Radu Haraga's  Instablog

There are rare cases where you see a study text on HR management linking so well the strategic theory with the day to day practice – and the accent here falls on strategic. Furthermore, the human resources management seems to be relatively neglected in the companies, although many experts argue that now, when the end of crisis is approaching, it should be more important. Not only should HR managers increase their focus on how to motivate better the battered employees, but also they should face the challenge of retaining the so much needed valuable assets – the ones who walk out of the door every day.

One more trigger for my reading “Human Resource Management” is my own experience (as I mentioned several times on the investing blog www.doitinvest.com). Book reviews should bring in something tangible for the reader – and for me it provided a link with my experience. Specifically, at certain moments of time all of us find themselves managing other people – be it our subordinates or bosses from the same company, our employees in our entrepreneurial endeavors, or other stakeholders. At the end of the day, what counts is how successful we manage all those people, so that:

-         they feel motivated, satisfied and rewarded by the working relationship with us;

-         we achieve our own objectives and get a feeling of achievement.

There are two ways you can do this:

-         you read lots of psychology and management books, then try to round up all the theories and distill what you found out or

-         you spend your money and time on a well-written book and get the most of other people’s experiences.

Well, you can guess I chose the second path. And this is what happened with my reading of the “Human Resource Management” study text.

There are countless points where this book proved valuable for my experiences. What I used several times and enjoyed the specific chapter called “Developing Employees and Their Careers”. The question of the egg or the hen is apparent here all the times – should we motivate people to get results or should we make them get results to be motivated? As you would expect, there are no definitive answers to this, but at least I could get a feeling of completeness when I started to apply various theories in various situations, with good to excellent results.

Another feature of the book that I liked was “Research made easy”: Throughout “Human Resource Management” the authors highlight in the How Do We Know section recently published research from scholarly journal in non-technical language. Each of the sections concludes with a "Bottom Line" summary that shows how the findings of the study contribute to our understanding of effective human resource management. This also allows you to pursue your own further research.

All in all, a nice study book on the neglected field of the HR management.

This book is published by the Wiley Publishing House under the human resources collection.

I was always fascinated by the multinational enterprises (MNE’s as they call them in the majority of the textbooks). This not only because their reach tends to be global , but also because they seem to dominate so dramatically the 21^st century business arena. If you think how big are these behemoths (the ones with the largest market capitalizations are several times higher than the mid-tier nations in terms of GDP), then the reason becomes also more obvious. At last but not at least, the global presence of the multinational companies means that they are an indispensable part of any investment manager’s portfolio.

 “Transnational Management” is structured rather as a study text for the MBA students. It does not neglect the study cases – in fact there are a myriad of those and the book is enjoyable especially because of their abundance. “Transnational Management” also insists on why the MNE’s are so successful – and you will be hardly surprised to find out that they practice very well the knowledge transfer. Interesting is how they do this transfer from one national or regional market to another, and here comes in the role of the book.

 This MNE book tries to offer a complete overview on the cross-borders operations of the modern multinational companies – and its advantage comes from the rather conceptual approach than from the specific lessons the student can draw from the study cases. “Transnational Management” focuses on the management challenges that MNE’s face globally – an even more important aspect given the rapid landscape change generated the emerging BRIC global companies and by the global crisis. The book focuses on the triple relationship between:

-         the multinational corporation itself;

-         the countries where it does business and

-         the competitive environment where MNE’s operate.

It is a good approach, since usually investment analysts and managers tend to focus only on one aspect of the three, neglecting the others. For example, some MNE’s are so obsessed with their competition, that it is practically impossible for them to tailor products or services for the markets they operate in to a large extent. This can lead to major losses of competitive advantages in those local environments.

 As a small aspect, the book could have been color printed, to the benefit of its marketing part mostly, since the brands of the MNE’s illustrated there are well known and easily recognizable. Anyway, this is a small drawback compared to the benefits of the book.

 At last but not at least, a table of contents:

