In Their Own Words

It is a textbook for a graduate course on project evaluation. Basically, it contains three parts: (1) private or financial evaluation; (2) principles of economics for social evaluation; and (3) social evaluation and social (national) pricing. At the end of every chapter is a list of problems and exercises.

Launched by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in July 2007 and based on a landmark study including in-depth interviews with the most outstanding Indian business leaders, this book includes a detailed study of the most effective behaviors vis-à-vis the most common situations faced by the Indian CEOs. Charting a countrywide blueprint of how the best CEOs think, and and feel--while focusing on the traits common among these leaders--this book discusses the critical dimensions of leadership in this emerging economy.

This is a theoretical and practical approach to the subject of common equities. Its theoretical contribution is the development of a robust, inflation-adjusted model of firm valuation that is easy to calibrate against macroeconomic realities. It employs the famous Merton Miller Capital Structure Irrelevance Theorem in such a manner that the usual market fixation on earnings per share can be completely bypassed. The simplicity and robustness of the model are examined through several case studies and econometric analyses. The book concludes with a detailed, practical study of asset allocation, directed in large measure to younger investors.

A behind-the-scenes look at the underlying roles of each player in a mergers and acquisitions transaction, Mergers and Acquisitions Dealmakers explores the roles of the buyers and sellers involved in mergers and acquisitions as well as executive management, line management, and the corporate development team. Now in a second edition, this book provides readers with a "behind the scenes" look into the roles, approaches, and motivations of each key player in a strategic transaction, and provides strategies on building a successful team. Providing a unique insight into the various professionals that drive mergers and acquisitions, Mergers and Acquisitions Dealmakers is a valuable reference destined to become essential reading for anyone trying to understand how mergers and acquisitions actually work.

Diamond Dollars is a provocative, insightful and analytical look at the business of baseball by author Vince Gennaro, a consultant to MLB teams. It delves deeply into a team's win-revenue relationship and how a team's competitiveness affects the dollar value of its players. Gennaro also quantifies a team's cost of player development, explores how farm system productivity contributes to a team's economic value and discusses the dramatic impact of team-owned regional sports networks on a team's economics.

With the booming interest in commodity investment--as investors seek alternatives to more traditional investments--there is a growing demand for up-to-date investment information. This book provides timely and intelligent insights from a broad range of institutional investors, consultants, hedge funds, commodity index providers, risk managers as well as research from academia.

This is the only multi-contributor book on commodity investment offering a breadth of opinions for sophisticated investors. It looks at commodity investment from the following perspectives:

* The Investor
* The Active Manager
* The Commodity Index Provider
* The Risk Manager
* The Researcher

The size of the global commodities derivatives market is now estimated to be around $750 billion. This growth is evident by the increased investment in commodity indexes and the growth of commodity hedge funds. Further evidence of growth is also seen in the increasing size of natural-resources mutual funds. China and other fast-growing countries are snapping up raw materials at a pace that, at times, is faster than mines and oil wells can produce them.

In response to the rapid growth in the market, this timely publication will bring you up to speed on the trends and challenges of commodity investment, providing you with a practical investment framework.

Military and defense-related procurement has been an important source of technology development across a broad spectrum of industries that account for an important share of United States industrial production. In this book, the author focuses on six general-purpose technologies: interchangeable parts and mass production; military and commercial aircraft; nuclear energy and electric power; computers and semiconductors; the Internet; and the space industries. In each of these industries, technology development would have occurred more slowly, and in some case much more slowly or not at all, in the absence of military and defense-related procurement. The book addresses three questions that have significant implications for the future growth of the United States economy. One is whether changes in the structure of the United States economy and of the defense-industrial base preclude military and defense-related procurement from playing the role in the development of advanced technology in the future, comparable to the role it has played in the past. A second question is whether public support for commercially oriented research and development will become an important source of new general-purpose technologies. A third and more disturbing question is whether a major war, or the threat of major war, will be necessary to mobilize the scientific, technical, and financial resources necessary to induce the development of new general-purpose technologies. When the history of United States technology development in the next half century is written, it will focus on incremental rather than revolutionary changes in both military and commercial technology. It will also be written within the context of slower productivity growth than of the relatively high rates that prevailed in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s or during the information technology bubble that began in the early 1990s. These will impose severe constraints on the capacity of the United States to sustain a global-class military posture and a position of leadership in the global economy.

