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BOOKS

2010/03/17 2 comments

Published. Not perished.

Managing Risk in Virtual Enterprise NetworksPublish or perish? Publish. It has taken its time, but finally it is there, the book that has my chapter in it. Managing Risk in Virtual Enterprise Networks: Implementing Supply Chain Principles, edited by Stavros Ponis, aims to serve as a point-of-reference for scholars and researchers who are interested in studying Risk Management in a cross-disciplinary fashion, linking Virtual Enterprise Networks with Supply Chain Management and Risk Management. I am proud to be able to contribute of this attempt at cross-fertilization between three distinctively different, yet highly interconnected fields of research.

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2010/03/16 Leave a comment

Book Review: Managing Risk and Security

Wagner Bode Managing Risk and Security One of my readers suggested this book to me via  a comment on my supply chain literature list pages, so I decided to find a copy for a proper review. Stephan M Wagner and Christoph Bode are renown authorities within supply chain risk research and as editors for Managing Risk and Security they have come up with a book that focuses specifically on security risks, as seen from the perspective of logistics service providers. And indeed, it was a suggestion well worth investigating, as supply chain security is something that every supply chain manager needs to take seriously.

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2010/03/13 Leave a comment

Book Review: The Geography of Transport Systems


This is a book I’ve wanted to lay my hands on for a long time. The Geography of Transport Systems by Jean-Paul Rodrigue, Claude Comtois and Brian Slack is a book that every geographer with an interest in transportation should read. It is also a book that every transportationist with a sense for geography should read. Even if your main focus is just transportation and nowhere near geography, this book will fascinate, because it so brilliantly explains, explores, researches and reviews the spatial impact of transportation systems and how they have shaped the world that surrounds us. It is not often that I fall in love with textbooks at first sight, and this is a book that will not spend much time collecting dust in my bookshelf, as I will read and use it again and again…

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2010/01/09 Leave a comment

The Definition of Agility

H T Goranson: The Agile Virtual EnterpriseAlthough 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 Leave a comment

HBR on Crisis Management


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 One comment

Book Review: Enterprise SCM

vivek-sehgal-sim-cityHave you ever played SimCity? I never liked Transport Tycoon 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 SimCity. And in some ways the 2009 book Enterprise Supply Chain Management by Vivek Sehgal really is very “Sim”-like. The book’s focus are the nitty-gritty details of operations and logistics, the flows of ins and outs, while strategic oversight and decisions seem to play a less important role. But only seemingly.

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2009/12/10 6 comments

Book Review: HBR on Supply Chain Management

hbr-supply-chain-management 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 2 comments

Book Review: HBR on Managing External Risk

managing-external-riskI 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 2 comments

Risk Management in Global Supply Chain Networks

viswanadham-gaonkar-risk-management-global-supply-chainsSupply 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 2 comments

Book Review:Managing Risks in Supply Chains

kersten-managing-risks-in-supply-chainsTo 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 Leave a comment

One bad apple...

kersten-managing-risks-in-supply-chains…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 Leave a comment

Book Review: Managing Supply Chain Risk and Vulnerability

managing-supply-chain-risk-and-vulnerabilityAnother 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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