Joining Forces

Joining Forces

Author: Mitchell Lee Marks

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2010-07-30

Total Pages: 254

ISBN-13: 0470651261

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If 75 percent of all mergers fail, what makes the other 25 percent succeed? Mergers, acquisitions, and alliances are more vital today than ever before in driving business success. This indispensible guide offers proven strategies and sound solutions to the multitude of integration issues that inevitably arise, and shows how to create a combined business that meets its strategic and financial objectives, competes better, and offers personal and organizational enhancements. Dubbed "merger mavens" by Fortune magazine, the authors report lessons learned from their experience in over 100 combinations. Executives, managers, and employees alike in all industries and sectors will find useful examples, strategies, and tools here. Praise for Joining Forces "This book will help both M&A veterans and those new to the game. The authorsprovide great insights into the human, cultural, organizational, and strategic factors that matter in M&A success." Richard Kovacevich, chairman and CEO emeritus, Wells Fargo & Co. "Don't commit to the merger or acquisition without them! I have personally witnessed how hard it is on everyone employees, shareholders, communities, and especially executives to work through an improperly managed merger. I have known Marks and Mirvis for almost twenty-five years and the only mistake our organization made was that we did not consult them soon enough. Their new book reflects unequalled experience and intellect. Don't merge, acquire, or be acquired without it!" Michael R. Losey, CEO (emeritus), Society for Human Resources Management (SHRM) "Joining Forces is a terrific resource for managers who want to understand thehuman dynamics of mergers and acquisitions, and a must-read for those who have to lead their companies through one. It is based on the latest research and providespractical insights and advice from authors who know M&A inside out." Edward E. Lawler III, Distinguished Professor of Business, Marshall School ofBusiness, University of Southern California


The China Strategy

The China Strategy

Author: Edward Tse

Publisher: Basic Books

Published: 2010-03-23

Total Pages: 258

ISBN-13: 0465020992

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No major enterprise or financial institution can avoid doing business with China -- if not directly, then through myriad hidden connections. Global businesses either use Chinese resources or sell to and in China or compete with companies that do. Because there's no avoiding China, business leaders need a framework that orders the different (and seemingly contradictory) streams of data that hint at its future. That framework is The China Strategy. In this invaluable book, Edward Tse explains the ever-changing nature of China's business environment, its increasingly complex relationship with the rest of the world, and the global business implications -- not just for our current environment but for the next decade. Change, Tse argues, is taking place in non-linearly. Some dimensions (like Chinese entrepreneurship) are expanding exponentially, while others (like the value of China's labor arbitrage) may be reaching a plateau. Eschewing easy explanations, Tse shows how to build and execute a global business strategy in light of these changes, offering practical advice amidst a sea of simple books that offer too-quick solutions. In a world in which a successful business strategy means a successful China strategy, this book is uniquely positioned to help business leaders navigate the &"country that cannot be ignored."


Luxury Arts of the Renaissance

Luxury Arts of the Renaissance

Author: Marina Belozerskaya

Publisher: Getty Publications

Published: 2005-10-01

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 0892367857

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Today we associate the Renaissance with painting, sculpture, and architecture—the “major” arts. Yet contemporaries often held the “minor” arts—gem-studded goldwork, richly embellished armor, splendid tapestries and embroideries, music, and ephemeral multi-media spectacles—in much higher esteem. Isabella d’Este, Marchesa of Mantua, was typical of the Italian nobility: she bequeathed to her children precious stone vases mounted in gold, engraved gems, ivories, and antique bronzes and marbles; her favorite ladies-in-waiting, by contrast, received mere paintings. Renaissance patrons and observers extolled finely wrought luxury artifacts for their exquisite craftsmanship and the symbolic capital of their components; paintings and sculptures in modest materials, although discussed by some literati, were of lesser consequence. This book endeavors to return to the mainstream material long marginalized as a result of historical and ideological biases of the intervening centuries. The author analyzes how luxury arts went from being lofty markers of ascendancy and discernment in the Renaissance to being dismissed as “decorative” or “minor” arts—extravagant trinkets of the rich unworthy of the status of Art. Then, by re-examining the objects themselves and their uses in their day, she shows how sumptuous creations constructed the world and taste of Renaissance women and men.


The Essential Advantage

The Essential Advantage

Author: Paul Leinwand

Publisher: Harvard Business Press

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 1422136515

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Conventional wisdom on strategy is no longer a reliable guide. In Essential Advantage, Booz & Company's Cesare Mainardi and Paul Leinwand maintain that success in any market accrues to firms with coherence: a tight match between their strategic direction and the capabilities that make them unique. Achieving this clarity takes a sharpness of focus that only exceptional companies have mastered. This book helps you identify your firm's blend of strategic direction and distinctive capabilities that give it the "right to win" in its chosen markets. Based on extensive research and filled with company examples--including Amazon.com, Johnson & Johnson, Tata Sons, and Procter & Gamble--Essential Advantage helps you construct a coherent company in which the pieces reinforce each other instead of working at cross-purposes. The authors reveal: · Why you should focus on a system of a few aligned capabilities · How to identify the "way to play" in your market · How to design a strategy for well-modulated growth · How to align a portfolio of businesses behind your capability system · How your strategy clarifies growth, costs, and people decisions Few companies achieve a capability-driven "right to win" in their market. This book helps you position your firm to be among them.


