A well-crafted, personal tale of business gone bad.
A true corporate David-and-Goliath story from an insider’s perspective.
Tales of Wal-Mart’s unsavory business practices (witness the class-action suit currently before the Supreme Court) are fertile ground for business books, television and film documentaries and the like, and this book is one more entry into the field. What makes Hood’s tale different is the fact that he owned a business that was literally driven into bankruptcy by the retailing behemoth. The story revolves around a product Hood’s company devised called the “Shopper’s Calculator,” which attached to a shopping cart, helping shoppers determine what they were spending. The product could also serve up advertising for various name brands as well as for Wal-Mart’s store brands. Through a detailed account that includes references to letters, phone calls and meetings, Hood documents the sorry story of how Wal-Mart management, at best, ineptly implemented a promotional program that they agreed to support, and, at worst, sabotaged it because of a perverted ego- and profit-driven arrogance Hood calls “egonomics.” In diary-like entries, Hood presents dates of specific occurrences and includes copies of documents that are hard to dispute, resulting in a uniformly unfavorable view of Wal-Mart’s way of doing business. In fact, the story culminates in Hood’s company filing a $40-million lawsuit against Wal-Mart, which he says was settled for “the discounted amount of $23.5 million.” Even after the lawsuit, however, Hood’s company continued to do business with Wal-Mart and, remarkably, the same people who initially undermined the relationship, says Hood, held “very cooperative and productive meetings” over the next two years. Nevertheless, Hood suggests Wal-Mart’s decision to cancel the contract after three-and-a-half years was premeditated and vindictive, as research proved the program did work. Clearly, Hood is anything but an objective observer and occasionally his emotion gets the better of him. But he writes well and tells his story with equal doses of irony and outrage. It will likely be difficult for the reader not to accept the author’s claim that Wal-Mart is a corporate villain after reading this book.
A well-crafted, personal tale of business gone bad.Pub Date: April 25, 2011
ISBN: 978-1456456009
Page Count: 254
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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