Executive Report on Strategies in Oman, 2000 edition (Strategic Planning Series)

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Oman has recently come to the attention to global strategic planners. This report puts these executives on the fast track. Ten chapters provide: an overview of how to strategically access this important market, a discussion on economic fundamentals, marketing & distribution options, export and direct investment options, and full risk assessments (political, cultural, legal, human resources). Ample statistical benchmarks and comparative graphs are given.

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The unique story of a business heretic and his concept of Economic Value Added (EVA)

In Against the Grain, Joel Stern shares for the first time, not only the story of how EVA swept the corporate world, but the story behind the story-the intellectual underpinnings of EVA, how he and his colleagues at Stern Stewart & Co. promoted the concept, won its initial acceptance by major corporations, and later turned the concept into a revolution. He has for good reason been called a one-man catalyst for change. In an engaging memoir, he has given us not only an account of his business strategy, but also provided fascinating anecdotes and vignettes of encounters with leading businessmen on four continents.

Joel M. Stern (New York, NY) has been the Managing Partner of Stern Stewart & Co. since its founding in 1982 and was coauthor of The EVA Challenge (Wiley: 0-471-40555-8). A recognized authority on financial economics, corporate performance measurement, corporate valuation, and incentive compensation, he is a leading advocate of the concept of shareholder value.
Irwin Ross (New York, NY) was retained to write The EVA Challenge with Joel Stern and John Shiely. He is a former roving editor of Reader's Digest and over the years has written for Fortune and a variety of other magazines.

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Success does not come easily in the world of business, especially if you choose to challenge some of the most widely held beliefs in modern finance. Nobody knows this better than Joel Stern--a man who swam against the strong current of conventional financial dogma and ended up revolutionizing the way CEOs and money managers value and measure performance. By maintaining a steadfast belief in his concept of Economic Value Added (EVA) and convincing individuals, institutions, and companies of its validity, Stern has become a catalyst for change in the world of finance. He has also become the man who made EVA the most insightful measure of today's corporate performance. In Against the Grain: How to Succeed in Business by Peddling Heresy, Stern shares for the first time, not only the story of how EVA swept the corporate world, but the story behind the story--the intellectual underpinnings of EVA, how he and his colleagues at Stern Stewart & Co. promoted the concept, won its initial acceptance by major corporations, and later turned the concept into a revolution that has continued to grip the worlds of business and finance.

Customer Reviews:

A real page turner.......2007-07-25

I read the entire book in one sitting. Better written than most novels, it was a pleasure to lose some sleep over this great read. After reading it a friend mentioned that he was in Mr. Stern's class at Columbia? and just as he writes received a phone call from Mr. Stern on his travels upon receiving an A on his paper.

In addition his coverage of Judaism and South Africa are facinating.

Who Is Joel Stern? Fortune Has Smiled on Him........2004-02-07

If you know who Joel Stern is, you may want to read this book. If you do not, you will probably not enjoy the book.

If you know and love Mr. Stern, the book will add many amusing anecdotes to your story of tales about this peripatetic self promoter.

Mr. Stern was originally known for visiting CEOs and telling them that "earnings per share don't count." That was a novel message to CEOs who usually got their bonuses for meeting budget targets for earnings. Intrigued by the comment, Mr. Stern would usually go on to explain that the stock market was highly efficient and followed the lead of "steers" like Warren Buffett who knew how to assess the economic effectiveness of an organization's performance. The book contains a copy of an early op-ed piece he wrote to explain his ideas.

What Mr. Stern wanted people to do was to focus on making the cash flow of their organizations that they did not have to reinvest grow ("free cash flow"). Turned into English, he wanted companies to make more money with their investments and invest as little as possible. He now characterizes that concept as "heresy." That's strange since businesses have been employing discounted cash flow as a discipline to making new investments since around 1890.

Since then, Mr. Stern has worked with his colleagues at Stern Stewart (his financial consulting firm) to turn these concepts into elaborate measures of economic performance called EVA and MVA that adjust for the cost of capital (something that has been around since the Capital Asset Pricing Model was introduced many decades ago). Mr. Stern also thinks of this as "heresy."

Few others than CEOs would have heard of Mr. Stern if he didn't constantly teach, speak and write about his work. The book has some elements of Adventure Capitalist as he describes his nomadic life.

His main prominence occurred after 1993 when Fortune Magazine made him the feature of a cover story. Why did Fortune do that? The book doesn't tell, but I once asked a friend who is an editor there. Stern Stewart was a tiny firm at the time, and barely breaking even (as Mr. Stern acknowledges in this book). The ideas were ones that had been around in academia for decades. What was so special? The editor told me that Roberto Goizueta, then chairman and CEO of Coca-Cola, had written to suggest the idea. Since Fortune had never received a letter like that from a CEO, they felt that they had to write the article. The Wall Street Journal later reported that Mr. Goizueta typically spent more than half his day writing letters to analysts and publications to get more exposure for his company's stock. Since then, Mr. Stern's firm continues to be published annually in Fortune, and prominent Fortune editors appear at his marketing conferences.

