A pair of hardware merchandising buddies chat about how they built one of the most successful big-box retailers ever. These moguls of do-it-yourself did it themselves: they built the Home Depot. In two decades, they built their business from the ground up to employ 200,000 “associates” in nearly 1,000 locations. It’s a kick-ass company, they are proud to announce, and indeed, it is. It has eliminated distributors and wholesalers from its network. It browbeats manufacturers for uncommon price concessions and rebates while great quantities of inventory are drop-shipped directly to their outlets. Founders Bernie and Arthur and their cohorts are fierce competitors, and they tell you so with broad grins. They allow managers much latitude, they say, even as they stress the tight reins on merchandise, distribution, finances, and infrastructure. The story is in the words of Arthur and Bernie, and their words are interchangeable. It’s all colloquial lumberyard schmoozing, and the scurrying metaphors are pleasantly mixed: “I opened the door and [he] ran with it,” and “sometimes they run with a red herring and get burned with it.” Some words are jerry-built to fit: associates are “inculturated” with Home Depot values—but you get the idea. The inculturation stresses care for the customer in particular and corporate decency in general. (It seems to work.) Bernie and Arthur thrive on merchandising and playing with the big boys, like Ross Perot and the late Sam Walton, but they don’t neglect the details. They acknowledge that many mom-and-pop stores haven’t been able to survive the Home Depot’s thorough competition. The message is that the day of mom and pop has passed (though Bernie and Arthur are now considering opening small neighborhood shops now that the old folks are gone). A garrulous handyman chronicle of a ubiquitous corporation, this text is constructed of plain pine, without a coat of writer’s varnish, by a couple of guys in orange aprons. (8 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: April 15, 1999
ISBN: 0-8129-3058-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Times/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1999
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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