Milkovich and Newman's text is sets the standard for Compensation and Human Resources texts,period. From its strategic decisions framework it clearly illustrates that compensation policy can be a key to unlocking an organization's capabilities (and the ever elusive sustainable competitive advantage).

The strength of the book is that it extracts and builds on key research findings in a way that advances the body of compensation knowledge (in a way pleasing to academics) and is relevant to practitioners. Chapter 2 on Strategic Perspectives and Chapters 9 & 10 on Pay for Performance best exemplify the confluence of research relevance and tactical usefulness.

It is absolutely a must read for anyone who is a student of organizations or who attempts to manage one (not just compensation managers).

A 5++ - the best BUSINESS text i've read. This is the first book i've read where i both grew intellectually and in tactical/application skills. This compensation text is quite unusual in that it effectively reduces huge bodies of research in business strategy, economics, organizational behavior and compensation to provide a holistic business model to analyze compensation decisions - all in the first three chapters. The Milkovich/Newman approach creatively blends a conceptual underpining (the why) with tactical details (the what and how). This blending allows them to supply enormous value by reducing the myriad of compensation decisions to 4 major pieces. The utility of this elegance is that long after reading the book or taking a course using this book, you'll still remember the framework and steps to both build from scratch and to adjust a compensation system - not just the what, but the why. i personally felt quite empowered and ready to take on compensation work after reading this text.

This text is really designed for those compensation practioners that want to understand how compensation might be used to supply a sustainable competitive advantage. The authors' deep reading and involvement in both research and consulting with business shows here. They worked very hard to allow us to absorb the research implication and to use the tools, without our having to read the full body of research or to invent the tools.

The authors balance the research perspective by developing a working model and applying it to real world cases where they have consulted. The reader is then challenged to apply the model to case situations presented in the book and to their work practice.

Lastly, some things i've learned from this book:

1. you get what you pay for ... -- the research clearly shows that pay is a key motivator and that people will behave as they're incentivized by their pay systems. -- the implication is that EVERY compensation system, no matter whether it's planned or evolves, supplies a network of incentives that in part direct employee behavior and business outcomes.

2. compensation systems can be designed to support a sustainable competitive advantage. -- through understanding the motivational incentives and how they tie into business strategy. -- a "universalistic" compensation approach that says there's one right answer supplies some good practices, but doesn't fully explain observed motivational differences.

3. Compensation must tie tightly to the work process (work flow) or it will surely fail in it's objectives. -- how many companies talk about changing their cultures while they don't change or even understand the motivational impacts of their pay plans?

4. There's no right answer, only a good model to help. -- is a tournament pay system (tied to an individual / hierachical workflow) better than an egalitarian system (tied to a team workflow)? it depends ... and that's where Milkovich/Newman fill in the blanks.

A M-U-S-T read for anyone participating in making compensation decisions - whether you're in school or already a compensation vice president.

This is an excellent book for long distance parenting ideas. Some are rather generic, but you can build on those to make them even more special. I recommend this book to any parent who is away or going to be away from their children for any length of time at all.

I was so impressed that I used this as a recommended book of the week in my [...] newsletter [...]!

This is quite the best specialist dictionary for collectors and dealers, and for translators like myself, checking that the English expression means what we hope. But there is a danger. Look up one expression and you find yourself reading several other entries as well, just for the fun of it. A most entertaining and erudite work. I know of nothing else to match it.

A beautiful and loving treatment of theater design through the ages, George Izenour's classic, long out-of-print, has been recently edited and re-released. A must-have for all theater fans, architects, stage designers, acouticians and classical musicians. The plan, perspective and cut-away drawings of hundreds of theaters, large and small, are a marvel of precision, detail and artistry. Professor Emeritus of Yale Drama School Izenour brings a life-time of experience to this handsome - and heavy - volume. Well worth the high price.

The Beautiful Days Of My Youth by Ana Novac is a book based on Ana's diary she kept while at Auschwitz and Plaszow. This is not the most well written book but not many 15 year olds could even write while going through the horrendous conditions at Auschwitz and Plaszow. We follow her life through the concentration camps as she is worked nearly to death and fights sickness after sickness until Britain soldiers liberate her camp. Overall the book is a bit confusing at times and a tad boring at times but a book that describes the life of a teenage girl at a concentration camp pretty well.

I had to do a biography and I picked this one, but it was really actually hard to understand and explain to the class the requirements of my book report. I could say it was very well done for a fourteen year old, but still, there were too many ideas taking place and that started to get confusing. I recommend this for any that wants to know more of the events of Aushwitz and Plasow, but for something for school, I highly recommend you to not read it. It is very hard to prepare a speech for the class on this one meeting all the requirements.

I thought reading this book was an important experience

Unfortunately, this Yale edition leaves out about half of what Newman himself published in 1873 as the definitive edition of THE IDEA OF A UNIVERSITY. Published here are only the nine "Dublin Discourses" from Part I on "University Teaching" and but four of the ten chapters of Part II, "University Subjects Discussed in Occasional Lectures and Essays." For the hundred-page displacement of Newman's essays, the editor substitutes five interpretive essays supposedly inquiring into the relevance of Newman's book for today's higher education debates. These interpretive essays have major inconsistencies and repetitions among themselves and are of mixed quality, with inaccuracies and serious misunderstandings of some of Newman's central ideas. As accurate forays of the Newmanian mind into the twentieth- and twenty-first century university, only the engaging and intellectually challenging essays by George Marsden and George Landow succeed. (COMPLETE paperback editions of Newman's IDEA are available from Loyola University Press, 1987, and University of Notre Dame Press, 1982).

A wonderful work, too bad that this edition by Regnery is chock full of glaring typographical errors. Detracts from Newman's otherwise brilliant prose.

Newman's work is not only an eloquent, erudite, and careful defense of the virtue of knowledge and the value of a liberal education; it is also a brilliantly reasoned and felt argument for the prevention of hubris on the part of any particular branch of knowledge.

Newman's sound warnings against the overreaching of scientific fields and the triumph of smug materialism and positivism are still urgent, of course. Newman is also careful to point out that the liberal arts and even theology may attempt to establish a single, inadequate framework for the discovery of truth.

Newman's complex epistemology does not fall prey to the heresy that truth is not one, but reminds us that in our present state, truth present various aspects and that the tyranny of any particular branch of knowledge is the victory of ignorance.

Since I ordered this book through Focus on the Family, I was really expecting something with some substance & in keeping with my moral & spiritual values. So I was very surprised with the light, fluffy, over-simplified approach to this very difficult topic. It might be helpful for military spouses or others faced with temporary separation, if they already have a good relationship with their children. But it fell short of offering any real insights on rebuilding and sustaining a relationship in more difficult circumstances such as divorce, etc. I was especially disappointed with the emphasis on pop culture "things" like movies, music, sports (encouraging betting on teams, etc.) instead of heritage & values that parents can impart to their kids.

I wish this book could somehow be recycled back into a tree! The author wasted his time on this product