The book is an extension of a generalization from Ruttan's earlier book, Technology, Growth and Development (Oxford, 2001), that the public sector has played an important role in the development of almost every general purpose technology in which the U.S. is globally competitive.

As women, we face a number of challenges as we strive to succeed in the workplace. Understandably, we feel conflicted. The glass ceiling and the unique stresses that we endure at all levels have been influenced by our historical and traditional roles as mothers in the home and as sexual objects. Society teaches us that a woman's place is in the home as wife and mother.

A woman who excels is looked upon as an anomaly, and there is a widespread perception that women do not make effective leaders. In addition, at all levels in the workplace women are vulnerable to sexual harassment. Working women, particularly women in professional careers with long hours, have to find ways to balance work with family responsibilities.

This book is a study of the tight rope we "walk" every day. You will be challenged to create your own sense of "balance." This book will encourage you to reach out for mentors, to search for support groups of other like-minded women, and to give back to younger women. This is a must-read for any woman who is currently in college or graduate school and about to enter the workplace. Today's young, professional woman needs to understand the challenges that await her. In addition, women who are currently in the workplace will see themselves in this book.

150 Best Jobs for Your Skills identifies the top ten skills that are the most important in today's economy, based on data from the U.S. Department of Labor. It helps job seekers find a fulfilling job and students explore their future career options by focusing on the 50 most promising jobs for each skill. A self-assessment helps readers discover their top three career skills, then matches them to 50 best jobs for each skill. The readers then explore the jobs they find interesting through more than 250 in-depth job descriptions.

This reference helps the economy's largest population group uncover their best job options, including new careers, part-time work, more interesting work, self-employment, and more. In just two easy steps, baby boomers can quickly find their ideal career. They browse more than 75 "best jobs" lists (including unique lists based on age-sensitive abilities, including strength, hearing, memorization, reaction time, and night vision) to find jobs that interest them and learn more about these positions in information-packed job descriptions. The book also includes specific best jobs lists for three age ranges: younger boomers, mid-boomers, and older boomers.

The more precisely risks can be defined the easier it is to make judgments about whether they're fairly valued. Valuing Fixed Income Futures is a practical resource that equips financial professionals with a means of measuring the performance of Treasury and Eurodollar futures.

If you want to diversify your portfolio and lower your risk exposure with hedge funds, here's what you should know: Hedge Funds For Dummies explains all the different types of funds, explores the pros and cons of funds as an investment, shows you how to find a good broker, and much more. All you need to know about hedge funds, to help you make better investing decisions.

A guide to helping small business owners and managers to find, work with, and motivate attorneys. Offers an overview of the legal process and how to work through legal problems.

Today, board members are becoming more involved in the risk assessment and corporate renewal process. Building Value Through Strategy, Risk Assessment and Renewal is an invaluable reference that guides readers from the beginning of strategy formulation through execution and evaluation. This book bridges the divide between theory and effective implementation by helping you assess the difference between value creators and value destroyers in a way that board members can understand and go on to monitor their company's value creation process. It thoroughly investigates oversight, and the roles played by the board and the management team. Authors Hass and Pryor simplify the sometimes complex and confusing aspects of strategy, risk assessment and renewal with a variety of war stories, expert insights, best practices, and one-page reporting and oversight formats that help balance short-term performance with long-term health.

