Overly detailed, but a hoot for car enthusiasts and a case study for business schools.
Vuic (Modern European History/Bridgewater Coll.) debuts with the story of a cheap imported car whose name still provokes outbursts of laughter.
The Yugo (1985–’92), a small $3,990 import that was poorly built and prone to breakdowns, became an endless source of jokes for late-night comedians. In 2000, Car Talk listeners voted it “the Worst Car of the Millennium.” Vuic shares the best jokes (“Q: What do you call the passengers in a Yugo? A: Shock absorbers”) as he recounts the Yugo’s journey from a poorly run communist auto plant in Kragujevac, Serbia, to U.S. showrooms, where it actually became the fastest-selling first-year European import in U.S. history. The Yugo was imported by American entrepreneur Malcolm Bricklin, who had successfully introduced Subaru of America two decades earlier, in the belief that there was a niche market for inexpensive minicars. Bricklin ignored warnings about the Yugo’s poor quality, requested more than design changes and in 1985 unveiled the car with hoopla at New York’s Tavern on the Green restaurant. A year later, Consumer Reports advised readers they were better off buying a good used car. Calling the Yugo “the greatest bad-car pop icon of all time,” the author traces Bricklin’s struggle with bad press, financial problems and a Congressman’s charge that the Yugo was built with slave labor. Some 150,000 cars were sold in seven years. Vuic speculates that Americans came to hate the bargain-priced vehicle because it failed to deliver status. He also clears up the mystery of the Michigan woman who drove her Yugo off the Mackinac Bridge in 1989. The wind did not blow her car off the bridge, he writes; low guardrails were to blame. The author leaves few facts about the Yugo’s manufacture and sale uncovered. Many readers will wonder whether they need so much information about what the Toronto Star called “a hopelessly degenerate hunk of trash.”
Overly detailed, but a hoot for car enthusiasts and a case study for business schools.Pub Date: March 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-8090-9891-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.
A helpful guide to working effectively with people from other cultures.
“The sad truth is that the vast majority of managers who conduct business internationally have little understanding about how culture is impacting their work,” writes Meyer, a professor at INSEAD, an international business school. Yet they face a wider array of work styles than ever before in dealing with clients, suppliers and colleagues from around the world. When is it best to speak or stay quiet? What is the role of the leader in the room? When working with foreign business people, failing to take cultural differences into account can lead to frustration, misunderstanding or worse. Based on research and her experiences teaching cross-cultural behaviors to executive students, the author examines a handful of key areas. Among others, they include communicating (Anglo-Saxons are explicit; Asians communicate implicitly, requiring listeners to read between the lines), developing a sense of trust (Brazilians do it over long lunches), and decision-making (Germans rely on consensus, Americans on one decider). In each area, the author provides a “culture map scale” that positions behaviors in more than 20 countries along a continuum, allowing readers to anticipate the preferences of individuals from a particular country: Do they like direct or indirect negative feedback? Are they rigid or flexible regarding deadlines? Do they favor verbal or written commitments? And so on. Meyer discusses managers who have faced perplexing situations, such as knowledgeable team members who fail to speak up in meetings or Indians who offer a puzzling half-shake, half-nod of the head. Cultural differences—not personality quirks—are the motivating factors behind many behavioral styles. Depending on our cultures, we understand the world in a particular way, find certain arguments persuasive or lacking merit, and consider some ways of making decisions or measuring time natural and others quite strange.
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.Pub Date: May 27, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61039-250-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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