Average customer rating:
- Great content, awful format
- Interesting Read
- As Good as Everyone is Saying...Just Buy It!
- Better than the 7 Harry Potter books together
- A Mars Bar for your Soul
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Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days
Jessica Livingston
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ASIN: 1590597141 |
Book Description
For would-be entrepreneurs, innovation managers or just anyone fascinated by the special chemistry and drive that created some of the best technology companies in the world, this book offers both wisdom and engaging insights—straight from the source.
— Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine, and author of The Long Tail
"All the best things that I did at Apple came from (a) not having money and (b) not having done it before, ever." —Steve Wozniak, Apple
Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days is a collection of interviews with founders of famous technology companies about what happened in the very earliest days. These people are celebrities now. What was it like when they were just a couple friends with an idea? Founders like Steve Wozniak (Apple), Caterina Fake (Flickr), Mitch Kapor (Lotus), Max Levchin (PayPal), and Sabeer Bhatia (Hotmail) tell you in their own words about their surprising and often very funny discoveries as they learned how to build a company.
Where did they get the ideas that made them rich? How did they convince investors to back them? What went wrong, and how did they recover?
Nearly all technical people have thought of one day starting or working for a startup. For them, this book is the closest you can come to being a fly on the wall at a successful startup, to learn how it's done.
But ultimately these interviews are required reading for anyone who wants to understand business, because startups are business reduced to its essence. The reason their founders become rich is that startups do what businessesdo—create value—more intensively than almost any other part of the economy. How? What are the secrets that make successful startups so insanely productive? Read this book, and let the founders themselves tell you.
Customer Reviews:
Great content, awful format.......2007-09-20
There's plenty of great information here, as all the other reviews said. But this interview format is really excruciating to read. Casual speech is very hard to transcribe in such a way that it becomes readable. This is why journalists and other writers are trained in how to reduce a long, tangential speech into something meaningful and clear. These interviews tend to run on and on and on, with the subjects jumping around, sometimes contradicting themselves, or misspeaking; all the stuff we do when talking, but which doesn't really matter in conversation, where other cues like body language make up for it. It really takes a lot of work to read this stuff, you're constantly having to hear the subject "out loud" in your head for it to make sense.
This book's easily twice as long as it could be if these interviews were edited down to a few really useful pages each. Or better: rewritten as short essays.
Interesting Read.......2007-09-19
Founders at Work is a fairly interesting read but lacks some depth. I'm the founder of a startup at the moment and am always keen to learn more about other founder's stories. The structure of this book is more like an interview with the interviewer rarely delving into the deeper human emotions, problems, issues, feelings etc of the founders. This really gives a basic "guided story" approach about each of the founders without any "pearls of wisdom" or "lessons learned".
Good for a single read or the average person who has an interest in technology startups from a founder's perspective, not worth being made into a hardcover.
As Good as Everyone is Saying...Just Buy It!.......2007-09-16
Loved this book. The interviewer asked a similar set of questions for all participants yet improvised when needed to follow an interesting train of thought to it's natural conclusion. All of the participants were refreshingly candid. Almost as if they were unloading on a therapist. Each interview is just long enough to feel complete but not so long as to feel redundant. On another note, I'm pretty anal when it comes to the physical presentation of a book and this one passes all my criteria: Decent margins, pleasant type face, good line space and font sizes, flexible spine stays open easily without trying to close itself, and easy to browse logical organization. If you're an entrepreneur working on tech start up this is one of the few "must read" books.
Better than the 7 Harry Potter books together.......2007-08-12
Better than the 7 Harry Potter books together (wich is a bad comparison as I didn't like them that much). The book is a collection of interviews with founders of famous technology companies about what happened in the very earliest days and later. Within each interviews, you'll catch dozen of interesting infos. Believe me , when you start it, you'll finish it within the week.
A Mars Bar for your Soul.......2007-08-02
Hey, maybe I'm just an old-fashioned chocaholic but books like this are what I turn to to get a lift.
In the same way a quick snack on a Mars Bar gives me a physical energy boost, I get a spiritual boost from reading about other people's struggles. An author needs a special style to pull off this kind of book and Jessica Livingston deftly steers the reminiscing. Maybe the book is just well-edited but there were many times when I think she asked just the perfect next question to keep the stories flowing.
I wish I'd been in the room.
Book Description
The international bestseller on the extent to which personal freedom has been eroded by government regulations and agencies while personal prosperity has been undermined by government spending and economic controls. New Foreword by the Authors; Index.
Customer Reviews:
Life transforming.......2007-06-23
Friedman was a genius. He was also the most articulate and fearless advovate for freedom. It seems that most are willing to give a little here and there for their pet projects. He was not. This is the best argument for the economic power that comes from freedom as well as the advantages for the individual. Over the long hall it is also the only way to prevent the loss of all freedoms. Read this book and it will positively change your life.
A book for freedom.......2007-06-14
Mr. Friedman, God rest his soul, continues to demonstrate the link between laissez faire economics and personal freedom. This companion to "Capitalism and Freedom" is a must read for those who are interested in individual liberty and the economic system that pertuates such liberty.
Be Free.......2007-05-24
Milton and Rose Friedman, "A society that puts equality - in the sense of equality of outcome - ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom.
...
On the other hand, a society that puts freedom first will, as a happy by-product, end up with both greater freedom and greater equality."
Milton Friedman, "Everybody agrees that socialism has been a failure. Everybody agrees that capitalism has been a success... yet everybody is extending socialism."
Lawrence Reed, "Free men are not equal and equal men are not free."
Tusen Takk!
Still a beauty.......2007-04-08
Almost 30 years on, Free to Choose still offers valuable insights to the political economics in western democracies. The books main message is that special interests always prevail over general interests. For that reason, we have tariffs on sugar though the majority of the electorate loses from it and we have restricted entry into several occupations like real estate brokers and furniture designing. The story of the development of the Interstate Commerce Commission is particuylarly readable. The ICC was established to protect the consumer (general interest), but quickly turned to protect the producers (special interest). Because special interests always prevail, the governments role in the economy should be restricted.
The Freidmans finish their book with a faint of hope. The final chapter is called The Tide is Turning, and in the foreword written in 1990, they acknowledge that public opinion is greatly different in 1990 than it was in 1975. And economic policy in the US is improved. Marginal tax rates are reduced sharply. Inflation is low and stable. The former communist countries have gone capitalist in scores.
Many of the key messages of the book are now conventional wisdom. Its still worth reading, though. The book offers a very gook look into the intellectual climate of the late 70s. It is one of the central works of one of history's most prominent economists. But foremost, it describes the logic of economics in a very beautiful way.
A Classic and Totally True but Slightly Incomplete.......2007-04-02
Milton Friedman was an economics professor at the University of Chicago who won the Nobel Prize in economics for his development of monetary economics. This book briefly explains how an economy works. Yet "Free to Choose" is something more. It's a personal statement that we should embrace free markets and freedom for all of us as individuals to make our own decisions. When we freely choose, the economy is more fair because individuals make their own choices with their own benefits and consequences. The economy is more prosperous and more efficient because the economy competed for customers and the best win out. A controlled economy is a huge mistake. The proper role of government should be that of a referee to ensure fair play - not run the game itself. Friedman's ideas moved the global economy ahead to more efficiency and prosperity, yet his ideas were based on the old ideas of liberty and free markets.