Formats such as V.S. Learns (a unique strategy and learning tool), value charts and the basic risk matrix can be used to evaluate and summarize any strategy, risk or renewal effort on the back of a napkin or boil-down several months of scenario planning in an easy to communicate form. A greatly needed book and set of tools to build value by improving communications between the board and the senior management team.

In an age of twenty-four-hour news coverage and cutting-edge technology, world events dominate our lives and impact the financial markets. From hurricanes to the war in Iraq, we exist in a crazy, connect-the-dot planet. However, the well-prepared investor can turn these events into profits. All they need is the ability to recognize the consistent characteristics of these events and the vision to build a strategy or portfolio that can take advantage of these situations when they begin to unfold. As a foreign exchange strategist with over twenty years of financial experience, author Andrew Busch knows what it takes to make it in today's dynamic market. And now, with World Event Trading, he wants to show you how.

Filled with in-depth insights and expert advice, this practical guide examines three categories of world events--infectious diseases, natural disasters, and politics--and provides hands-on strategies for trading profitably on each. Using actual examples of the war in Iraq, Hurricane Katrina, and other recent "page one stories," Busch shows you how to understand all-important market moods and anticipate profitable trades. He also reveals little-known details on legendary event-driven trading successes, illustrating how any trader can repeat them in different market environments.

How do companies in mature markets--where savings from cost-cutting have been exhausted and breakthrough innovations are hard to come by--achieve sustainable increases in profits? For decades, managers have been told the answer lies in pursuing high market share. But Hermann Simon, Frank F. Bilstein, and Frank Luby argue that this misguided advice has destroyed, rather than created, an additional profit potential. In Manage for Profit, Not for Market Share, the authors contend that companies can extract a profit potential of one percent to three percent of revenue by pursuing a profit, rather than a market share, orientation. Based on their extensive consulting work, the authors lay out a practical, proven program for making significantly more money by reconfiguring the marketing mix to sell existing products and services in different ways. The book offers practical strategies managers can use to differentiate mature products, raise prices effectively, time promotional activities properly, better understand consumer preferences, and more. A convincing counterargument to the reigning market share dogma, this book outlines the new mind-set and tools managers need to bring their companies closer to peak profit performance.

For centuries, indigenous peoples harvested strawberries in fields and woods. Today, the strawberry is one of the world's most popular fruits. Quest for the Perfect Strawberry is a comprehensive chronology of the breeding and technology used in the search for the ultimate taste, texture, and color of the perfect strawberry. Author Herbert Baum takes you on a journey that leads to the current era of California dominance and excellence of an industry that has soared during the last fifty years. Strawberry growers are achieving global supremacy and revolutionizing agriculture with evolutionary marketing programs, but such programs have become cost prohibitive. Baum hopes that his framework for measuring marketing and agricultural-research-program effectiveness will help marketing boards become more accountable to participating growers. As an eyewitness to an agricultural revolution within the industry, Baum describes in detail what intelligence and the human spirit can create with cooperation between academia and industry.

Friedman's book enables businesses, groups and individuals to deal effectively with crisis situations.

Anyone who can think critically and rapidly and then act decisively will gain a competitive edge. Once you have read this book and applied its lessons you will become consistently more successful.

My new book, co-authored with Stella Cox and Bryan Kraty, has been published by Euromoney Books. Entitled Structuring Islamic Finance Transactions, our work is designed to assist readers in understanding the core principles of Islamic finance instruments, their applications and structures, their placement in the context of modern financial developments, and the growth of Islamic financial institutions.

Our book starts with an analysis of the Shari'a, Islamic faith-based reasons why Islamic financial methods must be distinct from traditional interest-based banking and finance. We then reach into our collective experience--each of us have more than 25 years of capital and financial markets expertise--to analyze an array of case studies relating to corporate finance for Emirates Airlines, structured lease finance for Hanco of Saudi Arabia, residential mortgage alternatives in the US market that apply lease structures, syndicated sales and supply in the global telecoms sector, project finance, and other applications of Islamic methods in the global financial markets.

