Book Description
Dramatic changes or revolutions in a field of science are often made by outsiders or "trespassers," who are not limited by the established, "expert" approaches. Each essay in this diverse collection shows the fruits of intellectual trespassing and poaching among fields such as economics, Kantian ethics, Platonic philosophy, category theory, double-entry accounting, arbitrage, algebraic logic, series-parallel duality, and financial arithmetic.
Book Description
This astonishing bestseller holds the secrets to all your ambitions and desires and everything you wish to accomplish. This is the book that holds the key to personal wealth.
Customer Reviews:
Essential.......2007-10-20
A book about being a respectful adult, a responsible business person and smart with your money. Every parent should have their kids read this when they turn 10.
Classic.......2007-10-18
George S. Clason did a wonderful job gathering information for this book. If you understand the Laws of Success better in parable form, then this book is for you!
The Richest Man in Babylon.......2007-10-13
A small, fun book, this guide to financial well-being is written as an archaeologist's translation of cuneiform tablets. The "richest man's" memoirs take the form of advice to his sons and colleagues. Simple, time-tested rules are easy to remember.
Secret to riches.......2007-10-07
This book is like going to a Sunday school class. It talks about Biblical times and the struggles of people living in harsh times. It also talks about people who want to grow rich and the things they do to become successful. "The Richest Man in Babylon" treated his employees generously and regularly gave a portion of his profits to the poor in his community. As a merchant he was fair and honest and dependable. The story does tell how to become rich and the road to riches is available to any person who follows the simple principles in this book.
Success in finance.......2007-09-23
An inspiring classic, and yet another testament to the fact that human follies and sound advice are timeless. Whether you're a slave in Babylon, or a modern banker, the principles are all the same: pay yourself first, save at least one tenth of your income, look for opportunity, work hard, and be wise in your investments. Passed on for centuries, it is surprising how few people use these maxims, and yet the successful stories are almost always based on them. For the hundred pages that it is, "The Richest Man in Babylon" may well be the most complete financial guide to date.
Product Description
Marketing in the early 21st century is dominated by two approaches, neither of which is visible to the naked eye: the use of data to define and shape human affairs into machine-readable form and the effort to create and sustain ongoing two-way relationships with customers. The former is one way human life is being subjugated to the regime of the machine; the latter is one way the individual may one day emerge from within the datascape. A post-modern perspective is used to reveal both the "kaleidoroscope" of data and the "raw immaterials" of relationships in two companion essays.
Customer Reviews:
Rebecca Nailed It.......2007-03-18
Rebecca's review is spot-on. I could read this book several times and get something new out of it each time. Ellis succinctly captures the changes in consumer-marketer interaction and the new 21st century value exchange and does a great job of putting it in historical and philosophical context.
Big Thoughts on Marketing .......2007-03-09
Most books on business (particularly those by self-proclaimed "gurus") seize on a single idea. With terrier-like tenacity they explain it, illustrate it, present case studies of it, then explain it yet again, until a readers feels she's entered some sort of textual version of "Groundhog's Day."
"Marketing in the In-Between," takes the opposite approach. It packs so many clusters of thought, ideas, revelations and connections on every page, the reader will need to repeatedly dip in to glean all the thoughts. It challenges readers to truly ponder and to question the basic precepts and practices upon which marketing is based.
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Social Strategy & Corporate Structure (Studies of the Modern Corporation)
Neil W. Chamberlain
Manufacturer: Free Press
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Binding: Hardcover
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ASIN: 0029058104 |
Book Description
This new work by Neil W. Chamberlain will be of great importance to the business community -- and to all those charged with defining the role large corporations play in the affairs of society.
Social Strategy and Corporate Structure is an objective, indepth examination of the organizational requirements of a social role for large-scale business. The role Neil Chamberlain presents is one of heroic dimensions: the political choice of goals, the strategic allocation of resources, and the tactical operations of the mechanisms of production.