Friedman was an old-school liberal, better known these days as a libertarian. He believed strongly in the power of liberty, as opposed to extreme social orders such as Communism, Nazism, monopolies, mafias, religious theocracies, slavery, segregation, sexism, etc.
Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness is one of the foundations upon which America had been founded. Yet pure free market economics fell out of favor in the wake of the excesses of the Gilded Age when unregulated capitalism was seen to have an immoral side of exploitation. After the trauma of the Great Depression, capitalism was seen to be unstable and cruel. Theodore Roosevelt used the Bully Pulpit to argue that government should regulate the "malefactors of great wealth." He created the Food and Drug Administration, broke up trusts, regulated railroads, and the American approved. Franklin Roosevelt pursued policies for economic stability and basic security, and Americans elected him president four times. Many people sincerely feared capitalism. This would inadvertently lead to some well-intentioned but very bad economic policies.
Some of the pragmatic reforms of the New Deal were excellent, such as the SEC to require audited financial statements, which leads to more transparent and more efficient markets. Without the SEC we would have many more Enron disasters. The Federal Reserve Open Market committee, a New Deal reform, manages the money supply. New Deal banking legislation requires certain capital reserves and insures deposits to $100,000, which forever ended bank panics. The FHA insured mortgages, which created the 30 year mortgage and brought home ownership to millions of people who used to have to rent or inherit a pile of money. Government regulations adopted later require safe consumer products, such as home appliances and the electrical hardware to bring electricity into our homes. The government regulates pollution. Student loans allow citizens to learn the skills that a prosperous economy needs.
Unfortunately, some of the government experiments in the mid-to-late 20th Century with regulations were mistakes, such as price controls and some welfare programs. Socialism became fashionable to many, especially in Europe, and regulations kept creeping upward. In the United States, this culminated in the late 1960s with the Great Society, although America never became truly socialistic like some European nations. By the 1970s, the global economy was mired in stagflation. Too many bureaucrats were making too many business decisions, hampering market activity and taking away the automatic operation of the economy through prices and consumer choices. Too many politicians were making decisions for purely political gain. Big city politicians have especially been that way for well over a century.
Friedman's weakness in this book is that he does not give due credit to the "referee" government regulations that ensure free and FAIR competition. Friedman is too one-sided in his argument. Indeed, his ideas work today because of pragmatic government reforms of capitalism, such as the New Deal, that did not exist in the past. Friedman emphasizes freedom, as he should for the time period he lived in, but there must be an assumption of at least mild fairness in order for free competition to work.
Remember the books by Charles Dickens on the horrors of the industrial revolution? Remember the disgusting pollution that was so bad in London that the fog was filthy black? Some old buildings in Europe today are still stained black from the filth because they could not be cleaned of the filth. Remember the horrors of industrial child labor and slavery? The most powerful quickly overwhelm the less powerful in a "free" market without protections, and that's how some people want it.
Friedman blames the Federal Reserve for the Great Depression, which is partly true, but the constrictive gold standard was a leading cause as it caused the Fed to tighten and then spread the Depression globally. The countries that abondoned the gold standard the quickest recoverd the quickest. The countries that were not on the gold standard did not experience the Great Depression at all! Hoover refused to abandon the gold standard. FDR abaondoned it quickly, and the contraction ended. Ironically, Friedman's critique says the government was responsible because it did not intervene as it should have earlier.
Also, the financial systems completely collapsed when over 10,000 banks collapsed. The economy would never have recovered without government intervention to save and then reform the financial system, which FDR eventually did. Friedman was not honest about this. He seems so fixated on claiming that government is the problem that he is not truthful about the Great Depression. Friedman also says that the Great Crash did not cause the Great Depression, which is true. But it did make a natural recovery impossible. The financial system fell like a house of cards because there was no regulatory structure to support it. Also, numerous financial scandals rocked the financial system, such as the scandal involving Richard Whitney, formerly the president of the New York Stock Exchange, a member of the board of governors, and arguably the most recognized broker in America.
Friedman also has an overly simplistic solution to inner-city poverty, and he says that schools should receive voicers so inner city parents can be better consumers through more freedom. This would do nothing to solve the real underlying (and maybe unsolvable problems) of cultures of disfunction, broken families, crime, and massive drug use. Ironically, Friedman would legalize drugs for more freedom. Friedman's overall theme of liberty being best is definitely correct, but with some commonsense exceptions please.
Adam Smith, the creator of economics, also said that government must make the investements for the common good that the free market never would make. America has a long history of making these investments, such as canals, roads, bridges, dams, school buildings, parks, aquaducts, etc. Yet Friedman mentions little about this partnership with government. Free markets do not work for everything, although I would argue for 95% of things.
Finally, economic activity is ultimately a social activity. People make money when they organizations with different functions and many people performing those function. It is only because we are socially cooperative that an economy can work. Friedman's emphasis on the individual is correct, but there is more to it. Look at this book as one of a dozen needed views.
Friedman was an optimist. He believed in the power of competition. He was 95% right. True competition will correct most economic problems. I wish more socialist liberals would read this book and learn that less is more. I highly recommend this book.
I also recommend Ronald Reagan's autobiography titled "An American Life," since he was the political figure who rhetorically sold Americans again on free markets. Reagan explains his optimistic views of free markets, his opposition to excessive government controls, his disgust for able-bodied freeloaders on welfare, and his optimistic belief in the goodness of individuals. He also says that he voted four times for Franklin Roosevelt, who said that welfare could destroy the work ethic like "a narcotic" and liquidated the temporary welfare programs designed to aid the country through the Depression once the crisis passed, only to be revived later. Reagan said he was not trying to undo the New Deal; he was trying to unleash the economy from the excesses of 1960s liberalism and excessive economic controls.
Average customer rating:
- The Godfather of the Libertarian Movement
- The Hobo Philosopher
- More Capitalist Rhetoric
- Like him or not - important to know
- Brilliant
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Capitalism and Freedom: Fortieth Anniversary Edition
Milton Friedman
Manufacturer: University Of Chicago Press
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ASIN: 0226264211 |
Book Description
Selected by the Times Literary Supplement as one of the "hundred most influential books since the war"
How can we benefit from the promise of government while avoiding the threat it poses to individual freedom? In this classic book, Milton Friedman provides the definitive statement of his immensely influential economic philosophy—one in which competitive capitalism serves as both a device for achieving economic freedom and a necessary condition for political freedom. The result is an accessible text that has sold well over half a million copies in English, has been translated into eighteen languages, and shows every sign of becoming more and more influential as time goes on.
