Instructive, but limited by its central gimmick.
A business book that uses the words of Mao Zedong to illustrate key strategies.
Taking voluminous writings–from books, speeches and articles–that laid out the chairman’s instructions for running China, Kleivan adapts Mao’s philosophy to modern business management. Describing Chairman Mao’s Business School as a “cookbook,” the author endeavors to “give ideas and inspiration to build corporations that will succeed in the competitive world.” Each of his chapters and subchapters–ranging in subject matter from “How to be an Efficient Business Executive” to “The Three Stages of Your Company’s Route to Success”–begin with lengthy quotations from the chairman. To apply these dictates to Western business practices, Kleivan provides a glossary of substitutions (for example, read “cadres” as “first line managers” and “peasants” as employees or workers). Then, using personal experience–the Norwegian author has worked for international companies like Dupont, IBM, Scandinavian Airlines, Diners Club and Citibank–and case studies from successful companies, he lays out his recommendations for success in business. From the outset, he stresses that his book should not be construed as “an endorsement of the politics that Chairman Mao carried out during his years in power” and he succeeds in drawing convincing parallels between Mao’s writing and modern management goals. But despite his enduring influence, Mao remains a controversial figure. By choosing as his centerpiece a divisive communist leader, Kleivan risks alienating potential readers before they even open his book. Furthermore, communism as an ideology and political system is very much at odds with the capitalist economy to which the author’s business advice is geared. Ultimately, the book is a bit of misnomer, since the vast majority of the book is rooted in the author’s experience in the business world, not Mao’s experience in the Cultural Revolution. Perhaps Kleivan should take more credit–his book is comprehensive, impassioned and clearly informed by a deep understanding of modern management.
Instructive, but limited by its central gimmick.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4257-9813-0
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An astute analysis of the dangerously self-serving economic games Japan and the US have been playing over the past 15 years, from an expatriate American investment banker. In mercifully jargon-free fashion, Murphy offers a critical interpretation of the events, strategies, miscalculations, and errors that have brought Tokyo as well as Washington ever closer to a day of financial reckoning. First, however, he delivers a clear- eyed overview of how big business works in Japan, where elite finance bureaucrats (who are accountable to neither the electorate nor its representatives) provide administrative guidance that recipients ignore at their peril. The author goes on to review how the credit and industrial policies of these shadowy shoguns made Japan a power in global trade, albeit at no small cost to its populace. He next examines how Japan's ultrainfluential Ministry of Finance allowed indigenous institutions to recycle the vast sums accruing from exports to buy the debt obligations of the US Treasury during the early years of the Reagan administration, when federal budget deficits topped $100 billion. Assessing the consequences of this bailout, Murphy reprises the 1985 Plaza Accord (which laid the value of the dollar far lower than signatories intended) and Wall Street's 1987 crash. Covered as well are the high costs accruing from the collapse of Japan's speculative boom and the unwillingness or inability of American officials to realize that their country's chief lender does not play by the same commercial rules as other nations. By the same token, the author points out, Japan's economic mandarins have yet to appreciate that the Cold War's end has changed a relationship long based on security considerations. Murphy closes with some uncommonly sensible suggestions on how the two superpowers could forsake the ideological denial that threatens their alliance in favor of a realpolitik calculated to inspire cooperation and trust.
Pub Date: March 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-393-03832-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1996
Always more of a critic than a scholar, Galbraith (The Culture of Contentment, 1992, etc.) here offers an exiguous primer on what, in his unabashedly partisan view, would constitute an attainably good society. Apparently assuming the truth of his progressive proposals to be self-evident, the octogenarian economist does not trouble to examine, let alone analyze, the varied elements of his construct at any length. Asserting that the welfare state is the result of historical forces (rather than political will) and that a modern consumer economy cannot perform satisfactorily without government intervention, the author starts by declaring that a good society should afford all of its members access to a rewarding life; it must also provide financial security for the aged, unemployment compensation for the jobless, a minimum wage, health care for all, strict regulation of working conditions, and price protection for farmers. Among other means to these ends, the author advocates progressive taxation; a willingness to tolerate moderate rates of inflation; less concern with federal budget deficits; curbs on speculation; and energetic efforts to counter swings in the business cycle. Galbraith goes on to laud the high returns yielded by substantive and systematic investments in education. Also high on his list of priorities are safeguards for the environment, a relatively open door for immigrants (who do society's heavy lifting), and a foreign policy calculated to ensure peaceful relations with other countries great and small. Galbraith argues that society should now look beyond the narrow confines of the nation-state to the brave new multilateral world that lies ahead. In the meantime, he urges Democrats to establish coalitions of the caring and compassionate to get out the vote for their party in future elections. An elder eminence's meagerly substantiated but righteously framed prescriptions for creating collective heavens on earth.
Pub Date: April 26, 1996
ISBN: 0-395-71328-5
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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