In that story, you get the essence of the book. Mr. Stern is a genius at persuading high profile people to endorse him and his work and help promote his career. This began while he was at Chase Manhattan Bank. I first met him in 1975 after the lending officer to our Fortune 200 company suggested we hire Mr. Stern to come speak to us. At the end of the presentation after Mr. Stern left, his internal sponsor in our company noted that Chase Manhattan did not use his concepts.

Not surprisingly, Mr. Stern eventually left Chase to start his own firm in 1982. Since then, his contribution has been to take the two groups of executives in our society who read the least (CEOs and CFOs) and teach them about the financial theory that is taught in every business school in the world. Before you dismiss that contribution, remember Peter Drucker's advice: There is no single measure of company performance that is any good. You should add more and use them all. In that vein, Mr. Stern has helped. He now has many competitors who provide reasonably similar versions of the same measurements.

If you want to know more about these measures, read The Quest for Value by Bennett Stewart rather than this book.

The most controversial part of his work is a compensation method based on EVA. I was amused to find out from this book that Stern Stewart does not use this method for its own compensation, although EVA is one part of the compensation determination.

If you are interested in how to be a high-profile consultant in the world of finance, you will get a good sense of the type of networking among academia, finance and senior executives that is required. If you want to live that nomadic life, cut off from your family, then the world is yours.

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OECD's Multilateral Agreement on Investment: A Chinese Perspective makes detailed analyses and comments on the MAI from the perspective of a Chinese scholar. The author believes that the behind closed doors process of MAI negotiations is unacceptable for developing countries, NGOs, and civil societies, and is inadvisable for any future negotiations on investment rules. The substantive contents of the MAI which include the definition of investor and investment, treatment of foreign investors and investments, treatment for investment protection, and the dispute settlement mechanism are of high standards that render them unreachable and unacceptable for developing countries. The nine chapters of the book include: 1. an introduction; 2. An analysis of the background of the MAI negotiations which briefly reviews the process and results of the negotiations and makes the author's comments on the negotiations; 3. An analysis and evaluation of the main features of MAI provisions and the approaches adopted by the MAI; 4. An exploration of the scope of application of the MAI through the analysis of the respective definition of investor and investment in the MAI, and points out that the purpose of broad definition is to broaden the MAI's scope of application; 5. An analysis and comment on the MAI's general principles of treatment accorded to foreign investors and their investments, and points out that the MAI's provisions in this regard have negative impacts on developing countries; 6. An introduction to the MAI's specific rules of treatment accorded to foreign investors and their investments in such new areas of international investment as performance requirements, investment incentives, key personnel, privatization, as well as monopoly, state enterprises and concessions; 7. An analysis and commentary on the MAI's treatment provisions on investment protection, i.e. the fair and equitable treatment and full and constant protection and security treatment as the general treatment, and the specific treatment with regard to expropriation and compensation, protection from strife and transfers; 8. An introduction to and evaluation of the MAI's dispute settlement mechanism: the state-state procedure and the investor-state procedure,and; 9. A conclusion.

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Knowledge intensiveness has featured prominently in most strategies to promote agricultural development. In the past strengthened research systems may have increased the supply of new knowledge and technologies, but that has not necessarily translated into enhanced agricultural growth. Knowledge converts into products and services through an innovation system -- a network of organizations, enterprises and individuals focusing on bringing new knowledge into economic use, together with the institutions and policies that enable a well-functioning network. This book assesses the usefulness of the innovation systems concept in guiding investments to support knowledge intensive, sustainable agricultural development for developing countries and its collaborators.

The Vanishing Peasant: Innovation and Change in French Agriculture (Mit Press Series in Logic Programming)

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The Vanishing Peasant: Innovation and Change in French Agriculture (Mit Press Series in Logic Programming)
Henri Mendras
Manufacturer: The MIT Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

An Anxious Pursuit: Agricultural Innovation and Modernity in the Lower South, 1730-1815

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Looking forward but stuck in the past
An ambitious interpretation of the 18th century Lower South

An Anxious Pursuit: Agricultural Innovation and Modernity in the Lower South, 1730-1815
Joyce E. Chaplin
Manufacturer: The University of North Carolina Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0807846139
Release Date: 1996-08-14

Book Description

In An Anxious Pursuit, Joyce Chaplin examines the impact of the Enlightenment ideas of progress on the lives and minds of American planters in the colonial Lower South. She focuses particularly on the influence of Scottish notions of progress, tracing the extent to which planters in South Carolina, Georgia, and British East Florida perceived themselves as a modern, improving people. She reads developments in agricultural practice as indices of planters' desire for progress, and she demonstrates the central role played by slavery in their pursuit of modern life. By linking behavior and ideas, Chaplin has produced a work of cultural history that unites intellectual, social, and economic history.

