A must-read resource for professional practitioners across the domains of public policy, economic development, corporate...
A best practices methodology for combining public, private, and philanthropic resources to confront complex social challenges.
Buffett (40 Chances, 2013) and Eimicke (The Effective Public Manager, 2007, etc.), faculty colleagues at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, combine their extensive experiences in multisector partnerships with rigorous scholarship in this book. They construct a five-point framework for establishing, managing, and evaluating collaborations among governmental, for-profit, and nonprofit organizations. Their combined experience is extensive: Buffett, the grandson of Berkshire Hathaway’s Warren Buffett, has directed the Howard G. Buffett Foundation, overseen U.S. Defense Department stabilization projects in Afghanistan and Iraq, and advised cross-sector policy in the Obama White House. Eimicke serves on the advisory board of the Central Park Conservancy’s Institute for Urban Parks and was formerly New York state’s housing “czar” and New York City’s deputy fire commissioner for strategic planning. They explain social value investing as being derived from the value-investing approach popularized by the elder Buffett, which seeks to identify overlooked opportunities in which the market has undervalued worth. Investing for social value yields long-term rewards by improving lives, they assert, creating healthier, better educated, and higher contributing members of society. The first two chapters trace the evolution of cross-sector partnerships and author Buffett’s journey from philanthropist to policy advocate. The framework’s five areas of concern are process, people, place, portfolio and performance. The authors devote a chapter to each followed by an illustrative case study. Examples address how biometric identification is enabling telemedicine across India and how data mining reduced fire deaths in New York City. To illustrate what can go wrong, they provide a cautionary chapter on the multipartner preparations for the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. They effectively bring theory into practice as they discuss creating accountable processes, meshing organizational cultures, gaining stakeholder buy-ins, managing capital across different sectors as a portfolio, and developing performance metrics. Throughout, they emphasize doing well by doing good, and they conclude: “Even more important than how we measure success is how we define success to begin with, because that dramatically affects our intentions, our actions and our results.” The authors model the collaborative principles they espouse. Although individual bylines appear on alternating chapters, the style and tone are seamless. Good organization, clear prose, the inclusion of supporting details, and authoritative analyses make their arguments easy to read and accept. The case studies are deep dives; casual readers may skim the minutiae, but the primary audience for this work will appreciate their thoroughness. Despite covering highly complex subjects, the authors keep jargon to a minimum. Lay readers should encounter little difficulty until the performance section, which introduces mathematical formulas to explain the Impact Rate of Return, a method of calculating social investment impact in tangible terms. However, it’s precisely these equations that prove social value investing a workable discipline—not merely a fuzzy dream of do-gooders.
A must-read resource for professional practitioners across the domains of public policy, economic development, corporate governance, and philanthropy.Pub Date: May 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-231-18290-4
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Columbia Univ.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 11, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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