Showing posts with label analytics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label analytics. Show all posts

E-Business and E-Commerce Management: Strategy, Implementation and Practice Review

E-Business and E-Commerce Management: Strategy, Implementation and Practice
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I really impressed by this book as it cover the most basics any e-business entrepreneur has to learn.
It's informative, interactive, and updated with the latest statistics and real world cases.

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Undergraduate degrees in e-commerce, e-business or Internet/digital marketing; postgraduate masters degree in e-commerce, e-business or Internet/digital marketing; MBAs with an e-business option; 2nd and 3rd year undergraduate students on generic degrees in Business Studies/ Administration or Marketing. This book contains a comprehensive global, accessible coverage of e-business and e-commerce topics using a student centred learning approach. The text synthesizes the developing practice of applying digital technologies with the emerging academic knowledge to integrate models, concepts and theories with practice. Most importantly it takes a European stance in terms of practice, cases and approach to learning.

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The Lords of Strategy: The Secret Intellectual History of the New Corporate World Review

The Lords of Strategy: The Secret Intellectual History of the New Corporate World
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The debate over the value of high-level strategic consultants and academics has waged for decades. I was one such consultant for the better part of ten years who often spent the first part of any conversation defending my profession (I have since moved to advertising and now defend that profession). Kiechel covers the rise of strategy consulting firms--BCG, McKinsey, and Bain--and notable business school professors who contributed to the strategy revolution. His background provides the credibility to do so, he was a former Managing Editor at Fortune magazine and was the Editorial Director of Harvard Business Publishing from 1998 to 2002.
He sees the best strategists as objective intellectuals who see patterns of evidence and put them through conceptual frameworks to produce pragmatic insights. This largely began in the sixties and seventies when strategy began to be systematized and integrated. Cost, customer and competitors were the three primary areas strategists looked for patterns to exploit. In the nineties, the practices were more fad-like including reengineering and total quality management. This was the era I practiced in and I felt like the lone voice extolling the virtue of a simple but robust strategic planning process. I jumped for joy when in June, 1997, BusinessWeek had on their cover, The Return of Strategic Planning: Once More With Feeling. Which was the pivot point for Taylorism-like monitoring and measurement processes becoming more humanistic and holistic in their design.
The author tells some great industry stories but what struck me is just how important the role of strategy and management consultants is to business. The influence that such a small number of people and firms have had on modern business is truly staggering. This is where the subtitle of the book comes from: The Secret Intellectual History of the New Corporate World. Just a handful of models and frameworks devised by a small number of minds have been used by countless businesses to generate their strategies - this is what is so amazing.
From my experience, the best strategists retain a child-like wonder and a natural intellectual curiosity that is backed by analytic rigor - an incredibly hard combination of skills to possess in one person. I suggest this book only if you are interested in the history it covers and/or are a follower of the strategist value debate. In other words, this is not a strategy how-to book. Other books in this area I have read are The Management Myth, The McKinsey Mind, Rip-Off!, House of Lies, and Consulting Demons - so you may want to check them out too.

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Secrets of Question Based Selling: How the Most Powerful Tool in Business Can Double Your Sales Results Review

Secrets of Question Based Selling: How the Most Powerful Tool in Business Can Double Your Sales Results
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This is perhaps the best all-around sales book I have ever read. While other books point out much needed information, or say the same thing with a different perspective that is sometimes necessary to understand a point, this book should be THE starting point for any sales professional. This book has helped me greatly in my success as a sale professional. It is a sales book, a persuasion book, and a psychology book all rolled into one. Everyone seems to try to start people off with "You Can't Teach a Kid to Ride a Bike at a Seminar" by Sandler, but this book is everything that book is and then some.
Where are the differences? Other books take an elementary strategy to the sales process. First you prospect, then you get the appointment, then you interview the customer, then you give your presentation, then you handle objections, then you close, close, close! I have even heard one person ask what the point of "step 1" is....and his answer was to get to "step 2". while this is somewhat useful to understand, it doesn't help you DO it, it doesn't tell you what to do and how to do it, and it's little more than an outline.
Secrets of Questions Based Selling gets down to the nitty-gritty. He brings things to the table that you may never think about if you don't read this book. He talks about how people interact, how they need to ad value, how they mismatch, how different types of questions serve different purposes- some are solely for the benefit of the person doing the questioning and ad no value to the person answering (i.e.- What CRM product are you currently using in your company?), while others provide more value to the customer (How many customers do you think you are losing because you do not have voicemail and people are hanging up?), etc.
I have read A LOT of books on sales, and I keep finding pieces of this book in all of the other works. High Trust Selling, Sandler's work, Selling with NLP, SPIN selling, etc. They may build on things differently, but this book IS the foundation.
So, as yourself these questions:
1. Am I EVER going to read a sales book? (If so, this should be the first one)
2. Have I been reading sales books, but haven't read this one yet? (If so, this should be the next one you read)
3. Have I been reading sales books, but haven't quite found a useful one yet? (See #2, and this will be a useful book- if you learn it)
Overall, this is a GREAT book that provides a GREAT foundation to your sales knowledge. However, always keep in mind that you have to use what you learn (which means you have to LEARN it first), and that you can't hit a baseball by reading a book. Use the books to learn the mechanics, but then get up and swing the bat a few times, and then get out and hit the ball!

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Time-Driven Activity-Based Costing: A Simpler and More Powerful Path to Higher Profits Review

Time-Driven Activity-Based Costing: A Simpler and More Powerful Path to Higher Profits
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Activity-based costing was introduced in the 1980s to correct the inaccurate allocation of overhead from standard cost systems, but activity-based costing systems were expensive to build, complex to sustain, and difficult to modify, according to Robert Kaplan and Steven Anderson in this book. According to the authors, Time-Driven Activity-Based Costing is simpler, cheaper and more powerful.
The authors' costing model assigns resource costs directly to resource objects. Firstly, a capacity cost rate is calculated for each department or process, being the total cost of the resources used by the department or process divided by the time available from the employees conducting the work. Secondly, an estimate is made of the demand for resource capacity that each cost object requires. This makes it very easy to see how much it costs to serve a particular customer, or how much excess capacity there is in a department.
The value to a business in implementing a system of the type advocated by the authors will depend on the extent to which the activities of the business consist of standard processes and the extent of benefits gained from knowing the cost of serving individual customers. The system might be better suited to a manufacturing firm, in which the time taken for each process can be estimated accurately, than to a law firm, where the mysterious activities engaged in by attorneys might defy rational measurement.
In my opinion the main value of the book is in the first few chapters where the principles of the system are explained. The last half of the book contains a number of case studies which are likely to be of interest only to those who have businesses similar to one or more of those described in the case studies.


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