John Kenneth Galbraith has long been at the center of American economics, in key positions of responsibility during the New Deal, World War II, and since, guiding policy and debate. His trenchant new book distills this lifetime of experience in the public and private sectors; it is a scathing critique of matters as they stand today. Sounding the alarm about the increasing gap between reality and "conventional wisdom" -- a phrase he coined -- Galbraith tells, along with much else, how we have reached a point where the private sector has unprecedented control over the public sector. We have given ourselves over to self-serving belief and "contrived nonsense" or, more simply, fraud. This has come at the expense of the economy, effective government, and the business world. Particularly noted is the central power of the corporation and the shift in authority from shareholders and board members to management. In an intense exercise of fraud, the pretense of shareholder power is still maintained, even with the immediate participants. In fact, because of the scale and complexity of the modern corporation, decisive power must go to management. From management and its own inevitable self-interest, power extends deeply into government -- the so-called public sector. This is particularly and dangerously the case in such matters as military policy, the environment, and, needless to say, taxation. Nevertheless, there remains the firm reference to the public sector. How can fraud be innocent? In his inimitable style, Galbraith offers the answer. His taut, wry, and severe comment is essential reading for everyone who cares about America's future. This book is especially relevant in an election year, but it deeply concerns the much longer future.
In the Historical Dictionary of the U.S. Maritime Industry, author Kenneth J. Blume provides a convenient survey of this important industry from the colonial period to the present day: from sail to steam to nuclear power. This concise new reference work captures the key features of overseas, coastal, lake, and river shipping and industry. An introduction provides an overview of the industry while the dictionary itself contains more than four hundred cross-referenced entries on ships, shipping companies, famous personalities, and major ports. A number of appendixes, including statistics on foreign trade, maritime disasters, famous ships, and major ports, supplement the dictionary, and a comprehensive bibliography leads the researcher to further sources.
With its unique range of case studies, real life examples and comprehensive coverage of the latest management control-related tools and techniques, Management Control Systems is the ideal guide to this complex and multidimensional subject for upper level undergraduates, postgraduates and practising professionals.
In this book we argue that as a first step it is important to recognize these group dynamics and the problems they cause. Some of them can be minimized through, for example, properly designed decision processes. Others are more complicated. But all of them need to be recognized and understood so that we can properly shape our expectations of the degree and quality of oversight corporate boards of directors can provide, and so that we can turn our energy toward the many group level factors that could improve board performance going forward.
What part does customer and employee satisfaction play in overall business success? Management Accountants developing business models must consider this question, especially if they are taking the popular "balanced scorecard" or "strategy mapping" approaches to performance measurement. When doing so, stating cause-and-effect relationships between measurable factors like satisfaction and profitability is common practice. However, few companies test their own hypotheses. If the links are incorrect, these models can actually guide the firm down a path to failure. Strategy Mapping: An Interventionist Examination of a Homebuilder's Performance Measurement and Incentive Systems reveals the findings of state-of-the-art interventionist research on a major US homebuilder. The core claims of this company's business model were positive effects in the future due to improvements in customer and employee satisfaction. Tests were made on the validity of these claims to discover how much we can rely on these factors to improve performance. This report also examines how effective various measurement alternatives are through analysis of data compiled by different consulting companies. The results reveal that the links between satisfaction and performance is less strong and more complex than the company had assumed: these measures cannot be relied upon to guarantee increased performance. Managers must have a sophisticated understanding of performance measurement systems and to test their strategy maps empirically, rather than relying on their intuitions. This report demonstrates how you can achieve both. State-of-the-art interventionist research: new method in which researchers interact with the subject of the research, monitoring the effects of their input Helps managers protect their businesses from bad business models through sophisticated understanding of likely causes of success Shows managers how to analyse data in balanced scorecards and strategy maps to draw reliable conclusions to make the best decisions for their business
Maximize the effectiveness of your Power BI solutions through performance optimization and drive superior business outcomes Key Features Learn how to build performant data models and apply row-level security Identify and fix performance issues in reports, DAX, and datasets using DAX Studio and VertiPaq Analyzer Implement a formal process for performance management, from setting targets to monitoring and remediating issues Purchase of the print or Kindle book includes a free PDF eBook Book DescriptionIn a world dominated by data, organizations heavily rely on business intelligence tools like Power BI for deriving insights and informed decision-making. Yet, as data volumes grow and user demands increase, achieving optimal performance becomes challenging. Author Thomas LeBlanc, a seasoned Business Intelligence Architect with over 30 years of IT experience, draws on his extensive expertise to guide you in overcoming challenges related to slow performance, data modeling, query optimization, visualization design, deployment, administration, integration, compliance, and security. This book covers topics ranging from architecture and data modeling to Power BI premium features, DAX formulas, and collaboration, helping you to gain a deep understanding of the Power BI architecture, design efficient data models, create efficient queries, and improve visualization performance. You’ll also learn best practices to deploy and manage Power BI solutions, integrate with other tools and systems, ensure compliance and security, and collaborate with team members. By the end of the book, you’ll have developed your knowledge and skills to design, build, and maintain high-performing, scalable, and efficient Power BI solutions to drive unparalleled business success.What you will learn Master setting realistic performance targets and proactively addressing performance challenges Understand the impact of architectural choices and configurations on performance optimization Develop streamlined Power BI reports and enhance data transformations for optimal efficiency Explore best practices for data modeling, mastering DAX, and handling large datasets effectively Gain insight into the intricate workings of Power BI Premium for enhanced performance Harness the potential of Azure services for extreme scale data processing Who this book is for If you are a data analyst, BI developer, or a data professional who wants to maximize the performance of your Power BI solutions and understand how to build advanced analytics solutions, this book is for you. It assumes familiarity with the major components of Power BI and a beginner-level understanding of their purpose and use cases.
