New Delhi: This week’s shortlist of books has tips on entrepreneurial management, honing coaching skills, ensuring successful mergers and acquisitions and bringing aesthetics into production, design and marketing of consumer products.
Niche Marketing for coaches
By Hannah McNamara
Price Rs295.00; Pages 239
Sage Publications
The book provides insider secrets that can help a company or individual attract clients. It provides practical tools on how to make the most of marketing opportunities.
For those wanting to make a career in coaching, it includes easy-to-follow guidelines on sharpening the saw be it in the form of re-training, picking up new skills or wanting to make a foray in altogether new areas of expertise.
Where it scores is not just in telling you ‘how to’ do it right but also ‘where to’ seek new business and clients, what methods to adopt to make an effective sales pitch and the best way to understand client mindsets.
The section on Coach Files gives you valuable first person accounts by coaches who entered niche areas, which according to the author is the way of the future where from an era of generalization, there has to be a marked shift towards specialized, niche areas which address client needs. At the end of it, one is left gaping in wonder at the rich life of a good coach. For, he amasses such a huge wealth of knowledge and network of friends with a bag full of rags-to-riches stories.
Mergers, Acquisitions and Corporate Restructuring
Edited by Chandrashekhar Krishnamurti, Vishwanath SR
Price Rs460.00; Pages 412
Sage Publications
Tracking all processes of a typical merger transaction, from identifying the most appropriate candidates to negotiating and closing the deal, the book is like a Bible for those wanting to establish a working understanding of mergers, acquisitions and corporate restructuring.
It gives the rationale for diversification via acquisition, searching for it, making valuations of publicly and privately held companies, going about making cross-border acquisitions and building empirical evidence along the way.
Converting jargon into friendly easy-to-comprehend concepts, it looks at various forms of corporate restructuring from spin-offs to carve outs, targeted stocks to reorganization of debt contracts, layoffs and downsizing. The sub heads of carefully structured chapters provides answers to how to maximize search for the right acquisition; ESOPS; accounting and tax implications resulting thereof; arriving at right valuations, making a smooth takeover possible and even issues related to bankruptcy and reorganization strategies.
Would be of use to corporates, entrepreneurs, researchers and financial experts
Entrepreneurial Management
By Shivganesh Bhargava
Price: Rs625; Pages 344
Sage Publications
With Asia likely to churn out over 50% entrepreneurs in the world by 2010, the art of entrepreneurial management is finding focus across management schools and now books dedicated to the subject.
Recognizing the fact that technical, business and financial skills alone will not be enough to ensure the successful execution of an idea/ business model into an economically robust business, things like developing entrepreneurial vision, motivating employees in such an organization so that they align themselves with the core idea and finding ways to optimize efficiencies, productivities and costs is what will help a fledgling company take flight and find a healthy anchor in a globally competitive environment.
A compilation of 14 papers on the subject by management gurus, faculty research scholars, consultants and administrators, the book looks at both dimensions – on how to be a successful entrepreneur and how to develop winning teams that can make that happen. Navigating through domains and situations that highlight pitfalls, external and internal conflicts, the book takes you through the very basics, building gradually to weightier issues that look at the complete gamut of activity that goes on in the name of business management today.
It looks at the psyche of women entrepreneurs, efficacy of small-scale businesses and even role of engineering institutions. The last chapter is useful, in that it studies the Business Incubator model that fosters the birth and development of Small Enterprises.
A very practical guide, it highlights qualities that an entrepreneur must have, the skills he must develop and the environment that he must operate in.
Aesthetics in Marketing
By Rajat K Baisya, G Ganesh Das
Price: Rs320; Pages: 313
Sage Publications
Taking aesthetics beyond their visual association, here is an attempt to make aesthetics relevant to broader product design strategies. The book sees how this very vital though under rated aspect can contribute to the consumer durable and automobile sectors specifically.
Real life case studies, interviews and surveys bring out the relevance of aesthetics in marketing, branding, consumer recall and even relationship building. Views and comments are adequately balanced with a detailed theoretical and conceptual framework, giving you enough food for thought.
The examples of some successful brands like the Audi, Toyota Prado, Suzuki Motorcycle, Mahindra & Mahindra Scorpio make the narrative extremely interesting. Simply told, here is one book where data and pie charts flow into the story telling, creating a case for factoring in aesthetics as a very tangible and assured form of assembling a product. From recognizing the need for it, to creating a framework, it looks at companies’ approach by giving some good and bad examples to drive home the point.
The book would be of interest not just to manufacturers and marketers of these products but also to users.