Read All About It!
Wharton Faculty and Staff Share Their Favorite Books

Wharton Fellows

Yoram (Jerry) Wind, PhD
Lauder Professor; Professor of Marketing
Academic Director, Wharton Fellows

"I have selected three art books, which I feel encourage readers to look for useful metaphors outside the traditional field of management. The books listed below — offered as a set — can provide a systematic perspective on contemporary art in America. For those interested in the perspective of the art dealer as opposed to the artist, I recommend any book on Leo Castelli, who is responsible for discovering and nurturing many of today's giants in the art world. For a good overview of modern art and its many movements (Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, Minimalism, Conceptualism, Postmodernism, and the art of the nineties), I recommend:

After Modern Art: 1945-2000
by David Hopkins (Oxford University Press, 2000)

Barnett Newman: Philadelphia Museum of Art 2002
Edited by Ann Temkin
"This book on the current (Summer 2002) exhibit [of Newman's work] emphasizes the importance of breakthrough innovation and persistence. It tells the story of Newman through his innovative work — originally rejected — that has since influenced generations of artists."


Jasper Johns to Jeff Koons: Four Decades of Art from the Broad Collections
by S. Barron, L. Zelevansky, T. Crow, E. Broadfamily, and P. Karmel (Contributors) (LA County Museum of Art/H. Abrams Inc., 2001)
"The passion and vision of a major art collector and the impact it had on contemporary art."

Clement Greenberg: A Critic's Collection
by Karen Wilkin and Bruce Guenther (Princeton University Press, 2001)
"Through detailing the private collection and story of one of the major shapers of contemporary art, the authors emphasize how balancing business (i.e., art criticism) and personal issues (appreciation of art) can contribute to understanding the importance of the art critic in discovering new artists, giving a parallel to the importance of new markets in the business world."

Neil Neveras
Director, Wharton Fellows

Hope Is Not a Strategy: The 6 Keys to Winning the Complex Sale
by Rick Page (Nautilus Press, 2001)
"To anyone who is involved in complex, high-level sales, this is a good read. Page takes the concepts of consultative selling a few steps further."

The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World
by Lawrence Lessig (Random House, 2001)
"Intellectual property rights keep extending, usually at the request of large corporations who benefit from the revenue these rights continue to generate. Yet the Internet forces us to radically re-think our assumptions in this area. Stanford Law Professor Larry Lessig offers a compelling approach that balances corporate interests and the new realities of a networked world."

 

Advanced Management Program

Rita McGlone
Director, Advanced Management Program

What the CEO Wants You to Know: How Your Company Really Works
by Ram Charan (Crown Publishers, 2001)
"Charan draws on examples from Wal-Mart, Dell, GE, and other successful companies to teach the fundamentals of business — concepts like return on assets, profit margin, growth, the value of customers and harnessing intellectual capital...using stories very effectively to make his points. I liked it because it provides a clear understanding of the complexities of business while providing guidelines to middle-managers on what it takes to enhance their performance and that of the organization."

The Divine Right of Capital: Dethroning the Corporate Aristocracy
by Marjorie Kelly (Berrett-Koehler, 2001)
"This book explores how the corporate world remains rooted in the pre-democratic (aristocratic) age...how shareholder primacy is a legacy of this age...how wealth privilege is built into the design of corporations and contradicts democratic and market ideals...a new theory is needed that takes into account the economic rights of employees and the community...wealth inequality, corporate welfare, and industrial pollution are symptoms of an economy in need of attention...she proposes a new model called economic democracy that sees the corporation as a human community...she outlines ways for businesses to extract aristocratic bias from their systems...resonates to me because it offers a compelling view of how far many corporations have drifted from the guiding principles of democracy and the possibilities for a more equitable business environment that is in harmony with the environment and humanity."

Tempered Radicals: How People Use Difference to Inspire Change at Work
by Debra E. Meyerson (Harvard Business School Press, 2001)
"This book explores how everyday leaders find innovative ways to promote positive change within organizations without rocking the boat so hard that they fall off...presents numerous stories about how ordinary people at various levels within their profession have been successful while promoting their own values and ideas for change...I liked the book because it offers hope and realistic solutions to readers who are trying to transform their visions into strategies for improving the workplace."

Beyond World Class: Building Character, Relatiohships, and Profits
by Alan Ross and Cecil Murphy (Contributor) (Dearborn Trade, 2001)
"Proposes that world-class leaders are capable of building ‘character culture' within their organizations...they offer guiding work principles that utilize qualities such as humility, mentoring, integrity, fairness, modeling, etc...once again, my bias is evident in that this book offers a critical examination of current corporate culture and proposes alternative leadership styles that can make a difference inside organizations and in the world."

