Advice on business literature from Helen Edwards

Here's recent business literature review from SKOLKOVO Library Project Manager Helen Edwards. All spring trends and best marketing pieces of advice are in five great books below!

 

Just start: take action, embrace uncertainty, create the future

Leornard A. Schlesinger, Charles F. Kiefer with Paul B. Brown
Harvard Business Review Press, 2012.
xxiv, 196 pages
ISBN: 9781422143612

For many people the uncertainty of life today is deeply disconcerting. The authors of this book, professors from the famous entrepreneurship programme at Babson College, describe how entrepreneurs think differently than most people. Instead of trying to predict the future, then assemble the necessary resources and carry out a plan, successful serial entrepreneurs focus on first steps and then learning from what happens. This approach also minimizes costs and attracts like minded people. The book is illustrated with examples showing in detail how the "creaction" - creation and action - method works.

Good products, bad products: essential elements for achieving superior quality
James L.Adams
McGraw Hill, 2012
xiv, 255 pages
ISBN: 9780071782401

This book uses a wide definition of product quality, taking in emotions, aesthetics, cultural symbolism and globalization in addition to the standard issues of performance, cost and price. The author identifies the importance of design thinking comprising creativity, comfort with several intellectual disciplines, cost consciousness, knowledge of the customer, ability to coordinate the work of different functions. The book also includes case studies of famous companies which got their products right or wrong.

Brand turnaround: how brands gone bad returned to glory...and the seven game changers that made the difference

Karen Post
McGraw Hill, 2012
xxiv, 262 pages
ISBN: 9780071775281

All brands strive to be the brand of choice. This book describes how 75 brands, some well known and some niche, ran into problems, what they did about it and how they re-established themselves. Part one describes how a brand can go bad - either from a specific event such as a product recall or more gradually as customer interests change. Seven chapters then illustrate the game changers, the persistence and steady work needed - to regain distinction, characterized by their innovation, promotion, persona and packaging.


The future of power
Joseph S. Nye Jr.
Public Affairs, 2011
xviii, 300 pages
ISBN: 9781586488918

How is the nature of power changing in the twenty first century? This book discusses the nature smart power, the combination of the hard power of coercion and the soft power of persuasion and attraction. Two great power shifts are occurring in this century: a power transition among states with the rise in importance of new countries, most notably Asia, and away from all states to non state actors. The information age and globalization mean that no country can act alone, the implications of this already visible in the instability of the international financial system.

The territories of the Russian Federation 2012
13th edition
The Europa Territories of the World Series
Routledge, 2012.
x, 327 pages
ISBN: 9781857436464

This directory covers the historical and political context, economic activity and key government contacts for each of the 83 territories in the Russian Federation. Here is information also about special economic zones, regions where western businesses have been established, and trade within and outside the CIS. Information comes from the Federal Service of State Statistics and other Russian agencies and is particularly useful for the non Russian speaker wishing to understand the wide variation in Russian regions.