A straightforward timeline of the demise of the Eastman Kodak Company from the 1980s to their bankruptcy in 2012.
Outlining a tumultuous 30 years of poor business decisions and lack of vision, the author wonders whether better executive leadership could have saved the Eastman Kodak Company.
Snyder states that in the 1980s, Kodak made its first foible: stopping production on 35 mm cameras that were gaining in popularity to produce a lower-quality, more user-friendly camera. From there, things got worse as the company purchased unrelated businesses, such as the pharmaceutical company that produced Bayer aspirin. During the same 10 years of nonsensical corporate buyouts, the company overlooked what had once been Kodak’s core business. After Kodak developed some of the first digital imaging sensors in the 1990s, explains Snyder, the company backtracked to build a new film plant in China. Then, just as Kodak reduced debt and restructured itself for the digital age, the financial crisis of 2008 kneecapped them. Throughout it all, Snyder asks: What would George Eastman have done? The question isn’t satisfyingly answered. Aside from mentions, which are too infrequent, the author doesn’t really introduce Eastman. In fact, the Kodak founder died decades before the book’s timeline begins, so the reader can only guess at Eastman’s abilities as a visionary, a characteristic that the author implies the company desperately needed during Kodak’s decline. The book alludes to crisscrossing storylines among Kodak’s demise, the economic effects on the company’s hometown of Rochester, N.Y., and a fierce competition between Kodak and Xerox. However, these stories don’t resolve into anything more compelling than a footnote. The author’s overwhelmingly thorough research lacks firsthand accounts that could have provided substance and context for Kodak’s undulating stock prices from the 1980s through today. Even without the additional context, the painstakingly compiled data serves as an interesting, approachable reference for those interested in Kodak or leadership studies in general.
A straightforward timeline of the demise of the Eastman Kodak Company from the 1980s to their bankruptcy in 2012.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2013
ISBN: 978-1479363667
Page Count: 180
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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