Grammar aside, Friedman offers sound, operational advice.
A compact guide to managing intergenerational sensitivities in the real-estate workplace.
Today’s managers, says the author, are often faced with four generations in one office: traditionalists (born before 1946), baby boomers (1946–1964), Gen Xers (1965–1980) and Millennials (1980–present). Each generation brings particular skills and expectations to the job, and each has to be handled with the appropriate managerial control to assure their positive contribution to the organization. The real-estate business, says Friedman, can find a beneficial use for all generational resources: the years of hard-won experience offered by the traditionalists; the team-playing, quality-consciousness of the baby boomers; the extended skill set of the Gen Xers; the technological savvy of the Millennials. In his experience, Friedman has learned that they also possess certain sensitivities that, if trod upon or left unaddressed, will cause many employees to jump ship. As he outlines salient characteristics of each generation, he points out contentious perceptions across the generational landscape–baby boomers misreading the Gen X work style as slacking, Gen Xers thinking baby boomers are self-righteous and too political, traditionalists thinking neither exhibit proper respect–and offers generationally appropriate feedback tools. Frieman displays native good judgment (“Never talk down to anyone…respect the speed factor of each generation…seek to understand, then to be understood”) but while his raw, direct style is appealing, its expression is often amateurish: “Her educational background does not truly exist as she married at 19”; “The concept of having a virtual tour to sell a house is just in her mind silly.” This kind of garbled syntax seriously undercuts the otherwise effective, real-life strategies for implementing promising ideas.
Grammar aside, Friedman offers sound, operational advice.Pub Date: Aug. 26, 2006
ISBN: 0-595-40129-5
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An illuminating and intelligible introduction to central banks, the immensely influential institutions that constitute virtually a fourth branch of government in most industrial democracies. These banks' low-profile operations affect a wealth of workaday affairs, including how much home buyers pay for mortgages and what business travelers or tourists get for their money in foreign ports of call. In tracing how they evolved, Deane and Pringle (journalists turned consultants) offer a comprehensive if episodic guide to central banking from its origins in 17th-century Europe through the turbulent present, when the deregulated, high- tech international marketplace is at constant risk from, among other things, sporty new financial instruments like the hedging/trading vehicles known as derivatives. In the process of outlining the clubby vocation's past, present, and future, the authors address three salient issues. To begin with, they probe just why over the past couple of decades America's Federal Reserve, the Bank of England, the Bank of Japan, Germany's Bundesbank, and their lesser-light counterparts have focused on containing inflation rather than fostering economic growth that could curb domestic unemployment. They also examine the increasingly independent, albeit not quite autonomous, role played by central bankers in the brave new post-Soviet world order. Last but not least, the authors evaluate the extent to which monetary authorities (so called because they control the supplies of money in their own countries) have assumed supervisory responsibility for transnational capital markets. Along their anecdotal way, the authors are at pains to explain the complex means by which central bankers achieve their many-splintered ends in the face of frequent pressures from host-country politicians. Despite the authors' occasionally irritating penchant for chatty reportage underscoring their status as privileged observers with access to top-drawer insiders, a first-rate primer on central banking and why the lay public should care about it.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-670-84823-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1994
An overstated case for the proposition that Japan Inc. has artfully hoodwinked a credulous West about the extent of its economic ambitions. Fingleton, Asia editor of Euromoney magazine, makes many valid points about the differences between Anglo-American free-enterprise capitalism and the mercantilist approach of Japan's government- industrial complex. In an effort to prove that the island nation is engaged in a conspiracy orchestrated by the formidable Ministry of Finance (MOF) to achieve global commercial supremacy, however, the author exaggerates the challenge to a degree that discredits legitimate concerns about Japan's bent for cartels, collusive labor relations, managed trade, encouragement of a high savings rate (at the expense of consumption), and an undervalued yen. Without going into detail, for instance, Fingleton ascribes all five of the postWW II crashes that have convulsed Japan's securities exchanges to cunning plots engineered by the MOF. He only hurts his case with selective attacks on Western publications (notably, The Economist and the Wall Street Journal) and scholars he believes have been gulled into a false sense of security by diabolically clever Japanese bureaucrats. Fingleton ignores a wealth of evidence at odds with his invincibility scenario. Cases in point include the demographic fact that Japan's population is aging at a faster pace than those of other developed countries and its unfortunate record of international investment (in US film studios, real estate, etc.). Overlooked as well is the risk that rivals will eventually take draconian steps against a competitor that desperately needs foreign outlets for a relatively narrow line of export goods but doggedly defends its own turf against significant offshore incursions. Occasionally perceptive but essentially hyperbolic prophecy from the I-alone-can-save-them school of analysis.
Pub Date: March 20, 1995
ISBN: 0-395-63316-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1995
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