Useful reading for those with an informed interest in geopolitics, or for anyone seeking to do business in Singapore.
A political memoir—and a playbook for how to start an improbably successful, postage-stamp nation.
In 1965, the island of Singapore, a strategically important British naval base with few resources of its own, gained unexpected independence when its Malay neighbors rejected union with Singapore’s predominantly Chinese population (evidently expecting that it would become a client state of Malaysia or Indonesia). Enter Lee Kuan Yew, a British-trained attorney and politician who made Singapore into a powerful city-state whose every detail (from family planning to education to traffic flow) he micromanaged. Lee’s authoritarian manner won him both admirers and detractors, as he himself relates in this memoir (which is organized not chronologically but thematically, with sections devoted, for instance, to “getting the basics right,” dealing with China, and forging alliances with the West), but it appears to have had the desired results, inasmuch as the people of Singapore remain independent, comparatively prosperous, and untroubled by the strife that now troubles the region. (They are, however, evidently not well enough behaved for Lee, who writes that “it will take another generation before standards of civic behavior of our people will match the First World infrastructure they now take for granted.”) Lee’s narrative is refreshingly free of the self-congratulatory tone of so many political memoirs; instead, he focuses dispassionately on the hard facts of building a trade economy, fending off the unwanted attentions of rival superpowers, and keeping an eye on the bottom line. His language is unadulterated realpolitik (not for nothing does Henry Kissinger contribute a foreword), and his view of such acts as China’s suppression of the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 is relentlessly practical. “But for [Deng Xiaoping],” he claims, “China would have collapsed as the Soviet Union did”—which might have robbed Singapore of a lucrative market, of course, and thus been catastrophic.
Useful reading for those with an informed interest in geopolitics, or for anyone seeking to do business in Singapore.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2000
ISBN: 0-06-019776-5
Page Count: 736
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2000
A tedious case study of what can happen before, during, and after the shift of a desirable advertising account from one agency to another. In an effort to revive the company's flagging car sales, Subaru of America (SOA) put its sizable (albeit modest by auto- industry standards) account up for grabs during 1991. Drawing on the access granted him by SOA, Rothenberg (The Neoliberals, 1984) offers an exhaustive and ultimately exhausting rundown on a commercial mating dance. He also lards his fly-on-the-wall reportage with digressive takes on the history of big-league advertising and its dominant players. To some extent, these asides provide context for the author's evaluation of the work done by the survivor of SOA's screening process—Wieden & Kennedy, a so-called postmodernist shop based in Portland, Oreg., which made a name for itself as Nike's ad agency. Like many partnerships, the SOA/W&K alliance proved short-lived, contentious, and mutually frustrating. The association ended not with a bang but a whimper shortly after the agency's spots (duly approved by a Subaru management team that had been revamped in the interim) finished dead last in a USA Today survey of viewer reactions to commercials broadcast during the 1993 Super Bowl telecast. In reporting countless instances of high- stakes conflict and steering the episodic narrative up innumerable blind alleys, however, Rothenberg (who borrowed the book's title from an A.J. Liebling pensÇe on fortune) frequently loses track of his story. He doesn't even get around to detailing the background of SOA's Japanese owner (Fuji Heavy Industries) until near the end. As it happens, the parent organization's engineering-versus-styling bias informed many of the clashes over image that marked promotional debates at SOA during the early 1990s. Despite a few fine set pieces, this is an overlong, essentially pointless anecdote in which unsympathetic hucksters are pitted against one another—and the consuming public.
Pub Date: Nov. 2, 1994
ISBN: 0-679-41227-1
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1994
Sound insight, but not for beginners.
Ercetin and her co-authors offer a collection of essays and scholarly papers aimed at all types of organizations, hoping to inspire managers at all levels to assess and develop the organizational intelligence of their arena and, therefore, of their entire organization.
According to the author, organizational intelligence (OI), the ability to take in, analyze and respond to new information and changes, can determine the success or failure of an organization. Akin to the way a person’s IQ influences all aspects of life, an organization’s OI plays a role in everything, from employee satisfaction, to overall performance, to efficiency and streamlining. It is important that managers at every level–as well as the employees who determine actual workflow processes–are working toward a higher OI, whatever their sphere of influence. Toward this end, Ercetin and company put forth not only the concept of OI, but a scale for measuring it and instructions for applying that scale, as well as commentary on different applications for OI and metaphors for understanding its different aspects. Unfortunately, OI is a complex concept, and those who understand it well seem to speak a language different than that of the average employee or midlevel manager. That, combined with some English-language and/or translation difficulties, will make this book difficult for any novice to understand and thus extremely difficult to apply in a meaningful way. On the other hand, those with previous training in the language and concepts the book discusses will find interesting, compelling ideas for further inquiry. The authors explore different aspects of matter and liquid as a metaphor for OI and expand the usual concept of OI with their study of peace intelligence. It’s fascinating, but not straightforward or rudimentary.
Sound insight, but not for beginners.Pub Date: Feb. 23, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4196-3582-3
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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