 Part 1 The Strategic Imperatives
Chapter 1 Expanding Abroad: Motivations, Means, and Mentalities
Case 1-1 Lincoln Electric
Case 1-2 Jollibee Foods Corporation (A): International Expansion
Case 1-3 Acer, Inc.: Taiwan's Rampaging Dragon
Case 1-4 Research in Motion: Managing Explosive Growth
Reading 1-1 The Tortuous Evolution of the Multinational Corporation
Reading 1-2 Distance Still Matters: The Hard Reality of Global Expansion
Reading 1-3 When You Shouldn't Go Global
Chapter 2 Understanding the International Context: Responding to Conflicting Environmental Forces
Case 2-1 Global Wine Wars 2009: New World versus Old
Case 2-2 The Globalization of CEMEX
Case 2-3 Mattel and the Toy Recalls (A)
Reading 2-1 Culture and Organization
Reading 2-2 Clusters and the New Economics of Competition
Chapter 3 Developing Transnational Strategies: Building Layers of Competitive Advantage
Case 3-1 Marketing the "$100 Laptop" (A)
Case 3-2 Global Branding of Stella Artois
Case 3-3 GE's Imagination Breakthrough: The Evo Project
Reading 3-1 Managing Differences: The Central Challenge of Global Strategy
Reading 3-2 How Local Companies Keep Multinationals at Bay
Reading 3-3 Regional Strategies for Global Leadership
Part 2: The Organizational Challenge
Chapter 4 Developing a Transnational Organization: Managing Integration, Responsiveness, and Flexibility
Case 4-1 Philips versus Matsushita: Competing Strategic and Organizational Choices
Case 4-2 ECCO A/S - Global Value Chain Management
Case 4-3 World Vision International's AIDS Initiative: Challenging a Global Partnership
Reading 4-1 Managing Multicultural Teams
Reading 4-2 Managing Executive Attention in the Global Company
Reading 4-3 Matrix Management: Not a Structure, a Frame of Mind
Chapter 5 Creating Worldwide Innovation and Learning: Exploiting Cross Border Knowledge Management
Case 5-1 Siemens AG: Global Development Strategy
Case 5-2 P&G Japan: The SK-II Globalization Project
Case 5-3 McKinsey & Company: Managing Knowledge and Learning
Reading 5-1 Building Effective R&D Capabilities Abroad
Reading 5-2 Connect and Develop: Inside Procter & Gamble's New Model for Innovation
Reading 5-3 Finding, Forming, and Performing: Creating Networks for Discontinuous Innovation
Chapter 6 Engaging in Cross-Border Collaboration: Managing across Corporate Boundaries
Case 6-1 Nora-Sakari: A Proposed JV in Malaysia (Revised)
Case 6-2 Mahindra and Mahindra Ltd.--Farm Equipment Sector: Acquisition of Jiangling Tractor Company
Case 6-3 Eli Lilly in India: Rethinking the Joint Venture Strategy
Reading 6-1 The Design and Management of International Joint Ventures
Reading 6-2 Collaborate with Your Competitors - and Win
Part 3: The Managerial Implications
Chapter 7 Implementing the Strategy: Building Multidimensional Capabilities
Case 7-1 ING Insurance in Asia/Pacific
Case 7-2 BRL Hardy: Globalizing an Australian Wine Company
Case 7-3 Silvio Napoli at Schindler India (A)
Reading 7-1 Local Memoirs of a Global Manager
Reading 7-2 Tap Your Subsidiaries for Global Reach
Chapter 8 The Future of the Transnational: An Evolving Global Role
Case 8-1 Hitting the Wall: Nike and International Labor Practices
Case 8-2 IKEA's Global Sourcing Challenge: Indian Rugs and Child Labor(A)
Case 8-3 Killer Coke: Campaign Against Coca-Cola
Case 8-4 Genzyme's CSR Dilemma: How to Play its HAND
Reading 8-1 Values in Tension: Ethics Away From Home
Reading 8-2 Serving the World's Poor, Profitably

Since quite a while I was looking more and more to something different outside the traditional investments. I played with derivatives based on shares, forex, indices. Yet, recently another area attracted my attention.

Yes, the periodically forgotten and rediscovered treasures of the commodities. They tend to be in fashion and then exit, then enter again into people’s favours. I decided that persistence is the key to success, therefore I started to look more into commodities.

In order to trade them properly, you need to look at your favorite ones and know them well. Since I like coffee, I started with it. Thus my curiosity on this book... which has been handsomely rewarded.

“Coffee: Growing, Processing, Sustainable Production: A Guidebook for Growers, Processors, Traders, and Researchers” is not a book about the coffee – is a mammoth of almost 1,000 pages. And this with good reasons – after wheat and sugar, coffee is the most traded commodity on Earth. No wonder that a lot of research has been dedicated to it.

“Coffee: Growing, Processing, Sustainable Production: A Guidebook for Growers, Processors, Traders, and Researchers” is not a collection of articles, as one would look at it in the beginning. It is rather a coffee encyclopedia – full of concepts and illustrations.

What I liked the most was the logical usage of the presentation style. The book startes from cultivating coffee and goes through all the steps require to put the magic liquid into your mug:

Part I: Growing
The Coffee Plant
Botany, Genetics and Genomics of Coffee
Coffee Selection and Breeding
Coffee Propagation
Biotechnologies Applied to Coffee
Environmental Factors Suitable for Coffee Cultivation
Establishing a Coffee Plantation
Crop Maintenance
Vermicomposting in Coffee Cultivation
Organic Coffee
Frost in Coffee Crops: Frost Characteristics, Damaging Effects on Coffee and Alleviation Options
Importance of Organic Matter and Biological Fertility in Coffee Soils
Sustainable Coffee Production
Shade Management and its Effect on Coffee Growth and Quality
Part II: Pests & Diseases
Coffee Pests in Africa
Major Pests of Coffee in the Asia-Pacific Region
Nematodes in Coffee
Coffee Diseases
Viral Diseases in Coffee
Resistance to Coffee Leaf Rust and Coffee Berry Disease
Spraying Equipment for Coffee
Quarantine for Coffee
Part III: Harvesting & Processing
Yield Estimation and Harvest Period
Harvesting and Green Coffee Processing
Ecological Processing of Coffee and Use of Byproducts
Part IV: Storage, Shipment, Quality
Green Coffee Storage
Shipment of Green Coffee
Green Coffee Defects
Factors Influencing the Quality of Green Coffee
Coffee Bean Quality Assessment
Part V: Economics
Economic Aspects of Coffee Production
Technology Transfer
Part VI: Data & Information
Units and Conversion Tables
Information Sources
Data on Coffee
Acronyms and Terms used in Coffee Production

Now, the book is quite exhaustive. I must admit I started with the purpose of reading the whole book. Well, this proved quite a time consuming task, so I rather focused on the economics of the coffee crops. And this is how I found lots of things about this commodity  - areas of cultivation, seasonality, major producers, even the diseases affecting the coffee. If you think about it, it is good not to be so ignorant when a magazine talks about an outbreak of Wilt’s disease in Congo, especially when you are trading coffee.

These being said, I think that – “Coffee: Growing, Processing, Sustainable Production: A Guidebook for Growers, Processors, Traders, and Researchers” is one of the most comprehensive books ever written on the topic – and pretty compulsory if you want to be considered an insider into this trade. Enjoy!

Book published by the Wiley Publishing House (wiley.com)