While there has been much discussion of corporate social responsibility, few have investigated the ways its structure will have to change if the corporation is to pursue a strategy that is both economic and social. This timely book integrates a large number of issues involving corporate activities and governance that go directly to the heart of this problem.
In step-by-step detail, Chamberlain analyzes the organizational imperatives of this new age of social responsibility: the composition and functions of boards of directors and the relation of their duties to a broad system of national planning; the internal social audit; changes in the characteristics of corporate social planning; and proposals for restructuring ultimate corporate authority, either through public or outside directors. In addition, he examines the potential relevance of federal chartering of corporations, and the effects of international economic interdependence on the development of a new corporate social strategy.
This book is not a detailed blueprint for change. Rather, it presents a thorough, systematic study of available courses of action for improvement, based on the principle that conventional notions of corporate independence will have to be modified for any social strategy to work. And while not everyone will agree with Neil Chamberlain, few can afford to ignore his provocative insights into what corporations must do to function effectively in a changed social environment.
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A Financial History of Modern U.s. Corporate Scandals: From Enron to Reform
Jerry W. Markham
Manufacturer: M.E. Sharpe
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Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits and Other Writings
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The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World
ASIN: 0765615835 |
Book Description
A collection of essays to help today's businessman understand the crucial role of philosophy in free trade, free markets, health care and business ethics. The book includes a title essay by Leonard Peikoff and two essays by Ayn Rand never before p ublished in book form: "The Money-Making Personality" and "An Answer for Businessmen." Twelve additional essays by Leonard Peikoff and other contributors are included.
Customer Reviews:
Excellent compilation of philosophical/economic thought.......2007-09-27
An excellent alternative to the nonsense offered by liberals and conservatives (and moderates, and socialists, and greens, and reds, and libertarians for that matter). Among the highlights are Harry Binswanger's excellent "'Buy American' is Un-American," along with articles addressing such perennially-hot issues as immigration, socialized medicine, etc. Great book. Don't miss it!
A Book That Is An Accolade to Efficacious Businessmen.......2003-08-02
A productive modern businessman at his most efficacious should consciously hold as much pride for organizing his sphere of business as for the profits he earns as a result of that organization. Should he ever observe an intellectual's insistence that unregulated business development is the cause for economic ills--e.g., the unfairness of using private information about the market to make profits, when competitors cannot thus prosper since they lack this information. . .or the intellectual's insistence that foreign competition is bad for the American economy . . .or the insistence that any motive for the businessman's activity other than his delight in production and in the self-serving use of his wealth, Why Businessmen Need Philosophy will both inspire the listener and galvanize him to follow the right political and economic direction.
The book is also valuable to an honest, reality focused intellectual (even if he has grasped the essential truths of Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, which contains Rand's articles about basic economic issues). Why Businessmen Need Philosophy offers the truth about some technical, "abstruse" business methods, using historic examples to make them clear. (Several such methods are not covered in CUI.)
The style of the book's authors is simple and straightforward, which makes their articles accessible to every literate reader.
Why Businessmen Need Philosophy is an excellent companion work to CUI, because it applies economic principles in the latter to some highly specialized areas of the business world. If you read one article in this collection, read any of "Why Businessmen Need Philosophy" by Leonard Peikoff, "Wall Street Under Siege" by Richard Salsman, "'Buy American' is Un-American" by Harry Binswanger, "The Philosophical Origins of Antitrust" by John Ridpath, and "Antitrust 'Returns' With a Vengeance" by Richard Salsman--a suggestion based on the standards of lucidity, excellent grammar, and emotional impact.
Businessmen Need Philosophy but Don't Know It.......2003-05-02
Business people find themselves under continual assault from government regulations, threats of lawsuits and under-appreciation of their positive role. The media, activists, politicians and even many religious officials cling to the cliché of business people as greedy, selfish or operating at the expense of others. The positive virtues of business people-self-sufficiency, responsibility and investment in the future--often are ignored by those who see business people as exploiters, cash cows for the government, or guinea pigs for government social policies.
