Ford Library’s calendar of hours for November – December 2009 is now available.

The Library will be open for abbreviated hours during the Thanksgiving and Winter Holiday Breaks.

Note especially that the Library will be closed from December 24, 2009 through January 3, 2010 — reopening on January 4, 2010.

View the Calendars and Library Hours.

This is the first of a four-part series and represents a joint collaboration between the Fuqua School of Business and McKinsey Quarterly.  The series will consist of forums on the following areas:  energy, the financial system, globalization and business education.

Check out some of these new titles from the Ford Library on sustainability (click on a link to place a hold or check availability). Or come browse our Sustainability display at the front of the library:

• Profession and Purpose: A Resource Guide for MBA Careers in Sustainability by Katie Kross
• Investing in a Sustainable World: Why GREEN is the New Color of Money on Wall Street by Mathew J. Kiernan
• Sustainability Strategies: When Does it Pay to be Green? by Renato J. Orsato
• Making Sustainability Work: Best Practices in Managing and Measuring Corporate Social, Environmental and Economic Impacts by Marc J. Epstein
• Sustainable Investing: The Art of Long-Term Performance edited by Cary Krosinsky and Nick Robins
• Sustainable Development Handbook by Stephen A. Roosa
• Global Warming is Good for Business: How Savvy Entrepreneurs, Large Corporations, and Others are Making Money While Saving the Planet by K. B. Keilbach
• The Gort Cloud: The Invisible Force Powering Today’s Most Visible Green Brands by Richard Seireeni

Schumpeter, Joseph A. Can capitalism survive? : creative destruction and the future of the global economy. Harper Perennial, 2009.

A role of economists is to provide economic analysis of recessions such as the current one created by the financial crisis and provide strategies for restoring economic growth and prosperity.

Leading up to the current recession, The Federal Reserve lowered interest rates to make housing more affordable, and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac developed a federal program enabling people to qualify for homes that ordinarily would not.

Subsequently, people purchased homes they could not afford and some lost their jobs due to the recession. Wall Street banks invested too heavily in risky loans rather than diversifying, accumulating toxic assets leading to tremendous losses.

Hayek goes as far to say that central banking destabilizes the economy. In the recent recession, government intervention led to inflation, over building, a housing bubble, and then economic indicators became unrealistic.

In addition to the destabilized housing market, the financial crisis had a ripple effect on travel, retail, the automobile and oil industries, and led to significant number of lost jobs.

Can Capitalism Survive? is excerpted from Joseph Schumpeter’s 1942 classic Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. This is where he proposed business cycles are caused by technological innovation, referred to as creative destruction. In Capitalist economies, markets eliminate obsolete technologies and utilize innovations to create new avenues for economic growth.

Technology can incrementally overhaul industries, for example, the news industry changing from print to web or the music industry evolving from records, eight tracks, cassettes, and CDs to iPods. The transition can also involve a radial transformation. At the turn of the twentieth century, the transportation industry employed hundreds of thousands of carriage makers and blacksmiths.

Subsequently, automobiles replaced horses and now the automobile industry is transitioning to electric cars and biofuels. During technology transitions, some individuals are worse off due to layoffs and bankruptcies.

In the free market model where economic disruptions are created by technological change, economic indicators are not necessarily predictive of how the economy is performing, rather just points in the business cycle. In this scenario, government intervention is not necessary since markets are self correcting.

Businesses that do not adapt successful business practices or employ creative people will not survive. In contrast, dominant companies such as Wal-Mart which revolutionized retailing with computerized inventory management and Microsoft which revolutionized computer software are so successful at adapting to the business environment, they can stifle innovation.

Guest reviewer Randy Mayes is a Duke Alumni, author, science writer and science policy analyst, and a Fellow at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies.

© Reviewer: Randall Mayes & Ford Library – Fuqua School of Business.
All rights reserved.

Kiernan, Matthew J. Investing in a sustainable world : why GREEN is the new color of money on Wall Street. Wiley, 2009.

Krosinsky, Cary and Nick Robins, eds. Sustainable investing : the art of long-term performance. Earthscan, 2008.

Traditionally, ethical and socially responsible investing has been driven by personal values. While this approach has been successful in some sectors in the U.S. and the U.K., the mainstream institutional marketplace has been out of reach. But now, research by Innovest Strategic Value Advisors shows that companies with superior positioning on sustainability issues achieved superior financial returns. Two new books discuss how both Wall Street and Main Street are now interested in investing in ethical, social and green companies to attain long term financial performance.

