INSEAD Blog by Zanat0s the INSEAD(er) @ Tokyo ! The Biggest among INSEAD MBA blogs. Insead is over, blogging not.

Review of BATTLE, a great book!

"Battle" can be described as a coffee table type book (although you may want to place it elsewhere when considering the subject matter) that is best suited for browsing. It surveys warfare throughout history and is quite sweeping and ambitious in scope. Generally, "Battle" is divided into eras/geographical areas and provides a briefing on the major powers and empires (and the rise and falls), strategic situations, weapons, tactics, and battles. The material is put together very well and contains many informative and striking pictures. In addition, it illuminates many periods and empires in areas such as India and China that are obscure to Westerners. Although probably not intended by the author, the reader is likely to grasp that any empire is fleeting when viewed in the context of history. Where "Battle" is lacking is in the descriptions of the individual battles. Generally that information is very brief and vague and those wanting details should look at other, more specific books. This is not surprising considering the immense scope. However, "Battle" is excellent for what it is and provides a gateway into the study of the many eras and participants of military history.

Brutal review: 50 Battles that changed the world

50 BATTLES THAT CHANGED THE WORLD: The Conflicts that Most Influenced the Course of History, William Weir.

In the tradition of Edward Creasy, J.F.C. Fuller, and Sir Basil H. Liddell-Hart, William Weir puts together a subjective list of important battles. A well-written introduction lays out the rationale for his particular approach. Weir meshes together the battles he feels ensured democracy and freedom, describes battles that gave Western civilization domination over the East, and provides examples of the political decline of the West--a recent trend in the examination of world history.

Weir thoroughly researched the battles he includes in his book and has a good grasp of their effect on the world. He includes several appendices, one of which includes several battles that did not make his list for more extensive treatment. He also includes a bibliographical glossary that addresses major leaders of the battles, a glossary of military terms, and a thorough index.

A chronological listing of battles is broken down by five different criteria:

1. A straight historical chronology, which is helpful because the book lists battles by order of importance, and often jumps from ancient to modern times and back again.

2. A list of battles pertaining to the development of democracy.

3. Battles of East versus West.

4. Battles dealing with European nationhood.

5. Battles reacting to Europe's domination and control.

I have a few criticisms: the bibliography, while extensive and complete, does not cross-reference battles; there is a lack of maps; it is difficult to keep up with national and cultural boundaries because battles cross vast time spans; there is little for those interested in troop movements; and the space allotted to each battle is insufficient. I knew most of these battles and the book didn't offer me any new specific knowledge.

In every entry, Weir attempts to define the world, provide insight into the mindset of military leaders on both sides of a battle, and describe the battles themselves. Doing this is a daunting task, and Weir's writing style suffers for it. While his narrative is informal and relaxed, a more structured approach would have better defined characters and events.

Weir concludes each entry with a brief discussion of how the battle affected the world or laid the foundation for the present world culture.

The book is best used as an introduction to battles for those new to military history. Although Weir obviously put a lot of work into the book, he does not explore each battle in enough detail to be of use to more than the casual reader. Some final remarks; There's 11 pages on Tenochititlan, and nine pages on the battle of Chickamauga, for instance, compared to five on Saratoga and Waterloo.
And listing the Nika Rebellion as the second most important battle of all time? Hard to figure where that is coming from.There's little to nothing about military strategic and tactics, which is why I think most people read this sort of thing.  There are almost no maps, and the illustrations are small.
Also, there are numerous typos, many of them just careless, such as the caption that says (insert commander here).

Again, it's an interesting take on the world's great battles. Just don't take it as gospel.

Best book about Alexander! His strategy...

Alexander, Killer of Men: Alexander the Great and the Macedonian Art of War. David J. Lonsdale.

The author of any new book on the generalship of Alexander the Great must begin by asking himself why the world needs another such work. He faces the fundamental challenge of saying something original about a well-worn topic. There are no new sources, and numerous excellent authors have written on the subject in the centuries since Alexander's death. Most authors solve this challenge by providing an original interpretation of familiar material. That is the approach David Lonsdale chose in dealing with Alexander. Fortunately, the title Alexander, Killer of Men does not hint at the interpretation he presents. Lonsdale, a protege of Colin Gray and currently a lecturer at the University of Reading, uses Alexander in his strategic studies courses. Consequently, he wrote an interpretation that is really an analysis of the Macedonian king's campaigns in terms of modern strategic and operational theory. This is a useful approach for modern students of the strategic art, provided they remember that such an analysis almost certainly bears no resemblance to how Alexander thought and consequently may provide little real insight into why he selected the strategic options he did.

