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I am a sucker for reference books. A
good reference book invites browsing by the hour and ends up
being tattered from frequent handling, littered with Post-It
Notes®, underlined and hi-lighted. When I saw this
one, I had to have it.
Business: The Ultimate Resource is an omnibus volume of
information and advice written by more than 200 contributors who
are practitioners, consultants, or academics. According to the
editors, it contains 2.5 million words, 700 illustrations, and
150 maps, and is the most comprehensive one-volume business
reference work ever published. It is organized into seven
sections: Best Practice, Management Checklists and Actionlists,
Management Library, Business Thinkers and Management Giants,
Dictionary, World Business Almanac, and Business Information
Sources. Each section includes brief articles about specific
business subjects.
The Best Practice section is
divided into ten topical subsections: People/Culture, Marketing,
Strategy/Competition, Finance, IT/Information Management,
Systems, Structure, Leadership, Renewal/Growth, and Productivity
and Personal Effectiveness. Each subsection contains a number of
two-page articles that describe best practices for processes and
practices like: “Managing Stress,” “Maximizing a New Strategic
Alliance,” “Power Struggling and Power Sharing,” “Competing on
Costs,” “Budgeting,” “Enterprise Information Systems,” “Project
Management,” “The Critical Factors That Build or Break Teams,”
“Setting Objectives for a Business,” “Profiting from Prices,”
“Managing Internal Politics,” and “Developing Exceptional
Problem-Solving Skills.” Each article begins with an executive
summary and ends with a list of recommended readings and cross
references to other articles in the book.
Some of the Best Practice titles
are especially intriguing, like “The Good, the Fad, and the
Ugly,” by Lucy Kellaway, an editor of Financial Times and
the author of Sense and Nonsense in the Office. Ms.
Kellaway writes that all senior managers hate management fads,
yet follow them like fashion-conscious teenagers, calling them
“ideas,” “concepts,” “theories,” and “solutions” when they do.
She says that although most academics say management fads do not
work, businesses buy into them because they are afraid of being
left behind. In discussing particular fads, she says that Total
Quality Management had the status of a religion by the end of
the 1980s, before managers began complaining about paperwork and
bureaucracy, but that companies began to abandon it by the start
of the 1990s. She also mentions Reengineering, which once seemed
to be an “unbeatable” management technique, but which ultimately
developed such bad press that even its creators backed away from
it. Other fads that get her attention include knowledge
management, benchmarking, mission statements, and empowerment.
At the end of the article, Ms. Kellaway suggests how to deal
with fads when they arrive, as they inevitably will, and urges a
cautious, thoughtful, and organization-specific approach. (I
wonder what she would think about contractual incentives and
performance-based service contracting.)
The section of Management
Checklists and Actionlists includes a collection of more than
300 top-level, two-page checklists and actionlists for a wide
variety of business processes. There are checklists for managing
absenteeism, mentoring, preparing presentations, writing
reports, developing a marketing strategy, handling complaints,
setting objectives, partnering, purchasing, establishing
performance measures, managing projects, managing cash flow,
budgeting, and controlling costs, to name just a few. (But not
proposal preparation, contract negotiation, and contract
management!) Each checklist begins with a statement of its
purpose, followed by a definition and a summary of advantages
and disadvantages, and ends with do’s and don’ts and references
to sources of additional information. The Effective Purchasing
checklist includes items for the buyer’s organization and for
suppliers and general hints and good practices. Among the
purchasing recommendations—compile a history of purchases, audit
major suppliers, use your supplier’s expertise, and maintain an
audit trail of all purchase documents.
The actionlists are short
instructions for performing tasks and solving problems in
e-commerce, marketing, personal development, and accounting and
finance. Examples include: setting up a website; planning an
advertising campaign; writing a resume; getting promoted; making
a host of financial calculations such as activity-based costing,
depreciation, efficiency, marginal cost, net present value,
working capital productivity, and economic value added; and
reading annual reports. Each actionlist tells you how to get
started and includes references to more information. The best of
them are the ones for accounting and finance, which explain
various business measures, like economic value added,
tell you why they are important, tell you how to calculate them,
and refer you to more information about them. They also tell you
how to do things like create a cash flow statement and read a
balance sheet. Very handy. Yet, every businessperson must buy
things by issuing purchase orders and negotiating contracts, and
the book lacks checklists and actionlists for those processes.
The Management Library is a set
of 70 one-page reviews of books about business and management.
Among them are many of the acknowledged classics––Administrative
Behavior, by Herbert Simon; How to Win Friends and
Influence People, by Dale Carnegie; My Years with General
Motors, by Alfred P. Sloan, Jr.; Parkinson’s Law, by
C. Northcote Parkinson; The Functions of the Executive,
by Chester Barnard; Out of the Crisis, by W. Edwards
Deming; The Peter Principle, by Laurence Peter; and
The Wealth of Nations, by Adam Smith. Surprisingly, there is
only one title by Peter Drucker—The Age of Discontinuity.
