Ford Library Blog

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.

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The end of the Bernie Madoff story has yet to be written, but books are already rolling off the presses, including five books in the month of August alone.

Here is a list of titles just purchased by the Ford Library last week.

• Betrayal: The life and lies of Bernie Madoff
  by Andrew Kirtzman
  Written like a novel, this book is the most readable of the lot, and gives readers an inside look at Madoff, his family and the investors.
• Too Good to be True: The rise and fall of Bernie Madoff
  by Erin Arvedlund
  A well researched book by an investigative journalist, who first warned investors about Madoff in Barrons in 2001, providing the clear explanations about how hedge funds and Madoff’s scam worked.
• Madoff with the Money
  by Jerry Oppenheimer
  A portrait of Madoff as a flawed man, as revealed through anecdotes from his family, friends and business associates.
• Catastrophe: The story of Bernard L. Madoff, the man who swindled the world
  by Deborah and Gerald Strober
  One of the first books about Madoff,  published by two historians in March 2009, is a chronicle of the weeks immediately before and after Madoff’s arrest.
• Bernard Madoff: Masterminding a billion dollar fraud
  by Filiquarian Publishing, LLC
  A summary of news articles about the Madoff scandal.

Tip: If any of these books are currently checked out, you can recall them by clicking the “Get this Title” text in the catalog record when you follow the links above. More about recalls …

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

Jarvis, Jeff. What would Google do?. Collins Business, 2009.

Media leader and founder of Entertainment Weekly, Jeff Jarvis, describes Google as the first post-media company. He analyzes company principles and shows how companies, organizations and people can use Google’s worldview to re-engineer their own strategy and behavior.

In business, the mass market is gone. Today’s economy is a mass of niches. Google goes to where the customers are, instead of requiring the customers to come to Google. As a network and platform, Google organizes and distributes content to an enormous market and payment is made by people and companies who want to reach that market.

For example, in the old economy, the media covered the cost of publications by charging readers and viewers. In the new economy, the publications are free — media charge advertisers for reaching the customers.

Author Jeff Jarvis recommends that every human being needs a search presence on Google. “Today, if you can’t be found in Google, you might as well not exist.” Exaggeration and hyperbole are abundant in this book. Yet the underlying ideas ring true and the conversational style makes this book an interesting read.

This title is also available in audiobook format in Ford Library.

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

MIT Sloan is now offering free case studies through their new web site called MIT Sloan Teaching Innovation Resources. The case studies cover the following management areas: industry evolution, sustainability, and global entrepreneurship.