Monday, April 13, 2009

New business books at Pueblo West Library

Your call is (not that) important to us, customer service and what it reveals about our world and our lives, by Emily Yellin
If youve ever been mildly frustrated, extremely irritated or driven just plain mad by automated customer service lines, rude telephone service representatives or agents who cant speak intelligible English, this book is for you. Yellin (Our Mothers War) dives into the often dysfunctional world of customer service, exploring the multimillion-dollar industry from various points of view, interviewing exasperated consumers, displeased CEOs and infuriated customer service reps themselves. She includes transcripts of agonizing telephone exchanges, such as one where an AOL rep tries to thwart a customers cancellation of his account, blog excerpts from reps who feel abused and as if they are being treated as machines and countless stories from irritated and confused managers. While Yellins study offers more industry anecdotes than concrete solutions, readers will likely look at the industry differently and with more empathy for those who participate in it. (Mar.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Companies we keep, employee ownership and the business of community and place, by John Abrams
Abrams presents a chapter on each of the eight "cornerstone principles" of sustainable businesses, including sharing ownership, cultivating workplace democracy, and celebrating the spirit of craft. In the new edition, he expands his vision beyond his own company (with its somewhat unusual Martha's Vineyard location) to companies across the United States. His conversational style and instructive anecdotes paint a rosy picture of employee ownership, but he also cautions that a company's transition away from reliance on a single leader can take many years. The overall message is positive, emphasizing local development and "challenging the gospel of growth." Appendixes provide South Mountain's employee-ownership contract, tips and resources to support a company's transition to employee ownership, and a guide to mediation and discussion; a reading list suggests books that Abrams says "changed the way [he] think[s]."

End of the line, the rise and coming fall of the global corporation, by Barry C. Lynn
The problem with globalized outsourcing, former Global Business executive editor Lynn warns, is that "a breakdown anywhere increasingly means a breakdown everywhere," as when a 2003 earthquake in Taiwan halted semiconductor manufacturing for a week, negatively affecting American electronics firms. National security, he argues, is jeopardized by this "hyperspecialized and hyper-rigid production system" as well; for Lynn, until the NAFTA-izing Bill Clinton came along, our trade policy had been for two centuries designed to prevent such potential catastrophes. Lynn has a knack for finding attractive, easy-to-grasp models from the contemporary business scene—such as using Dell's rise in the 1990s to explain the triumph of logistics management—but readers sometimes have to wade through heavy doses of economic theory to get to the livelier sections. Though some might view his concerns as excessively alarmist, Lynn delivers a welcome new facet to the antiglobalization debate, moving well beyond the stale "corporations are evil" argument to lay out a worrying economic overview. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Ethical markets, growing the green economy, by Hazel Henderson
In this companion to the television series of the same name, economist Henderson delivers an optimistic overview of socially responsible, environmentally sensitive businesses, investors and visionaries. Keeping an eye on the "triple bottom line" that adds "people" and "planet" to the usual focus on "profits," the book divides "cleaner, greener, more ethical and more female sectors of our U.S. economy" into three areas: lifestyles of health and sustainability, socially responsible investing and corporate social responsibility. An economist with a long history of activism in "redefining success" (for example, revamping the GDP to include environmental capital and unpaid labor such as child-rearing), Henderson adeptly packs large amounts of information into chapters within her expertise. Discussion of topics that are further from her experience, such as green building and the health care system, tends to careen from problems to solutions so quickly that a reader can become confused. The interviews after each chapter, meant to show how CEOs are "walking the talk," seem to be taken unedited from the TV show, coming across as incoherent and shallow. Fortunately, the book is crammed with Web references that can offer a fuller picture to readers tantalized by this glimpse of the economic revolution thriving below the radar of mainstream media. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.