What keeps great companies winning, year after year, even as yesterday's most hyped businesses fail? It's not what you think - or what you've read. To find the real answers, strategic-management expert Alfred A. Marcus systematically reviewed detailed performance metrics for the 1,000 largest U.S. corporations, identifying the 3.2 percent that have consistently outperformed their industries for a full decade (1992-2002).

Many of these firms get little publicity: firms like Amphenol, Ball, Family Dollar, Brown & Brown, Activision, Dreyer's, Forest Labs, and Fiserv. But their success is no accident: they've discovered patterns of success that have largely gone unnoticed by their competitors.

Big Winners and Big Losers shows you how these consistent winners build the strategies that drive their success; move toward market spaces offering superior opportunity; and successfully manage the tensions between agility, discipline, and focus. You'll learn how to identify the right patterns of success for your company, build on the strengths you already have, realistically assess your weaknesses...and generate sustainable advantage one logical, incremental step at a time.

In today's volatile business environment, valuing intangibles properly is a critical art and science all managers and shareholders must master. Beginning with an introduction to intangible asset valuation, this comprehensive guide explores valuation from the perspectives of economics, accounting, finance, and the law. Author Jeffrey Cohen introduces the three main approaches to valuing intangible assets-applying discounted cash flow methodology, using comparable assets to benchmark value, and calculating the cost of the intangible asset-as well as details the latest accounting methodology and rules for GAAP treatment of intangible assets. Filled with in-depth insights and practical advice, Intangible Assets provides a comprehensive framework for identifying and valuing all the intangible assets of a company.

America may be one of the wealthiest countries in the world, but its citizens rank near the bottom in health status. Americans have lower life expectancy, more infant mortalities and higher adolescent death rates than most other advanced industrial nations--and even some developing countries. Though Americans are famous for tolerating great inequality in wealth, the gross inequities in the health system are less well recognized. In Healthy, Wealthy and Fair, a distinguished group of health policy experts chart the stark disparities in health and wealth in the United States. The authors explain how the inequities arise, why they persist, and what makes them worse. Growing income inequality, high poverty rates, and inadequate health care coverage: all three trends help account for the U.S.'s health troubles. The corrosive effects of market ideology and government stalemate, the contributors argue, have also proved a powerful obstacle to effective and more egalitarian solutions. A clarion call for a populist uprising to end the stalemate over health reform, Healthy, Wealthy, and Fair outlines concrete policy proposals for reform--tapping bold new ideas as well as incremental changes to existing programs. This important work will be indispensable to all those who care about our people's health, inequality, and American democracy.

Mergers and Acquisitions Basics provides senior-level executives with essential answers to questions about the nature of M & As and the steps involved in executing M & As for the first time. It explains what key events, processes, and issues a buyer and seller must consider during a merger, as well as common pitfalls to avoid. By using this book, executives can avoid costs and fatal mistakes, and maximize the financial and operational value of the deal.

By the mid-19th century, music publishing was no longer the provenance of shopkeepers, instrument makers, or individual scholars, but a business enterprise undertaken by a new breed of Victorian entrepreneur. Two such were Vincent Novello and his son, Alfred, whose music-publishing house enjoyed significant growth between 1829 and 1866. Victoria Cooper builds up a picture of Novello during this period and the socioeconomic and cultural climate which influenced the company's business decisions. Looking in detail at some of the editions Novello published, she analyses the editing style of the firm and how this was dictated by Novello's main audience of amateur musicians and choral societies. Scrutiny of Novello's stock book indicates the financial fortunes of these editions, while correspondence between the firm and composers such as Mendelssohn reveals how Vincent and Alfred went about acquiring new compositions. With its focus on the development of a music publishing business, this study brings a fresh dimension to musicological research. Novello was able to combine business practice with a commitment to disseminating music of educational and artistic value, and the history of the company provides illuminating evidence of the commodification of music in 19th-century Britain.