An intuitive and straightforward introduction to management accounting In the newly revised second edition of Management Accounting: An Integrative Approach, a team of distinguished accountants and educators delivers a comprehensive and authoritative discussion of key management accounting subjects. From business planning and analysis to the measurement and evaluation of performance, estimating costs, activity-based costing, and management accounting in large, complex organizations, this book covers every critical component of a rapidly evolving and centrally important subject. This latest edition includes updated data tables, revised practice problems, corrected and simplified formulas, new "In the News" and "Looking Back" sections, and updated figures. It is essential reading for students of business, managerial accounting, and related subjects.
Charles Schwab was known to his employees, business associates, and competitors as a congenial and charismatic person-a 'born salesman.' Yet Schwab was much more than a salesman-he was a captain of industry, a man who streamlined and economized the production of steel and ran the largest steelmaking conglomerate in the world. A self-made man, he became one of the wealthiest Americans during the Gilded Age, only to die penniless in 1939.Schwab began his career as a stake driver at Andrew Carnegie's Edgar Thomson steel works in Pittsburgh at the age of seventeen. By thirty-five, he was president of Carnegie Steel. In 1901, he helped form the U.S. Steel Corporation, a company that produced well over half the nation's iron and steel. In 1904, Schwab left U.S. Steel to head Bethlehem Steel, which after twelve years under his leadership, became the second-largest steel producer in America. President Woodrow Wilson called on Schwab to head the Emergency Fleet Corporation to produce merchant ships for the transport of troops and materials abroad during World War I.Kenneth Warren presents a compelling biography that chronicles the startling success of Schwab's business career, his leadership abilities, and his drive to advance steel-making technology and operations. Through extensive research and use of previously unpublished archival documentation, Warren offers a new perspective on the life of a monumental figure-a true visionary-in the industrial history of America.
A native of northern Russia, Alexander Baranov was a middle-aged merchant trader with no prior experience in the fur trade when, in 1790, he arrived in North America to assume command over Russia’s highly profitable sea otter business. With the title of chief manager, he strengthened his leadership role after the formation of the Russian American Company in 1799. An adventuresome, dynamic, and charismatic leader, he proved to be something of a commercial genius in Alaska, making huge profits for company partners and shareholders in Irkutsk and St. Petersburg while receiving scandalously little support from the homeland. Baranov receives long overdue attention in Kenneth Owens’s Empire Maker, the first scholarly biography of Russian America’s virtual imperial viceroy. His eventful life included shipwrecks, battles with Native forces, clashes with rival traders and Russian Orthodox missionaries, and an enduring marriage to a Kodiak Alutiiq woman with whom he had two children. In the process, the book reveals maritime Alaska and northern California during the Baranov era as fascinating cultural borderlands, where Russian, English, Spanish, and New England Yankee traders and indigenous peoples formed complex commercial, political, and domestic relationships that continue to influence these regions today.