Using public records as well as planters' and farmers' private papers, Chaplin examines innovations in rice, indigo, and cotton cultivation as a window through which to see planters' pursuit of a modern future. She demonstrates that planters actively sought to improve their society and economy even as they suffered a pervasive anxiety about the corrupting impact of progress and commerce. The basis for their accomplishments and the root of their anxieties, according the Chaplin, were the same: race-based chattel slavery. Slaves provied the labor necessary to attain planters' vision of the modern, but the institution ultimately limited the Lower South's ability to compete in the contemporary world.

Indeed, whites continued to wonder whether their innovations, some of them defied by slaves, truly improved the region. Chaplin argues that these apprehensions prefigured the antimodern stance of the antebellum period, but she contends that they were as much a reflection of the doubt inherent in theories of progress as an outright rejection of those ideas.

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Looking forward but stuck in the past.......2007-03-11

As the title implies, Joyce E. Chaplin has a dual purpose. She describes slave agriculture in the colonial to the pre-antebellum period and studies the Lower South's notions of Western modernity and innovation. While southern whites were aware of and tried to apply modern ideas and innovations, they could not, in the end, disassociate themselves from being slaveholders. In a nutshell the Lower South was characterized by continuity as well as, in Chaplin's words, change and persistence. It was anything but static.

In her analysis, Chaplin found that whites frequently used Scottish enlightened thought as an historical framework for assessing their own chances of achieving socio-economic improvement. The Scottish school, Chaplin proposes, is a way to show how whites' were informed of modern contemporary theory from newspapers, books, and local authors. The Reverend Alexander Hewitt wrote a 1770s account of the rise and progress of the Lower South and David Ramsey, a physician and early North American historian, modeled the Scottish statistical efforts of Sir john Sinclair.

Landholders were keeping up with the times and not at all languishing in the backwaters enjoying mint juleps on verandahs. Still, while they adjusted to national and world events and adapted their crops, capital and labor, they did not, in the end, relinquish their reliance on slavery. Chaplin's tries to understand this aspect of slavery in order to discover why racism is so persistent.

Chaplin offers a cautionary comment in the preface. She says she doesn't want to come across as cynical toward humanity's ability to overcome racism. She succeeds in adhering to her scholarly purpose until, interestingly, at the end of her book she expresses some skepticism. While whites in the Lower South adopted notions of modernity, they adhered to slavery in order to achieve their own ends. In doing so they rejected an opportunity to use their wealth, resources and leadership for reform. Instead they chose to avoid the instability that would be necessary to move beyond slavery.

An ambitious interpretation of the 18th century Lower South.......2001-05-20

Many histories of the South have focused exclusively on the antebellum period, characterizing the region as economically undiverse, intellectually out of touch with Enlightenment ideals, and culturally static. These assesments create the impression that southerners were backward people who should have known that the society they created was not maintainable. Joyce Chaplin argues that during the period from 1730 to 1815, the region was in actuality a dynamic and innovative place that fell victim only to its own success. To do so, she has compiled an enormous amount of evidence, based on sources ranging from specialized secondary literature on economics, philosophy, and culture, as well as primary documents such as period newspapers, public records, and private correspondence.

Chaplin begins her study with a treatment of the predominant economic and political theories of the late 17th century, arguing that southerners accepted the theories of the Scottish school that a commercial society was most conducive to individual wealth creation, and thereby a stronger and more harmonious society. To find products that would create the most wealth, southerners experimented and innovated with various crops and productive means, reflecting the Enlightenment values of scientific pursuit and rationality. In the process, they created a culture that celebrated the right of the individual to pursue prosperity, but that relied upon government aid and regulation, as well as black slavery. Both of the latter aspects were seen as potentially disruptive to their fragile new society, but also unavoidable if individual (and thereby societal) betterment was to be achieved. Even as southerners came to fear the potential of government and slaves (who Chaplin shows to be far from powerless) to challenge their authority, they found that they could not do away with them without undermining the culture of white achievement they had fostered.

Book Description

The work of Douglas Harper has for two decades documented worlds in eclipse. A glimpse into the life of dairy farmers in upstate New York on the cusp of technological change, Changing Works is no exception. With photographs and interviews with farmers, Harper brings into view a social world altered by machines and stuns us with gorgeous visions of rural times past. As a member of this community, Harper relates compelling stories about families and their dairies that reveal how the advent of industrialized labor changed the way farmers structure their work and organize their lives. His new book charts the transformation of American farming from small dairies based on animal power and cooperative work to industrialized agriculture.