Life's Economic Wisdom is about balancing your life, not your checkbook. Some of the most important and fundamental lessons that shape our lives and that of our children are rooted in a handful of economic principles about personal choice and behavior. They are not about the economy, they are about you.

The Professional Services Firm Bible is a comprehensive, sophisticated guide to every aspect of operating all types of midsized professional services firms--from law and accounting firms to consulting, real estate offices, and marketing companies. Focused primarily on growing firms with several to hundreds of professionals, it presents a wealth of expert advice for firm partners and managers who want to dramatically improve their business and keep their clients and professional staff happy.

Written for business owners and their professionals (CPAs, attorneys, insurance agents), this is the first book to teach a lay reader how to value a business. The reader can download Excel spreadsheets to do the valuation from my Web site, www.abramsvaluation.com.

Corporate Scandals reviews business scandals in the first part of the 21st century, putting them into historical context. The book devotes a chapter to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and another chapter to the practice of virtue in organizations.

This book explores the ways decision-makers can educate themselves and their plan participants in making investment decisions that best meet plan participants' needs. This is Hackleman's third book. He's also published Public Employee Benefits: From Inquiry to Strategy (2000) and Deferred Compensation/Defined Contribution: New Rules/New Game (2001).

We all need to involve others to accomplish tasks and achieve our goals, but all too often involving others seems like more trouble than its worth. You Don't Have to Do It Alone is the Swiss Army knife of involvement--a comprehensive set of tools for getting the help you need. The authors lay out a straightforward plan for involving others to get things done, detailing a practical five-step process that begins with five key questions: What kind of involvement is needed? How do I know whom to include? How do I invite people to become involved? How do I keep people involved? How do I finish the job?

Fifteen authors with backgrounds in business, academia, politics, and the highest levels of policy making investigate the Latin American business culture. New insights are given into Latin America as a diverse, not homogeneous, continent with specific and regional perspectives. Subregions, regionalism, and globalism are discussed in depth.

Global comparison of the structure of securities markets in the 1960s.

World's best-selling textbook on industrial organization. Covers antitrust, regulation, international trade, and all standard topics.

This volume provides the latest research and practical insights into assessing country risk, in-depth analysis of country risk cases, and advice on how to manage a country risk portfolio. Leading practitioners, academics, and economists discuss topics such as best practice in country risk and Basel II, theories of crises, stress-testing, measuring state stability and political risk, country risk and the private sector, country risk indicators and early warning systems, currency inconvertibility, and pricing of political risk. The authors come from such world-leading organizations as ABN Amro, Aon Political Risk, Duke University, the Bank for International Settlements, Oxford Analytica, Fitch Ratings, and the World Bank.

From computer viruses and epidemics to terrorism and political unrest, change and uncertainty have come to define the world in which we live and do business. Rather than resisting and being paralyzed by this precarious state, executives should seize the opportunities it presents. The book offers a practical framework for building scenarios that make future possibilities clearer. Five key drivers likely to shape tomorrow's global business environment--globalization, demographic developments, changes in consumer attitudes and tastes, natural resource trends, and growing activism and regulation--form the foundation. This is not a crystal-ball approach to strategic planning, but a set of practical tools that can help executives separate false signals from meaningful developments.

No Seminars in Foxholes offers practical lessons for real-world salespeople. You will learn (1) the best sales tactics to use depend on the situation, (2) the strength of your product, company, status at an account, and timing of market entry are crucial, (3) people in the sales process are swayed by politics and emotions, (4) prospects will select vendors based on how they feel about the limited inputs they have, (5) how to gather, often surreptitiously, the information you need about the decision process, and (6) how to use that knowledge and other techniques to affect the outcome. One-size-fits-all approaches to sales do not work. This book will change how you view the sales profession.

