Ford Library

Happy Valentine’s Day to you. From our hearts to yours, our gift is 10 classic audiobooks that you can download to your own device.

Here is a list of Duke students’ most loved audiobooks:

The Tipping Point

Lean In

The Big Short

Good to Great

Nudge

Smarter Faster Better

The Intelligent Investor

Friend and Foe

Mindset

The Power of Habit

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

…Check out our website & connect with us online

…Together we have 140 years of experience serving the Fuqua community!

…Our Reference Librarians have been asked where to find information on everything from consumer debt to 1950s car dealership jingles. If you have a question, ask a librarian via email, phone, or chat.

…Not only do we have a dedicated and hardworking staff, we also offer access to some incredible resources. Read on to find out more.

…Whether you’re planning a vacation to Alaska or a business trip to Shanghai, our Lonely Planet Travel Guides can help you find some of the best places to eat, shop, and lodge.

…With Pronunciator and Transparent Language Online, your language-learning needs are covered from Afrikaans to Xhosa.

…If you’re looking for information on retirement planning or personal investing, evaluating a charitable organization, or researching a company, you’re in luck. More than fifty databases are available to you, including Morningstar Investment Research Center, GuideStar, and OneSource.

…Need to get organized? Amazon’s #2 bestseller The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up is one of hundreds of books available to you on Ford Library Kindles.

…Audiobooks on CD are perfect for a commute. The Art of the Start 2.0 may be just the motivation you need to get started on a project.

…You can read Fifty shades of Grey on your smartphone, or listen to Gone Girl on your MP3 player with Duke’s OverDrive subscription.

…Binge-viewing is in. You can now check out up to 3 movie titles (DVD and/or Blu-Ray) for 7 days. Let the Game of Thrones marathon begin!

…Meg Trauner, Ford Library founder. 33 years at Fuqua haven’t changed her a bit!

Vault just released its annual signature list of the top 50 consulting firms to work for: the “Vault Consulting 50”. To view this list and additional premium Vault content, Fuqua students can create an account here.

Vault offers career research for candidates seeking opportunities across hundreds of industries and professions. With a premium Vault account, Fuqua students can access downloadable career guides, employer profiles and rankings, discussion boards, industry blogs, news covering the latest trends and issues, and Vault’s job board, which matches employers and recruiters with top talent.

For additional career resources, including WetFeet Guides, books on resumés and interviewing, and information about companies recruiting at Fuqua, visit Ford Library’s Career Tools webpage.

We usually focus on movies for these posts, but TV shows have become just as popular so here are a few worth checking out. We have at least one season of all three.

• Alpha House is a political comedy written by Gary Trudeau and released by Amazon. Four Republican senators rent a house in D.C. while Congress is in session, and their misadventures fuel seasons one and two. John Goodman plays the starring role as Senator Gil John Biggs from North Carolina, and the series features a slew of high profile
  guest stars like Wanda Sykes, Amy Sedaris and Stephen Cobert.
• Lost Girl, one of our genre entries, is best described as fantasy/detective show about a succubus, Bo, and her human sidekick, Kenzi. Bo was raised as a human so she leaves a trail of dead lovers behind her until a random encounter leads her to discover her link to a supernatural race of beings call Fae. This Canadian series is great fun as Bo tries to uncover the secrets of her past.
• Orphan Black is another Canadian genre show with a more sci-fi focus. As the show opens protaganist Sarah witnesses the suicide of a woman who looks just like her. On the run from a bad relationship, Sarah assumes the woman’s identity but soon learns she’s jumped from the frying pan into the fire. She and the dead woman are clones, they have several “sisters”, and someone is trying to kill them all off. SAG award-winning actress Tatiana Maslany plays all of the clones who look identical but act very differently.

Be sure you have entertainment for those long car trips over the Thanksgiving weekend, and check out some of our downloadable audio books from Overdrive. You can find popular business titles like The Virgin Way by Richard Branson, Roadside MBA by Michael Mazzeo, and Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely. There are fiction titles as well, courtesy of Perkins Library.