 

Solving the CRM Challenge

Peter Fader, PhD
Associate Professor of Marketing
Academic Director, Solving the CRM Challenge

There are lots of books available on customer relationship management (CRM), but buyer beware, advises Peter Fader, academic director of Solving the CRM Challenge. "I've browsed a lot of the so-called best sellers on CRM and many of them just formalize the obvious, such as ‘Be nice to your good customers.' There is one, however, that stands out — Mastering Data Mining: The Art and Science of Customer Relationship Management (John Wiley & Sons, 1999) by Michael J.A. Berry [and Gordon S. Linoff], who is one of the guest lecturers in our program. My own personal picks for delving into CRM are the textbooks listed below. They're not your average business books, but I stand by them. To understand CRM, you need to do the work. Our program is trying to cut through all the clutter that all these ‘new' books on CRM have created."

Repeat Buying (second edition)
by A.S.C. Ehrenberg (Oxford University Press, 1988)

Consumer Behavior Models for Non-Statisticians: The River of Time
by Jerome D.Greene (Prager, 1981)

Stochastic Models of Buying Behavior
by W.F. Massey, D.B. Montgomery, and D.G. Morrison (The MIT Press, 1970)

Analyzing Complex Decisions: A Workshop for Managers

John C. Hershey, PhD
Daniel H. Silberberg Professor; Professor of Operations and Information Management
Academic Director, Advanced Management Program

Choices, Values, and Frames
Edited by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky (Cambridge University Press, 2000)
"This is a wonderful compilation of recent literature on behavioral decision research. Some articles describe various descriptive theories of decision making that challenge conventional economic models of choice. Others present applications to fields as diverse as the stock market, medical diagnosis, insurance, and horse betting. Anyone interested in consumer behavior, behavioral finance, or the study of negotiation and conflict will want to own this outstanding collection."

[An interview with Drs. Jack Hershey, Ziv Katalan and Anjani Jain on how to enrich your decision-making skills with decision models will appear next month in E-Buzz: Whaton@Work]

More Faculty Picks

Steve Kobrin, PhD
William H. Wurster Professor of Multinational Management

Theodore Rex
by Edmund Morris (Random House, 2001)
"I found this to be a very well-written book that covers Roosevelt's presidency. It provides much needed background on the origins of business regulation in America and follows Roosevelt's development from an ‘accidental President' to one of the more popular and effective leaders in American history."

Eric K. Clemons, PhD
Professor of Operations and Information Management and Management

I offer below my top-ten business books, which I've placed in three categories, with illumination on two of them:

Category 1 — The Role of Reason and Intellect

Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West
by John Ralston Saul (Vintage Books, 1993)

The Armchair Economist: Economics and Everyday Life
by Steven E. Landsburg (Free Press, 1995)

Category 2 — Finding the Pattern in What You See

The Character of Physical Law
by Richard Feynman (Modern Library, 1994)

The Selfish Gene
by Richard Dawkins (Oxford University Press, 1990)

Guns, Germs, and Steel
by Jared Diamond (Books on Tape, Inc., 1999)

The Continental Op
by Dashiel Hammett (Vintage Books, 1992)
"This is considered the first ‘private eye' novel and the archetype for all that followed. Think of his character, like Sam Spade in the Maltese Falcon. This novel sets the stage for spotting patterns, seeing through distractions, doing the analysis, and the main character always, always getting his man. I wish more consultants, executives, and more faculty members had the ability to analyze subjective data, not numerical data, to determine what is relevant, rather than what is statistically significant, and get it right, fast, under pressure and in danger. The first step is learning to spot the pattern when the data are merely suggestive, not conclusive."

Category 3 — Communicating What You Have Found

Snow Crash
by Neal Stephenson (Bantam Doubleday Dell, 2000)

The Green Sea of Heaven: Fifty Ghazals from the Diwan of Hafiz
by Elizabeth T. Gray (Translator) (White Cloud Press, 1995)

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
Edward R. Tufte (Graphics Press, 2001)

Swing Like a Pro: The Breakthrough Method of Perfecting Your Golf Swing
by Ralph Mann and Fred Griffin, with Guy Yocom (Broadway Books, 1998)
"The golf swing is in principle very simple — a weight shift, a rotation, a shift back, and a rotation back. It requires speed and not force. Yet millions of people take lessons from tens of thousands of pros, without actually getting any better. This book uses a novel way to communicate the swing. The text is helpful. But the principal contribution is detailed computer tracking of hundreds of pros, the computerized generation of a composite "pro" swing, and then the use of key positions in this computerized perfect professional to teach the rest of us. It is not the golf swing that is interesting in this book, but the use of a novel technique to communicate effectively where thousands of other teachers have demonstrably had far less success."

    

This month's articles: