Cultural Influences on Strategic Planning


Book Description

This book challenges the universal applicability of strategic management concepts. It argues that it is necessary to pay attention to contextual facets of the environment, in particular to societal culture. It also depicts the current planning situation in the banking industry. The culture-boundness of strategy formulation and implementation is challenged and advocated trough discussing planning systems, processes, and heuristics, and contextual influences both an a theoretical basis and with empirical research. The book is based an my doctoral dissertation, which was completed at the Marketing and Banking Departments of the Vienna University of Economics under the auspices of Fritz Scheuch and Gustav Raab. Their teaching, constructive criticism, and encouragement provided the intellectual stimulation for bringing this dissertation to completion. This applies equally to several professors at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Harry Triandis and Anant Negandhi introduced me to cross-cultural research and inter national management. Howard Themas, Marjorie Lyles, and Irene Duhaime helped me to crystallize thoughts. Hanns-Martin Schönfeld, Seymour Sudman and Gerald Salancik challenged my thoughts about organizational behavior and methodology. Richard Watson, Univer sity of Georgia, and Louis Flores of Northern Illinois University were very helpful in providing address material for Australia and Latin America, as well as through assistance with translations. Norihiro Suzuki of Int'l Christian University, Tokyo, and Hiro Matsusaki of Tokyo University helped with Japanese translations.







The International Monetary System


Book Description

For 50 years, the International Finance Section at Princeton University has encouraged and published work in international finance. This volume, a semicentennial celebration of the Section's essays in international finance, is comprised of 12 essays.




The Banking Systems of the EU Member States


Book Description

This practical pocket handbook provides the essential information on the financial markets of twelve member states of the European Union. It includes descriptions of the structure and function of the respective central banks and the bank supervisory bodies.




Strategy Beyond the Hockey Stick


Book Description

Beat the odds with a bold strategy from McKinsey & Company "Every once in a while, a genuinely fresh approach to business strategy appears" —legendary business professor Richard Rumelt, UCLA McKinsey & Company's newest, most definitive, and most irreverent book on strategy—which thousands of executives are already using—is a must-read for all C-suite executives looking to create winning corporate strategies. Strategy Beyond the Hockey Stick is spearheading an empirical revolution in the field of strategy. Based on an extensive analysis of the key factors that drove the long-term performance of thousands of global companies, the book offers a ground-breaking formula that enables you to objectively assess your strategy's real odds of future success. "This book is fundamental. The principles laid out here, with compelling data, are a great way around the social pitfalls in strategy development." —Frans Van Houten, CEO, Royal Philips N.V. The authors have discovered that over a 10-year period, just 1 in 12 companies manage to jump from the middle tier of corporate performance—where 60% of companies reside, making very little economic profit—to the top quintile where 90% of global economic profit is made. This movement does not happen by magic—it depends on your company's current position, the trends it faces, and the big moves you make to give it the strongest chance of vaulting over the competition. This is not another strategy framework. Rather, Strategy Beyond the Hockey Stick shows, through empirical analysis and the experiences of dozens of companies that have successfully made multiple big moves, that to dramatically improve performance, you have to overcome incrementalism and corporate inertia. "A different kind of book—I couldn't put it down. Inspiring new insights on the facts of what it takes to move a company's performance, combined with practical advice on how to deal with real-life dynamics in management teams." —Jane Fraser, CEO, Citigroup Latin America




The Evolution of Central Banks


Book Description

The Evolution of Central Banks employs a wide range of historical evidence and reassesses current monetary analysis to argue that the development of non-profit-maximizing and noncompetitive central banks to supervise and regulate the commercial banking system fulfils a necessary and natural function. Goodhart surveys the case for free banking, examines the key role of the clearing house in the evolution of the central bank, and investigates bank expansion and fluctuation in the context of the clearing house mechanism. He concludes that it is the noncompetitive aspect of the central bank that is crucial to the performance of its role. Goodhart addresses the questions of deposit insurance and takes up the "club theory" approach to the central bank. Included in the historical study of their origins are 8 European central banks, the Bank of Japan, the Bank of England, and the Federal Reserve Board of the United States.




Debt, Financial Fragility, and Systemic Risk


Book Description

A remarkable feature of the period since 1970 has been the patterns of rapid and turbulent change in financing behavior and financial structure in many advanced countries. This book explores, in theoretical and empirical terms, the nature of the relationships between the underlying phenomena--levels and changes in debt, vulnerability to default in the corporate and household sectors, and systematic risk in the financial sector. The book focuses on the generality of this phenomena--whether similar patterns are observable in certain countries, as well as in the international capital markets themselves. Emphasis is placed to the importance of the nature and evolution of financial structure to the genesis of instability. Given the international scope of the analysis, the work is germane to the study of the development of financial systems in all advanced countries, as well as the euromarkets.




Finance and Philosophy


Book Description

Taking the 2008 financial crisis as his jumping off point, Alex Pollock deftly illustrates how private firms and governments alike have failed to understand the shifting risks that financial systems create. With candor, clarity, and wit, he uncovers the persistent uncertainties inherent in banking, central banking, and economics. “At the height of the 2008 financial panic, Queen Elizabeth plaintively asked why nobody saw it coming. In the winning pages of Finance and Philosophy, Her Majesty can find the answer. With a lightness of touch that belies the complexity of his subject, Alex Pollock shows why the financial future is now, why it has been and always must be a closed book. A successful banker and gifted writer, Pollock tells us all we need to know about money and banking, risk and uncertainty, debt and temptation, and science and economics. He delights as he instructs.”—James Grant, founder and editor, Grant’s Interest Rate Observer “Why can’t human beings take the lessons of boom and bust, bubbles and crashes that are clearly described in history books—and learn from experience? That’s where Mr. Pollock’s wry humor and philosophic bent help understand the hubris that makes every generation believe that not only can it predict the markets, but control them . . . [Finance and Philosophy] should be required reading in economics classes, or before opening an investment account—and by every member of Congress.”—The Washington Times Alex J. Pollock is a distinguished senior fellow at the R Street Institute in Washington, DC. He was a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute from 2004 to 2015, and President and Chief Executive Officer of the Federal Home Loan Bank of Chicago from 1991 to 2004.