Books : Top Stories: News: Stanford GSB

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Books

The Red Queen Among Organizations: How Competitiveness Evolves

by William P. Barnett.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008

Organizations that don’t keep changing eventually become punished for being really good at what used to be rewarded, according to Professor William Barnett. Like the Red Queen of Alice in Wonderland, businesses have to move fast to keep even with the competition.

Barnett looks at two of the most competitive industries-computer manufacturing and commercial banking and concludes organizations that survive competition become stronger competitors-but only in the market contexts in which they succeed. He finds that an organization's competitiveness at any given moment hinges on the organization's historical experience. Through Red Queen competition, weaker competitors fail, or they learn and adapt. This in turn heightens the intensity of competition and further strengthens survivors in an ever-evolving dynamic.
2006 presentation on the Red Queen
Video File, 1:03 hour 2006 Presentation by Barnett

Innovation in Medical Technology: Ethical Issues and Challenges

Margaret Eaton, Lecturer in Management
Johns' Hopkins University Press, 2007

The book examines the ethical, legal, and social problems that arise with cutting-edge medical technology. Using as examples four powerful and largely unregulated technologies-off-label use of drugs, innovative surgery, assisted reproduction, and neuroimaging-Margaret L. Eaton and Donald Kennedy illustrate the difficult challenges faced by clinicians, researchers, and policy makers who seek to advance the frontiers of medicine safely and responsibly. This work's insights into the nature and consequences of medical innovation contribute to the national debate on how best to protect patients while fostering innovation and securing benefits.

Intro version (5:28 min.) - A short introduction, intended largely for a medical audience.
Full version (18:34 min.) - This version, including the Intro version, is intended for both medical and business audiences.

Making IT: the Rise of Asia in High Tech
Henry S. Rowen, Marguerite Gong Hancock, William F. Miller, eds,; Stanford Project on Regions of Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Stanford University Press, 2007.
In 2003, consumption of information technology goods worldwide was $1.5 trillion, with Asia representing 20 percent of the total. Even more telling, Asia produced about 40 percent of these goods. The increasing role for Asia in the markets and manufacturing of IT, along with Asian innovation, will pose a challenge to traditional centers, notably Silicon Valley. The book analyzes policies and the results of this trend on nations and centers such as Silicon Valley.

Logics of Organization Theory: Audiences, Codes, and Ecologies
by Michael T. Hannan, László Pólos, and Glenn R. Carroll, Princeton University Press
Three leading authorities rethink organization theory , advancing organizational theory, and it also drawing lessons for theory building elsewhere in the social sciences. Organizational research typically analyzes organizations in categories such as "bank," "hospital," or "university." These categories have been treated as crisp analytical constructs designed by researchers. But sociologists increasingly view categories as constructed by audiences. This book builds on cognitive psychology and anthropology to develop an audience-based theory of organizational categories. It applies this framework and the new language of theory building to organizational ecology. It reconstructs and integrates four central theory fragments, and in so doing reveals unexpected connections and new insights.

What Were They Thinking? Unconventional Wisdom About Management
Jeffrey Pfeffer, Harvard Business School Press Books; 2007
Every day companies and their leaders fail to capitalize on opportunities because they misunderstand the real sources of business success. Jeffrey Pfeffer challenges conventional wisdom while providing data and insights to help companies make smarter decisions. The book contains a series of short chapters, each provides guidelines about how to think more deeply and intelligently about critical management issues. Topics range from managing people to leadership to measurement and strategy.

Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise: Five Steps to a Better Health Care System
R. Glenn Hubbard, John Cogan, and Daniel Kessler, American Enterprise Institute Press, 2005
The authors present their prescription for healing the U.S. healthcare system. Their proposal emphasizing private market competition includes: tax, insurance, and malpractice reform; an upgrade of health information; and greater competition by providers and insurers. Appendices offer estimates of the cost-saving financial impact of these reform policies. The book discusses how several problems including glaring gaps in the quality and efficiency of care, high rates of uninsurance, and out-of-control cost, can be resolved by empowering patients.
Video File, 58:16 minutes

Globalization and Labor Conditions: Working Conditions and Worker Rights in a Global Economy
Robert J. Flanagan, Oxford University Press, 2006
Labor economist Robert Flanagan discusses how immigration affects wages globally, a subject in his new book on globalization and working conditions. His new book explains the effects of three key mechanisms of globalization international trade, international migration, and the activities of multinational companies on working conditions and labor rights around the world.

Q and A with the author

Making Innovation Work: How to Manage It, Measure It, and Profit from It
Tony Davila, Marc Epstein and Robert Shelton
Wharton School Publishing, September 15, 2005
Innovation is an imperative for growing a business. Yet there are no secret formulas for innovation; it is about good management. The authors present a framework that allows management to harness the power of both business model innovation and technology innovation to create a dominant competitive advantage and profitability. They show how innovation is a management process that requires specific tools, rules and discipline. They describe how standard management tools such as strategy, organizational design and structure, management systems, performance evaluation, people, and rewards can increase the payoffs from innovation investments.

Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die
Chip Heath and Dan Heath, Random House, 2007
Mark Twain once observed, “A lie can get halfway around the world before the truth can even get its boots on.” His observation rings true: Urban legends, conspiracy theories, and bogus public-health scares circulate effortlessly. Meanwhile, people with important ideas–business people, teachers, politicians, journalists, and others–struggle to make their ideas “stick.” Authors Chip and Dan Heath reveal the anatomy of ideas that stick and explain ways to make ideas stickier, such as applying the “human scale principle,” using the “Velcro Theory of Memory,” and creating “curiosity gaps.”

Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't
Jim Collins, MBA '83, HarperCollins Publishers, 2001
How can good companies, mediocre companies, even bad companies achieve enduring greatness? Using tough benchmarks, Jim Collins, co-author of the business classic Built to Last, and his research team identified a set of elite companies that made the leap to great results and sustained those results for at least 15 years. Over five years, the team analyzed the histories of all 28 companies in the study. Collins and his crew sifted through mountains of data and thousands of pages of interviews to discover the key determinants of greatness—why some companies make the leap and others don't.

Good to Great and The Social Sectors
Jim Collins, HarperCollins Publishers, 2005
A monograph to accompany Good to Great.

Building Supply Chain Excellence in Emerging Economies, International Series in Operations Research & Management Science, 2006
Editors Hau Lee, Chung-Yee Lee Hau L. Lee, Chung-Yee Lee, Springer, 2006
The rapidly developing new economies in China, India, Hungary, Vietnam, Costa Rica, Mexico, Brazil, etc., are at the crossroads of almost all major supply chains. In fact, these emerging economies are growing faster than the established industrial economies of the world, yet their physical, social and cultural characteristics provide some real challenges. The book discusses how to manage supply chains in emerging economies, coordinate information flows with multiple partners, tackle challenges such as unexpected disruptions, diversify the risks and increase flexibilities, be efficient but at the same time contribute to the social and environmental developments of these economies, and use supply chain concepts and practices to improve the economic welfare of these countries.

Investors and Markets: Portfolio Choices, Asset Prices, and Investment Advice
William F. Sharpe, Princeton University Press, 2006
Nobel Laureate financial economist William Sharpe shows that investment professionals cannot make good portfolio choices unless they understand the determinants of asset prices. But until now asset-price analysis has largely been inaccessible to everyone except PhDs in financial economics. Based on his Princeton lecture in finance, Sharpe details his state-of-the-art approach to asset pricing in a nonmathematical form that will be comprehensible to a broad range of investment professionals. Sharpe makes this technique accessible through his computer program (available for free on his website) enabling users to create virtual markets, set the starting conditions, and then allow trading until equilibrium is reached and trading stops.

