Corporate-finance

This book has nothing to do with organizational change. It is simply the ravings of a futurist. There are plenty of good books of strategic organizational change, buy those instead.

The Art of the Long View By Peter Schwartz Peter Schwartz challenges uncertainty by using scenario planning as the tool to predict and prepare for the future. Schwartz suggest that to act with confidence, "[o]ne must be willing to look ahead and consider uncertainties". In his book, Schwartz presents many "rules" to creating scenarios such as: "seeking out truly unusual people...who could see significant but surprising forces for change". Another rule is to view the future with at least three different mindset: as an optimist, pessimist and transitionist. Schwartz also advises the future scenario planners to have a good focus yet practice using peripheral vision (called fringes) to guide direction. What people don't see directly, such as activities happening in another country for example, may interrupt economy, social factors and so on. As an example, Schwartz mentioned the problem of third countries' rise of youth. With the rise of teenage population and little job opportunities in their own country, millions of foreign youth may migrate to countries like U.S. When this happens the stability of U.S. in terms of population, social welfare and minority issues will be affected. In turn these social factors may affect the economic factors. Thus, the readers of this book will learn that awareness will become a strong asset to being a great scenario planner. The advice and guides Schwartz provides are logical and simplistic. Human beings are used to some degree of future planning and Schwartz acknowledges this as he labels people as "scenario-building animal." With the acknowledgment of this innate capability people have for scenario planning Schwartz tries to focus on fine-tuning that innate skill to help people and business plan for their future. By planning for the future one can stabilize uncertainty both emotionally and financially. Schwart's background of having worked at SRI (Standford Research Institute), Shell and Smith & Hawken made the advice of the author more legitimate and provided examples of how scenario building can become a profession to consider. Scenario writing is truly an art that requires open-minded, creative and resourceful thinking. Overall, I enjoyed reading this book. Schwartz understands that though we have no control over uneventful factors that may disrupt our future, we can have the power to prevent disasters from sneaking up on us. By preparing our minds to possibilities, both good and bad, people can learn to adapt to the future. I especially liked the optimistic view of Mr. Schwartz. I ended the book with enlightenment and happy thoughts of my own future.

I was given this book at a seminar I went to at AT&T. I have always been interested in IT Strategic Planning since I have been in management within the IT field for more than 20 years.

I found this book to be very theoretical, and not very real world oriented. If I were to implement his suggestions I could soon be in trouble.

However, it does have some good information and some graphics that I found useful for presentation purposes.

An inane pill to swallow. The book says little in its 341 pages. I'll never get that time back.

This was an inane pill to swallow. The book says little at all in its 341 pages. I'll never get that time back.

In my 23 years of experience of working in IT, I would say that this is the first book on IT strategy that attempts to make IT a PART of startegic intent of the business.

No doubt, the book is hard to read and comprehend, but the effort is worth it.

I would have given it an higher rating but for the fact that practical examples is missing which would have made the book more complete.

If you are a practicioner, skip this book. Even academics will find this rehash (and outright clone) of better material a waste of time.

The focus comes from the insurance perpective and covers a niche in risk management that other books do not cover.

Finance professional and professor Christopher L. Culp tells all, that is, all about alternate risk transfer (ART) products. Culp discusses corporate finance in detail, covering different types of capital. He sets out the risk control and capital structure functions of various classical and alternative risk transfer steps, such as derivatives targeted at market and credit risk, asset divestiture, insurance and reinsurance. Don't even go here if you aren't already familiar with (or studying) the sophisticated basics of finance, since this is highly technical reading, including numerous formulas, charts and graphs describing financial theories and processes. But if you are an expert, we from getAbstract congratulate you on finding your way to Culp, who aimed his book at the already-savvy: corporate treasurers, financial officers and those who participate in capital markets and the reinsurance industry.

The Good -
The main concepts of the book are sound and time proven, and it has some interesting and novel ideas. Moreover, the book has decent recommendations of other books (not surprisingly they were written by the same author).

The Bad -
What was meant to be an entertaining fictional side plot, in the fashion of The Goal or The Max Strategy, doesn't work. It ends up being both corny and archaic. Basically, the main character of the book is a 20 something trying to save the large conglomerate which employs him. Give me a break. The vast majority of my peers including myself (in that age group) could care less about the slow and large, uncaring bureaucracies we work for. If anything we're dreaming up of escape plans to start our own businesses. Throughout the book I just kept wondering whether Steve was a complete moron or whether the story took place 30 years ago.

A related flaw is how the book's concepts are delivered. Hearing the mentor character, Zhiao, give lessons is akin to listening to Bill Cosby's or Grandpa Simpson's random rambling for hours. It's very difficult to differentiate the useless/nonsensical crap from the good pieces of data, Zhiao keeps jumping from here and there. Sadly I could go on and on about how horrible the plot and side dialogue are... For ex, "What kind of fish do you think you are? I am a light fish." - enough said.

Conclusion
Unless you have spare money or time, read Slywotsky's other books instead to get to the meat of his ideas. This is largely a waste of time.

I liked the structure of this book, and the approach of using parables - it makes it easy to read & absorb the principles. However, given my level of business experience, I wasn't a rookie setting out to learn everything from scratch.
I considered the instruction "read only one chapter per week" to be supercilious.
A typical chapter is only 10 pages or so (some are as short as 5, the longest is 14), but as there's 23 chapters I didn't want to spend 6 months reading this book. By reading 2 or 3 chapters per day, I could still absorb the message, and yet complete the book within 2 weeks.

This book is focused on explaining 23 different models of profitability that different firms have followed. The author uses the realtionship between a wise mentor and an eager mentee to take the reader through the process of understanding the different models. The book is aimed at describing and giving the reader some insight into each model; it is not an in depth analysis of profitability. Given its aim, it is well written.

It is not a step by step process to apply at a business. This is a book to make a manager reflect, not follow. Each chapter is one story that describes a model; the style seems to follow the general outline of Harvard Business School cases, which, given the author's professorship there, is not so surprising.

I highly recommend it to someone looking for an entertaining read that will make one reflect. However, disregard the recommendation that you go through one chapter per week. It is too little, I think I would probably lose the book by the 3rd week. It is, instead, a book to be read in 3 days, and be referred back for ideas.