Changing Works combines Harper's pictures with classic images by photographers such as Gordon Parks, Sol Libsohn, and Charlotte Brooks-men and women whose work during the 1940s documented the mechanization and automation of agricultural practices. Part social history and part analysis of the drive to mass production, Changing Works examines how we farmed a half century ago versus how we do today through pictures new and old and through discussions with elderly farmers who witnessed the makeover. Ultimately, Harper challenges timely ecological and social questions about contemporary agriculture. He shows us how the dissolution of cooperative dairy farming has diminished the safety of the practice, degraded the way we relate to our natural environment, and splintered the once tight-knit communities of rural farmers. Mindful, then, of the advantages of preindustrial agriculture, and heeding the alarming spread of mad cow and foot-and-mouth disease, Changing Works harks back to the benefits of an older system.

Customer Reviews:

Review of Changing Works .......2005-11-05

I found "Changing Works" to be a very informative text in the area of technological advances in the dairy industry. Harper uses SONJ pictures to highlight wonderful interviews with various dairy farmers that farmed in the generations before World War II. These interviews bring the past back to life as the reader goes through the mechanization introductions such as replacement of horses and the reconstruction of the milking process. I recommend this book to anyone who wants to learn about the dairy industry and to future dairymen. As an agricultural student, I was enthralled throughout the entire book. Harper tends to be less descriptive when it comes to the actual workings of the machinery, but it does not take much away from the rich narrative he weaves with the farmers' interviews. The reader gets a feeling of loss for the traditional ways that Harper projects throughout the book and it only enhances the content.

Green revolution: Agricultural and social change in a north Indian village (Anthropological papers of the American Museum of Natural History)

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Green revolution: Agricultural and social change in a north Indian village (Anthropological papers of the American Museum of Natural History)
Stanley A Freed
Manufacturer: American Museum of Natural History
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Unknown Binding

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ASIN: B0006S2CNY

Agroecology in Action: Extending Alternative Agriculture through Social Networks (Food, Health, and the Environment)

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Agroecology in Action: Extending Alternative Agriculture through Social Networks (Food, Health, and the Environment)
Keith Douglass Warner
Manufacturer: The MIT Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0262731800

Book Description

American agriculture has doubled its use of pesticides since the publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring in 1962. Agriculture is the nation's leading cause of non-point-source water pollution--runoffs of pesticides, nutrients, and sediments into streams, rivers, lakes, and oceans. In Agroecology in Action, Keith Douglass Warner describes agroecology, an emerging scientific response to agriculture's environmental crises, and offers detailed case studies of ways in which growers, scientists, agricultural organizations, and public agencies have developed innovative, ecologically based techniques to reduce reliance on agrochemicals.

Agroecology in Action shows that agroecology can be put into action effectively only when networks of farmers, scientists, and other stakeholders learn together. Farmers and scientists and their organizations must work collaboratively to share knowledge--whether it is derived from farm, laboratory, or marketplace. This sort of partnership, writes Warner, has emerged as the primary strategy for finding alternatives to conventional agrochemical use. Warner describes successful agroecological initiatives in California, Iowa, Washington, and Wisconsin. California's vast and diverse specialty-crop agriculture has already produced 32 agricultural partnerships, and Warner pays particular attention to agroecological efforts in that state, including those under way in the pear, winegrape, and almond farming systems.

The book shows how popular concern about the health and environmental impacts of pesticides has helped shape agricultural environmental policy, and how policy has in turn stimulated creative solutions from scientists, extension agents, and growers.

Agricultural and rural reconstruction: A sustainable approach

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Agricultural and rural reconstruction: A sustainable approach
Jayant Patil
Manufacturer: Concept Pub. Co
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Unknown Binding

Agricultural Change and Rural Poverty: Variations on a Theme by Dharm Narain (International Food Policy Research Institute)

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Agricultural Change and Rural Poverty: Variations on a Theme by Dharm Narain (International Food Policy Research Institute)

Manufacturer: International Food Policy Research Institute
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0801832756

Agricultural Systems: Agroecology and Rural Innovation for Development

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Agricultural Systems: Agroecology and Rural Innovation for Development

Manufacturer: Academic Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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Book Description

Ecological principles, the latest biology, and social science must be understood by students, scholars, and practitioners for sustainable development and innovation in agriculture to occur. Written by experts in agriculture, ecology, soil science, international development, anthropology and economics, this book brings together the technical, biological, ecological, economic and sociological aspects of farming systems science for rural livelihoods.

* Addresses social and development issues related to farming systems
* Focuses on biological science and agroecosystems
* Companion website includes Powerpoint presentations, lecture notes, additional case studies and reference links

Agriculture and Community Change in the U.S.: The Congressional Research Reports (Rural Studies Series)

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Agriculture and Community Change in the U.S.: The Congressional Research Reports (Rural Studies Series)
Louis E. Swanson
Manufacturer: Westview Pr (Short Disc)
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0813374529

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