(Why not include The Practice of Management, The
Effective Executive, and Managing in a Time of Great
Change?) While many of the choices are very
worthwhile—everybody should read The Wealth of Nations,
which is one of the source documents of capitalism and actually
a good read—several of the titles would seem no longer to be of
current interest, like Megatrends and The Third Wave,
which are twenty year old futurology books. I would have swapped
either of them for Confessions of an Advertising Man, by
David Ogilvy.
The section on Business Thinkers
and Management Giants is a collection of brief profiles of
important persons in the history of business, including such
leading lights as Philip Crosby, W. Edwards Deming and Joseph
Juran, the quality gurus; Peter Drucker; Rosabeth Moss Kanter,
the writer and former editor of the Harvard Business Review;
Abraham Maslow; Adam Smith; Frederick Winslow Taylor; Andrew
Carnegie; Walt Disney; Lee Iacocca; Bill Gates and Steve Jobs;
Estee Lauder; Akio Morita; David Packard; Martha Stewart;
Cornelius Vanderbilt, and Oprah Winfrey.
One of the most useful sections
of the book, and my favorite, is the Dictionary, which includes
definitions of more than 5,000 international business terms.
Each entry identifies the topical category to which the word or
term belongs, such as e-commerce; general management; finance,
banking, and accounting; human resources and personnel, etc. The
definitions are clear and concise. If you like to browse
dictionaries, you will enjoy the entries for Abilene paradox,
bludge, bricolage, glaze, guan xi,
kiasu, obcuranto (Can you speak it?),
ohnosecond, permalancer, presenteeism,
prosuming, scripophily, SCUM, spruik,
taste space, tree, Willie Sutton rule,
WOMBAT, and word of mouse (yes, mouse), to name just
a few.
The World Business Almanac is a
compendium of facts about more than 150 countries and 24
industrial sectors. Do you know the gross national income of
Brazil? Which country is the largest exporter of commercial
services? Which is the most popular tourist destination? Which
has the greatest life expectancy (I never heard of it.) Or which
is the least corrupt? You might be surprised to learn which
country has the highest prevalence of heart disease.
Business Information Resources is
a topical compilation of books, magazines, websites and
organizations. While I found many interesting and useful entries
in this section, I was disappointed in the entries for
contracts and contracting, purchasing and supply chain
management, and outsourcing. There are references to
only six books for contracts and contracting—four about
general contract law, one about negotiation, and one about
outsourcing. Two of the four legal texts are oriented toward
British contract law, one is a “for dummies” book, and one is a
fairly new book with which I am not familiar. There are no
references to any of the well-known American contract law
hornbooks (e.g., Calamari and Perillo or Farnsworth), to the
Uniform Commercial Code, or to the famous Cibinic and Nash
books: Formation of Government Contracts and
Administration of Government Contracts. The only website
given for contracts and contracting is www.ncmahq.org,
maintained by the National Contract Management Association. What
about Where in Federal Contracting?, www.wifcon.com?
Outsourcing also seems neglected, despite its importance in
both the private and public sectors. Purchasing and supply
chain management receives more attention, but, as usual, the
references are oriented toward purchasing for manufacturing
operations. Also, the entries for pricing seemed scant—only five
books, no magazines, two websites, and one organization—given
the importance of the topic; this is only slightly better than
the entries for mission statements—five books, no
magazines, two websites, and no organizations. In comparison,
packaging merits references to seven books, six magazines,
six websites, and four organizations. There are no entries for
cost estimating, proposal preparation, or
scheduling, which I consider to be major omissions. The
entries for accounting and for negotiation are good, and the
entries for project management are extensive, but some
well-known titles are missing, such as Harold Kerzner’s
Project Management: A Systems Approach to Planning, Scheduling
and Controlling, arguably the most famous and comprehensive
book about project management ever written, now in its seventh
edition.
One problem with a reference work
about a field as dynamic and ever-changing as business is that
it quickly becomes out of date. The publisher of Business:
The Ultimate Resource may have solved this problem by
setting up a website and making free monthly updates available
to purchasers. The updates are in PDF format and can be read
on-line or printed and stored. The book provides the website
address and a password. All you have to do to access and
download the updates is register on-line.
Overall, Business: The
Ultimate Resource, is very strong on soft skills and
topics—people management, personal development, communication,
culture, organization, teams, training and the like. It is also
very strong on accounting and finance, e-commerce, marketing and
strategy. It is less strong on hard skills such as production
management, project management, service operations management,
and quality assurance and control, and the coverage of
contracting, purchasing and outsourcing is inadequate. Yet,
despite these shortcomings, which hopefully will be remedied
through updates and in the next print edition, Business: The
Ultimate Resource, belongs on the reference shelf of every
contracting office, and career professionals will want a copy of
their own. |