Customer Reviews:
The Godfather of the Libertarian Movement.......2007-09-17
An absolute classic work in the areas of Laissez Faire economics and libertarianism. While not everyone in the libertarian movement idolizes Dr. Friedman, his work was written in such a clear and accessible way that it introduced classical liberalism to a generation of people in the 1960's, who were big government Keynesians. Friedman fought for individual liberty, and while he wasn't an anarcho-capitalist by any means and sometimes uses government to solve problems, he is still the godfather of the libertarian movement and the libertarian movement would not be where it is today without Dr. Friedman.
The Hobo Philosopher.......2007-09-14
I hate to be so outspoken on a review of a book. But I find this gentleman elemental, childish and silly. On top of all of that I do not believe that he is entirely sincere. This man was a statistician and "accountant" not a theoretician. He actually won the Nobel Prize. This I find very hard to believe. I have not given up on him though. But I have yet to find anything that he has written that I can get past the introduction. The more I read of what he has to say the worse it gets.
More Capitalist Rhetoric.......2007-08-07
Clearly he overlooks the basic concepts of political economy in an effort to advocate for capitalist societies. Moreover, he fails to confront the basic questions of inequality which is characteristic in capitalist societies.
Friedman asserts that communism and socialism are mere tools of totalitarian regimes as if he's even attempted to study marx. This book is extremely lopsided and narrow in its praise for a system that has accounted for much pain in the world.
If your looking for a balanced intellectual perspective, look else where. However, I will recommend this book after gaining a true foundation on the study of political economy; try Adam Smith, Karl Marx, John Locke, James Mill, Keynes, Proudhon, Ricardo, Owen, Engels, etc.
Like him or not - important to know.......2007-07-26
Overview / Review: Milton Friedman, like him or hate him, is an essential economic theorist to tackle if one is interested in that field or in theories of economic justice. Having a progressive bias, I disagree strongly with many Friedman's theories. Having said that, for anyone interested in getting the essentials of his "liberal" (used in the older, more classic sense) economic views would do well to read this book. Friedman is opposed to state intervention in individual freedom, so many see Friedman as a modern counterpart to Adam Smith. Friedman advocates a free-market economy, with minimal taxation and government interference, because he believes the free market approach assures the greatest measure of freedom, justice, and overall affluence. Many modern conservatives have echoed the arguments he makes herein.
Friedman is actually convincing in his review on a few counts - the abuse of licensure, the problems of tax loopholes, and the fact that there are frequent shortcomings of the well-intended social welfare state. Having said that, however, Friedman does seem unduly biased in favor of a society so individualistic it is therefore almost atomistic, with little to no social cohesion. Some of his arguments are more assertions and claims than full-blown arguments, and one wishes he had addressed major issues in more detail (perhaps he does elsewhere). The book's virtue is that it is brief, but its weakness is also that its arguments are often too brief, and too compact. Karl Marx for example, has many faults in his theory that can be found, but Friedman too casually blows off Marx in about one page of analysis (Chapter 10, p. 167-8). Friedman's argument for a very limited government, and against socialism/communism, would have been more convincing if he had devoted a full chapter to Marx for one, and more attention to other matters of social justice, inequality, and oppression.
In a nutshell: this book encapsulates Friedman's "liberal" or laissez-faire approach to a wide range of issues on economics, government, and capitalism. The free individual is given utmost importance, and government that governs best is that which governs (or interferes) least in his Friedman's view. Not convincing from the standpoint of those interested in progressive social justice (Niebuhr's views on selfishness and power are more cogent), but essential to read and analyze if one is interested in economics and ethics.
Brilliant.......2007-07-05
Friedman was America's preeminent economists that explained the connection between Political and Economic freedom without the signature econo-techno-babble that is the vernacular of lesser economists. This book should be REQUIRED reading for all high school, or at the very least, college students. I enjoyed it immensely and will be wary of "too many dollars chasing too few goods"!
Amazon.com
On September 23, 1998, the boardroom of the New York Fed was a tense place. Around the table sat the heads of every major Wall Street bank, the chairman of the New York Stock Exchange, and representatives from numerous European banks, each of whom had been summoned to discuss a highly unusual prospect: rescuing what had, until then, been the envy of them all, the extraordinarily successful bond-trading firm of Long-Term Capital Management. Roger Lowenstein's When Genius Failed is the gripping story of the Fed's unprecedented move, the incredible heights reached by LTCM, and the firm's eventual dramatic demise.
Lowenstein, a financial journalist and author of Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist, examines the personalities, academic experts, and professional relationships at LTCM and uncovers the layers of numbers behind its roller-coaster ride with the precision of a skilled surgeon. The fund's enigmatic founder, John Meriwether, spent almost 20 years at Salomon Brothers, where he formed its renowned Arbitrage Group by hiring academia's top financial economists. Though Meriwether left Salomon under a cloud of the SEC's wrath, he leapt into his next venture with ease and enticed most of his former Salomon hires--and eventually even David Mullins, the former vice chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve--to join him in starting a hedge fund that would beat all hedge funds.
LTCM began trading in 1994, after completing a road show that, despite the Ph.D.-touting partners' lack of social skills and their disdainful condescension of potential investors who couldn't rise to their intellectual level, netted a whopping $1.25 billion. The fund would seek to earn a tiny spread on thousands of trades, "as if it were vacuuming nickels that others couldn't see," in the words of one of its Nobel laureate partners, Myron Scholes. And nickels it found. In its first two years, LTCM earned $1.6 billion, profits that exceeded 40 percent even after the partners' hefty cuts. By the spring of 1996, it was holding $140 billion in assets. But the end was soon in sight, and Lowenstein's detailed account of each successively worse month of 1998, culminating in a disastrous August and the partners' subsequent panicked moves, is riveting.
The arbitrageur's world is a complicated one, and it might have served Lowenstein well to slow down and explain in greater detail the complex terms of the more exotic species of investment flora that cram the book's pages. However, much of the intrigue of the Long-Term story lies in its dizzying pace (not to mention the dizzying amounts of money won and lost in the fund's short lifespan). Lowenstein's smooth, conversational but equally urgent tone carries it along well. The book is a compelling read for those who've always wondered what lay behind the Fed's controversial involvement with the LTCM hedge-fund debacle. --S. Ketchum
Book Description
John Meriwether, a famously successful Wall Street trader, spent the 1980s as a partner at Salomon Brothers, establishing the best--and the brainiest--bond arbitrage group in the world. A mysterious and shy midwesterner, he knitted together a group of Ph.D.-certified arbitrageurs who rewarded him with filial devotion and fabulous profits. Then, in 1991, in the wake of a scandal involving one of his traders, Meriwether abruptly resigned. For two years, his fiercely loyal team--convinced that the chief had been unfairly victimized--plotted their boss's return. Then, in 1993, Meriwether made a historic offer. He gathered together his former disciples and a handful of supereconomists from academia and proposed that they become partners in a new hedge fund different from any Wall Street had ever seen. And so Long-Term Capital Management was born.