Those suffering under the weight of such attacks will find encouragement and articulate arguments on their behalf in Why Businessmen Need Philosophy, a book-collection of essays that champions the free market and individual rights. Published by the Ayn Rand Institute, a free market and individualism advocacy group, the book lays a solid foundation of reasoned argument of how business people in a free economy exemplify the positive principles on which this country was founded.
"Some critics point to the homeless and blame their poverty on greedy private businessmen who exploit the public. Others, such as [economist] John Kenneth Galbraith, say that American are too affluent and too materialistic, and blame greedy private businessmen...," says philosopher and commentator Leonard Peikoff, who forcefully argues against this negative attitude. "Who are the most denounced and vilified men in the country? You are-you, the businessmen."
The book is an exuberant, enthusiastic reaffirmation of the business person as providing the moral and economic foundation to the country. It provides a spirited defense of small and large business, argues the necessity of a foundation of honesty and fair dealing as growing from a free market economy and states the philosophical basis of why no one has a right to take the earnings of another.
The book argues against the welfare state that relies on the false premise that the desire for another's property creates a right to take it. "The (American) system guarantees you the chance to work for what you want-not to be given it without effort by somebody else," Peikoff says. "We are seeing a total abandonment by the intellectuals and the politicians of the moral principles on which the U.S. was founded. The rule now is for politicians to ignore and violate men's actual rights, while arguing about a whole list of rights never dreamed of in this country's founding documents-rights...."
For those weary of overflowing government regulations and laws dictating their professional lives and businesses, and for those working people who need reaffirmation of their vital role in society, this book serves them well.
Awesome reality check.......2002-02-19
This book does a terrific job at showing how one's philosophy will impact one's success (or failure) in business. It also reminds readers that the long term cannot be ignored, or one will fail in the long term.
Its not by Ayn Rand!.......2001-08-18
The front cover says "by Ayn Rand" but look at inside -- most of the essays are not by her. I think she called this secondhandedness.
Amazon.com
Work, for most of us, is something we do, not something we think about. We may wonder whether our work is sufficiently stimulating, whether it brings in enough money, or whether it makes a difference in the grand scheme of things, but we don't often question what, in fact, work really is, and why we work in the first place. In The Working Life, Joanne Ciulla asks these critical questions and others, taking a philosophical, sociological, and practical look at the nature of work and its role in our lives today.
As Ciulla points out, we live in a work-oriented society where, even though we have more freedom and flexibility than ever and more tools to increase convenience and efficiency, our work determines our lives. We have "gone beyond the work ethic," she states, to a point where our jobs have become our primary source of identity. To understand this, Ciulla looks at the values we reflect in our choice of jobs and professions, the attitudes we express in our language for work, and the sociohistorical journey that work has taken from cursed necessity to calling. She follows the path of work in our recent past, from unregulated labor and slavery, through unionism, to the rise of the all-encompassing corporation and today's blurred lines between private and public lives. In the final section, Ciulla investigates the role that work plays in our understanding and use of time and our search for meaning.
Now teaching courses on ethics, leadership, and critical thinking at Virginia's University of Richmond, Ciulla has examined and experienced the nature of work from both sides of the managerial divide. After supporting herself through the first nine years of an academic career with bar and restaurant work, she went on to study and teach business ethics at Harvard and Wharton. These varied experiences give the book a balanced and sensitive tone, adding credibility to her insights. She supports and refines her ideas about work with the comments of philosophers, writers, sociologists, economists, management theorists, and even the narratives of popular television shows. Her sources range from Aristotle and the ancient storyteller Aesop to the early-20th-century time-study engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor, the comic strip "Dilbert," and modern-day business gurus. The diversity of perspectives is inspiring and helps--together with Ciulla's own interpretations and clear, precise prose--create a thought-provoking and stimulating look at the nature of work. --S. Ketchum
Book Description
A wide-ranging look at the allure and changing significance of work.With seductions, misunderstandings, and misinformation everywhere, this immensely readable book calls for a new contract--with ourselves.
