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BOOKS
 2010/01/09  Although getting close to 20 years old now, The Agile Virtual Enterprise: Cases, Metrics, Tools , written in 1992 by H T (Ted) Goranson, is a book that still holds timeless ideas and visions that are still applicable. While the at that time emerging vision of the virtual enterprise is at the forefront of the book, it is also the only reference I have found that properly differentiates between agility and flexibility and what being agile actually entails. This blog has previously reported profusely on flexibility, let alone resilience and robustness, but has severely neglected agility. With this post, I intend to take a closer look at what it means to be agile.
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2009/12/21  
Close calls and near misses are not unusual in the business world, but how do companies deal with them? Published in 1999, the Harvard Business Review on Crisis Management is my third post on the Harvard Business Review Paperback Series, not that I intend to review all 73 of them. But this book reflects much of what is on my mind these days. I’ve had this book on my bookshelf for some time now, and I was planning on a review later this month, but the news on SAAB’s demise compelled me to move up my review in my posting schedule. The closure of SAAB is a major crisis by all standards, and is a fitting reminder that this 10-year old book will never go out of date. Why and how do some companies survive, and some not? This book sheds some light on this.
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2009/12/11
2009/12/10  Today we continue my exploration of the Harvard Business Review Paperback Series that I started yesterday when I reviewed Managing External Risk, an enterprise-wide approach towards risk management. Today it’s back to basics: Harvard Business Review on Supply Chain Management. It was published in 2006, so it has been out there for a while, but I have been blissfully oblivious to it, preoccupied as I have been with other literature. Besides, the Harvard Business Review Paperback Series, as the “Paperback” in the name implies, are not written for us academics and researchers, but for the professional manager seeking executive perspectives and solutions.
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2009/12/09  I am blessed to have a college library that complies with most of my book acquisition requests and the other day my library told me that the last book I asked them to acquire had arrived. It was the Harvard Business Review on Managing External Risk , brand new, published in September 2009, part of the Harvard Business Review Paperback Series. After flipping through the book my first feeling was general disappointment, perhaps because I am an academic, not a professional. After re-reading and re-considering I have to admit, though, that it wasn’t that bad after all. In fact, the book has managed to summarize the essence of executive risk management in an excellent manner. You don’t need to have an MBA to be enable to enjoy this book, common sense and curiosity about the inner workings of business decisions are enough. I learned a lot from this book.
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2009/11/23  Supply Chain Risks can be classified as either one of these three, Deviation, Disruption or Disaster, and can be approached using either a Preventive or an Interceptive approach; the former attempts to build in risk tolerance, the latter attempts to contain the damage or impact of an undesired event. So say N Visvanadham and Roshan S Gaonkar in Risk Management in Global Supply Chain Networks, a chapter in the 2008 book Supply Chain Analysis, edited, among others, by Christopher S Tang. Using this framework, the authors develop a simple integer quadratic optimization model that optimizes partner selection and minimizes operational cost variability.
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2009/11/21  To make up for yesterday’s perhaps overly harsh critique of just one article from this book, this is a full and proper content review. Managing Risks in Supply Chains: How to Build Reliable Collaboration in Logistics , edited by Wolfgang Kersten and Thorsten Blecker, is a collection of articles by various researchers from mostly Germany and Austria, and lo and behold, Marco Moder, whose PhD on Supply Frühwarnsysteme has been reviewed on this blog previously, is also among the contributors. This book has been out for a while, but I didn’t discover it until recently, and now my library finally bought a copy for me to read and review for the readers of my blog.
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2009/11/20 …spoils the barrel? Yesterday I sat down to prepare a review of this book, Managing Risks in Supply Chains: How to Build Reliable Collaboration in Logistics, edited by Wolfgang Kersten and Thorsten Blecker. The book is a collection of articles by various researchers from mostly Germany and Austria, and while many of the articles/chapters maintain an excellent academic standard, one of the chapters does not at all hold up to any standard. In fact, it is so bad it makes me wonder how this could have slipped by editorial control?
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2009/11/11  Another book by someone from the ISCRIM gang? No, not this time, or perhaps, yes, after all. Managing Supply Chain Risk and Vulnerability: Tools and Methods for Supply Chain Decision Makers by Teresa Wu and Jennifer Blackhurst sounds like ISCRIM, but it’s not. If it were, it should have been noted in the ISCRIM Newsletter, but it wasn’t. Nonetheless, several of the ISCRIM members have contributed to the chapters in this book, which is well worth taking a closer look at, particularly if risk modeling and decision-making is your field.
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2009/11/09  Just out a few days ago, Single Point of Failure is a fascinating read. The author, Gary S. Lynch, is Global Leader, Supply Chain Risk Management Practice at Marsh Consulting, so he knows what he is talking about. The book’s tagline reads “The 10 Essential Laws of Supply Chain Risk Management” and what Gary Lynch is trying to convey is that there are certain basics every manager should know, understand, and act upon. Lynch breaks down Supply Chain Management into ten basic laws, neither founded in academic theories or mathematical formulas, but simple basic principles that anyone can appreciate.
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2009/10/05   This is an updated and extended review of the Handbook of Transportation Engineering by Myer Kutz (editor) which I have reviewed in a previous post 4 years ago: Book Review: The Handbook of Tranportation Engineering. While rummaging through references for a journal article I came across an old copy of the chapter on Transportation Engineering in the above book and to my surprise I discovered a recent acquaintance I had forgotten that I already had met 4 years ago: The risk definition by Kaplan & Garrick (1981). For supply chain risk researchers, this risk definition has it all.
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2009/09/07  Dynamic Supply Chain Alignment. That is the magic formula that runs like a red thread through John Gattorna’s latest book, where he demonstrates how there are four types of supply chains, based on four types of customer behavior. This is a well-written and excellently illustrated book, which I will take a closer look at, chapter by chapter, in order to answer the question: Is Dynamic Supply Chain Alignment the ultimate formula for streamlining your supply chain for the utmost performance?
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Have you ever played 
? I never liked 
that much, but I used to play SimCity a lot, and I still do on occasion, when my wife lets me have my own quality time, and maybe that’s why I fell for this book, because the cover picture looks exactly like a scene from 
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