Information Ethics: Privacy and Intellectual Property provides an up-to-date discussion of the main ethical issues that face today's information-intensive society, including the areas of intellectual property rights, privacy, accessibility, and censorship. The explosive growth of information technology, increased competition in the global marketplace, and the rush to use information in an effort to protect society from terrorism has led to the unintended erosion of rights and duties that are often considered fundamental. Through chapters written by some of today's leading information-ethics researchers, this book provides the reader with a thorough overview of the current state of information ethics, the dangers and opportunities presented by information technology, and potential solutions to the risks currently faced by today's information society.

Stephen J. Spurr, a professor of economics at Wayne State University in Detroit, has just completed a textbook on economic analysis of law, Economic Foundations of Law. His book, which is designed for undergraduates but may also be of interest to law students, provides an economic analysis of the law of property, contracts, torts, criminal law, corporation law, tax law, and of the litigation process. Publication of this book is timely because of the steadily increasing influence of economic analysis on the law--through its effect on legal scholarship and on judicial decisions. Today virtually any lawyer is likely to encounter applications of economics in his or her law practice. Of course, researchers at the University of Chicago have had an enormous impact on this field--probably more than those of any other university. Spurr wrote his book over a period of some seven years.

This book enables individuals, groups and organizations to successfully cope with crisis. It teaches how to think critically and rapidly, and then act decisively in order to gain a competitive edge. This applies in business, in society at large, and in personal life. The lessons are illustrated by interesting real life stories--some of which occurred at the U of C--and reinforced through suggested exercises.

As volume two in the publisher's ambitious new series on financial management, this step-by-step guide does an admirable job of outlining techniques for creating shareholder value in an area that is too often subject to luck and hapless guesswork. In so doing, the author, who is head of the IT strategy group for PricewaterhouseCoopers, demonstrates interactions among computer science, corporate finance, and market research. Aimed at financial analysts, technology executives, and venture capitalists, the book's quantitative approach--with examples from a number of IT success stories as well as failures, along with charts and graphs--shows readers how to build a technology system that enhances shareholder investment without neglecting other imperatives of the firm.

Extended, historically grounded case studies from Nigeria, Ghana, Uganda, Vietnam, Nunavik, Canada, and Guyana are intended to encourage reflection about how international businesses can enhance the capital--financial, productive, natural, human, and social--of their host countries, as a matter of fairness in exchange (commutative justice). Rather than challenging students with quandaries, the cases aim to sensitize students to how businesses might engage in 'asset-building' rather than 'cost-minimization' as a basic business strategy.

Mergers, acquisitions, and other strategic transactions are no longer exclusively practiced by a small number of huge corporations. Today these deals are standard business activities, engaged in by companies of all types and sizes. As one of the first books broadly written for any business professional engaged in a strategic transaction, Deal Teams outlines the basics and details the intricacies of how a deal works and who the players are. With hundreds of deals under his belt, author Michael Frankel is a seasoned authority who offers the reader a clear and candid explanation of the roles, motives, and objectives of the key players in a deal. As he characterizes the entire deal team--from executive management and the corporate development team, shareholders and other internal players, to external advisors including public relations and human resources executives, as well as investment bankers and outside counsel--Frankel profiles everyone involved in a strategic transaction. The deal-rich environment of the corporate world in which we live today demands that business professionals understand the landscape of the deal table as well as the roles, biases, and incentives of those seated around it. Deal Teams is a critical read for that rapidly-widening pool of anyone involved in, contemplating, or affected by a business deal.

This book covers the range of essential antitrust topics, from mergers in the U.S. and Europe to business practices including predatory pricing, price discrimination, product bundling, and tying. It features 14 articles by respected experts at NERA Economic Consulting, on of the world's foremost firms of economists.

Thomas and Nathif Adam describe the latest development in Islamic finance, the expanding use of tradable financial instruments which meet Islamic religious requirements and integrate into the global capital markets. Islamic bonds now facilitate better management of Islamic banks in emerging markets as well as the expansion of Islamic banking in Western markets.