Drawing from history, mythology, literature, pop culture, and practical experience, Ciulla probes the many meanings of work or its meaninglessness and asks:
Why are so many of us letting work take over our lives and trying to live in what little time is left?
What has happened to the old, unspoken contract between worker and employer?
Why are young people not being disloyal when they regularly consider job-changing?
Employers can't promise as much to workers as before. Is that because they promise so much to stockholders?
Why are there mass layoffs and "downsizing" in a time of unequaled corporate prosperity? And why are the most common lies in business about satisfactory employee performance?
The traditional contract between employers and employees is over. This thoughtful and provocative study shows how to replace it by the one we make with ourselves.
Customer Reviews:
Eye-opening, informative, enjoyable........2007-07-06
Ciulla covers a broad range of topics dealing with work -- its meaning throughout history, workplace ideologies/culture (i.e., how to get workers to want to do what they'd ordinarily rather not), the end of workplace loyalty, how we determine what is meaningful work, etc. -- and she does so in a very readable way. This book will likely make you think about the work choices you have made and have yet to make, and although it's not a practical, how-to-get-the-job-you-love type of book (nor is it meant to be), it will give you a broader perspective that will arm you to make wiser decisions. Regardles of whether you use the information to ruminate about your work life or make decisions or not, it's an enjoyable, informative, and sometimes eye-opening read.
Employer manipulation and arbitrariness (4.25*s).......2007-06-21
Never at any time in our past have work and workplaces been such an integral part of our lives - often forming our very identities. Because of the centrality of work in our lives, the author conducts a wide-ranging examination of work including basic definitions and a brief historical look even to ancient times, its potential for providing meaning to our lives, and the control that employers have over the nature of work and the organization of workplaces.
As the author points out, work was once under the control of craftsmen, who worked to produce a complete product irrespective of the specific time needed. With the industrial revolution that manner of working was completely undermined as factory owners gained control by breaking manufacturing into a sequence of simplistic, timed steps to be performed by workers with minimal training, in essence bypassing skilled craftsmen. But the high-speed, dead-end nature of that work was problematical, resulting in massive turnover and no commitment on the part of employees, not to mention the formation of unions. Employers in the 1920s began a counter offensive by adopting a human relations approach geared to inducing willing compliance to perform deadening jobs. As part of that approach, businesses provided increased benefits for employees. Consumerism was promoted as the means to produce the meaning in lives lacking in the workplace. Employers have in more recent times pushed such initiatives as creating a family-like corporate culture (IBM), work teams for purposes of employee participation and empowerment, and promoting total quality management (TQM) to closely bind workers to companies and their agendas, especially white-collar workers. Many social critics, including C. Wright Mills, view these programs as mere manipulation of employees, creating conforming, compliant organization men.
There was the assumption that corporate and employee interests were one and the same and that loyalty and trust best described the new employment relationship. The superficiality of this new social compact was brought home in a devastating manner beginning in the early 1990s as corporations supposedly under the dictates of global markets unceremoniously shed thousands of loyal employees. These newly downsized companies were said to be re-engineered - more management speak for unilateral actions. Employee empowerment turned out to be a cynical ploy to be discarded at the first convenient opportunity.
Given the utter lack of concern on the part of employers to providing long-term employment, the author chides those who continue to look to places of employment to provide the fulfillment normally provided by family, friends, and communities. She notes that unions are the only the workplace organizations that have ever provided a basis for fairness and justice in contrast to the informality of implied agreements easily withdrawn by management.
The book is disappointing because having clearly assessed the state of employment in the US, the author does virtually nothing in recommending change, other than to state the obvious that employers are unreliable in terms of providing security and meaning. At the least, she could have outlined the European approach of works councils and active employment policies. European workers long ago realized that employers cannot be allowed to act with impunity when their economic well-being is at stake. The American system of employers arbitrarily turning workers' lives upside down with no avenue for effective worker input is unconscionable.
The book is a well-written, lively overview of the state of working in America. She notes others have described the internals of workplaces, most notably the Dilbert cartoons. She also notes the lack of community among workers, who prefer to adopt cynical self-coping approaches to modern work instead of collaborating to change it. In the face of the obvious employer disregard for employee well-being, the passivity of American workers is baffling.