In Investing in a Sustainable World, Innovest founder and CEO Matthew J. Kiernan makes the business case for integrating environmental and social considerations into investment decisions. He presents conceptual and practical tools to help investors realize environmental, social and financial objectives at the same time. Going green is a global megatrend that will eventually lead to a wholesale transformation in investment that will improve environmental and social conditions worldwide. He also provides concrete examples of organizations that are already investing for sustainability profitably.

Sustainable Investing is a compilation of essays by leading experts in the responsible investment arena. Topics include: The rise of sustainable investing; New risks and opportunities emerging from carbon emission markets, clean energy and water; And the outlook for sustainable investing. The editors conclude that investment management will be transformed over time and sustainable investing will become the new mainstream.

© Reviewer: Meg Trauner & Ford Library – Fuqua School of Business.
All rights reserved.

From 5:00 PM EST, Friday October 16th, until 1:00 AM EST, Monday, October 19th, the Business Publication Advertising Source, and the Consumer Magazine Advertising Source will be offline and unavailable.

SRDS is upgrading and re-naming these component publications during this downtime.  Please email us if you experience any difficulty accessing other publications within the SRDS Media Solutions database.

Our Daily Bread
Reincarnation
Rosemary’s Baby
Sleep Dealer
The Thief Lord
Trick ‘r Treat
Wallace & Gromit : A Matter of Loaf and Death
X-Men Origins. Wolverine

Duke University Libraries access to text + graphics issues of the Economist Magazine via Economist.com is temporarily unavailable.

Duke users who attempt to access the Economist Magazine via Economist.com from our Economist Publications home page, and from the Library catalog are being erroneously prompted to login by Economist.com.

We have contacted EIU concerning this issue and are awaiting their response. In the meantime, the current, full text (no graphics) of The Economist Magazine is still available from our Economist Publications home page, and in the ABI-Inform Complete database.

Thanks for your patience while we work with EIU to resolve this issue.

Midler, Paul. Poorly made in China : an insider’s account of the tactics behind China’s production game. Wiley, 2009.

Paul Midler could be said to be biting the hand that feeds him. After all, he has built a lucrative career as a China-based manufacturing consultant, using his expert knowledge and insight into Chinese history, language, and culture. And yet, he has penned a work that, while frank in its admiration for many Chinese cultural idiosyncrasies, is also sharply critical of both the questionable ethical basis on which the Chinese have built their gargantuan export economy, and the impatience and greed of American businesses in rushing to embrace the perceived advantages of having their product lines manufactured in China.

In the 240 smoothly written and eminently readable pages of Poorly Made In China, Mr. Midler recounts his daily experiences in creating and managing relationships between Chinese factory owners and American importers, giving us example after example of why the Chinese, in his opinion, win at every hand dealt at the negotiating table of price and quality. Thus the importer and the U.S. consumer often have a good chance of ending up with a product that either degrades in quality over time or increases in cost without benefit to the consumer, or both.

For example, a manufacturer will agree to initial product specifications at a price the importer jumps at. The manufacturer then figures out how to unilaterally change some specifications for his own increased profit, while appearing to offer the same product. A shampoo bottle might be made of progressively thinner plastic in order to save the manufacturer on material costs. When the importer discovers a shipping container full of collapsed bottles and unsaleable product, the manufacturer says there is a production problem.

The importer demands that it be corrected. The manufacturer agrees that it should be fixed, but it is not possible at the originally agreed price point, so the price on the product goes up in order to restore the original quality. If this sounds like negotiating in bad faith, read Mr. Midler’s book to find out why, on the shores of mainland China, foreign importers have no choice but to play by Chinese rules or take their business elsewhere, and why many importers have realized that this is no choice at all.

Epilogue: Midler also points out that the Western stigma attached to the production of “counterfeit” goods does not exist on the same scale in China due to their cultural reverence for the skill of the artist / producer — even if the goods are not original creations. Midler’s point is driven home by a recent Wall Street Journal article (via ProQuest | via WSJ.com ) that describes the status of Hong Lei, creator of China’s popular “Tomato Garden” pirate edition of Windows XP.

“People regard Hong Lei as a talent, a national hero,” said Liu Fengming, vice president for Microsoft in Greater China. “This is part of the problem.”

Guest reviewer Marlys Ray is a librarian at the Institute on Aging at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.