Saturday, December 5, 2009

Managing Human Resources or Compensation

Managing Human Resources

Author: George W Bohlander

The #1 textbook on the market, MANAGING HUMAN RESOURCES covers all aspects of human resource management and its impact on both individuals and organizations. The text builds on a foundation of research and theory but also provides a practical framework focusing on critical issues and successful practices. Users and reviewers of the text praise its pleasant writing style, user-friendly design, and highly effective examples that provide meaningful insight into the world of HR. In fact, over 500 different organizations from a variety of settings are used as examples to illustrate key points and make the connection to HR practice. Important issues and critical trends are spotlighted in each chapter and reflected in the comprehensive and chapter ending cases included in the text. Managing Human Resources' balance of theory and practice, hands-on activities, applications, and examples helps students develop the competencies to understand and help their organizations create a sustainable competitive advantage through people.



Table of Contents:
1The Challenge of Human Resources Management3
2Equal Employment Opportunity and Human Resources Management41
3Job Requirements and the Design of Organizations to Achieve Human Resources Productivity85
4Human Resources Planning and Recruitment121
5Selection177
6Training and Development221
7Career Development273
8Appraising and Improving Performance317
9Managing Compensation361
10Incentive Rewards399
11Employee Benefits435
12Safety and Health475
13Employee Rights and Discipline519
14The Dynamics of Labor Relations563
15Collective Bargaining and Contract Administration597
16International Human Resources Management631
17Creating High-Performance Work Systems675
Cases703
Glossary725
Name Index736
Organization Index747
Subject Index753
Photo Credits767

New interesting textbook: The Fugitive Game or Contemporary Project Management

Compensation

Author: George T Milkovich

As the market-leading text in its course area, COMPENSATION, 9th Edition by Milkovich and Newman offers current research material, in-depth discussion of topics, integration of Internet coverage, excellent pedagogy, and a truly engaging writing style. The 9th edition continues to examine the strategic choices in managing total compensation. The total compensation model introduced in chapter one serves as an integrating framework throughout the book. The authors discuss major compensation issues in the context of current theory, research, and real-business practices. Milkovich and Newman strive to differentiate beliefs and opinions from facts and scholarly research. They illustrate new developments in compensation practices as well as established approaches to compensation decisions.



Friday, December 4, 2009

The General Theory of Employment Interest and Money or Investing Basics

The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money

Author: John Maynard Keynes

In 1936 Keynes published the most provocative book written by any economist of his generation. Arguments about the book continued until his death in 1946 and still continue today. This new edition, published 70 years after the original, features a new introduction by Paul Krugman which discusses the significance and continued relevance of The General Theory.



Read also Wisdom of Teams or Fundamentals of Corporate Finance Standard Edition

Investing Basics (Quamut)

Author: Quamut

Quamut is the fastest, most convenient way to learn how to do almost anything. From tasting wine to managing your retirement accounts, Quamut gives you reliable information in a concise chart format that you can take anywhere. Quamut charts are:

  • Authoritative: Written by experts in their field so you have the most reliable information available.
  • Clear: Our explanations take you step-by-step through everything from performing CPR to threading a needle.
  • Concise: You’ll learn just what you need to know—no more, no less.
  • Precise: Quamut charts include detailed text, photos, and illustrations to show you exactly how to do just about anything.
  • Portable: Your know-how goes with you wherever your projects lead.


Wealth made easy.

Although a savings account is never a bad idea, the only way to build your wealth significantly over time is to invest. And it’s far easier than you think: even the simplest investing plan can boost your net worth and secure your financial future.