For those of you who would prefer a more traditional format, we also have plenty of audiobooks on CD. Some of our newer titles include Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Creativity, Inc. by Edwin Catmull, and Haunted Empire: Apple After Steve Jobs by Yukari Iwatani Kane.

Occasionally we’ll highlight interesting DVDs in the collection that you may have missed when they were first released. Here are three older titles:

• Sorcerer, a new addition to the collection though an older title, follows a four-man team who must transport a volatile cargo of nitroglycerin over 200 miles of treacherous terrain to stop a potentially disastrous oil fire. Director William Friedkin’s previous films included The Exorcist and The French Connection, but Sorcerer had the colossal misfortune to be released one month after Star Wars.
• Gattaca is a science fiction thriller starring Uma Thurman, Ethan Hawke, and Jude Law. Hawke plays an “In-Valid”, a natural-born human, doomed to low-level work in futuristic caste society while Law plays a disabled genetically engineered “Valid”, those groomed for high-level corporate jobs. With Law’s help, Hawke attempts to subvert the system, but runs into trouble when he becomes a murder suspect.
• One more thriller, The Devil’s Backbone, ends the list. Hellboy’s  Guillermo del Toro directs this supernatural story set during the final days of the Spanish Civil War. The 12-year-old protagonist, Carlos, arrives at Santa Lucia School and uncovers a host of secrets and the ghost of a murdered student.

Yina Lu, Andrés Musalem, Marcelo Olivares, Ariel Schilkrut, (2013) Measuring the Effect of Queues on Customer Purchases. Management Science 59(8):1743-1763.

Professor Andres Musalem of The Fuqua School’s Marketing faculty and his co-authors conducted an empirical study to analyze how waiting in lines (queues) at a retail store affects customers’ purchasing behavior.

Their study methodology combines a novel data set with periodic information about how lines are structured (collected via video recognition technology) with point-of-sales data. The authors found that waiting in line to make a purchase has a nonlinear impact on purchase incidence; and that customers appear to focus mostly on the length of the line, without adjusting enough for the speed at which the line moves.

Unlike prior research, which relied on surveys to measure both actual and perceived waiting times, this study uses actual field data to analyze the effect of lines on customer purchases. During a 7-month pilot study in 2008, Musalem and his co-authors used digital photos analyzed by image recognition software to track the number of people waiting, and the sales staff serving the customers at the deli of a large “supercenter” grocery chain store in a major metropolitan area in Latin America.  They also collected point-of-sale data for all transactions involving relevant  purchases from the beginning of 2008 until the end of the study period.

The research was further focused on grocery purchases of loyalty card customers who visited the store an average of one or more times per month. This accounted for a total of 284,709 transactions from 13,103 customers. Based on their analysis and findings from these data, the authors present and discuss three managerial insights. Pooling (combining) identical lines into a single queue served by multiple staff may result in lost sales. The benefits of adding servers when staffing queues is considered. Finally, the implications of external circumstances generated by congestion for pricing and promotion management in a product category are considered.

One of this paper’s significant contributions to queuing theory research is the development of this research methodology utilizing objective data rather than surveys after the fact. Because of their objective and empirically based methodology, the authors are confident in their conclusions regarding customer behaviors and the impacts of queue design on purchasing behavior.   They also acknowledge that while their research focuses on the short term implications of lines during store visits, there are good opportunities for future applications of their method to study longer term effects of queues and customer service experience on future customer purchases.

The authors’ integration of advanced methods from both operations management and marketing have provided managers with an important and useful tool for decision-making regarding current operations, potential future operations, and the pricing and promotion of products.

Post content only © Carlton Brown & Ford Library, The Fuqua School of Business.

Today, we’re beginning a new series of posts on our blog. Fuqua Faculty Scholarship will briefly highlight currently published research by members of the faculty here at the Fuqua School of Business.

In addition to a citation and an adapted abstract, we’ll provide a link to the featured article’s full text online within one of the e-journal platforms provided to Duke users by Ford Library or Duke Libraries. If you’re reading these posts from off-campus, you’ll need to enter your Duke Net ID and password in order to view the article full text.