Shylock, the Jewish moneylender in The Merchant of Venice who famously demands a pound of flesh as security for a loan to his antisemitic tormentors, is one of Shakespeare’s most complex and idiosyncratic characters. With his unsettling eloquence and his varying voices of protest, play, rage, and refusal, Shylock remains a source of perennial fascination. What explains the strange and enduring force of this character, so unlike that of any other in Shakespeare’s plays? Kenneth Gross posits that the figure of Shylock is so powerful because he is the voice of Shakespeare himself. Marvelously speculative and articulate, Gross’s book argues that Shylock is a breakthrough for Shakespeare the playwright, an early realization of the Bard’s power to create dramatic voices that speak for hidden, unconscious, even inhuman impulses—characters larger than the plays that contain them and ready to escape the author’s control. Shylock is also a mask for Shakespeare’s own need, rage, vulnerability, and generosity, giving form to Shakespeare’s ambition as an author and his uncertain bond with the audience. Gross’s vision of Shylock as Shakespeare’s covert double leads to a probing analysis of the character’s peculiar isolation, ambivalence, opacity, and dark humor. Addressing the broader resonance of Shylock, both historical and artistic, Gross examines the character’s hold on later readers and writers, including Heinrich Heine and Philip Roth, suggesting that Shylock mirrors the ambiguous states of Jewishness in modernity. A bravura critical performance, Shylock Is Shakespeare will fascinate readers with its range of reference, its union of rigor and play, and its conjectural—even fictive—means of coming to terms with the question of Shylock, ultimately taking readers to the very heart of Shakespeare’s humanizing genius.
From 1501, when the first slaves arrived in Hispaniola, until the nineteenth century, some twelve million people were abducted from west Africa and shipped across thousands of miles of ocean - the infamous Middle Passage - to work in the colonies of the New World. Perhaps two million Africans died at sea. Why was slavery so widely condoned, during most of this period, by leading lawyers, religious leaders, politicians and philosophers? How was it that the educated classes of the western world were prepared for so long to accept and promote an institution that would later ages be condemned as barbaric? Exploring these and other questions - and the slave experience on the sugar, rice, coffee and cotton plantations - Kenneth Morgan discusses the rise of a distinctively Creole culture; slave revolts, including the successful revolution in Haiti (1791-1804); and the rise of abolitionism, when the ideas of Montesquieu, Wilberforce, Quakers and others led to the slave trade's systemic demise. At a time when the menace of human trafficking is of increasing concern worldwide, this timely book reflects on the deeper motivations of slavery as both ideology and merchant institution.
This guide uniquely presents the three volumes of Capital in a different order of reading to that in which they were published, placing them instead in the order that Marx himself sometimes recommended as a more user-friendly way of reading. Dr Smith also argues that, for most of the twentieth century, the full development of the capitalist mode of production (CMP) has been undermined by the existence of a non-capitalist ‘third world’, which has caused the CMP to take on the form of what Marx called a highly developed mercantile system, rather than one characterized by an uninterrupted circuit of industrial capital of the kind he expected would develop.
At the outbreak of the Second World War, Britain, desperately short of merchant shipping, turned to the Norwegians who agreed to loan several hundred of its modern cargo and tanker ships. In early 1940 when Hitler invaded Norway, both the British and Germans rushed to seize the remainder of the fleet. King Haakon VII and his government, now fleeing from Nazi occupation, refused to relinquish control of this vital national asset. Instead, they nationalized the fleet and established the Norwegian Shipping and Trade Mission. Nicknamed Nortraship, it became overnight the largest shipping company the world had seen with a thousand ships and offices on six continents. Generously made available to Great Britain, it became a priceless Allied asset without which victory over Germany would arguably have been impossible. By the end of the war, about half Nortraship’s fleet had been lost to enemy action. The Norwegian Merchant Fleet in the Second World War is a superbly researched addition to Second World War history being the first detailed account in English of Norway’s critical contribution to the Allies. As well as telling this little-known but hugely significant story, the author covers the controversies that developed and persist into the present day.
Saint Francis of Assisi is arguably the most attractive saint ever produced by the Catholic Church. Based on a reconsideration of the earliest biographies of the saint, and Francis's own writings, this title sheds light on the inherent ironies of poverty as a spiritual discipline and its relationship to poverty as a socio-economic affliction.
This book provides a comprehensive guide to all three volumes of Karl Marx’s ‘Capital’, with advice on further reading and points for further discussion. Recognizing the contemporary relevance of ‘Capital’ in the midst of the current financial crisis, Kenneth Smith has produced an essential guide to Marx’s ideas, particularly on the subject of the circulation of money-capital. This guide uniquely presents the three volumes of ‘Capital’ in a different order of reading to that in which they were published, placing them instead in the order that Marx himself sometimes recommended as a more user-friendly way of reading. Dr Smith also argues that for most of the twentieth century, the full development of the capitalist mode of production (CMP) has been undermined by the existence of a non-capitalist ‘third world’, which has caused the CMP to take on the form of what Marx called a highly developed mercantile system, rather than one characterized by an uninterrupted circuit of industrial capital of the kind he expected would develop. While the guide can be read as a book in its own right, it also contains detailed references to Volumes I–III so that students, seminars and discussion groups can easily make connections between Smith’s explanations and the relevant parts of ‘Capital’.
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