Ford Library

Day, George S. and Christine Moorman. Strategy from the outside in : profiting from customer value. McGraw-Hill Professional, 2010.

Fuqua faculty member Chris Moorman and co-author George Day argue that, over the long term, the most successful companies focus on creating and keeping their customers. When designing their corporate strategy, the best companies start with the market. All parts of the enterprise are focused on understanding the customer, solving customer problems and seeking out opportunities in the market. Market driven companies work to sustain and improve customer value.

Authors Day and Moorman introduce the concepts of inside-out and outside-in strategies. Many companies employ inside-out strategies, maximizing shareholder value or leveraging competitive advantage. By contrast, the most profitable companies use outside-in strategy, viewing the market through the customer’s eyes. These companies also invest in market intelligence to determine patterns in customer behavior, and to identify market opportunities. They take specific steps to create and reinforce customer value and profitability. These actions distinguish market leaders from ordinary companies and are the focus of the book.

Author Christine Moorman is the T. Austin Finch, Sr. Professor at the Fuqua School of Business, Duke University. Her teaching and research interests include marketing strategy, new products and consumer behavior. For more details, you can visit: http://www.strategyfromtheoutsidein.com/

© Reviewer: Meg Trauner & Ford Library – Fuqua School of Business.
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Three new books in the Ford Library collection are designed to power your career to the next level.

Pfeffer, Jeffrey. Power : why some people have it–and others don’t. HarperBusiness, 2010.

Stanford professor Jeffrey Pfeffer shows that good performance on the job is not enough for career success. People who are more skilled politically are perceived to accomplish more on the job, and achieve more in their careers, than their less savvy coworkers. Pfeffer describes personal qualities that bring influence, such as confidence and empathy, and shows how to build personal networks. He discusses how to speak with power and to project confidence so that others will be inspired to follow.

Spaulding, Tommy. It’s not just who you know : transform your life (and your organization) by turning colleagues and contacts into lasting, genuine relationships. Broadway Books, 2010.

In this autobiographical self-help book, a popular kid with below-average grades and a learning disability grows up to become a CEO of a nonprofit and a leader in his community. He accomplishes this by cultivating his leadership potential. Spaulding argues that relationships based on trust and respect lead to influence, which he uses to help other people. (more…)

Farrell, Greg . Crash of the titans : greed, hubris, the fall of Merrill Lynch, and the near-collapse of Bank of America. Crown Business, 2010.

Engrossing and infuriating in equal measure, Crash of the Titans is a story of two troubled companies during the economic crisis, 2007 -2009. On the surface, this book covers the collapse of Merrill Lynch and its sale to Bank of America. But the real story is about the deeply flawed people who ran those companies, who failed to understand the risks they were undertaking and who failed to act in time to save their firms.

Author Greg Farrell, correspondent for the Financial Times, has written a riveting tale of arrogance, posturing and gamesmanship. On Wall Street, preoccupation with bonuses blinded corporate leaders to the financial risks in fixed income departments at Merrill Lynch and other firms. Colossal losses in these departments threatened to bankrupt their companies. After Merrill’s collapse, executives awarded themselves $3 billion in bonuses at the same time as they were laying off thousands of rank and file employees. Failed leadership and epic mismanagement at Merrill Lynch doomed a company that once epitomized the American spirit.

After a hasty decision to acquire Merrill Lynch, Bank of America executives in Charlotte were blindsided by additional losses. At the same time, the bank generated its own losses that the CEO could not explain. Stockholders were outraged about the bonuses paid to Merrill executives. And merging the cultures of the two companies proved difficult. In two years, a strong and profitable bank was forced to rely on federal bailout funds for survival.

Also available as an audiobook.

© Reviewer: Meg Trauner & Ford Library – Fuqua School of Business.
All rights reserved.

Doggett, Peter. You never give me your money : the Beatles after the breakup. HarperCollins, 2009.

The dust jacket to Peter Doggett’s new book claims that “the world stopped in 1970 when Paul McCartney announced that he was through with the Beatles.” Not exactly. And as Doggett makes clear in You Never Give Me Your Money, quitting the Beatles was not easily done.