Ben-David, Itzhak; Graham, John R.; Harvey, Campbell R. (2013) “Managerial Miscalibration“, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Volume 128, Issue 4, November 2013, Pp. 1547-1584.

A person is said to be “miscalibrated” when they overestimate their ability to predict the future, or because they underestimate the volatility of random events. Miscalibration is the systematic underestimation of the range of potential outcomes by individuals, or in the language of psychology, excessive confidence about having accurate information.

Ben-David, Graham, and Harvey ask, does miscalibration apply to senior financial executives and managers, who when designing corporate policies, must routinely estimate future unknowns (e.g., demand, cash flows, and competition)?

Using a unique 10-year panel that includes more than 13,300 expected stock market return probability distributions, the authors find that executives are severely miscalibrated with regard to estimating future unknowns — to the extent that realized market returns are within the executives’ 80% confidence intervals only 36% of the time.

The authors conclude that “knowing that executives are miscalibrated has important implications for investors, regulators, and other corporate stakeholders who rely on corporate data and forecasts.” The authors anticipate future research that will examine “how such data should be best used and also that determines how miscalibrated employees should be compensated and motivated.”

Post content only © Carlton Brown & Ford Library – Fuqua School of Business.
All rights reserved.

Fresh off the best seller lists, here are the new business titles available via the Ford Library Kindles:

• $100 Startup: Reinvent the Way You Make a Living, by Chris Guillebeau
• Athena Doctrine: How Women (and the Men Who Think Like Them) Will Rule the Future, by John Gerzema
• Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think, by Viktor Mayer-Schonberger et al
• Contagious: Why  things catch on, by Jonah Berger
• Decisive:  How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work, by Chip & Dan Heath
• End this Depression Now, by Paul Krugman
• Give and Take:  A Revolutionary Approach to Success, by Adam Grant
• Great Degeneration:  How Institutions Decay and Economies Die, by Niall Ferguson
• Happy Money:  The Science of Smarter Spending, by Elizabeth Dunn et al
• One Thing:  The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results, by Gary Keller
• Quiet:  The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, by Susan Cain
• Start:  Punch Fear in the Face, by Jon Acuff
• To Sell is Human:  The Surprising Truth About Moving Others, by Daniel Pink
• Unthink:  Rediscover Your Creative Genius, by Erik Wahl
• Billionaire’s Apprentice:  The Rise of the Indian-American Elite, by Anita Raghavan
• End of Power:  From Boardrooms to Battlefields, by Moises Naim
• How Asia Works, by Joe Studwell
• Race for What’s Left:  The Global Scramble for the World’s Last Resources, by Michael Klare
• Private Empire:  ExxonMobil and American Power, by Steve Coll
• Why Nations Fail:  The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty, by Daron Acemoglu
• This is How:  Surviving What You Think You Can’t, by Douglas Rushkoff
• Naked Statistics:  Stripping the Dread from the Data, by Charles Wheelan

Our MMS students arrived earlier this summer, first year Orientation kicked off two weeks ago, and the second year MBA class have slowly returned to the library.

As you arrive, you may have time to read a few titles that provide clarity to your qualities as an employee, a leader, a partner, or a parent.  Keeping this in mind, the staff of the Ford Library as well as the Career Management Center contributed a few titles available on Kindles.

You may borrow these Kindles from the Ford Library circulation desk by using your Duke ID.  Stop by and borrow a few titles that might change how you see your life’s work.

• Peter Bregman, 18 Minutes:  Find Your Focus
• Timothy Clark, et al, Business Model You
• Bene Brown, Daring Greatly:  How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead
• Ellis Chase, In Search of the Fun-Forever Job
• Shawn Achor, Happiness Advantage:  Seven Principles of Positive Psychology
• George B Bradt, et al, New Leader’s 100 Day Action Plan
• Shirzad Chamine, Positive Intelligence
• Meg Whitman, Power of Many:  Values for Success in Business and in Life
• Dorie Clark, Reinventing You:  Define Your Brand, Imagine Your Future
• Karen Linder, Women of Berkshire Hathaway:  Lessons from Warren Buffett’s Female CEO’s and Directors
• Thomas J Neff, et al, You’re in Charge:  Now What?