Lonsdale finds that Alexander inherited a good army equipped with good technology. He cautions against overemphasizing the value of the sarissa--a judicious warning since it is not obvious that this extra-long spear was really the decisive advantage of the Macedonian system. Lonsdale also praises the overall loyalty and professionalism (overlooking various assassination plots and revolts) of the Macedonians, their operational mobility and flexibility, and their tactical use of combined arms. Especially in the combined-arms aspects, which he depicts as an innovation, he underestimates the progress the Greeks made during the Peloponnesian War. Because of terrain and culture, Greek city-states would never have adopted heavy cavalry, but they were all using light troops of all kinds and had moved past what Lonsdale calls the "quasi-ritualistic warfare" of earlier periods.

Lonsdale believes Alexander had an effective process through which he exercised command. The heart of the process was Alexander himself, but it included trusted competent subordinates and some system to relay plans and orders. Lonsdale recognizes that this process became less effective as Alexander grew increasingly paranoid and consequently less trusting of his generals. Alexander actually missed Parmenion (not personally but professionally) after he had the old general assassinated. In the end, Lonsdale, like most analysts of Alexander, falls back on the assertion that he was a military genius. This is a frustratingly unsatisfying explanation, but perhaps unavoidable.

This reviewer would have liked a more detailed explanation of how Alexander's campaigns knit together to achieve strategic objectives--what I understood to be the purpose of the book. What did Alexander want to achieve, and how did the campaigns he designed and battles he accepted further the achievement of that objective? Lonsdale addresses those issues; however, most readers would be looking for more in three areas. First, what was Alexander doing? Why was he in Persia, and why did he continue east after defeating the Persians? In other words, what were the strategic objectives? Other than Alexander's paranoia, Lonsdale downplays the strategic impact of his personality. I believe the Macedonian's sense of destiny and his sheer curiosity were critical in determining the strategic objective. Thus, other than the fact it happened, Lonsdale does not discuss the incredibly difficult side trip to Siwa, Egypt, which makes no strategic sense unless you know that Alexander went there to pray at a famous shrine. He received a prophecy, the exact contents of which he never revealed, but which traditional accounts imply reinforced his ambition to conquer the world. If true, that may well have been a critical moment in the campaign--a redefinition of the strategic objective. Similarly, there seem to be two significant reasons Alexander kept pushing his army east after the conquest of Persia. Both rise from Alexander's personality. He was curious and just wanted to know what was out there, and he was ambitious and wanted to subjugate everyone he encountered. If strategy is all about achieving political objectives, and Alexander personally selected those objectives, then a strategic study must necessarily deal with such subjects. An inquiry along those lines leads to the murky realm of myth and legend that Lonsdale tried to avoid, but if understanding the strategic objective is essential, some journey into that realm is unavoidable.

Next, there needed to be a more detailed examination of the enemy. One cannot understand Alexander's strategy without understanding the Persian military system. As one example, the reason Alexander could afford to tramp around the rim of the Mediterranean and spend months besieging ports had to do with how the Persians raised armies. Once Alexander had destroyed the professional core of Persians and mercenary Greeks at Issus, Darius had to rely on levies from outlying satrapies. Those were of poor quality and took time to assemble. That time gave Alexander strategic options that might not otherwise have been available

So where should i go?

It almost 3 here in INSEAD and i still do not know what my competitive advantage is. Looking back i can describe myself as some1 who would always try to achieve his objectives. I have worked in 3 companies, all 3 of them had to do with trade and retail. I have worked in the sourcing/procurement, marketing, strategy and finance departments for these 3 companies so I can safely say i have a spherical view of the retail indusry in general. I think i will stay on this path and won't diverge. That's why I read the book called Retailization, which i want to recommend to everyone who's interested in retailing. Retailing is THE FUTURE.

In perhaps the most creative and authoritative book on selling brands ever written reveal how the world's most successful brands sell themselves to today's increasingly demanding shoppers and retailers. As the world of mass communications evolves into the world of media of the masses the very concept of the brand is transforming - from branding to the shelf to branding from the shelf. Two years in the analysis, "Retailization" is the largest study ever conducted on how corporations and their brands are dealing (or not dealing) with this new era. The study covering over twenty countries worldwide and interviews with some of the leading brand marketers has drawn on countless examples of both creative execution and retail impact. "Retailization" shows how to establish a business approach that can better meet the needs of today's shopping Kings and Queens by creating and activating revolutionary selling situations. The central thesis of this book is that corporations must undertake nothing less than a radical reinvention of how they reach their customers to sell their products. The shelf where products are sold is the new centre of the business and communications universe. The answer to how to get the most from this change lies in a radically new business philosophy - Retailization. "Retailization" presents an innovative and pragmatic step by step process to help businesses rethink, reimagine and restructure their entire business and brand efforts around the retail strategies and executions that can better meet the needs of today's shopping Kings and Queens. Research shows that we have as little as four seconds to get a shopper's attention. The authors explain what you need to do to guarantee that you own that four seconds from understanding your competitive arena and context to understanding the nature of today's shopper. From there they explain how you can optimize the creation of your products, your retail impact and your communications. Finally, they demonstrate how to activate the process through retailizing your entire organization from top to bottom and we how to verify the results.

