Mr. Simon demonstrated thorough research and thought provoking writing on the subjects of sport and athletics. It is a book that anyone involved in athletics (in particular, intercollegiate athletics) MUST read! Buy two copies--one to keep for your own personal library and one to lend to a friend who is involved in athletics. This book opened my mind to different aspects of sport and athletics. Simply a must read!!!

this book told me everything that i wanted to know about george and ira. when i was done i felt that i knew them myself. i totally reccomend this book to anyone with the slightest intrest in either one (or both) of the gershwins.

Robert Simons is Professor of Business Administration. Antonio Davila was doctoral candidate at HBS when this article was publised, he is now (2001) Assistant Professor of Accounting at Stanford Graduate Business School. This article was published in the January-February 1998 issue of Harvard Business Review.

"Why is it that a large percentage of the most reasonable, analysis-driven, implementable strategies never make it from concept to reality? The answer lies with managers themselves - or more specifically, with how managers direct their energy." Managerial energy is an organization's most important and most scarce resource, but the modern business world which is full of opportunities and breakthroughs makes managers struggle for time and attention. This results in misdirected or diffused managerial energy. The authors introduce a new business ratio, which they call return on management (= equation productive organizational energy released divided by management time and attention invested). This business ratio is not a quantitative formula but a qualitative one and its output is directional. In order to measure your organization's ROM the authors introduce five acid tests/questions. These questions are complemented with a discussion of ROM's allies and enemies. What we must realize is that return on management is a function of managerial focus and communication, and should result is better use of managerial time and energy.

I do like this article. It is in line with Kaplan and Norton's Balanced Scorecard articles, by introducing and measuring non-financial measurements. (Surprise, surprise, the authors have written a book together with Robert Kaplan in 1999.) But I can also recognize some influences of William Oncken and Donald Wass's 1974-Harvard Business Review classic (Management Time: Who's Got the Monkey?). The article is well written, clear, and uses great, practical examples. The main message is: Stop wasting valuable managerial time and energy on unimportant issues! I would recommend this article to (senior) management and MBA-students. The article is written in simple US-English.

Peter Cozzens rightly compares General John Pope's memoires with those of U.S. Grant and W.T. Sherman. This is a highly readable account from one of the participants in some of the least-understood episodes of the Civil War.

Of course, Pope's writings are not "new." As Cozzens relates, the entries which make up this book appeared in the National Tribune and other Reconstruction-era publications. However, they have spent the last century forgotten by the general public. Cozzens and his colleague, Gerardi, have done a great service both to Civil War scholars and to the casual Civil War buff by bringing Pope's reminiscences and analyses to life.

What is most surprising is the humor, candor and generosity of a man who has gone down in history as a narrow, bitter mediocrity. For example, devotees of General Lee, whose comments largely consigned Pope to history almost as a barbarian, will be surprised to read Pope's poetic evocation of the beauty of Virginia and the nobility of its citizens.

In a similar vein, readers will benefit from a "fresh" take on a wide range of issues -- such as the relationships between Lincoln, Stanton, Halleck and McClellan -- from a player very much in the know, but whose views have gone largely unremarked.

My only cautionary note would be that an appreciation of this volume depends upon a basic understanding of the events of the war, and perhaps also upon an introductory familiarity with the post-war debates on those events.

This is a fantastic historical atlas. I have a collection of dozens of historical atlases and the quality is not always high. Too often topical historical "atlases" have too few actual maps -- most of which are just reprinted from earlier historical atlases.

"The Penguin Atlas of British & Irish History" is the exact opposite. There's an original full-color map on every page. The atlas covers the whole length of British history from the Ice Age to the Chunnel. The maps are very well made and detailed, alternating between overviews of the whole of the British Isles and close-ups of particular cities, regions, and topics. One particularly nice touch is original panoramic reconstructions of historic sites including: Roman-era London, Viking-era York, Medieval Norwich, Tudor-era London, 18th-century Dublin and Edinburgh, 19th-century Manchester, and contemporary London...

I rarely get excited about textbooks, but this particular treatment of strategy, balancing leading and lagging indicators with a view of past, present and future, was enlightening. This book should be a "must read" for any mid- or senior- level manager. It shows how to make your decisions more fact-based and less 'art'. With the coming of age of "management of knowledge" this is a great tool to use to improve business processes. Definitely worth every single penny spent - but especially if you are interested in learning tangible methods!

"History must be told through the eyes of people that have experienced it..." wrote Vine Deloria, Jr., American Indian author, in his 1972 book Of Utmost Good Faith.

Taking a similar documentary approach in his new book A RACE AT BAY, journalist Robert G. Hays looks to the past for some answers to understanding the cultural conflicts between the Native American Indians and the ever-expanding population of white settlers in America during the late nineteenth century.

Using well-selected editorials from the New York Times between 1860 and 1900, Hays skillfully focuses the reader's attention on the role of the press in defining and influencing public opinion on what the editorial writers called the "Indian problem."

But what was the Indian problem? To most non-Indians of that time, particularly economic opportunists and frontier settlers, the American Indian simply was in the way of national expansion and progress. Indians were either to be contai! ned or exterminated if efforts to "civilize" them failed. And civilization, as Hays amply illustrates, "was defined in the whites' terms."

Many Americans in the "civilized" eastern states of that time held the belief of the nineteenth century historian John Fiske that the race of aboriginal Americans could be identified by three cultural classifications: "barbarous," "savage," and "half-civilized." As Robert Hays points out the Times editorial writers also were not immune to these popular xenophobic expressions and added a few of their own like "greasy red men," "dusky savages," and "Lo." It is not surprising, therefore, that the editors of the Times used the typical "we/they" attitude in their otherwise critical reporting of the treatment of the American Indians.

A RACE AT BAY is well organized in eleven short chapters each presenting a topic that can be read in or out of s! equence of the others. Hays begins each of his chapters wit! h an insightful overview of his selected editorials. At the end of the book is a complete index that should prove particularly useful to readers who want to focus on selected issues within the same thread of discussion.

In one of his longest chapters Robert Hays covers the contentious topic on Indian policy--as debated and (re)defined by the U.S. Congress, as implemented by the Department of Interior, as discharged by the Department of War, and as defended or ridiculed by the New York Times as in the following editorial excerpt from May 22, 1870:

"There is a white problem to be dealt with along the whole of our vast frontier, in order even to get at our Indian problem...why the Russians and French and English have always succeeded better with the Indians than we have, is, not that they are more humane or more just than we are, or have more tenderness for the red race than we have, but that their system of governing the white race is different...they do not permit t! he sparse and half-civilized communities which collect on their frontier to govern themselves as we do under our Territorial system."

A clear, consistent, and equitable national policy for the American Indians was never realized then, and remains just as elusive today, as a Times editorial writer on October 7, 1879, admonishes with the question "What has Congress ever done to define the course of conduct which should be pursued toward the Indians?"

Perhaps the enigmatic answer lies in an old Indian quote: "The only promise that the Government kept with the Indian was the promise to take the Indians' land, and it did."

This book is well written and includes many practical examples and illustrations. It provides Minitab macros for computations and includes modern advances including the bootstrap. These macros are written out in an appendix and the data sets used are also listed in an appendix. The data and macros can be used on the computer throught the floppy diskette that comes attached to the book. The authors show exact calculations of the bootstrap distribution for the median. This is useful text that I referenced in my book on the bootstrap. The level of the book is intermediate and is appropriate for an advanced undergraduate or a graduate course in modern statistical inference. It covers both the robust estimation of location and scale and has a nice bibliography of the literature as of 1990. It also includes many advanced topics such as the two-sample problem, robust regression and time series. Chapter 1 introduces modern advances in statistics and provides motivation for robust methods. The authors emphasize the importance of computing in modern statistics but also provide a sound warning against the over-reliance on computers. They make a serious effort to mix theory and practice, covering the important asymptotic results and theoretical concepts and also providing practical examples mainly from biology and the physical sciences.

With selections from writers as varied as Asimov and Dave Barry, this book has something for everyone. I used it as a writing text to teach my eighth grader at home. It has excellent writing prompts, grammar and punctuation lessons, pre-reading hints, vocabulary, and great questions about each prose selection to point out HOW the writer achieved the effect he/she wanted. I highly recommend this for homeschoolers and others who just enjoy good writing.

pedeatric infictions must be treatd well