Posted on 08/12/2007 5:36:39 PM PDT by JerseyHighlander
As the New York Times recently highlighted, a business student (or CEO’s) best friend is a well-constructed library. The following are the books that I highly recommend to any current, aspiring, or “damn, why did I go to law school!” MBA student. Certain titles may be a bit ‘atypical’ at first glance; indeed they are anything but.
[Note: each title links to the listing on Amazon.com]
WSJ Guide to Understanding Money & Investing
Tufte on Envisioning Information
Handbook of Alternative Investments
Apologies to my boys Cramer, Friedman and Welch. You’ll be in round two.
Popularity: 1% [?]
Over the years FR has had fantastic thread conversations about great books of various types, i.e.
100 most influential books of all time http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1179639/posts
Military History and Strategy Reading List http://www.FreeRepublic.com/forum/a3b6dc7786a95.htm
The Fifty BEST Books of the Century (What Was Your Favorite?) http://www.FreeRepublic.com/forum/a3b6490d83502.htm
I thought this might join this list of good threads.
Why do the makers of these lists always have to include one oddball pick to show they're trying to be different?
Silly book, unless you're one of those "adults" who reads kids' books but hasn't gotten around to the classics.
I would suggest a good library of exposes of business fraud. Equity Funding, Homestake Oil, Penn Square Bank, Dreyfuss Securities, Enron, Worldcom.
I don’t see anything here form Ludwig Von Mises. An incomplete list to put it kindly. Atlas Shrugged is not so much a primer on Economics as a warning of what will occur if we ignore history.
Voted comic book of the year by all the leftest of Venezuela
Wealth of Nations?
Winning Through Intimidation?
The single most under-appreciated economic text in recent history. A transcendant work.
He observed, learned wrote about and applied his knowledge in a stellar career which culminated in his promotion to CEO of New Jersey Bel!!!!
On retirement he was accepted to the faculty of Harvard Business School where he taught the lessons that he had compiled in his work and book. He defined the the terms "efficient" and "effective" which were key to his thesis. His students produced case studies which became the foundation of modern Organization Behavior and Administration!,(OB&A). When I received my MBA from SMU, (Dean's List BTW), I had the good fortune to have a professor who had studied at Prof Barnard's knee.
I attended SMU in '78 and the "One Minute Manager" was riding high as well. Considering some of the "mess" that I've seen in the workforce today, both these books would be worth the read.
At my graduation Stanley Marcus, (of Nieman and Marcus fame) was our keynote speaker. For many years, until his death he published a weekly column which peated and repeated his core management belief.
The Customer ALWAYS comes first
Excellent! I’ve been looking forward to wading into some of this recently.... :)
Any of Warren Bennis’ books on leadership.
Not to sure, when I got my MBA, one of our requirements was to take a semi-ethics class, and study some of the fraud and unethical cases of years past (including enron and woldcom).
At the end of it, the professor was asking us what we learned, I (jokingly) noted I had now learned several various ways to commit money laundering, embezzlement, fraud, how to cover up bribary, and various ways to commit unethical, if not outright illegal acts, and by not making the same mistakes as others, not get caught.
I was kidding, but the good old prof, actually said it was concerning him, that he hadn't realized, he could be making a better criminal for tomorrow.
One of the interesting things about these companies is that very few people start with the idea of fraud. It is always an exciting new way of doing things, a new paradigm. Whether it’s fraud or pie in the sky, the failure to ask common sense questions at the outset and intermediate stages is what leads to full-blown disaster.
And if an article I read a few years ago was true...you could tell
your old prof that forensics investigators now commonly find putative
murder scenes strongly smelling of chlorine bleach (to destroy
trace DNA, etc).
Of course, this trend has really taken off with CSI, CSI-Miami,
CSI-New York, etc, etc, ad nauseum.
I found another one this week at Powell’s in Portland....(I’m an MBA, btw).....it’s title is “The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t” by Robert I. Sutton.
Hah, that one sounds good,
I’ve got downtime while commuting now, need some good reads, so I started this thread hoping I could find something.
I read through every trade magazine I had in the office, so I had to reach out for suggestions.
My experience, is that whenever a new law is passed, that becomes the first questions asked.
I.E. how can we exploit this?
My joking scared the hell out of the teacher, but it was funny, because it has real world apps.
I think I know what your talking about, in one of our classes, we took a variety of tests, I got identified as a psychopath (apparently following Milton Friedman makes you sound mad, as in his quote about obligations to shareholders).
He said a number of companies had approached him to see if they could use his methodology in screening executive candidates.
The teacher I had for this class, actually did side consulting work, not a good idea, his version of mentally ill was basically anyone who used financial incentives over altrustic ones, which made his opinions subjective and probably hurt his clients.
He said he was still hesistating to do that... for fear the tests would be used to find high-achiever sociopaths for CEO slots.
He is right on that, a good CEO should follow his shareholder obligations, but these consultants, would argue that they should follow employee (i.e. union) interests first, (and going against that made you look crazy according to him) which my old teach thought was a sign of being a psychopath (he also cited some left wing documentary to back him up).
My biggest gripe with him, was that he could not seperate his own beliefs and altrusim from finanical incentives (or greed) and thought anyone who disagreed with him was nuts.....FWIW, making money and helping the company could be labled as signs of being mentally ill, while doing things that put the company out of business and destroying the company would be signs of being sane.
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