Soft side: Stupidity is Invicible

Business

Misjudgements causing a severe loss of profit, often associated with the failure of an individual product.
1958 model year - Ford Motor Company introduces the Edsel, a new car model remembered as a spectacular blunder because of its association with the Ford family. The Edsel was named after Edsel Ford, former company president and son of Henry Ford. The vehicle sported a front grill described as looking like a horse collar, and was priced higher than competing companies' models. The Edsel was discontinued early in the 1960 model year. The model failure was responsible for Ford losing nearly half of the $650 million raised by the company in its 1956 initial public stock offering (IPO). The Ford Edsel is such a famous failure that the name "Edsel" itself has become an appellation for something that's irredeemably flawed and thus doomed to failure. [2] [3]
1985 - Coca-Cola releases New Coke. The New Coke formula actually beat the old Coke in taste tests, but Coca-Cola's blunder was in failing to realize the immensity of the Coke legacy that they had built up over nearly a century. This legacy was so strong that the mere idea of changing Coke, by this time considered an American icon, – even "for the better" – met with intense, passionate resistance. People felt as if Coke was turning its back on their drinking preferences, their childhood, and even their way of life. "Coke is as basic as the Magna Carta, the Declaration of Independence." "Next week, they'll be chiseling Teddy Roosevelt off the side of Mount Rushmore." Coca-Cola eventually re-released the original Coke formula as "Coca-Cola Classic". [4]
1991 - Gerald Ratner made a speech in which he rubbished one of his own company's products and, by implication, their entire range. As a result he lost his job, and the company lost market share and had to rebrand. See Doing a Ratner.
1992 - Hoover ran a promotion campaign in the UK, offering free flights to Europe and New York when customers spent more than £100 on Hoover products - significantly less than the cost of the flights. The company had been relying on customers being unwilling to go through the complex application process, but they severely underestimated how popular the offer would be, leading to the company denying customers their flights, and years of bad publicity. Eventually, Hoover was forced to honour many of these deals, at a cost of £48m. Parent company Maytag sold the British division to Italian electrical appliance firm Candy, and all senior staff involved in the promotion lost their jobs.
2001 Shares in Exodus, a bankrupt internet firm, jumped by 59,000% when a rogue trader accidentally bid $100 for its shares, at a time when its value was 17 cents.[1]
2002 In October, the US investment bank Bear Stearns entered an order to sell $4bn (£2.6bn) worth of stocks by accident in a late trade. The exchange said the order was the result of a "clerical error" and should have been for $4m. They managed to cancel all but $622m of the order before execution.[2]
2005 - A trader working for Mizuho Securities Co. part of the Mizuho Financial Group mis-types and sells 610,000 shares for 1 yen instead of the intended 1 share for 610,000 yen in the stock J-Com Co. This represented a sell order for more than forty two times the number of shares on issue. Mizuho Securities managed to buy back about 480,000 shares during which time the price rose to 700,000 yen. The eventual losses are expected to be around 100 billion yen. [5]
2005 - Sony BMG introduced XCP (Extended Copy Protection) software on music CDs in order to combat piracy. In October 2005, security researcher Mark Russinovich published an online analysis of the software and determined that it functioned as a rootkit, installing itself on users' computers without notification and cloaking itself to run without detection. The software was also found to be very difficult to uninstall, caused crashes in many systems, and presented a significant security threat by allowing piggybacking by other malware. Russinovich's article led to a public uproar. Sony initially denied the software posed a threat, but later released an uninstaller. This only exasperated the problem, as it was revealed that the uninstaller used an ActiveX component that caused a larger security threat than the XCP software itself. In the wake of the Copy Protection Scandal, Sony BMG's market share fell from 28.46% to 25.61% in 2005, likely as a result of Sony having to recall and replace several million CDs in the middle of the holiday season. It also resulted in several class action lawsuits, many of which are still in litigation, and caused significant damage to Sony's image.

Soft Side: IF

I've received a lot of nice feedback from folks about this particular poem. I'm glad that I could contribute something useful to the Internet, even if the words are Kipling's and not mine. Enjoy. This poem is one the best ever written. It talks stragiht to my heart. i draw my inner strength from it. I hope it has the same effect on u. I went to Kunikuniya to buy this poem, since i left my own copy in China. I was so surprised when they told me they don't have it. It was quite a shock so here it is

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you
But make allowance for their doubting too,
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream--and not make dreams your master,
If you can think--and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it all on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on!"

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings--nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much,
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And--which is more--you'll be a Man, my son!

--Rudyard Kipling