Success Built to Last: Creating a Life that Matters
Stewart Emery, Jerry Porras, Mark Thompson, Wharton School Publishing, September 2006
Co-authored by Jerry Porras whose earlier best seller Built to Last studied corporate success, this book analyzes traits of successful people and creates a set of simple practices to transform life and work.

Untested Beliefs and Half-Truths Pass as Management Gospel

If doctors practiced medicine the way many companies practice management, there would be far more sick and dead patients, and many more doctors would be in jail, argue Stanford Graduate School of Business faculty members Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton in their new book.
Video File Interview with Pfeffer and Sutton, 16:32 minutes

Excerpt

Ethics and Bioscience

Margaret Eaton
Stanford University Press, 2004
Business School lecturer Margaret Eaton follows biotechnology industry research, development, and marketing of medical and bioscience products, highlighting the ethical decisions business managers frequently face.

Books on Break: What Are They Reading at Stanford Business School?
They’re reading about God, baseball, and the collapse of society, among other things, in this year’s Books on Break reading series at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Culture and Demography in Organizations
J. Richard Harrison and Glenn R. Carroll, Princeton University Press, 2006
How do corporations and other organizations maintain and transmit their cultures over time? Culture and Demography in Organizations uses mathematical tools and computer simulation to explicitly consider the effects of demographic processes of entry, exit, and organizational growth. The authors model with three components: hiring, socialization, and employee turnover. Topics covered include organizational growth and decline, top management teams, organizational influence networks, terrorist organizations, cultural integration following mergers, and organizational failure. The book serves as an introduction to the increasingly popular use of computer simulation.

The Business of Sports: Text and Cases on Strategy and Management
George Foster, Stephan A. Greyser, Bill Walsh, Thompson South-Western, 2006
The book explores key decisions made by managers on the business side of sports, highlighting the diverse nature of these decisions and the financial and other issues at stake. The book draws on the business of sports classes taught at Stanford Business School by George Foster and Bill Walsh, and at Harvard by Stephen Greyser, each with an interactive component that draws guests from the sports world. Foster and Walsh also teach the NFL-Stanford Executive Program for football executives. The book includes a number of cases and is designed to provide faculty members with materials to develop similar courses. The cases include discussions of major league soccer, the Boston Red Sox's Fenway Park, the pros and cons of hiring a sports agent, Magic Johnson's endorsement deals, and the Women's NBA. Each individual case is followed by discussion questions.

Trust and Distrust in Organizations: Dilemmas and Approaches
The Russell Sage Foundation Series on Trust, April 2004, V. 7
Edited by Roderick Kramer and Karen Cook
The effective functioning of a democratic society—including social, business, and political interactions—largely depends on trust. Yet trust remains a fragile and elusive resource in many of the organizations that make up society’s building blocks. Editors Kramer and Cook compile research on trust in organizations, illuminating the complex nature of how trust develops, functions, and often is thwarted in organizational settings. With contributions from social psychologists, sociologists, political scientists, economists, and organizational theorists, the volume examines trust and distrust within a variety of settings—from employer-employee and doctor-patient relationships, to geographically dispersed work teams and virtual teams on the internet.

Top Down: Why Hierarchies Are Here to Stay and How to Manage Them More Effectively
Pundits have been forecasting the demise of the hierarchical corporation for decades. Prof. Harold J. Leavitt argues that hierarchy remains the foundational shape of every large human organization and Leaders can reshape them to enable employees to thrive.

The Modern Firm: Organizational Design for Performance and Growth
John Roberts
Oxford University Press in May 2004
The book explores how businesses experimenting with ways to improve performance are changing the scope of their business operations, redrawing their organization charts, and taking other steps. Roberts argues there are predictable, necessary relationships among the changes that will improve performance and growth.

Microeconomics for Managers
by David Kreps
W. W. Norton & Co., 2004
The book tries to motivate and illustrate frameworks and theories with real-world examples: from General Motors trying to settle a class-action lawsuit with coupons to Porsche trying to reorganize how its cars are retailed in the United States; to an explanation for how and why Toyota increases the power of its suppliers.