Merge Ahead: Mastering the Five Enduring Trends of Artful M&A

Merge Ahead: Mastering the Five Enduring Trends of Artful M&A

Author: Gerald Adolph

Publisher: McGraw Hill Professional

Published: 2008-10-20

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 0071508333

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Prior to the economic downturn of 2008–2009, the number of mergers and acquisitions reached an historic high. Whatever happens next, one thing is clear: mergers, acquisitions, and growth will be more important than ever. Those who prepare their organizations for a multifaceted growth strategy—integrating acquisitions, organic growth, and alliances—will be the ones most likely to survive the difficult years and seize the opportunities in tomorrow’s restructured industries. If you’re a corporate leader—of a company large or small—there’s a merge ahead in your future. With Merge Ahead, corporate leaders and M&A professionals across the deal-making spectrum will have at their fingertips an insightful, accessible guide to the forces driving today’s deal environment and the most effective strategic and tactical responses for managing them. Merge Ahead provides key advice on managing the five major M&A trends that are shaping the corporate landscape: Creating the relevant scale and coherence a company needs for profitable growth Using deliberate speed to manage increasing velocity and stakeholder impatience Coping with increased competition as the new blue chip companies from emerging markets pursue deals globally Competing with a host of agile and deeppocketed financial buyers, including private equity and sovereign wealth funds Managing growing waves and bubbles of M&A activity that can drive valuations to unsustainable heights Merge Ahead contains the most up-to-date information available on recent mergers and trends in the world of M&A. It conveys critical information inconcise and fast-paced language, providing busy executives a hands-on resource that won’t bog them down. All signs point to M&A as one of the most useful vehicles of growth now and in the future. Let Merge Ahead be your guide through the sometimes rocky but ultimately fruitful and exciting new landscape of mergers and acquisitions.


To Life!

To Life!

Author: Linda Weintraub

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2012-09-01

Total Pages: 380

ISBN-13: 0520273613

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This title documents the burgeoning eco art movement from A to Z, presenting a panorama of artistic responses to environmental concerns, from Ant Farms anti-consumer antics in the 1970s to Marina Zurkows 2007 animation that anticipates the havoc wreaked upon the planet by global warming.


The Topkapi Scroll

The Topkapi Scroll

Author: Gülru Necipoğlu

Publisher: Getty Publications

Published: 1996-03-01

Total Pages: 414

ISBN-13: 0892363355

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Since precious few architectural drawings and no theoretical treatises on architecture remain from the premodern Islamic world, the Timurid pattern scroll in the collection of the Topkapi Palace Museum Library is an exceedingly rich and valuable source of information. In the course of her in-depth analysis of this scroll dating from the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century, Gülru Necipoğlu throws new light on the conceptualization, recording, and transmission of architectural design in the Islamic world between the tenth and sixteenth centuries. Her text has particularly far-reaching implications for recent discussions on vision, subjectivity, and the semiotics of abstract representation. She also compares the Islamic understanding of geometry with that found in medieval Western art, making this book particularly valuable for all historians and critics of architecture. The scroll, with its 114 individual geometric patterns for wall surfaces and vaulting, is reproduced entirely in color in this elegant, large-format volume. An extensive catalogue includes illustrations showing the underlying geometries (in the form of incised “dead” drawings) from which the individual patterns are generated. An essay by Mohammad al-Asad discusses the geometry of the muqarnas and demonstrates by means of CAD drawings how one of the scroll’s patterns could be used co design a three-dimensional vault.


Liquid Modernity

Liquid Modernity

Author: Zygmunt Bauman

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2013-07-10

Total Pages: 183

ISBN-13: 074565701X

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In this new book, Bauman examines how we have moved away from a 'heavy' and 'solid', hardware-focused modernity to a 'light' and 'liquid', software-based modernity. This passage, he argues, has brought profound change to all aspects of the human condition. The new remoteness and un-reachability of global systemic structure coupled with the unstructured and under-defined, fluid state of the immediate setting of life-politics and human togetherness, call for the rethinking of the concepts and cognitive frames used to narrate human individual experience and their joint history. This book is dedicated to this task. Bauman selects five of the basic concepts which have served to make sense of shared human life - emancipation, individuality, time/space, work and community - and traces their successive incarnations and changes of meaning. Liquid Modernity concludes the analysis undertaken in Bauman's two previous books Globalization: The Human Consequences and In Search of Politics. Together these volumes form a brilliant analysis of the changing conditions of social and political life by one of the most original thinkers writing today.


No Logo

No Logo

Author: Naomi Klein

Publisher: Macmillan

Published: 2000-01-15

Total Pages: 520

ISBN-13: 9780312203436

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"What corporations fear most are consumers who ask questions. Naomi Klein offers us the arguments with which to take on the superbrands." Billy Bragg from the bookjacket.


Jackson Pollock

Jackson Pollock

Author: Pepe Karmel

Publisher: The Museum of Modern Art

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 9780870700378

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Published to accompany the exhibition Jackson Pollock held the Museum of Modern Art, New York, from 1 November 1998 to 2 February 1999.