This financial and legal story begins in 1967, at the height of the Beatles’ popularity, when the Fab Four owe 3 million pounds in taxes to the UK government. Setting up Apple Corps as a tax dodge, their earnings are now subject to corporation tax rather than personal income tax (94% marginal rate), and their expenses are deductible. The Beatles also envision the holding company as a utopian business empire and they establish companies in music publishing, retailing, tailoring and others, all run by their friends.

Running in parallel is the Beatles’ drama – the petty jealousies, the backbiting, the sex, drugs and Maharishi, and later the financial disputes and litigation, all meticulously researched and excruciatingly detailed. Midway through the book, the weary reader thinks “So break up already.” And that’s the point. The Beatles could not break up. The business arrangements made years earlier had locked them into a continuing melodrama, like a dysfunctional family. There was no divorcing each other.

For serious Beatles fans and for those interested in the entertainment industry.

© Reviewer: Meg Trauner & Ford Library – Fuqua School of Business.
All rights reserved.

Here’s the January 2011 installment of Ford Library Director, Meg Trauner’s selections of five recent business books recommended to Fuqua Dean Blair Sheppard.

Click the titles below for information on location and availability.

Lords of strategy: the secret intellectual history of the new corporate world by Walter Kiechell III.

Academics and consultants focused on ideas launch the field of business strategy and develop the framework for describing how companies achieve competitive advantage over others.

The shallows: what the internet is doing to our brains by Nicholas G. Carr

The calm, focused mind of the book reader is being replaced by the new mind of the internet user who finds it difficult to pay attention and to engage in learning. Read our full review.

The big short: inside the doomsday machine by Michael Lewis.

Four players in the subprime mortgage market make millions by betting against the market and shorting risky mortgage deals called CDO contracts. Read our full review.

Crash of the titans: greed, hubris, the fall of Merrill Lynch, and the near-collapse of Bank of America by Greg Farrell

The story of two troubled companies run by deeply flawed people whose failure to understand the risks they were undertaking caused their firms to founder.

Delivering happiness: a path to profits, passion and purpose by Tony Hsieh

CEO of Zappos.com reveals how he built a dot com business, LinkExchange, which he sold to Microsoft for $265 million. His next start-up, Zappos.com, struggled to make payroll before becoming a huge success. Read our full review.

© Reviewer: Meg Trauner & Ford Library – Fuqua School of Business.
All rights reserved.

“It is a little known fact that tea has more caffeine than coffee.” Pound for pound that is true, yet by the brewed cup, coffee has twice the amount of caffeine as tea. So why has this saying been floating around for 30 years? Because it is fun to debunk conventional wisdom.

Three new books in the Ford Library challenge commonly held beliefs about business.

Colvin, Geoffrey. Talent is overrated : what really separates world-class performers from everybody else. Portfolio, 2010. – also in audiobook format

Most people believe that those who are exceptionally talented in fields such as music, chess, sports, public speaking or leadership, have an innate ability, something that they were born with. Yet author Geoff Colvin reports that expert performance is the result of deliberate practice – intense devoted effort for many years, often with a teacher’s help. With focus and concentration over many hours, ordinary people increase their mental capacity or skill level, becoming world class. Employees and organizations can apply the principles of deliberate practice to improve performance at work. This engrossing read was rated as “essential” by Daniel Pink in Drive.

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Menn, Joseph. Fatal system error : the hunt for the new crime lords who are bringing down the Internet. Public Affairs, 2010.

Cybercrime is serious business and the internet is more vulnerable than most people realize. A reporter for the Financial Times illustrates this important topic through a true story that reads like a crime thriller, taking the reader worldwide in this hunt for justice.

The story begins with a 25 year old computer nerd from California who is hired by an internet gambling business run out of Costa Rica. An unidentified hacker is crashing the website, causing millions in lost revenues, until protection money is paid. As the story unfolds, the hackers evolve from small time thieves to an organized gang of Russian extortionists. The gambling business reveals itself as controlled by criminals, including the Mob, who are also involved with identity theft and internet fraud.