  • Learn the basics of risk, return, compounding, and diversification

  • Choose investments that are the right risk level for you

  • Recognize the pros and cons of stocks, bonds, mutual funds, and ETFs



Thursday, December 3, 2009

Uncommon Grounds or The Travels of a T Shirt in the Global Economy

Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and how It Transformed Our World

Author: Mark Pendergrast

Uncommon Grounds tells the story of coffee from its discovery on a hill in Abyssinia to its role in intrigue in the American colonies to its rise as a national consumer product in the twentieth century and its rediscovery with the advent of Starbucks at the end of the century. A panoramic epic, Uncommon Grounds uses coffee production, trade, and consumption as a window through which to view broad historical themes: the clash and blending of cultures, the rise of marketing and the “national brand,” assembly line mass production, and urbanization. Coffeehouses have provided places to plan revolutions, write poetry, do business, and meet friends. The coffee industry has dominated and molded the economy, politics, and social structure of entire countries.Mark Pendergrast introduces the reader to an eccentric cast of characters, all of them with a passion for the golden bean. Uncommon Grounds is nothing less than a coffee-flavored history of the world.

Wall Street Journal

"A focused and juicy history of our last legal and socially acceptable drug."

New York Times Book Review

"Pendergrast has served up a rich blend of anecdote, character study, market analysis, and social history...everything you ought to know about coffee is here."

NY Times - Betty Fussell

With wit and humor, Pendergrast has served up a rich blend of anecdote, character study, market analysis and social history....[E]verything you ought to know about coffee is here: even how to make it.

Economist

Mr Pendergrast provides a stolid analysis of [Starbucks'] rise to prominence, and waxes eloquent about coffee being "the millennial elixir in the Age of Starbucks"....Who knows? By restoring some of the magic that propelled coffee to greatness in the first place, Starbucks may well help launch the next great revolution.

Publishers Weekly

Caffeinated beverage enthusiast Pendergrast (For God, Country and Coca-Cola) approaches this history of the green bean with the zeal of an addict. His wide-ranging narrative takes readers from the legends about coffee's discovery--the most appealing of which, Pendergast writes, concerns an Ethiopian goatherd who wonders why his goats are dancing on their hind legs and butting one another--to the corporatization of the specialty cafe. Pendergrast focuses on the influence of the American coffee trade on the world's economies and cultures, further zeroing in on the political and economic history of Latin America. Coffee advertising, he shows, played a major role in expanding the American market. In 1952, a campaign by the Pan American Coffee Bureau helped institutionalize the coffee break in America. And the invention of the still ubiquitous Juan Valdez in a 1960 ad campaign caused name recognition for Colombian coffee to skyrocket within months of its introduction. The Valdez character romanticizes a very real phenomenon--the painstaking process of tending and harvesting a coffee crop. Yet the price of a tall latte in America, Pendergrast notes, is a day's wage for many of the people who harvest it on South American hillsides. Pendergrast does not shy away from exploring such issues in his cogent histories of Starbucks and other firms. Throughout the book, asides like the coffee jones of health-food tycoon C.W. Post--who raged against the evils of coffee and developed Postum as a substitute for regular brew--provide welcome diversions. Pendergrast's broad vision, meticulous research and colloquial delivery combine aromatically, and he even throws in advice on how to brew the perfect cup. 76 duotones. Author tour. (June) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

In this enlightening sociocultural chronicle, journalist Pendergrast (For God, Country & Coca-Cola) focuses on the popularity of coffee, especially in the Western Hemisphere. Coffee-drinking came late to the New World but was embraced almost immediately. It accompanied settlers on their way west (Native Americans referred to it as "black medicine") and was popular with soldiers in the Civil War and both world wars. Pendergrast's book is filled with stories about the rise (and fall) of coffee dynasties like Hills Brothers and Folgers and of how the fledgling advertising industry helped promote each. The book concludes with the advent of specialty firms like Starbucks. While it lacks the extensive industry overview that characterizes Gregory Dicum and Nina Luttinger's The Coffee Book: Anatomy of an Industry from Crop to the Last Drop (LJ 4/1/99), it provides substantial background on coffee production as well as making an entertaining yet serious attempt to understand the popularity of the beverage. Recommended for academic and larger public libraries.--Richard S. Drezen, Washington Post News Research Ctr., Washington, DC Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Booknews

From its beginnings in Ethiopia to the expansion of the Starbucks empire, the author explores the growth and nature of the coffee business. Mainly concerned with the marketing of coffee in the United States, he does touch upon coffee in Europe and social justice and health issues. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

The Economist

Mr Pendergrast provides a stolid analysis of [Starbucks'] rise to prominence, and waxes eloquent about coffee being "the millennial elixir in the Age of Starbucks"....Who knows? By restoring some of the magic that propelled coffee to greatness in the first place, Starbucks may well help launch the next great revolution.

Brill's Content - Jane Manners

Mark Pendergast's Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World often reads as if it was written under the influence of caffeine: The wide-ranging, animated account charges through coffee's history, from its legendary discovery in an Ethiopian mountain forest sometime before the tenth century to the proliferation of gourmet brands and coffeehouses in the 1990s...

Pendergast concludes his sweeping history on an up note. After largely dismissing reports of coffee's bad health effects, he offers what most readers have probably been craving all along: instructions on how to brew the perfect pot.

The Washington Monthly - Heather Bourbeau

is not only a good read but a vital one for anyone who considers him or herself an American political economist. Or simply a responsible coffee drinker.

The Wall Street Journal - Zakaria

[A] focused and juicy history of our last legal and socially acceptable drug....Balzac ate coffee powder to help 'ideas march into motion like battalions of a grand army.' Perhaps Mr. Pendergrast had a few spoonful while writing this stirring book.

Kirkus Reviews

An exhaustive, admirably ambitious examination of coffee's global impact, from its roots in 15th-century Ethiopia to its critical role in shaping the nations of Central and Latin America. Pendergrast (For God, Country, and Coca-Cola, 1993) explains almost everything we'd ever want to know about coffee. The story begins in the mountains of Ethiopia, where goat herders first discovered the pleasures of the coffee bean. Arab traders helped spread coffee to Europe, where it became a 17th-century sensation. Soon the imperial powers of Europe established coffee plantations from Java (a Dutch colony) to Brazil (a Portuguese colony) to Haiti (a French colony), enslaving the indigenous populations. Even after freeing themselves from centuries of imperial control, the coffee-growing nations remained under "coffee oligarchies" that exploited local peasants. Today, most coffee workers "live in abject poverty without plumbing, electricity, [or] medical care." Afraid of leftist rebellion in Latin America and eager for low-cost coffee, the US has actively supported these oligarchies. Pendergrast does a fine job exploring the disturbing economic inequalities behind every cup of coffee. He also analyzes how the boom-and-bust cycles of the coffee harvest have destabilized nations like Brazil, Colombia, and Costa Rica. After WWI, coffee emerged as a major American industry—advertising helped turn Maxwell House, Folgers, and Hills Brothers into household names. With intense competition, coffee quality was often sacrificed for low price. By the 1960s, coffee quality was so low that a "gourmet" coffee movement emerged, led by purists such as Alfred Peet. While the "gourmet" coffee movement reactedagainst bland, mass-produced coffee, it's now identified with a corporate giant called Starbucks, whose aggressive tactics Pendergrast skillfullyÊdescribes. Should be read by anyone curious about what goes into their daily cup of Java—too often, good coffee isn't good for the people who produce it. (60 b&w photos) (Author tour)



Books about: No More Mondays or Fashion Design

The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy: An Economist Examines the Markets, Power, and Politics of World Trade

Author: Pietra Rivoli

Praise for THE TRAVELS OF A T-SHIRT IN THE GLOBAL ECONOMY


"Engrossing . . . (Rivoli) goes wherever the T-shirt goes, and there are surprises around every corner . . . full of memorable characters and vivid scenes."
Time

"An engaging and illuminating saga. . . . Rivoli follows her T-shirt along its route, but that is like saying that Melville follows his whale. . . . Her nuanced and fair-minded approach is all the more powerful for eschewing the pretense of ideological absolutism, and her telescopic look through a single industry has all the makings of an economics classic."
The New York Times

