A tough-minded study that shows there’s gold in them there halls, but getting to it is a problem—or, an entrepreneur might...
Why can’t Johnny make a buck in the school game? Perhaps because, though the potential earnings are huge, the barriers to entry are formidable, as a former investment banker and current business professor charts.
“Some of the most respected minds of our generation have invested many billions of dollars in for-profit education enterprises,” writes Knee (Professional Practice/Columbia Business School; The Accidental Investment Banker: Inside the Decade That Transformed Wall Street, 2006, etc.). “And, with surprising regularity, they have lost their shirts.” One of the four case studies is that of Chris Whittle, the media maven–turned–educational entrepreneur: “What is surprising, even shocking, is that for over twenty years, in the educational arena, Chris Whittle has been able to continue to separate sophisticated investors from their money despite a plethora of red flags that in any other context might be viewed as disqualifying.” Even so, Whittle’s venture into the educational market had a solid basis, if you consider that the sector amounts to something like $1.3 trillion, mostly funded from government sources. That explains why sullied investor Michael Milken turned to the education market with an enterprise that, it seems, failed to recognize what to Knee seems obvious: that some markets, especially higher education, are tough to crack, such that only one school, Stanford, has managed to join the world’s elite institutions in the last half-century. The author’s dissections of various sectors of the market, from textbook publishing to child care centers, point to a common lesson, namely that most of it does not respond to the traditional economics of scale. School governance tends to be intensely local, for instance, and thus “a major textbook publisher must produce literally hundreds of thousands of SKUs of its core products to respond to local requirements.” It’s a hard arena even for a giant to make a living in, much less smaller players, no matter how good and noble the intentions.
A tough-minded study that shows there’s gold in them there halls, but getting to it is a problem—or, an entrepreneur might say, a challenge.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-231-17928-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Columbia Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 14, 2016
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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