In a decade that had seen the longest and most rewarding bull market in history, hedge funds were the ne plus ultra of investments: discreet, private clubs limited to those rich enough to pony up millions. They promised that the investors' money would be placed in a variety of trades simultaneously--a "hedging" strategy designed to minimize the possibility of loss. At Long-Term, Meriwether & Co. truly believed that their finely tuned computer models had tamed the genie of risk, and would allow them to bet on the future with near mathematical certainty. And thanks to their cast--which included a pair of future Nobel Prize winners--investors believed them.
From the moment Long-Term opened their offices in posh Greenwich, Connecticut, miles from the pandemonium of Wall Street, it was clear that this would be a hedge fund apart from all others. Though they viewed the big Wall Street investment banks with disdain, so great was Long-Term's aura that these very banks lined up to provide the firm with financing, and on the very sweetest of terms. So self-certain were Long-Term's traders that they borrowed with little concern about the leverage. At first, Long-Term's models stayed on script, and this new gold standard in hedge funds boasted such incredible returns that private investors and even central banks clamored to invest more money. It seemed the geniuses in Greenwich couldn't lose.
Four years later, when a default in Russia set off a global storm that Long-Term's models hadn't anticipated, its supposedly safe portfolios imploded. In five weeks, the professors went from mega-rich geniuses to discredited failures. With the firm about to go under, its staggering $100 billion balance sheet threatened to drag down markets around the world. At the eleventh hour, fearing that the financial system of the world was in peril, the Federal Reserve Bank hastily summoned Wall Street's leading banks to underwrite a bailout.
Roger Lowenstein, the bestselling author of Buffett, captures Long-Term's roller-coaster ride in gripping detail. Drawing on confidential internal memos and interviews with dozens of key players, Lowenstein crafts a story that reads like a first-rate thriller from beginning to end. He explains not just how the fund made and lost its money, but what it was about the personalities of Long-Term's partners, the arrogance of their mathematical certainties, and the late-nineties culture of Wall Street that made it all possible.
When Genius Failed is the cautionary financial tale of our time, the gripping saga of what happened when an elite group of investors believed they could actually deconstruct risk and use virtually limitless leverage to create limitless wealth. In Roger Lowenstein's hands, it is a brilliant tale peppered with fast money, vivid characters, and high drama.
Download Description
John Meriwether, a famously successful Wall Street trader, spent the 1980s as a partner at Salomon Brothers, establishing the best--and the brainiest--bond arbitrage group in the world. A mysterious and shy midwesterner, he knitted together a group of Ph.D.-certified arbitrageurs who rewarded him with filial devotion and fabulous profits. Then, in 1991, in the wake of a scandal involving one of his traders, Meriwether abruptly resigned. For two years, his fiercely loyal team--convinced that the chief had been unfairly victimized--plotted their boss's return. Then, in 1993, Meriwether made a historic offer. He gathered together his former disciples and a handful of supereconomists from academia and proposed that they become partners in a new hedge fund different from any Wall Street had ever seen. And so Long-Term Capital Management was born.
Customer Reviews:
Illuminating and Fascinating Business Classic.......2007-10-07
Roger Lowenstein's 'When Genius Failed' has been justly acclaimed as a business classic. In the wake of the 2007 credit crunch, Lowenstein's riveting study of the 1998 collapse of Long Term Capital Management (LTCM) retains its relevance and has much to teach market observers.
Ironically, LTCM had much going for it. The firm was founded by savvy Salomon Brothers veterans, and its luminaries included Nobel Prize winner Myron Scholes, the creator of the acclaimed Black-Scholes options pricing model. LTCM was also established on the premise of hedging risk and thereby minimizing financial loss.
The unraveling of LTCM, lucidly and compelling depicted by Lowenstein, has many parallels with the subprime mortgage meltdown of 2007:
--An unwavering faith in financial engineering, coupled with the erroneous belief that financial structures will protect against substantial losses.
--The insatiable search for higher yields in crowded markets, which ultimately drives even savvy managers to investments with unfortunate risk profiles.
--The use of significant amounts of borrowed capital to boost returns. Sadly, the use of leverage forces the rapid liquidation of positions to repay lenders during declining market conditions, excarbating market slides and the withdrawal of credit.
--Hubris. Hedge fund managers and successful traders tend to get overconfident after a run of good luck, leading them to take riskier positions with borrowed capital.
Together, these factors led to the downfall of LTCM and to the 2007 subprime meltdown.
Kudos to Roger Lowenstein for demystifying the arcana of derivatives trading and the Black-Scholes model-- if you want an account that describes these subjects lucidly, this is your book. As well, Lowenstein offers a riveting depiction of the 1998 market slide that sent LTCM reeling toward insolvency, and the rescue events coordinated by the Federal Reserve and undertaken by an international capital consortium.
Bottom line: a five star financial read that maintains its relevance.
Incredible story.......2007-10-06
Two things make this a great book: a riveting story (losing hundreds of millions a day is mind-boggling) and excellent writing. Roger Lowenstein, first of all, is a master of using analogies explain complex things, like financial derivaties and how the big investment banks operate. Long Term Capital Management was a gang of complex gamblers (including a couple of Nobel Prize winners to boot) that employed equations and theories from the academic world of finance to build an enormously successful hedge fund that sucked in the big banks of Wall Street. Lowenstein details the rise of LTCM (it seems it had to have taken place with an interesting mixture of Luck, Smarts, and Arrogance) and their massive and rapid failure with a cadence that makes it difficult to put the book down. When Genius Failed offers a glimpse into the world of big-time finance and the unrepentant and bizarre characters that it attracts (the money these guys rake it in and how they do it will stun you if you aren't familiar with Wall Street). Highly recommended - even a decade after the collapse of LTCM!
great book.......2007-09-20
Great read. Didn't want to put it down and finished it in a few days. Great to read how these smart guys lost all their money by being too greedy. Thumbs up for sure.
A fantastic tale of risk, reward and rue.......2007-09-20
It's a wonderfully written account of a remarkable risk taking adventrue crafted by the best of wall street's arbitrage mavens and acclaimed academic laureates. Author has done a supreb job as a slueth who followed the trail that aparantly divulged very little about its journey into the financial debacle that could've brought the whole financial world down. Throughout the work of the author, one can perceive the vastness of his research into this matter, his depth of knowledge in the world of arbitrage and his exquisite story telling skill.
He portrayed each character with great care that went above and beyond what I expected. Though at times the deatils seemed a bit overwhelming and unnecessary, it was enjoyable nonetheless.
Besides gaining a great deal of knowledge about bond trading, risk arbitrage and about all the parties associated with it, it also gave me a good picture about the human inter-relations that plays into the rise and fall of such wall street ventures. One thing I wanted to see in this book is Greenspan's involvement and opinion on this. But, not sure why his role in the shoring up of LTCM wasn't covered. I earlier read a book on Greenspan where his rebuttal on the criticism of Fed's involvement with the bail out LTCM was deatiled. I expected Lowenstein to cover this as well.