"Rarely is a business book so well written that one would gladly stay up all night to finish it. Pietra Rivoli's The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy is just such a page-turner."
CIO magazine

"Succeeds admirably . . . T-shirts may not have changed the world, but their story is a useful account of how free trade and protectionism certainly have."
Financial Times

"[A] fascinating exploration of the history, economics, and politics of world trade . . . The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy is a thought-provoking yarn that exhibits the ugly, the bad, and the good of globalization, and points to the unintended positive consequences of the clash between proponents and opponents of free trade."
Star-Telegram (Fort Worth)

"Part travelogue, part history, and part economics, The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy is ALL storytelling, and in the grand style. A must-read."
—PeterJ. Dougherty, Senior Economics Editor, Princeton University Press author of Who's Afraid of Adam Smith?

"A readable and evenhanded treatment of the complexities of free trade . . . As Rivoli repeatedly makes clear, there is absolutely nothing free about free trade except the slogan."
San Francisco Chronicle

Foreign Affairs

The protagonist of this highly informative and entertaining book is a $6 T-shirt purchased in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Georgetown economist Rivoli uses her T-shirt as a vehicle for telling an analytic story about its life — from the cotton fields of Texas to either its proud purchase by a Tanzanian villager or its sale as mattress filler, depending on its condition when discarded by its American owner. Along the way, she explores the history of cotton production and the cotton textile industry and evaluates the misguided and often absurd U.S. textile policy over the past half century, up to the end of 2004, when the multilateral Multifiber Arrangement (which inadvertently created many more jobs in not-quite-competitive developing countries than it preserved in the United States) expired. Rivoli draws heavily on her own interviews and on anthropological as well as economic literature, which gives her tale a human touch. She shows how despite the awful working conditions in apparel factories, in both historical America and contemporary poor countries the jobs they offered were often liberating to young women, who preferred the sweatshops to the stifling life they otherwise would have had to endure on the farm.



Table of Contents:
Preface.

Prologue.

PART I: KING COTTON.

1. Reinsch Cotton Farm, Smyer, Texas.

2. The History of American Cotton.

3. Back at the Reinsch Farm.

PART II: MADE IN CHINA.

4. Cotton Comes to China.

5. The Long Race to the Bottom.

6. Sisters in Time.

PART III: TROUBLE AT THE BORDER.

7. Dogs Snarling Together.

8. Perverse Effects and Unintended Consequences of T-Shirt Trade Policy.

9. 40 Years of “Temporary” Protectionism Ends in 2005—and China Takes All the Jobs.

PART IV: MY T-SHIRT FINALLY ENCOUNTERS A FREE MARKET.

10. Where T-Shirts Go after the Salvation Army Bin.

11. How Small Entrepreneurs Clothe East Africa with Old American T-Shirts.

Conclusion.

Epilogue to the Paperback Edition.

Acknowledgments.

Notes.

Bibliography.

Index.

Wednesday, December 2, 2009

Transparency or Why We Want You to Be Rich

Transparency: How Leaders Create a Culture of Candor

Author: Daniel Goleman

Praise for Transparency

"After watching so many American presidents derailed by a culture of secrecy—Richard Nixon and George W. Bush are only the most recent—one might imagine that transparency would become the watchword of leaders everywhere. Alas, it has not: witness Enron and subprime mortgages. Here in these pages, with arguments that are enormously compelling, Warren Bennis, Daniel Goleman, and James O'Toole urge leaders of every stripe to create 'a culture of candor' around them.?Please give this book to'anyone heading toward the front office, especially if it is oval."
—David Gergen, professor and director of the Center for Public Leadership, Harvard University; former White House advisor; author of Eyewitness to Power

"Transparency vividly describes the powerful imperative for open and honest communication in a boundless world transformed by information technology and its impact on corporations and politics. With many practical examples, the authors underscore the importance of the leadership values of integrity, candor, courage, and responsibility as fundamental to sustainable success in an increasingly complex environment."
—Daniel Vasella, M.D., chairman and CEO, Novartis AG, Basel, Switzerland

