Showing posts with label mba. Show all posts
Showing posts with label mba. Show all posts

The Leadership Challenge, 3rd Edition Review

The Leadership Challenge, 3rd Edition
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The Leadership Challenge, 3rd Edition Review
This book has been around in various editions for almost twenty years now. One reason for that is that it is an excellent overview of leadership in organizations and how you can do it yourself.
The book's structure follows its basic recommendations. The authors recommend five fundamental practices, each of which has two commandments, for a total of ten. In general, these are both straightforward and insightful. "Challenge the Process" talks about searching for opportunities, experimenting, and taking risks. "Modeling the Way" talks about setting the example and planning small wins. There is also material on "Enabling Others to Act."
Then there are a couple of weaker sections. Sections on inspiring and encouraging simply are too fluffy and lack the support that is given to other points.
Even having said that, this is a book that's worth reading if you are responsible for leadership in an organization of any size. The reason is the way the book came together.
The authors used two different kinds of research to develop their recommendations. They looked at over five hundred leaders, but they looked at them in a particular way.
In each case, they had asked the leader to talk about his or her actions as a leader when they were doing excellent work. In other words, they looked for excellent examples of leadership and tried to draw lessons from them.
They also went to the other side and talked to followers about what they wanted in leaders. When they put those two kinds of research together, you get recommendations that are both practical and, for the most part, behavioral.
Warren Bennis' recent book, Geeks and Geezers, is an excellent companion for this book. In that book, Bennis talks about crucibles of leadership or experiences, which provide intense stress and learning of leadership that form leadership values.
On the plus side this is good, practical, behavioral and helpful if you're responsible for a group of any kind or size. On the downside, some of the language can be fuzzy and simplistic, and some of the concepts, like "Encourage the Heart" sounds just a tad too New Age for my taste.
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Marketing Management (13th Edition) Review

Marketing Management (13th Edition)
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Marketing Management (13th Edition) ReviewThis book tries to cram too much into each chapter, often breezing over incredibly deep topics in a way that is only confusing.
For instance, one chapter on data analysis mentions linear regression but doesn't speak at all to what it is. If I had not taking a Quant course recently I would have been completely lost.
This seems to happen the most frequently at the ends of chapters. It seems as if they cover all the main points and then Kotler et. al try to cram all their other little notes and tidbits into overly dense paragraphs just before concluding.
Also if you're a student who has to take the accompanying tests created by Prentiss Hall, expect the questions to come literally word for word from the test, rather than asking concept questions. I felt like I was back in gradeschool.
On the plus side, the book constantly gives breakout examples of the topic being discussed as applied in real life to actual businesses. Where many texts would continually reference the same handful of examples, the companies featured in this book vary widely in size, industry, and other features, giving a good, broad look at marketing as a whole, not just in the US but globally.Marketing Management (13th Edition) Overview

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Kellogg on Branding: The Marketing Faculty of The Kellogg School of Management Review

Kellogg on Branding: The Marketing Faculty of The Kellogg School of Management
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Kellogg on Branding: The Marketing Faculty of The Kellogg School of Management Review
The last time I checked, Amazon and its online partner Borders sell more than 8,000 different books on the general subject of brands and brand management. Presumably this number will continue to increase as organizations become more actively involved with marketing initiatives which effectively leverage one or more brands.
What we have here is one of the volumes which comprise a series produced by faculty members at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. It was edited by Alice M. Tybout and Tim Calkins who co-authored the Preface; Philip Kotler provides the Foreword and Calkins the Introduction.
I feel obligated to suggest at the outset that none of the volumes in this series is an "easy read." On the contrary, each requires but will generously reward a careful consideration of its contents which, in this volume, are carefully organized within four Sections:
I (Chapters 1-3) Key Branding Concepts
II (Chapters 4-6) Strategies for Building and Leveraging Brands
III (Chapters 7-13) From Strategy to Implementation
IV (Chapters 14-20) Branding Insights from Senior Managers
There are five themes which are rigorously examined through the narrative: brand positioning, brand design, brand meaning, leveraging a brand, creating a brand-driven organization, and then three chapters are devoted to issues on measurement. I especially appreciate the provision of various frameworks, check-lists (e.g. the five-step process for designing a brand on page 38), "Figures" (e.g Whirlpool's Touch Point Wheel" on page 230), and other tools to assist the reader with clarifying her or his thoughts about branding in terms the specific needs and interests of his or her organization.
Although taken out of context, the following three excerpts are representative of the high quality of thinking and writing throughout this book:
"The word brand has a tripartite etymology. One emphasis clusters around burning, with connotations both of fiery consummation and of banking the hearth. A second emphasis clusters around marking, with connotations of ownership and indelibility, as well as paradoxical allusions to intrinsic essence, whether or merit or stigma. A third emphasis clusters around the delivery of, or deliverance from, danger (stoke, anneal, cauterize; conflagration, possession, aggression). The brand embodies the transformative heat of passion, properly tended. It is bestowed and it is earned. The brand bespeaks the forging of a family." John F. Sherry, Jr. on "Brand Meaning," page 41.
"There are several sources of pioneering advantage. All are derived from the pioneer's unique role in creating the category, in defining the dimensions on which brands compete, and in influencing the importance buyers attach to perceived differences. Simply put, the pioneer plays a unique role... It is perceived different from others, and that perception is valuable in several ways....A pioneer can become the standard against which later entrants are judged simply by establishing the category and being viewed as the near-ideal product. This strong association with the product category means that virtually all other products in the category are now judged by the established standard. Standards in markets take at least two forms -- psychological standards and technological standards." Gregory S. Carpenter and Kent Nakamoto on "Competitive Strategies," pages 75 and 77.

"The differences between technology markets and CPG [consumer packaged goods] markets from a branding standpoint can be categorized into differences related to the market, differences related to products, differences related to customer behavior, and differences related to channels and ecosystems. I use this categorization scheme to discuss the challenges and principles of branding in technology markets. Figure 11.1 [pages 204 and 205] summarizes the key contextual dimensions that form the basis of contrasting brands in technology markets with branding in CPG markets." Mohanbir Sawhney on "Branding in Technology Markets," pages 202 and 203.
This book will be of greatest value to those senior-level executives who need to know their customers better and how to get closer to them, who need expert counsel on how to differentiate what they offer and then with formulating appropriate branding strategies which position their offering, not only as relevant to the given target market but indeed superior in value to whatever is offered by competitors.
Those who share my high regard for this volume are urged to check out Kellogg on Marketing edited by Dawn Iacobucci and Kellogg on Integrated Marketing co-edited by David Dranove and Sonia Marciano. I also recommend Harvard Business Review on Brand Management, Alina Wheeler's Designing Brand Identity, William J. McEwen's Married to the Brand, Marty Neumeir's The Brand Gap, Martin Lindstrom's Brand Sense, David A. Aaker's Building Strong Brands as well as Brand Portfolio Strategy, Bill Schley and Carl Nichols Jr.'s Why Johnny Can't Brand, Scott Bedbury and Stephen Fenichell's A New Brand World, Kevin Lane Keller's Strategic Brand Management (Second Edition), Alex Wipperfurth's Brand Hijack, and Douglas B. Holt's How Brands Become Icons.
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