As the story moves to Moscow, author Menn introduces his second colorful character, a British high-tech agent, and describes a world where top cyber criminals are protected by the Russian government. Prosecution is impossible because the governments in Russia and China are allies of organized crime for political purposes, such as stealing defense secrets of other governments and monitoring political dissidents.

At the end of the book, Menn calls for readers to be more vigilant about security on their own hardware, by using anti-virus software that updates automatically and to guard personal information on social networks.

© Meg Trauner & Ford Library – Fuqua School of Business.
All rights reserved.

The year has ended and the votes are in. On Marketplace.com by American Public Media, these respected reader/writers identified their favorite business books of 2010

Click the titles below for information on location and availability.

• FELIX SALMON, blogger at Reuters. Favorite book: The Big Short (our review) by Michael Lewis.
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  The most compellingly readable of all of the finance books. “This is a man who really knows how to write in a way that most journalists just simply don’t.” Lewis, author of best sellers Liar’s Poker and Moneyball, provides insights into the housing bubble and 2008 market crash.
• JUSTIN FOX, editorial director of the Harvard Business Review Group. Favorite book: Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer–and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class, by Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson.
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  This book is a “well-done, well-researched… look at the political forces over the past 35 years that have led to more economic inequality in the United States.”
• (more…)

Hsieh, Tony. Delivering happiness : a path to profits, passion, and purpose. Business Plus, 2010.

Monday evening, a new pair of Dansko clogs appeared at my door. I had ordered them two days earlier from Zappos.com. Any customer will tell you that Zappos has great selection, free shipping and problem-free returns. But the reason that customers keep coming back is their service.

Entrepreneur Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.com, has written a new book, part autobiography, part company history, part business advisory. He tells how he built a dot com business, LinkExchange, which he sold in Microsoft for $265 million, when he was only 24 years old. Then he used the money to fund a start-up, Zappos.com. Most of the book is the tale about Zappos, how the company survived on the brink of bankruptcy for years, barely making payroll, then became an overnight success.

Author Hsieh explains that he cultivated his business by combining profits, passion and purpose. He says his company was successful because they invested their time and money into three areas: into customer service to build the brand; into corporate culture and development of core values; and into employee training and development. Hsieh feels that those three areas are Zappos.com’s only competitive advantages in the long run.

The book closes in 2009, the year that Fortune rated Zappos as one of the best companies to work for. That same year, Amazon.com acquired Zappos for $1.2 billion. Hsieh explains how he made that happen in this entertaining and easy read.

© Reviewer: Meg Trauner & Ford Library – Fuqua School of Business.
All rights reserved.

Three new books about the men (and yes, they are all men), who made millions manipulating money — from the first investment bank in the early 20th century to the hedge fund boom and bust days at the millennium.

Click the titles below for information on location and availability.

• When money was in fashion : Henry Goldman, Goldman Sachs, and the founding of Wall Street. by June Breton Fisher. Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
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  Henry Goldman’s granddaughter unfolds the story of the Goldman dynasty, their investment banking business, and the fights and feuds with the Sachs family. The book includes many details about family and society, interwoven with historical events of the era, as well as stories about Henry’s famous friends, including Einstein and FDR.
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• High financier : the lives and time of Siegmund Warburg. by Niall Ferguson. Penguin Press, 2010.
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  London investment banker Siegmund Warburg is credited with the first hostile takeover bid ever in 1959, and for creating the Eurobond market in 1963, largely to circumvent controls. He was instrumental in reestablishing London as a global financial center. Renowned historian Niall Ferguson recounts the life and times of a private and powerful man in this authoritative biography.
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• More money than God : hedge funds and the making of a new elite. by Sebastian Mallaby. Penguin Press, 2010.
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  Using interlocking stories about real life Masters of the Universe, this history of hedge funds profiles the men who gambled on their ability to spot market opportunities that others missed. The author concludes that today’s hedge funds deliver value to the investor; they are not too big to fail; and they are more likely to be contrarian than other types of investors — but as hedge funds grow, so does the risk to the global financial system.
  

© Meg Trauner & Ford Library – Fuqua School of Business.
All rights reserved.