The Definitive Drucker
Elizabeth Haas Edersheim
McGraw-Hill, €26.50
ISBN 0071472339  After profiling Marvin Bower, the guiding influence at management consultancy McKinsey, where she was once a partner, Elizabeth Edersheim now focuses on his contemporary and close friend, Peter Drucker, who is universally regarded as the father of modern management. The Definitive Drucker showcases the subject’s visionary concepts and applies his homely management theories to today’s business dilemmas and opportunities such as globalisation, virtual marketplaces and rising customer expectations. In a series of interviews conducted during the last six months of Drucker’s life, Edersheim cajoles him into sharing his views on current business practices, economic changes and trends, the emergence of some of which he predicted decades ago. He is also provoked into revealing his thoughts on current popular economic bumper stickers such as the earth being flat, which dovetail with his insight into the fragility of entire economic systems, not to mention how senior management has evolved and why so many leaders fail. Drucker’s insights are divided into five main areas he says the modern organisation needs to focus on in order to survive. These are connecting with customers, innovating without abandoning what works, developing lasting partnerships, creating and retaining knowledge workers, and establishing disciplined decision making. Drucker’s skewed or offbeat way of thinking persuaded many business, corporate and political leaders throughout the 20th century to refine their diagnostics and goals. Edersheim’s extensive interviews with some of these luminaries, including Bill Gates, George Gallup, Jr. and A.G. Lafley, underscore Drucker’s colossal influence.
Consequently, this engaging book manages to be a biography of modern business practices – taking in the likes of GE, Siemens and Canon – without being merely a breathless rundown of Drucker’s once-revolutionary ideas. Not a bad idea, considering that Drucker wrote a total of 39 books on management, economics and politics. Instead, via a series of relaxed and often humorous interviews, Edersheim gathers nuggets of practical advice that can usefully be applied to a wide array of challenges involving innovation, leadership, marketing and customer satisfaction. The Definitive Drucker is a celebration of the man and his life’s work, but it is also Drucker’s final business masterclass on how to strategise, compete and ultimately triumph in any market. In this final chapter of a glittering career, Drucker is as playful as he is profound in his reflections, while not diminishing the intellectual rigour of his own works. This book further burnishes his legacy. BF Chechnya: The Case for Independence
Tony Wood
Verso Books, €22.95
ISBN 1844671143  With socialism discredited and the Soviet Union just a horrible memory, Chechen independence has become something of a cause célèbre for Europe’s discredited left. Like drowning men clutching at straws, however, few appreciate the irony that today’s big, bad villain – Russia – was only a few years ago still considered by some of their unreconstructed kin to be the salvation of humanity.
Tony Wood – assistant editor for the New Left Review – has few illusions and thus makes no pretence at building a balanced case incorporating Russia’s point of view. Instead, he gives us a potted history of Chechnya’s suffering through the Tsarist era and especially under Stalin, when like other nationalities in the USSR the entire population was uprooted from its homeland and exiled to central Asia. The worst was to come in the 1990s, of course, when Russia – disorientated by the evaporation of the communist ideology that had bound it since 1917, humiliated by the sudden loss of its European client states and appalled that the supposedly invincible Soviet Union could disappear overnight – determined that its disintegration would stop at its borders. This of course is the main reason Chechnya has not received the independence Wood thinks is its due and which many even within Russia’s elite once considered inevitable (once an oil-producing territory, Chechnya today has few natural resources, is of questionable strategic value and comprises a relatively homogenous population more naturally inclined to hate Russians than to like them). Writing with something of a dead hand, Wood dutifully recounts Moscow’s two invasions: Yeltsin’s 1994 disaster, which revealed both the brutal incompetence of the Russian Army and just how desperate Chechnya was for its freedom, and the 1999 war, which took a devastating toll on Chechen civilians and what was left of the capital, Grozny. Wood is up front about Chechnya’s failings during its brief independence after 1995 and possible disaster scenarios if the Russians actually did withdraw, admitting that “in a country rife with weapons and un-slaked vengeance a generalised settling of accounts could take an immense toll”. What’s really missing, though, is a rigorous comparative framework. It’s all very well to stress a people’s right to self-determination (all the more pressing if the coloniser is renowned for brutality and lack of compromise), but ignoring the highly complex international realpolitik involved makes such views little more than wishful thinking. JK Primal Leadership
Daniel Goleman, Richard E. Boyatzis and Annie McKee
Harvard Business School Press, €15
ISBN 1591391849 Daniel Goleman – who wrote the bestseller Emotional Intelligence – and his co-authors believe that the “primal” role of a leader is to serve as the group’s emotional guide. Leaders with emotional intelligence create “resonance” in their organisations; their presence inspires enthusiasm. On the other hand, leaders with low emotional intelligence may rely on negative emotions to get jobs done in the short run, but long-term dissonance will lead to a workforce too anxious, fearful and dispirited to do its best work. Cut Carbon, Grow Profits
Edited by Dr Kenny Tang and Ruth Yeoh
Middlesex University Press, €60
 ISBN 190475015X A book exemplifying the point we’ve been trying to make for over a year at CNBC European Business; to whit, that companies can reduce their emissions and their bills simultaneously. More than that, they can leap ahead of their rivals in their core activity, their branding or their customer loyalty. It’s a thick volume, in fact a compendium of case studies and insights by several dozen contributors, but what it lacks in a unified approach, it makes up for in breadth. Go and buy it. RL Voluntary Carbon Markets
Ricardo Bayon, Amanda Hawn and Katherine Hamilton
Earthscan, €30
 ISBN 184407417X This is a fabulous book covering every aspect of the voluntary carbon offsetting sector that should be read by any individual or corporation contemplating carbon neutrality, the latest must-have in business. Its numerous contributors have been carefully edited so as to present a comprehensive rather than falsely unified commentary on this as-yet fragmented sector, and it never swerves into excessive journalese or incomprehensible academic jargon. RL |