American business schools fail to produce savvy international corporate managers because the schools' philosophical and technical biases are narrow, Cartesian-based, and one-dimensional—and so don't provide the tools to master increasingly complex marketing and production problems. So say business-school professors Mitroff (USC) and Linstone (Portland State Univ.) in a rigorous but often murky study of the thought processes that govern business decision- making. Old-style systems-analysis theory goes like this: To fashion a decision that's objectively correct, experts must huddle and reach an agreement based on fact or logic, or else a single expert must mediate among ``multiple realities'' or referee outright conflicts. In what the authors call their ``new thinking'' or ``unbounded systems thinking,'' all points of view and definitions of a business problem (why GM doesn't sell more cars, for instance) carry equal weight, especially if they fall into any of three categories: the ``Technical Perspective'' (which views a corporation as an engineered machine that must be properly streamlined and maintained); the ``Organizational Societal Perspective'' (which treats a corporation as a set of hierarchical networks made up of social and political relationships); or the ``Personal Perspective'' (which asks how things look from the point of view of any or all of the corporation's employees, customers, or suppliers). Known respectively as ``T,'' ``O,'' and ``P,'' these perspectives are fitted into various problem-solving formulas, such as T+O(us)+P(w,us)+P(s,us)=X?; and these are loosely applied to business disasters such as Exxon Valdez or Bhopal. The authors claim that such technological horrors result from excessive reliance on ``T,'' or engineering/statistical perspective; if planners had taken into account ``P,'' or personnel weaknesses and other factors, the crises might have been averted. Hindsight is 20/20, but the authors' prose and prescriptions are far from clear, marred by bad grammar, jargon, and patches of supreme self-evidence. (Five line illustrations.)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-19-507783-0
Page Count: 172
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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