Corporate-finance

This workbook is filled with sample forms for a variety of uses. Unfortunately, it's a little sketchy as to the applicability of each form. The book is intended to be a companion to Karlof's prior work, "Benchmarking: A Signpost to Excellence and Productivity". The biggest disappointment is the price. The book has a text book price -- it's a paperback! At that price you would at least expect forms that are closer to letter sized. Based on the pricing of the paperback edition, the hardback must be over $200. This book is hardly a value.

Boxwell does an outstanding job explaining benchmarking and why it is important for every company that hopes to compete in todays competitive environmnet. He demistifys the subject matter and presents a no nonsense approach to implementing benchmarking in your organization. A real find

It's not just that Ben and Jerry's ideas are stupid; it's that these guys don't practice what they preach. There is an article that some naïve reviewers on this board should read. It's called "The Evil Empire" in the New Republic (hardly the voice of capitalism or the political right). Amazingly the New Republic finds Ben and Jerry's arrogance just too hard to swallow.

What does the article have to say?

On Ben and Jerry's success:

"With the publicity came the inevitable backlash: that Ben and Jerry are nothing more than New Age scam artists, feeding social consciousness to gullible yuppies and pocketing the cash. The scarier truth may be that they've scammed themselves. Like their fortysomething followers, they believe the most flattering image of themselves: that, despite their millions, they haven't sold out."

How Ben and Jerry discovered why CEOs get paid big salaries:

This doesn't mean the company is built on scandalous lies--just little white lies, mutual delusions that keep everyone happy. For example, one tenet of caring capitalism is to be "real," to "connect with the customer." This spirit is what drove the company's offbeat search for a new CEO. Early last summer, Ben and Jerry held a press conference to announce that Ben would step down as CEO. Profits had plummeted, the superpremium ice cream market was shrinking; in short, the company had grown too complicated for a "multi-college dropout and failed pottery teacher to run," Ben announced. What pained him most was the company's decision to give up the salary cap that had limited the top executive's salary to seven times that of the lowest-paid employee, the $8 an hour scooper (a sacrifice that had always obscured Ben's millions in stock shares).

And my favorite section of the Article when Ben and Jerry show their hypocracy for all the world to see:

"Then there are the inner-city initiatives that fail. If there are any doubts about B&J's bloodless business instincts, they can be dispelled by another holy man, the Reverend James Carter, who crossed the company's path in 1992. Back then, Carter ran a modest New Jersey bakery called LaSoul, where recovering addicts churned out pumpkin pies for the local groceries. A week after he saw Ben on ABC's "20/20," Carter packed up a trunk full of pies and drove to the company headquarters. Ben loved both the pies and "Reverend Carter's vision of building a sound business." In three weeks, Carter had a letter of intent to do business with the company, which he showed to the bank to borrow money for equipment. Ben flew down to New Jersey to tape a TV show of himself helping ex-addicts mix batches of the new Apple Pie frozen yogurt.

After two years, however, sales of the flavor were flagging. In May 1994, Ben and Jerry's drastically decreased its orders, leaving Carter with freezers full of pies. Frantic, Carter laid off all but two employees and called Ben. The next day, Ben flew to New Jersey, "sat down, looked them straight in the eye," and, recalls Carter, said, "Don't worry, we'll stick with you." But orders never picked up, and, this June, Carter received a letter from the company, by fax, that congratulated him on his "good works" and canceled all remaining orders. He was left half a million dollars in debt. "It's pretty cute, this social mission," Carter says bitterly. "But the bottom line is, Ben and Jerry's buried my company."

Ask Ben about the incident, and he sounds more like Gordon Gecko than Robin Hood: "We told Jim to find more customers. We gave him six months' notice." When the normally upbeat Alan Parker is reminded of a spreadsheet dated November 11, 1994, that projected $500,000 worth of orders from LaSoul in 1995, he replies: "That spreadsheet was given to him as a best-case scenario for volume expectations. Nothing about that memo could be construed as a firm commitment, and it's really disingenuous for him to cite it." Do they feel at all responsible? "Sure, we feel sad," says Parker. "But our sadness is tempered with `why are we being blamed?' We worked closely with him to make our demands on him easier, and that's not something many customers would do for their suppliers. In the end, LaSoul was just not a viable business enterprise."