Book Analyzes Health Care Systems
A new book, co-edited by Business School professor Alain Enthoven, analyzes physician group practices, a key elements of the U.S. health care delivery system.

Living Memories: Reflections of Students Volunteering in VA Hospitals
Four recent Business School graduates played key roles in a book of essays published by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, describing how college volunteers connect to residents of VA hospitals. The book is an outgrowth of the United Students for Veterans Health organization, founded to foster the relationships.

Strategic Management of Technology and Innovation
Robert A. Burgelman, Clayton M. Christensen, and Steven C. Wheelwright, McGraw-Hill/Irwin, 2004
This 4th edition includes new cases combined with text and readings to explore the latest research.

Leading for Innovation and Organizing for Results
Frances Hesselbein, Marshall Goldsmith, eds., Jossey-Bass, 2002
In this second volume of The Drucker Foundation's Wisdom to Action Series, twenty-seven remarkable thought leaders, including Jeffrey Pfeffer, help today's leaders meet the challenge of releasing the power of innovation.

Managing the Global Network Corporation
Edited by Bruce McKern, Senior Lecturer in International Business and Director, Stanford Sloan Program
A look at Taiwan's Acer Corp., Germany's Hoechst, and the United States' Emerson Electric suggests that global corporations are more likely to be networks of related affiliates than hierarchical, says the Business School's Bruce McKern in his book Managing the Global Network Corporation.

Party, Process, and Political Change in Congress: New Perspectives on the History of Congress
Edited by David W. Brady and Mathew D. McCubbins, Stanford University Press, 2002
In recent decades, political scientists have produced an enormous body of scholarship dealing with the U.S. Congress, and in particular congressional organization, most of it focused on the 20th Century. During the nation's first 150 years, parties emerged, developed, and realigned; the standing rules of the House and Senate expanded and underwent profound changes; the workload of Congress increased dramatically; and both houses grew considerably in size. Contributors to this book describe these changes. Each engages one of three general questions that have animated the literature on congressional politics in recent years: What is the role of party organizations in policy making? In what ways have congressional process and procedure changed over the years? How does congressional process and procedure affect congressional politics and policy?

Credit Risk
by Darrell Duffie and Kenneth J. Singleton, Princeton Series on Finance, Princeton University Press, 2003
Credit Risk, a new book by professors Darrell Duffie and Kenneth Singleton, provides the first integrated treatment of the conceptual, practical, and empirical foundations for credit risk pricing and risk measurement. The book models credit risk for the purpose of measuring portfolio risk and pricing defaultable bonds, credit derivatives, and other securities exposed to default. Duffie, the James Irvin Miller Professor of Finance, and Singleton the C.G.O. Miller Distinguished Professor of Finance, offer critical assessments of alternative approaches to credit-risk modeling, while highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of current practice. Reviewed in the June 2003 issue of Risk magazine (may require subscription to access)

It Pays to Talk: How to Have the Essential Conversations with Your Family about Money and Investing
Carrie Schwab-Pomerantz and Charles R. Schwab. Publisher: Crown Business, 2002
Discussing family finances can be a harrowing experience. The book examines some strategies families can use to talk about their financial futures and looks at those investment needs particular to families, such as estate planning. Investment legend Charles Schwab and his daughter share their own insights into this touchy area, suggesting that leaving these issues unresolved can be catastrophic for the entire family.

Foundations of Stochastic Inventory Theory
Evan Porteus, Stanford University Press, 2002
The book serves as an advanced textbook designed to prepare doctoral students to do research on the mathematical foundations of inventory theory and as a reference work for those already engaged in such research. All chapters conclude with exercises that either solidify or extend the concepts introduced.

Strategy is Destiny: How Strategy-Making Shapes a Company’s Future
Robert Burgelman and Andrew Grove, Free Press, 2002
Intel CEO Craig Barrett's frustration with some of the spoils of success is told by Robert Burgelman, the Edmund W. Littlefield Professor of Management at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, in a new book about how Intel has built business strategies, sometimes from the bottom up, sometimes from the top down, or from all parts of the hierarchy simultaneously.

