, by preventing cold humid air from getting into the grain at night and keeping the roof from getting so hot that condensation forms.

Climate change will make harvests far less assured in the future, with more years between successful harvests, as Brian Fagan describes in "The Little Ice Age". Research into how to store food after harvesting for long periods is essential to prepare for the double whammy of extreme weather and declining energy.

Long distance fresh produce will be the first to vanish from grocery store shelves as energy declines, but as Marion Nestle points out in "What to Eat", the longer it takes food to reach market, the more nutrition is lost. Locally produced produce is far healthier.

So more funding for research into low-energy, potentially manual post-harvest storage of durable crops ought to be increased. Currently, modern storage technology is very energy intensive, and favors large farms over small farms because:
* Small farms are expensive to include in horizontal and vertical supply chains
* Small farms can't meet as stringent quantity and quality demands as large firms supplying food to markets
* Fruits and vegetables are hard for smaller or medium farms to deal with - they need special packing and refrigeration equipment to cool down the produce, transport it, and large growers can afford the computer-controlled deep irrigation systems, intense fertilizers and pesticides, and sophisticated packing plants to keep produce cool throughout the entire supply chain.
* Small and medium farms don't have the money to keep up with the latest research on hygiene, health, aesthetics, development, and marketing
* The cost to build and operate high-tech storage structures is huge

Because agriculture, infrastructure, and western civilization are so dependent on fossil fuels, many writers have concluded the best way to lower suffering as energy declines, and to make as orderly and peaceful a transition as possible, is for millions of families to go back to land. Clearly most families would prefer to be independent small farmers on their own land rather than poorly paid seasonal workers (google "Peak Soil" and Richard Heinberg's "Fifty Million Farmers" for details).

I hope, but doubt, there is funding for engineers and scientists to figure out the best ways to adapt existing infrastructure each step downward on the energy curve. In the case of post-harvest technology, one puzzle that needs to be solved is how to continue using the enormous durable storage facilities we've built. If long-term, it's impossible to load half-mile-long 120-foot high grain elevators without fossil-fuel driven energy, then let's start building smaller grain elevators and other post-harvest storage technology now, while the energy to do so still exists.

This is amazing! ... It is virtually a text-book from which people could look at the details of some really problematic transboundary issues that cover smaller areas. I think it's going to be a very useful source-book.

This is am important work for anyone responsible for rolling out large-scale systems on a global or local scale. The book's tone is somewhat academic, but the issues and factors that it addresses unquestionably applies to real-world challenges.

The two parts I liked most are chapter 4 (crossing cultural boundaries) and chapter 8 (deployment timelines). The cultural boundary issue addressed in chapter 4 can also be applied to corporate culture as well as national and ethnic cultural boundaries, and the information provided in invaluable for anyone who works in the global domain or is a consultant who has to adjust to each new client. Getting past the culture and internal politics is a fact of life and not addressed in most books to the degree it is in this one.

Chapter 8's treatment of deployment timelines is an excellent resource for project managers. The associated checklists provided in chapter 9 are especially valuable as well.

Overall, this book is a valuable addition to the scant body of knowledge on deploying large-scale systems and solutions, and is must reading for anyone who works with global companies as an IT project manager or member of a global project team.

Kaia Tollefson and Monica K. Osborn's CULTIVATING THE LEARNER-CENTERED CLASSROOM: FROM THEORY TO PRACTICE packs in tips on how to facilitate learning communities within and outside the classroom. From moving from educational theory to applied practice to shifting teaching approaches and planning instruction for individuals, small groups or an entire class, the keys here will provide teachers with a lifetime of options. Corwin Press's 'Engage the Brain' titles ($15.95 each) offer graded activity books perfect for compiling activities based on accompanying books.