Anyway for those who would rather read a true story than this useless book I suggest getting a hold of the whole article:

Source: New Republic, 9/11/95, Vol. 213 Issue 11, p22, 4p, 1 cartoon Author(s): Rosin, Hanna

These two idealistic lefty entrepreneurs think that there should be a 100% tax on all income over $250,000... This offers a real incentive to work and build a business when the government takes away all the profit. This book should really be called "How to Run a Business While Supporting Anti-Business, Politically-Correct, Leftist Do-Gooder Causes." However, if your IQ is the same temperature as Ben-and-Jerry's ice cream, this will certainly satisfy your appetite for mouth-watering politically correct jibberish.

great book for those who HATE big business and its "selfishness". Although the book, I think, is poorly written at times, it is always very interesting as it offers a perspective one NEVER hears about in the business section of the newspaper or in business/management books. More execs should read this and thing long and hard about their "social mission", as well as their strategies. The social effort seems to have worked well for B&J.

I read this book at the suggestion of a business school professor. It was supposedly a great illustration of the trials and tribulations of entrepreneurs.

I found that the book tried more to be humorous than to convey any business knowledge to the reader. Everything seemed to be an inside joke. Rather than producing a well thought-out account of a business experience, the book fell flat with dumb humor. I was very unimpressed with how the company was run, and I don't feel like I got much from the book.

A good recount of how the company got going, but the last few chapters dragged.

There are things to learn about how Ben and Jerry developed their company:
1)They are geniuses at this. They actually figured out mass production without knowing what they were doing, they figured out marketing from scratch, they encountered financing and survived.
2)They had a near masochistic willingness to work. Boy did these guys work hard (it would kill me to do what they did, even if I had the will to do it).
3)They could adapt incredibly.

4) and finally: There are pitfalls and prices to trying to make social profits and business profits at the same time and to not planning your company to be as big as it already is.

You can learn about businesses in their growth phase from this book. You can learn about making sure a company has sufficient controls in place for its size. You may be able to learn whether you have what it takes to be an entrepeneur.

The first 3/4th of the book were fun to read but for some reason the last couple of chapters, when Ben and Jerry were playing less of a part in the business, were slow and boring (I don't exactly know why but I know they dragged).

It's a chronicle of the intriguing journey of junior high friends who split the $5 cost of a home study course in making homemade ice cream and turn it into a $237 million company (1999 sales). Ben & Jerry's antics of giving away ice cream so they can 'get the ice cream into people's mouths so they will buy it,' take on some unusual situations. Free cones are offered to folks who register to vote, donate books to Head Start, or send postcards to elected officials for a variety of causes, and to celebrate at Fall Down Festivals with block long stilt walking races, music and other amusements. Solar-powered mobiles are used to transport the ice cream and a show on the road. They still sponsor customer appreciation day once a year when free cones are dipped all day.

It's hard to resist a bowl or cone of Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough or Cherry Garcia as you read this humorous show and tell of two guys who really want (and do) make a difference. You'll be ready to book a snow shoe tour of the Vermont plant by the time you finish reading about these guys' mission. Their values-led business (in addition to having fun) is to produce the best ice cream from Vermont dairy products, to increase the value of the of the company for the stockholders and create career opportunities and financial rewards for employees, and to improve the quality of life for the community. (They donate 7.5% of pretax profits to Ben & Jerry's Foundation that supports a variety of causes that improve the quality of life for children.)

I'm using this book as a project for an organizational communications course and enjoyed the reading (and eating) more than I ever expected. It was the most fun I've had doing homework!

Not all businesses can be run without "going there". If all a company handles is information that can be zipped through the internet, it might be fine. But you can't send a car through email or a conference call.

I have spent 17 years in selling Information Systems and had to travel alot for meeting which took me out of my territory but with the concept of this book implemented alot of time, money and effort could have been saved - I have recommended that we implement this concept - very good book

I still work at this company, but that is not relevant to the book. The book outlines very well how business can and will be conducted at future looking companies. While some of the concepts may appear difficult, most have been employed with success at many companies. What this book does is present them in a concise and easy to read style that causes good business people to question why the do business the way they do and search for ways to improve company performance while improving employee lifestyle. Carried further, it shows how companies can expand their employee base to really hire and retain the best tallent without disrupting peoples families and lives for the sake of a job.

