Aesch’s deft handling of angry customers, union thugs and other critics illustrates how this CEO’s winning attitude played a...
Upbeat, inspiring account of the surprising makeover of an upstate New York bus company.
“Change can really happen,” writes Aesch, CEO of the Rochester Genesee Regional Transportation Authority. “People can learn to do things differently.” In 2004, at age 37 and with little business training, the author took charge of an inefficient public bus company with a $27 million deficit and transformed it within two years into a performance-based public-private organization with a nearly $20 million surplus. It was all part of “something magical” that happened when Aesch successfully persuaded everyone to help reinvent the ailing Rochester organization. His leadership of the turnaround is all the more remarkable considering that the author relied only on commonsense wisdom learned from his farmer parents. Suggesting that any dysfunctional enterprise can remake itself following his managerial principles, he offers a feel-good chronicle of his actions, beginning with an overhaul of the company’s paternalistic and ego-driven culture. Managers began listening to front-line workers and engaged them in a customer-service campaign that viewed passengers as customers who deserved a product worth buying. Despite misgivings, employees helped create and gradually became invested in a new strategic vision, which argued that the company provided a product, not services, and that drivers operated not “buses” but “stores.” The author details the introduction of such key changes as purposeful spending, accountability, performance incentives and decision-making based on real information about the company’s actual performance rather than gut impulse. At each turn, the author made sure the underlying logic of new methods (revamped bus schedules, etc.) was understood by everyone. Keeping data constantly in mind, the company grew “just a little bit better each week, each quarter, each year.”
Aesch’s deft handling of angry customers, union thugs and other critics illustrates how this CEO’s winning attitude played a critical role in the making of a transformed and still-growing organization.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4013-2397-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: Dec. 2, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2010
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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