Tough-love business management advice that never loses sight of the big-picture economy.
A demanding road map for turning around a failing business.
Fifty years of corporate management experience are distilled in this practical handbook for business managers, especially for those tasked with saving a business that is bleeding revenue and fending off bruising publicity. In their debut volume, the Zoreas—father and son—coach middle managers on fixing internal management problems. The senior author’s engineering background is evident in the book’s clear, methodical approach to information gathering and analysis, all succinctly summarized in a questionnaire included as an appendix. The basis of good management, according to the Zoreas, is the unglamorous but necessary business of “problem finding, problem solving, implementation, monitoring, and control.” In turning around a failing business, accurate profit-and-loss accounting matters more than charismatic leadership, the authors write. The handbook is filled with tables showing, for example, how to keep track of action items and how to create “change design” dashboards. Offering coaching tips on communicating effectively with higher-ups, selecting project management software and conducting productive meetings, the book has an explicit bias against employees with advanced degrees who lack multidisciplinary business skills, despite their MBAs. It also takes aim at conflict-of-interest practices among corporate executives. Some executives who are compensated for meeting performance benchmarks are setting goals and objectives that are too easy to reach, thereby causing their companies to stagnate and lose market share. It’s hard to imagine a more disciplined regimen for business recovery than the one outlined by this coaching duo, who demand a seven-days-a-week commitment of time and thought for a stretch of two to three years. Although the book follows a fictional midcareer business manager through two years of coaching, many of the narrative details—e.g., “Chuck took a sip of his mineral water”—aren’t great additions to the book’s valuable business insights, including those related to outsourcing. Chuck criticizes managers who, instead of learning how to manage complex business challenges, become “addicted” to outsourcing: “Maybe that’s okay for the retiring generation, but what about the younger generations who need to work and feed their families?”
Tough-love business management advice that never loses sight of the big-picture economy.Pub Date: March 12, 2014
ISBN: 978-0991392704
Page Count: 346
Publisher: Manage It Right! Press
Review Posted Online: May 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A provocative contribution to the energy debate.
Former U.S. Secretary of Energy Abraham advocates a new power-generation strategy for the next 20 years.
The author suggests that the United States derive its energy from a combination of sources, including nuclear energy, natural gas and coal gasification and hydroelectricity, solar power, wind power and other renewable sources. However, Abraham warns that competing priorities—increasing energy independence, maintaining low energy prices and the not-in-my-backyard syndrome, among others—combined with what he deems to be irrational fears about nuclear energy have prevented a competent approach to dealing with the problem of global warming: “The contradictions,” he writes, “always emerge to undermine any momentum we may establish.” Although bipartisan consensus has been at low ebb recently, Abraham attempts to bridge the gap. He remains a strong advocate for tapping off-shore oil reserves and opening the national parks for drilling, but he gives short shrift to the conservative claim that scientific evidence about global warming is a hoax. While he endorses solar and wind power as auxiliary energy sources, his central thesis focuses on the need to build more than 50 new nuclear plants in the next 20 years as a major component of a viable program for clean energy. A section on nuclear energy covers several crucial objections—reactor safety, terrorist attacks, the proliferation of nuclear weapons and the problem of nuclear waste—and points to its advantage over solar and wind power because of its tremendous energy density: “2 million times greater than the energy releases from chemical reactions of fossil fuels.”
A provocative contribution to the energy debate.Pub Date: July 6, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-312-57021-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 29, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2010
The suspenseful tale of an employee buyout that has kept an old-line steel mill operating when many of its Rust Belt counterparts have fallen by the wayside. Drawing on apparently open access to key figures in the lengthy survival struggle, Pittsburgh-based attorney Lieber offers an absorbing account of what happened after National Steel, then America's fifth-largest producer, resolved to close its tinplate facility in Weirton, West Va. While the 1982 decision made business sense, it would have precipitated a socioeconomic disaster in the surrounding area. With thousands of high-paying jobs at stake, the community, politicians, the plant's union, and a flock of outsiders (some with ideological axes to grind) went into action. In return for sizable wage concessions, rank-and-file workers eventually acquired the Weirton complex by means of a controlling interest in a debt-burdened employee stock ownership plan. The 1984 buyout proved but the start of a long march during which the self- consciously democratic owners have had to cope with the fact that their tinplate competes not only with imports from Asia and Europe but also with such rival materials as aluminum and plastic. Constant debates about badly needed capital expenditures, contractual rights, corporate governance, and allied issues convulsed without ever quite transforming shop-floor culture. Despite frequent infighting, Weirton has retained a place in the global steel market in large measure because labor and management found ways to get along with each other at critical junctures. Lieber's narrative brings events to vivid life with deft profiles of the lawyers, union stewards, corporate executives, investment bankers, and other parties to the protracted proceedings who rose to the occasion—or failed to. A detailed briefing on a consequential deal that opened the way for more landmark transactions. (8 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: June 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-670-82075-X
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1995
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