I first came across the story of LTCM from Taleb's "Black Swan", then went to wikipedia to know more about it, and finally got a hold of this book and I'm glad that I did. I love real life stories where turns of events and drama unfold from the work of an invisible hand, not from that of a gifted writer. I would love to see the story of LTCM on big screen one of these days. I caught a glimse of the NOVA's episode "The Trillion Dollar Bet [2000]" which covered LTCM, but I couldn't get a hold of the full content.
It's a must read for anyone who has interest in wall street, business, risk and how they all work. Lowenstein is a great writer in my opinion and I will move on to reading his pervious work on Buffet.
Great insight into market movements.......2007-09-12
The LTCM story is fascinating, and Lowenstein makes clear enough what kind of 'hedging' they were doing. The most valuable details to me were the intertwining of instituions and trades. I thought it illuminated how forced trading and fear can spread. Also captures the mood of the nineties well, I'd like to find detailed history of other market eras.
And from an academic viewpoint, his discussion of 'fat tails' was great.
Book Description
This textbook brings modern I/O analysis to the undergraduate level. Consistent with modern analysis, the authors focus explicitly on the nature of strategic interaction and make extensive use of game theoretic tools. At the same time, they never lose sight of the policy motivation behind much IO analysis. Formal analysis is combined with many practical applications, and the presentation does not assume familiarity with calculus, rather it relies on the ability to work through algebraic equations.
Customer Reviews:
Not very clear.......2007-08-10
I had a very hard time following what's going on because the language is not very clear and too verbose. The book focuses on the beauty of language rather than how to express the ideas in a clear and understandable manner. Makes simple stuff a lot harder than it should. Translating equations into words is sometimes confusing, and the concepts are too ideal that they can hardly apply to the real world situations.
do not touch.......2006-12-26
the book is filled with typo. Given that this is third edition, the author doesn't seem to pay much attention to the hw. I was a TA for this class, and it took me some times to figure out what i did wrong because the hw questions are wrong. The theories in this book can only be applied in the context of the book's examples; some of these theories are not general and can't be applied in a broad sense.
Induvitably excellent book!.......2003-11-04
Above all, it enraptured me with its practical orientation,
which really builds the economic sense at the reader. Numerous, straight superior and often also heartbreaking examples make theory well comprehensible. There doesn't lack nor more complex mathematical assecession for more serious study. 1A
Induvitably excellent book!.......2003-11-04
Above all, it enraptured me with its practical orientation,
which really builds the economic sense at the reader. Numerous, straight superior and often also heartbreaking examples make theory well comprehensible. There doesn't lack nor more complex mathematical assecession for more serious study. 1A
Book Description
The world's most exciting, fastest-growing new market? It's where you least expect it: at the bottom of the pyramid. Collectively, the world's billions of poor people have immense entrepreneurial capabilities and buying power. You can learn how to serve them and help millions of the world's poorest people escape poverty.
It is being done-profitably. Whether you're a business leader or an anti-poverty activist, business guru Prahalad shows why you can't afford to ignore "Bottom of the Pyramid" (BOP) markets.
In the book and accompanying CD videos, Prahalad presents...
Why what you know about BOP markets is wrong A world of surprises-from spending patterns to distribution and marketing
Unlocking the "poverty penalty"
The most enduring contributions your company can make Delivering dignity, empowerment, and choice-not just products
Corporations and BOP entrepreneurs Profiting together from an inclusive new capitalism
"C. K. Prahalad argues that companies must revolutionize how they dobusiness in developing countries if both sides of that economic equation areto prosper. Drawing on a wealth of case studies, his compelling new bookoffers an intriguing blueprint for how to fight poverty with profitability." Bill Gates, Chairman and Chief Software Architect,Microsoft
"The Bottom of the Pyramid belongs at the top of the reading list forbusiness people, academics, and experts pursuing the elusive goal ofsustainable growth in the developing world. C. K. Prahalad writes withuncommon insight about consumer needs in poor societies andopportunities for the private sector to serve important public purposes whileenhancing its own bottom line. If you are looking for fresh thinking aboutemerging markets, your search is ended. This is the book for you." Madeleine K. Albright, Former U.S. Secretary of State
"Prahalad challenges readers to re-evaluate their pre-conceived notionsabout the commercial opportunities in serving the relatively poor nations ofthe world. The Bottom of the Pyramid highlights the way to commercialsuccess and societal improvement--but only if the developed worldreconceives the way it delivers products and services to the developingworld." Christopher Rodrigues, CEO, Visa International
"An important and insightful work showing persuasively how the privatesector can be put at the center of development, not just as a rhetoricalflourish but as a real engine of jobs and services for the poor." Mark Malloch Brown, Administrator, United Nations Development Programme
Customer Reviews:
Saving the World.......2007-10-02
The author loves his TLA's (3 letter acronyms)! I wish someone had told me how technical this book was; those with an MBA will get the most out of it. But I love Prahalad's outlook and creativity. Perhaps with a little advice I can take my ideas and come up with a formal business plan.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and anecdotal evidence is not proof.......2007-06-24
Last year this book became a best seller hit among the developmental community at Washington, D.C., to the point that all bookstores at Metro DC run out of it. With notorious and well publicized praising comments from Madeleine Albright, Bill Gates and the like, I bought it too, but just to discover all the frenzy was undeserved from the viewpoint of poverty eradication.
Undoubtedly Mr. Pralhad's research demonstrates there are plenty of opportunities to do good business among the poor at the BOP (bottom of the pyramid), for them to benefit from the products and services not available now, and for some of them to go out of poverty by becoming entrepreneurs (market penetration is always limited). I agree on these conclusions, as commented extensively by the previous reviewers, and without a doubt this book will become a reference in many Business Schools. But to assert that this strategy will eradicate poverty and bring development is plain sophistry. As Carl Sagan said "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence".
Why sophistry? Regarding the poverty eradication claimed by Mr. Prahalad I will try to highlight some of the main flaws in his rationale and lack of sufficient evidence:
1. Despite the consideration of several cases from around the Third-World, most of the discussion and arguments to build the framework are related to India, excessively. The conditions of the poor in Latin America are quite different, and often, they have better public services available to them. On the other hand, many African countries have worst conditions. So you can not reach valid conclusions based solely on a country with such unique cultural and ethnical conditions. For doing business the cases are fine, especially for India or China because they are such huge markets at the BOP.
2. Wealth creation is hugely overestimated. Poor entrepreneurs and their immediate family will undoubtedly benefit from these new economic activities, but the framework lacks an explanation about how these oases of welcomed capitalism will trickle-down to the rest of their neighbors and poor villages. The implicit assumption is that everybody at the BOP has to become an entrepreneur for this strategy to work, because by just having access to affordable consumer products it seems very unlikely that poverty will be eradicated. The proposed framework is just good for doing business and for the poor to have access to new services and products, but where is the sustainable "fishing industry" for the rest of the poor population? The cases are very unique, islands of excellence, and with limited potential for a population the huge size of the BOT to bail out of poverty in significant numbers.