Creating and Capturing Value: Perspective and Cases on Electronic Commerce
Garth Saloner and A. Michael Spence, John Wiley and Sons, 2001
Included in this book are 22 case studies that contain a wealth of information about technologies, industries, issues, firms, strategies, organizational structures, and the issues electronic commerce poses for students and practitioners.

Reinventing the Bazaar: A Natural History of Markets
John McMillan, W. W. Norton & Co., 2002
In his new book, economics professor John McMillan explores markets ranging from ancient bazaars to eBay and explains what makes or breaks a marketplace.

Education in the Twenty-First Century
Edward P. Lazear (Editor) Hoover Institution Press, 2002
Few issues today are more important in the United States than improving education. In Education in the Twenty-first Century (Hoover Institution Press, 2002), editor and Hoover fellow Edward P. Lazear brings together a range of Hoover scholars to address this crucial issue. Nine fellows, some of the most respected experts in the field of education reform, contribute their expertise, evidence, and insights. Scholars such as Lazear, George Shultz, Thomas Sowell, and Shelby Steele discuss a range of areas that include such widely debated topics as national exams, accountability, performance, and school funding.

Frontiers of Development Economics: The Future in Perspective
Gerald M. Meier, Joseph E. Stiglitz (Editor), and Nicholas Stern with:
World Bank and Oxford University Press, 2001
Biographer of Developmental Economics

The Psychology of Legitimacy: Emerging Perspectives on Ideology, Justice, and Intergroup Relations
John T. Jost and B. Major, Editors, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001
This book summarizes and integrates the best social scientific research currently going on in a previously neglected but rapidly emerging interdisciplinary field seeking to understand processes of legitimation and de-legitimation in social relations. Contributors are leading researchers in sociology, psychology, political science, and organizational behavior. The chapters converge on key questions concerning the ways in which people construct ideological justifications or rationalizations for their own actions and for the actions of others taken on behalf of valued groups and systems. The result is a general approach to the psychological basis of social inequality, which may be applied to distinctions of race, gender, social class, occupational status, and many other forms of inequality.

Creating and Capturing Value: Perspective and Cases on Electronic Commerce
excerpted from the book by Garth Saloner and A. Michael Spence, John Wiley and Sons, 2001.
This book on electronic commerce is divided into two parts: "Perspectives" provides an overview of these important issues in electronic commerce; "Cases" written under the supervision of Stanford faculty provide real world insight. Both parts contain a wealth of information about technologies, industries, firms, strategies, and organizational structures as well as issues that the challenge of electronic commerce poses for practitioners.

Weird Ideas That Work: 11-1/2 Practices for Promoting, Managing, and Sustaining Innovation
Robert I. Sutton, Free Press, 2001
In his latest management book Robert Sutton, professor of organizational behavior (by courtesy) at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, shakes readers out of their box, helps them break out of the rut of their past, and see old problems in new ways.

The Silicon Valley Edge: A Habitat for Innovation and Entrepreneurship,
Chong-Moon Lee, William F. Miller, Marguerite Gong Hancock, Henry S. Rowen, eds., Stanford University Press, 2000
This series of essays by 25 academic and industry leaders study the experiences that have created Silicon Valley, focusing on the business environment. Although large established companies play a major role in this economy and are responsible for many technology advances and products, the authors find that these large firms are less likely to create a sea change in industries or create entirely new industries.