"In this vital new book, Warren Bennis, Daniel Goleman, and Jim O'Toole have teamed up to address the vital question of our times, whether organizations have the courage to be open, honest, and most of all, transparent. They give deep insights into why transparency is essential to long-term business success. It is a mustread for anyone who wants to build an authentic organization."
—Bill George, formerCEO, Medtronic; professor, Harvard Business School; author of True North and Authentic Leadership



Go to: Food or Eating as I Go

Why We Want You to Be Rich: Two Men - One Message

Author: Donald Trump

The world is facing many challenges and one of them is financial. The entitlement mentality is epidemic, creating people who expect their countries, employers, or families to take care of them. Donald Trump and Robert Kiyosaki, both successful businessmen, are natural teachers and have joined forces to address these challenges. They believe you cannot solve money problems with money. You can only solve money problems with financial education. Trump and Kiyosaki want to teach you to be rich.

"Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach him to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime."

They each could have written a book on the subject, but they chose instead to write a book together because of their shared passion for education and their desire to bring emphasis to the importance of financial education. In addition they have designated a portion of the profits from each book to be donated to charitable and educational organizations that also support financial education.

Why We Want YOU To Be Rich, Two Men — One Message was written for you.

Publishers Weekly

The wildly financially successful authors of this book state, early on, that a reader will not find in its pages specific advice on how to make or invest money. It's more a book of philosophy (note the "why" in the title), and if it's not exactly Kierkegaardian in scope or language, this collaboration of real estate magnate and rags-to-riches financial guru manages to entertain and to inform. Written in bite-size chunks and adorned with quotes (some from the authors' previous works or speeches) and graphs, it explains why some people get rich and others... well, don't. Some tales are shopworn: the many references to Warren Buffett are tales well told, for example, but what works best are the aphorisms and the personality type descriptions within the "CASHFLOW Quadrant" no matter what you do for a living, in your heart are you an E, an S, a B or an I? (Key: E=employee; B=big business owner; S=self-employed, specialist or small business owner; I=investor.) But Trump and Kiyosaki (Rich Dad, Poor Dad) together are a strangely winning combination (they've published this book jointly and privately and a portion of its profits will be donated to charity). Bottom line: these Messrs. Money-bags know their business. We're talking billionaires here, and really, how can you argue with success? (Oct.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.



Table of Contents:
Authors' Notes
Introduction     1
Why Donald Trump And Robert Kiyosaki Wrote This Book     15
Millionaire Meets Billionaire     17
Our Shared Concerns     35
The Shrinking Middle Class     45
How To Make Yourself Rich     59
Why We Want You To Be Rich     71
Three Kinds Of Investors     85
Investing To Win     87
Choosing Your Battle - And Battlefield     95
There Is A Difference Between Savers And Investors     105
The Two Things You Invest     117
Winners Take Control     131
Right-Brain And Left-Brain Creativity     139
Think Big - Think Expansion     147
Getting Very Rich Is Predictable ... Not Risky     155
Defining Moments: Going Beyond Winning And Losing     163
What Did You Learn From Your Father?     167
What Did You Learn From Your Mother?     175
What Did You Learn From School?     181
How Did Military School Help Define My Life?     187
What Was The Defining Lesson You Learned From Sports?     197
What Did You Learn From Business?     211
What Are Your Philosophies Concerning God, Religion, And Money?     217
If YouWere In My Shoes, What Would You Do?     227
I Am Still In School, What Should I Do?     229
I Am An Adult Without Much Money, What Should I Do?     247
I Am A Baby Boomer Without Much Money, What Should I Do?     259
What If I Am Already Rich, What Advice Do You Have For Me?     271
Why Do Some People Who Want To Be Rich ... Fail To Become Rich?     279
Just Get Started     289
Why Do You Invest In Real Estate?     291
Why Do You Recommend Network Marketing?     305
Why Do You Recommend Starting Your Own Business?     313
Leaders Are Teachers     323
Conclusion     331