Excellent book.......2006-10-15
Prof. Ciulla tackles this central component of Life from different directions. The book will make you think and maybe even change your preferences in life.
Makes use of myriad areas to exemplify values and attitudes.......2005-05-28
This book explores the over-worked state of Americans today and why people work at all. The author helps readers discover the values and attitudes expressed in their jobs using history, literature, popular culture, and personal anecdotes. Many good insights.
A more optimistic 'Nickel and Dimed".......2001-11-29
Sciulla's book avoids policy conclusions, and other theoretical certainties as other books like Fogels' 4th Awakening. She notes the interesting point that "Today, clock time measures events" in the past events measured time. For example, in Magadascar a half hour was measured by the time it took to cook rice. She became interested in the nature of work when she subsidised one job teaching philosophy with another as a waitress in a restaurant. Ms. Ciulla is particularly struck by the fact thatt wealth has not brought happiness. People continue to want to earn a living. Even when people have enough to live on, many of them continue to want to work, remaining perplexed at the fact that while life is supposed to be easier, many continue to seek meaning through employment. However, she notes, employment provides a schedule and a rythm for daily life and serves as an outlet ofr greater forms of community participation.
Book Description
This collection of essays and interviews, some previously unpublished and almost all of which appear in English for the first time, encompasses the political and ethical thinking of Jacques Derrida over thirty years. Passionate, rigorous, beautifully argued, wide-ranging, the texts shed an entirely new light on his work and will be welcomed by scholars in many disciplines—politics, philosophy, history, cultural studies, literature, and a range of interdisciplinary programs.
Derrida’s arguments vary in their responsiveness to given political questions—sometimes they are vivid polemics on behalf of a position or figure, sometimes they are reflective analyses of a philosophical problem. They are united by the recurrent question of political decision or responsibility and the insistence that the apparent simplicity or programmatic character of political decision is in fact a profound avoidance of the political. This volume testifies to the possibility and the necessity of a philosophical politics.
Negotiations assembles some of the most telling examples of the intrinsic relationship, so often affirmed by Derrida in more abstract philosophical terms, between deconstructive reading practices and what is called the “political”—more precisely, politics in an almost down-to-earth, pragmatic, and commonsense use of the word. Among the many subjects covered in the book are: the death penalty in the United States, the civil war in Algeria, globalization and cosmopolitanism, the American Declaration of Independence, Jean-Paul Sartre, the value of objectivity, politics and friendship, and the relationship between deconstruction and actuality.
Customer Reviews:
Interesting.......2001-02-10
I first read an extract from this in second year English in university, and thought the author had some interesting ideas. Although the blurb casts the book as part of the great age of 17th-century English satire, it's more of a straight critique of society than a sarcastic diatribe, and probably doesn't warrant comparison with say, Swift's A Modest Proposal.
From what I can remember, the book is all about the changes taking place in society at the time, especially with the growth in the importance of commerce. Much of it concerns hypocrisy and some moral paradoxes that seem to go unnoticed. Mandeville's starting-point is to liken society to a hive, wherein the behaviour of the bees, though individually selfish, aggregates to form a kind of common good. The book was banned by the Grand Jury of Middlessex, and I suspect that much of the controversy resulted from readers mistaking description for prescription. In other words, people seem to have concluded that Mandeville was saying that this is how society ought to behave, whereas he was merely making observations.
His ideas are interesting, but I can't agree with all of them. One egregious error occurs when he makes the sweeping generalisation that morality is frequently selfishly motivated, using the following argument. Most people, if they see a baby falling from a high window, will rush to try and save it, not out of the child's interests, but merely to spare themselves the pain of seeing the child injured or killed. The next obvious question never seems to enter Mandeville's mind: if people are truly selfish, how would they have developed the empathy to feel the child's pain that strongly to begin with? So: a good commentator but perhaps not a brilliant thinker.
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Books Index
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