Hidden Value: How Great Companies Achieve Extraordinary Results with Ordinary People
Charles A. O'Reilly III, and Jeffrey Pfeffer, Harvard Business School Press, 2000
Two Stanford Graduate School of Business professors suggest a novel approach for finding top talent: look in your own backyard, shop floors, or office blocks. Too many companies waste the talent they have on staff by using systems like the old command-and-control leaders of Communist countries—they don't really know how to instill shared values and then train and support their people to take on responsibility for success. The book uses case studies of innovative companies to demonstrate how they have created added value by fostering the creativity, motivation, and commitment of their people. The companies profiled are Southwest Airlines, Cisco Systems, The Men's Wearhouse, SAS Institute, PSS World Medical, AES, New United Motors Manufacturing Inc and Cypress Semiconductor.

Strategic Management
Garth Saloner, Andrea Shepard, and Joel Podolny, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2000
Written for current and future general managers who have or will have overall responsibility for a business. The essential ability for this job is a well-developed capability for strategic thinking. Saloner, Shepard, and Podolny provide a set of frameworks, tools, and concepts to build this capability. They have drawn from research in the disciplines that surround and support strategic management with an emphasis on their own disciplinary backgrounds: theoretical and empirical microeconomics and organization theory. The goal of the text is to provide insights into organizations and strategy that will help general managers make strategic thinking in their firms pervasive, effective, and rewarding. This text is appropriate for the core MBA strategic management course and the capstone strategic management course at the undergraduate, senior level.

Knowing-Doing Gap: How Smart Companies Turn Knowledge Into Action
Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton, Harvard Business School Press, January, 2000
"Did you ever wonder why so much education and training, management consultation, organizational research and so many books and articles produce so few changes in actual management practice?" ask Stanford Business School Professors Pfeffer and Sutton. "We wondered, too, and so we embarked on a quest to explore one of the great mysteries in organizational management: why knowledge of what needs to be done frequently fails to result in action or behavior consistent with that knowledge." The authors describe the most common obstacles to action---such as fear and inertia---and profile successful companies that overcome them.

Principles of Internet Marketing
Ward Hanson, Southwestern College Publishing, February 2000
Stanford Business School faculty member Ward Hanson lays out the strengths and weaknesses of Internet technology, how it can generate immediate benefits, and how it can cause a company to rethink its entire marketing organization. The book is aimed at anyone in business trying to harness the power of the Internet for an organization. "The person I had in mind when I wrote the book was really the VP of marketing, anyone responsible for knowing what is fundamentally new and different about the Internet and its use in marketing," says Hanson, who teaches MBA courses in Internet Marketing. "My goal is to explain systematically why and how Internet marketing is exploding and how it can create value and profits."

Strategic Human Resources: Frameworks for General Managers
James N. Baron and David M. Kreps, John Wiley & Sons Publisher, 2000 Human resources is no longer a polite euphemism for the personnel office, and that department is not the corporate dead end it once was. As Stanford Business School faculty James Baron and David Kreps note in their new textbook the traditional view of the personnel office as a place to "send good, solid managers who fell off the fast track" deprived managers of U.S. companies of information about one of their most important resources—their employees. Baron and Krep's book is directed at general managers as well as human resource specialists.

The Demography of Corporations and Industries
Glenn R. Carroll and Michael T. Hannan, Princeton University Press, 2000
The Demography of Corporations and Industries is the first book to present the demographic approach to organizational studies in its entirety. It examines the theory, models, methods, and data used in corporate demographic research. Carroll and Hannan explore the processes by which corporate populations change over time, including organizational founding, growth, decline, structural transformation, and mortality.

Hot Groups: Seeding Them, Feeding Them, and Using Them to Ignite Your Organization
Jean Lipman-Blumen and Harold J. Leavitt, Oxford University Press, May 1999
Named the best business book of 1999 by the Association of American Publishers. "A hot group is just what the name is just what the name implies: a lively, overachieving, dedicated group - usually small - whose members are turned on to an exciting and challenging task," say Lipman-Blumen and Leavitt, the Walter Kenneth Kipatrick Professor of Organizational Behavior and Psychology, emeritus.

Stanford GSB News

Books

The Red Queen Among Organizations: How Competitiveness Evolves

Innovation in Medical Technology: Ethical Issues and Challenges