Necessary but not sufficient

10/29/2009 at 12:47 pm | Martijn Lofvers | No Comments

A great deal has been published about Baan Company, in many different media. The best-known book is the one by Mark Houben and Jeroen Wester of the Dutch newspaper Het Financieele Dagblad, which gives an illuminating overview of the issues with Baan....

Account management in the Supply Chain

10/29/2009 at 11:38 am | Martijn Lofvers | No Comments

A book about customer-oriented collaboration in the Supply Chain sounds very promising, like an inspiring subject. For a long time, major multinationals in particular focused on chain control of internal collaborations with sister and parent...

Strategies and tactics in supply chain event management

09/11/2009 at 2:00 pm | Martijn Lofvers | No Comments

The authors of 'Strategies and tactics in supply chain event management' have bundled a number of articles about theories, methods and tools for dealing with various disruptions in the supply chain. The book is mainly intended for supply chain...

Measuring the Value of the Supply Chain

09/11/2009 at 1:56 pm | Martijn Lofvers | No Comments

Enrico Camerinelli, senior analyst at the Celent Banking Group, has recorded his experiences with the financial supply chain in a book.  He describes the bridge between the supply chain manager and the CFO as being threefold: 1) it is hard to...

Hidden champions

08/11/2009 at 1:51 pm | Martijn Lofvers | No Comments

Hermann Simon has been studying ‘Hidden champions’ for more than twenty years, and already published some of his findings in 1996. In this sequel, he mainly focuses on the influence of globalisation on these companies. ‘Hidden champions’ are...

The Contract Scorecard

08/11/2009 at 1:46 pm | Martijn Lofvers | No Comments

With 'The contract scorecard', author Sara Cullen guides her reader, step by step, through the various elements of an outsourcing contract. The ‘contract scorecard’ consists of four quadrants: quality, finance, relationship and strategy. Cullen...

1609: The forgotten history of Hudson

06/15/2009 at 10:39 pm | Martijn Lofvers | No Comments

With just a slight twist of fate, New York might have been called Nouveau Paris. The English sailor Henry Hudson, who sailed to America on the ship Half Moon four hundred years ago on behalf of the Dutch East India Company (VOC), was also at the time...

Visible Cities

06/11/2009 at 10:46 pm | Martijn Lofvers | No Comments

In his book ‘Visible Cities’, the Leiden historian Leon Blussé paints a clear picture of the economic world of the 16 th, 17th and 18th centuries based on a study of three key cities: Canton in China, Nagasaki in Japan and Batavia in the Dutch...

Think Again

04/10/2009 at 1:30 pm | Martijn Lofvers | No Comments

Even top managers with a proven reputation of intelligence can make fatal mistakes. How does that happen, and how can it be prevented? The book 'Think Again. Why Good Leaders Make Bad Decisions and How to Keep It From Happening to You' describes how...

Mastering the Hype Cycle

03/15/2009 at 1:25 pm | Martijn Lofvers | No Comments

The two Gartner technology analysts Jackie Fenn and Mark Raskino make a convincing argument with their book ‘Mastering the Hype Cycle’, using the stock market graphs for Amazon and investments in China, namely that the familiar S-shaped...