Well written, with real life experience behind it. For a business based book, fun to read.

This extremely well written book about ABB comes at the right time. ABB is endlessly reinventing itself, taking bold moves such as the divesture from its joint-venture with Alstom in power systems. However, the book has a few defaults. The main one is the overemphasis on production and labor issues. Many of the writers have backgrounds in operations or industrial relations, and it shows. Most of the papers depict factory-level efforts to raise productivity, quality,etc. This is fine, but I think ABB's success has a lot more to do with its ability to offer total solutions to its customers, including financing and maintenance. This is of course what its chief competitor GE does, but ABB has the advantage of being a truly transnational company, i.e. without an American (or in its case, Swedish) bias.The service is truly global. This side of ABB is not fully developed in the book. The impression we get is that ABB is the Toyota of electrical engineering, while I suspect it's more than that. The service aspect should have been researched more.

He takes many liberties in trashing Chrysler products of the early 80's. For instance, he states that chrysler's 2.2 engine was based on "twenty year old technology" yet he offers no evidence to back up this claim. Mr. Levin also carps about the lack of technology in Chrysler's cars such as using a "beam axle" while conveniently overlooking the fact that other cars of this time frame used solid rear axles quite frequently. Nor does he give much coverage to Chryslers lowest cost per unit, the VNT technology used in its turbo cars, the fact it had OHC engines on the market LONG before GM and Ford, the first domestic auto company to use airbags in its cars, the firs electronically adaptive transmission.
Mr Levin admitted he got little in the way of cooperation from Iacocca and it appears he wrote this tome to vent against a good yet flawed man and a great company.

I really wanted to like this book, but was disappointed with the end result. When the author sticks to the facts of the story, it is a revealing look at the politics of running a struggling auto company. The biographical information of the main players in upper echelons was quite interesting, also.

However, there is a sense of the author's bias lurking throughout the pages. He manages to imply that somehow, once Toyota introduced the Corona in 1966, there wasn't a marketing misstep to be made by the Japanese, particularly Toyota. Do the nameplates "Crown", "Cressida" and "Echo" ring a bell? I won't even mention some of the other sad cars that other manufacturers have coughed up in the ensuing years, and still do occasionally, from both sides of the Pacific.

Every now and again factual errors will appear, but they're so glaring that somebody with even a moderate interest in the car industry will pick up on. For instance, Honda earned customer loyalty because they "never dropped a nameplate." Really? Where did one go in 1987 to purchase a new Honda 600 GT or Sports 800?

More troubling was a hint of elitism that came up a couple of times. Was there (is there) really anything wrong with selling new cars to the blue-collar crowd? I know that some people are consumed by image, but most of us don't care what anybody else is driving, as long as they know HOW to drive it. People without a stratospheric income should be able to make a fully warranted purchase and get "that new car smell", too.

Finally, too little of the book is spent explaining exactly what was wrong, quality-wise, with Chrysler vehicles. Aside from the Aspen / Volaré twins, there was precious little time given to specific examples of lax quality control or design deficiencies. Even the A/V cars were a major problem only in their first year. More detail would have been revealing as to why buyers were steering clear of Chrysler's showrooms in the late 70's, when the whole mess started.

I've always had an avid interest in the auto industry, and have been waiting for somebody to write a book on the true Lee Iacocca to show the savior / charlatan that he really was. Unfortunately, somebody else is going to have to write it. This one falls short.

In case anybody's wondering, I have owned several cars from both American and Japanese manufacturers, including an 80's era Chrylser product. I have enjoyed the majority of them, and the only lemon I ever picked was from a European make.

I found this book provided a quite interesting history of not only Chrysler, but the entire auto industry between the years of '70-'80. I particularly enjoyed the author's insights in to Chrysler's main player Iacocca. The book did however seem to jump around from subject to subject with no clear tie-ins. I found it difficult during some portions of the book to figure out what time frame the author was speaking of, as he tended to bounce back and forth. All in all I found the book to provide some excellent information on Chrysler and the prevailing personalities and values that has kept the organization alive for so many years through so many triumphs and tragedies.