3. The analysis lacks the historical, cultural, legal and socio-economical background for a given country or region, and this consideration is fundamental for a proper analysis on sustainable development. Even when Mr. Pralhalad correctly identifies lack of education, corruption and the size of the informal sector as barriers for development and doing business, he then oversimplifies a lot on how to overcome these key issues, and again, an isolated Indian case is used as the magic formula to solve the problem through information technology. In fact, at the end of Chapter 6, within the conclusions, he recognizes that the illustrations he provides "are but islands of excellence in a sea of deprivation and helplessness". As the development community knows well, these successful stories are very hard to replicate. In Latin America we have the outstanding cases of Chile, Uruguay and Costa Rica. In Brazil, we have the cases of the Southern states of Santa Catarina, Paraná, São Paulo and Rio Grande do Sul. All of them very developed as compared to their neighbors (in terms of income, education, health, etc.), but despite all efforts, no one has successfully reproduced these islands of excellence at a scale that makes a difference.
4. An example will help to understand how superficial the cases are from a point of view of development and poverty eradication. The Brazilian case of "Casas Bahia" lacks the consideration of the socio-economic environment of the country, especially the case omits to mention key characteristics of the financial and credit markets (for those interested in this particular case from the point of view of business, I recommend you read "Samuel Klein e Casas Bahia: Uma trajetoria de Sucesso", Novo Seculo, 2005, this is a real and really impressive business success story). Mr. Klein successfully, by trusting the poor, built an empire that today is still one of the few option many mid- and low-income families have to buy the first computer for their children going to college in Brazil. But, let's see why the market share for credit cards is only 4%, and why it is not a real threat for Casas Bahia own financial system as stated in the book, as well as why there is not much in here to help eradicat poverty in Brazil. Annual inflation today in Brazil is in the order of 3-4%, and the Brazilian currency, the "Real" have been steadily revaluating against the dollar for the last 3 years. However, interest rates in Brazil are sky-high, a legacy of the hyper-inflation times of twenty years ago. Interest rates for well-known international credit cards are 9-11% per month, which compounded translates to an annual rate close to 180%, regardless of whether you're poor or rich. Today retail chain stores of this type charge around 3% per month, embedded in the price of the consumer products, so the consumer doesn't know up-front the real price. This translates to a compounded rate of 43% per year. Often if you try to pay upfront, there is no discount. So where is the real benefit for the poor? Or are they just getting every day more indebted, and spending money on fat interests that they could have used to buy more or better food or better health services for their kids. I do not see where poverty eradication fits in this case. Obviously Brazil has a problem of lack of real competition in the capitalist sense; even the branches of American Banks doing business in Brazil charge these exorbitant rates. As a reference for the readers, you can buy a 30Gb iPod in Brazil for the "reasonable" amount of US$1,000, payable in 12 installments, and for the high price we also have to thank the federal government high taxes on almost everything. Coming back to the case, as an additional "benefit", you only can make the payments in person at stores of the retail chain, just to make sure the poor are tempted every month and come back for more when they are close to payback that debt. That's why there is a 77% of clients who make reapeat purchases as the book reports. Not surprisingly the case description mentions the criticism "that Casas Bahia simply exploits the poor and charges them exorbitant interest rates", but neglects to present a due explanation of why this is not truth, and simply disregards the cristicism.
5. Finally, Mr. Prahalad is extremely optimistic. At he end of Chapter 6 and in his own words: "I have no doubt that the elimination of poverty and deprivation is possible by 2020". This prophecy speaks by itself about the reliability of the analysis. And again, let's remember that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. All the book presents is anecdotal evidence, which is not proof as any scientist knows, and the framework presented has no predictive power, much less to assert that poverty will end by 2020.
Unquestionably an excellent business book, and a very innovative one, but just for that, business. That's why to me it only deserves 3 stars. On the other hand, not much value-added in there for doing real sustainable development across the board, as the author insinuates and some of the readers think, and certainly not much for real poverty eradication. For that outrageous addition to the book's title I took the other 2 stars. The "Erradicating poverty through profits" part of the book's title should be erased, so the book really deserves the 5 stars most reviewers gave to it (and as the previous reviewer rightly complained, the cases were really awfully edited for the paperback edition, even with repeated sentences). Definitely this book is not recommended if you are serious about new ideas for sustainable development. For a real book on that subject, read the recently publicated "The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It" by Paul Collier, though its scope refers mainly to very poor African countries, it is an example of a serious and proper approach to the problem of eradicating poverty. To understand the complexities of promoting development, you may also read "Making Globalization Work" by Joseph Stiglitz. These two books will clearly ilustrate why "The Fortune at the BOP" is not a book on development, and absolutely, no Nobel Prize is deserved.
Hardcover and tradepaperback are different!!!.......2007-04-13
Here is a note I sent to the editor after buying the tradepaperback version.
Your editorial staff has done something so dumb I am astounded! (Also really $%^& mad.) The hardcover and trade paperback versions of CK Prahalad - The fortune at the bottom of the pyramid, are NOT the same. I assigned readings from this book to my class of 100 students. They went and bought the book and found that the case studies aren't there. On closer investigation I see that you shortened the case studies and renamed the chapters. Unfortunately the editing on the shortening is terrible and I simply can't ask my students to read such badly written material.
You did several things wrong
1) You sell two books with identical titles and covers, which have different content
2) You edited very very badly
3) You did this on an award winning book with high visibility
As far as I can tell there is no way for anyone to figure out that the content is different except in the very rare case that they own both versions.
This is a black mark on the Wharton name. What were you thinking?
-james
at last a pragmatic approach to develpment.......2007-01-09
Prahalad'book "the fortune at the bottom of the pyramid" demonstrates the importance to get the people we are "supposed" to help to get involved. The bottom up approach is in line with William Shaffeerly and David Bornstein books where the people are key to any lasting development. The top down approach a la Jeffrey Sacks are fine for the politicians but did not bring much results after all these years. It is time for a change in approach and the Nobel Price to Dr. M.Yunus is very encouraging.
Magical .......2006-08-29
FBP is an intriguing concept and the model can be scaled up or down in size in all parts of the world. The book serves as a wake up call to businessmen across the world.
Amazon.com
It's become clear by now the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism in most places around the globe hasn't ushered in an unequivocal flowering of capitalism in the developing and postcommunist world. Western thinkers have blamed this on everything from these countries' lack of sellable assets to their inherently non-entrepreneurial "mindset." In this book, the renowned Peruvian economist and adviser to presidents and prime ministers Hernando de Soto proposes and argues another reason: it's not that poor, postcommunist countries don't have the assets to make capitalism flourish. As de Soto points out by way of example, in Egypt, the wealth the poor have accumulated is worth 55 times as much as the sum of all direct foreign investment ever recorded there, including that spent on building the Suez Canal and the Aswan Dam.
No, the real problem is that such countries have yet to establish and normalize the invisible network of laws that turns assets from "dead" into "liquid" capital. In the West, standardized laws allow us to mortgage a house to raise money for a new venture, permit the worth of a company to be broken up into so many publicly tradable stocks, and make it possible to govern and appraise property with agreed-upon rules that hold across neighborhoods, towns, or regions. This invisible infrastructure of "asset management"--so taken for granted in the West, even though it has only fully existed in the United States for the past 100 years--is the missing ingredient to success with capitalism, insists de Soto. But even though that link is primarily a legal one, he argues that the process of making it a normalized component of a society is more a political--or attitude-changing--challenge than anything else.
With a fleet of researchers, de Soto has sought out detailed evidence from struggling economies around the world to back up his claims. The result is a fascinating and solidly supported look at the one component that's holding much of the world back from developing healthy free markets. --Timothy Murphy
Book Description
"The hour of capitalism's greatest triumph" writes Hernando de Soto, "is, in the eyes of four-fifths of humanity, its hour of crisis." In The Mystery of Capital, the world-famous Peruvian economist takes up the question that, more than any other, is central to one of the most crucial problems the world faces today: Why do some countries succeed at capitalism while others fail?
In strong opposition to the popular view that success is determined by cultural differences, de Soto finds that it actually has everything to do with the legal structure of property and property rights. Every developed nation in the world at one time went through the transformation from predominantly informal, extralegal ownership to a formal, unified legal property system. In the West we've forgotten that creating this system is what also allowed people everywhere to leverage property into wealth. This persuasive book revolutionizes our understanding of capital and points the way to a major transformation of the world economy.
Customer Reviews:
Insightful.......2007-09-26
I thought this was a fantistic book. The author compares the sorry state of property rights in the third world today with identical problems in earlier periods of US history.
Rich countries are frequently blamed for the problems in poor countries but this book shows why that blame is misplaced. This book also shows why billions of dollars in foreign aid have not and can not eliminate third world poverty.
Clear, Precise, Cogent and Important Thoughts.......2007-09-12
Although De Soto is trumpeted in the halls of the Chicago School as a person directly in line with his ideological primogeniteurs, it is clear that De Soto is not an ideologue.
His main thesis is that property rights are one of the fundamental underpinnings of western capitalism. Property rights allow the smooth functioning of capital accumulation without the diversion of too many supernumerary laws and institutions, and form the base impedements that allow capital markets, lending institutions and wealth creation mechanisms to function smoothly. If property rights are not highly developed then the "friction" this creates in the movement of capital impedes growth. As a concrete example, people in Africa and much of Latin America and Asia live in hovels that do represent accumulations of capital, but because these hovels, many owned by squatters cannot be leveraged to create capital or cannot be lent against. They in effect at dead capital because their ownership is in limbo. Advanced societies have smooth functioning property laws and markets that allow the process of wealth creation.
All of this is simple and De Soto does chronicle, as well as he can the underlying condition of dead capital formation, historical development of property rights and solid policies for implementing more legal property controls in the third world.
De Soto is also profoundly motivated to move backward societies forward and feels the poverty profoundly. In this sense he is very much a thinking man's economist and not an ideologue.
The one thing I would state is that the concepts De Soto is propounding are simple in nature and scope. As such I think that De Soto does repeat himself from time to time. Also the historical developments of property rights in the US is a good example of how a country with essentially third-world property rights, emerged to relatively advanced property rights. But I do think that his historical scholarship suffers a little as an Economist outside of his area of interest.
The writing style, though good, is not so exciting at times and would do better with a bit more details on specific human examples. But that should not detract from its scholarship.
Important work.......2007-07-23
This book is a very important work in the area of the economics of property rights. De Soto emphasizes the importance of property rights for the development of developing countries.
Capitalism Triumphs in "Market" and Fails EveryWhere Else.......2007-07-04
Most reader comments on the "political" and "Policy" side of the book. They applause by embracing the idea of less government intervention, better legal protection, better property right and so on. But I will comment the Economic side of the book. The most important point in this book is that there is a lot of "dead capital" in under developing countries. My wonder to this point is that which mechanism generate so huge amount of "dead capital". From the content of De Soto book, it is sure that all these "dead capital" comes from "black/underground Market" or "Illegal Free Market". The "Illegal Free Market" generate 9.3 trillion dollar. Actually I think De Soto is still highly under estimate the value since De Soto does not include all the human capital estimation. I think De Soto agree Free Market is the real source of economic growth.
Also in De Soto analysis, capital is the fuel for economy growth while the Keynesian believe that both individual and government spending the fuel for economy growth. De Soto book does not directly compare this 2 different ways to go. But De Soto clearly show that Foreign loan or aid does no help since it only simulate spending only. From my understanding, De Soto recommends to use Market to replace the government to release the "dead capital". Government is only require to provide minimum effect to ensure that the contract is fulfilled.
Spot on!.......2007-06-24
It's been a while since I read the book. As a citizen and resident of a third world country I can vouch that what de Soto says is the absolute truth. I have also had a business in the USA and the difference is just staggering. The longest procedure in the USA for setting up my business was getting the sales tax permit and that took about two hours. A similar procedure in my country can take months.
I'm a bit amazed that some reviewers are commenting about the book being badly written. I don't have that recollection but then, it's been a while since I read it and I enjoyed it very, very much.
Book Description
"What a "kick" I get out of teaching from
Images of Organizations. What a head-snapping view of organizations it offers to my MBA students, as well as to the odd client/executive who is disposed to creep out of the practicality of business-as-usual and take in a vibrant thrilling view of organizations."
— Ariane David, Ph.D.,
Senior Advisor/President, The Veritas Group
Since its first publication over twenty years ago,
Images of Organization has become a classic in the canon of management literature. The book is based on a very simple premise—that all theories of organization and management are based on implicit images or metaphors that stretch our imagination in a way that can create powerful insights, but at the risk of distortion. Gareth Morgan provides a rich and comprehensive resource for exploring the complexity of modern organizations internationally, translating leading-edge theory into leading-edge practice.
This new
Updated Edition preserves Morgan’s renowned creative images and metaphors while refreshing the references and tables. The addition of a preface situates this classic theory in today’s business environment while the instructor’s resources (now available on CD) aid classroom teaching. Please contact SAGE customer service to order your copy.
Images of Organization challenges and reshapes how we think about organization and management in the most fundamental way. The new
Updated Edition makes this monumental work available to a new generation of students and business leaders worldwide.
Listen to an interview with author, Gareth Morgan on The Invisible Hand podcast.
Go to http://www.theinvisiblehandpodcast.com/The_Invisible_Hand_Episode_38.mp3
Customer Reviews:
Morgan Images of Organization.......2007-01-04
great metaphors from author to help understand organizational thinking but read slowly if you are a concrete thinker. Easy reading really if you think metaphorically. Had to write a paper on psychic prisons, uncanny how true Morgan's analogy is to real workplace environment. This book was better than our required text. Hated the Organizational Behavior instructor I had but loved the book and the subject matter.
Most valuable read of my MBA.......2003-02-15
Gareth Morgan's book provides an antidote to the finance, marketing and HR texts that are required reading for an MBA student. The clever use of metaphor allows the reader to absorb the huge anount of information contained within the book (check out the bibliography!) - you don't even realise how much you are learning until you start relating concepts to others around you. My fellow students, colleagues and even my parents had to listen ...
I found it a very easy to read book, if you are willing to put aside your existing ideas (psychic prison) about the way the organisation works(?) If you prefer big words, read Morgan and Burrell's Sociological Paradigms and Organisational Analysis - essential reading, but even more brilliant as a companion to Images.
Learn the stuff you are expected to know from your finance, marketing, statistics, strategy and HR texts, but understand the stuff that will change your world from Images of Organisation.
This book can profoundly change your thinking about orgs.......2003-02-14
This is not a "three steps to understanding organizations" type book. The people posting negative reviews for this were looking for something simple and digestable - this book is not that. However, if you take the time, you will find it profoundly alters your thinking about understanding organizations.
This book provides solid theoretical models for understanding what is occuring in organizations. I read this book over 10 years ago and STILL find it the second best and most enlightening thing I have ever read on organizations. This has dramatically aided me in being a very successful business consultant.
The foundation of this book is the notion that you cannot understand complex organizations in any meaningful way through a single perspective. People in the organizations operate on many different perspectives. Each view of the world creates its own understanding of the organizational problems, solutions and daily pattern of interaction. This book provides you the tools for understanding organizations through a number of key perspectives or metaphors, and gives you indications on how to perform a multi-perspective systems analysis.
If you spend the time with this book, you will find yourself able to understand your surroundings FAR better than your peers.
Too esoteric...hard to follow........2003-01-08
I am a graduate student in organizational development. Although this book has some good underlying concepts, I found most of the book hard to follow and not very engaging. It was often difficult to see how many of the concepts actually apply to organizations. There may be good ideas, but they often get lost in the rambling chapters.
Terrific Find.......2001-07-28
I found this book to be insightful and very useful in administrative organization analysis. It was a useful tool in developing a change management program for a public organization.
Book Description
The past twenty years have seen great theoretical and empirical advances in the field of corporate finance. Whereas once the subject addressed mainly the financing of corporations--equity, debt, and valuation--today it also embraces crucial issues of governance, liquidity, risk management, relationships between banks and corporations, and the macroeconomic impact of corporations. However, this progress has left in its wake a jumbled array of concepts and models that students are often hard put to make sense of.
Here, one of the world's leading economists offers a lucid, unified, and comprehensive introduction to modern corporate finance theory. Jean Tirole builds his landmark book around a single model, using an incentive or contract theory approach. Filling a major gap in the field, The Theory of Corporate Finance is an indispensable resource for graduate and advanced undergraduate students as well as researchers of corporate finance, industrial organization, political economy, development, and macroeconomics.
Tirole conveys the organizing principles that structure the analysis of today's key management and public policy issues, such as the reform of corporate governance and auditing; the role of private equity, financial markets, and takeovers; the efficient determination of leverage, dividends, liquidity, and risk management; and the design of managerial incentive packages. He weaves empirical studies into the book's theoretical analysis. And he places the corporation in its broader environment, both microeconomic and macroeconomic, and examines the two-way interaction between the corporate environment and institutions.
Setting a new milestone in the field, The Theory of Corporate Finance will be the authoritative text for years to come.
Customer Reviews:
an enchiridion on corporate finance.......2007-08-23
This book is the best enchiridion for any kind of studies in finance. All students are advised to read it;they will find it useful, not only due to its deep and scrutable meanings, but also because it awakes profound questions to the reader and urge him to make his own research on a sector in finance which is still in its infancy.
This handbook helped me a lot with my dissertation, as it concentrates in its pages various and many topics on corporate finance.
Excellent Theoretical Approach .......2006-04-06
Even a few years ago the theory of corporate finance was relatively simple. To be sure, everyone knew that the models weren't perfect. The close cooperation between favorite trading partners and/or between companies and their governments, the impact of taxes, currency issues, and a whole raft of financing instruments that never existed before has forced drastic changes in the basic theories of corporate financing.
This book employs a single, elementary model in order to illustrate the main economic insights. While this approach doesn't take into account all of the various extentions that more complex models might give, it is much easier for the student to get accustomed to one model and then to modify it as circumstances warrent.
This book is aimed at the advanced undergraduate student, or more likely one at the graduate level. While not nearly as mathematically oriented as some books, this one does include enough that the student should consider calculus as a prerequisite.
All in all, this book does a supurb job of developing a theory that reflects the real world as it exists today.
Superb.......2006-02-05
Tirole's book is one of the very few formal texts to cover corporate finance theory. It is structured around a few basic models which are changed/extended in myriad ways in order to illuminate this or that topic. This allows the reader to cover a lot of ground with minimal investment.
I have taught a master's level finance course based on the notes that the book is built on and found it a pleasure.
I found it useful to cover some basics of principal agent theory before covering Tirole's material, as some knowledge of information economics is assumed. Laffont and Martimort's book makes the transition smooth as they essentially use the same basic two action two outcome setup as Tirole's first couple of chapters.
I very much doubt that a superior book will appear on the shelves for some time, that is of course, until Tirole decides to update his text some years from now.
Good PhD book.......2006-02-04
This is definitely a good PhD-level book on Corporate Finance. It is based on Jean Tirole's lecture notes at Toulouse and definitely follows his research style. It uses theoretical models with agency problems to explain several empirical findings of corporate finance. A great purchase for grad students interested in financial THEORY.
Customer Reviews:
Good and not a "heavy" book.......2000-03-29
I'm a undergraduate economic student and have tried a good sort of books in this matter, and I finally get one that fits very nice to my needs. This book touches all the aspects of the subject without being very hard to understand or too boring to read, and that is hard to find in book about industrial organization! Another good point is that the book is very new and have useful and contemporary examples. A liked very much!
Books:
- Friedrich Hayek: A Biography
- Global Cities
- Global Economic Issues and Policies with Economic Applications
- Global Shift, Fifth Edition: Mapping the Changing Contours of the World Economy (Global Shift: Mapping the Changing Contours)
- Good to Great and the Social Sectors: A Monograph to Accompany Good to Great
- History: Fiction or Science? (Chronology, No. 1)
- History: Fiction or Science? (Chronology, No. 1)
- History: Fiction or Science? (Chronology, No. 1)
- History: Fiction or Science? (Chronology, No. 1)
- History: Fiction or Science? (Chronology, No. 1)
Books Index
Books Home
Recommended Books
- The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11
- Sleeping with Strangers
- Grand Hotels of the Jazz Age: The Architecture of Schultze and Weaver
- How to Manage Conflicts of Interest: A Guide for Nonprofit Boards
- Ionospheric effects of solar flares
- Liar's Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage of Wall Street
- Mortal Stakes
- Sketching and Rendering of Interior Spaces
- Identifying American Architecture: A Pictorial Guide to Styles and Terms : 1600-1945
- Immunoregulation and Fetal Survival
