‘Visible Cities: Canton, Nagasaki and Batavia and the coming of the Americans’ by Leon Blussé

According to Blussé, the local culture is the secret tosuccess behind the Dutch’s famed adaptability. The pushy Catholic Portuguese were run out of the Japanese island of Dejima in the bay of Nagasaki, after which the reserved Protestant Dutch ran this important trading post. When the Shogun was insulted by seeing the Christian inscription Anno Domini 1639 on a newly built Dutch warehouse, the Dutch immediately destroyed the storage site. A supervising Japanese officer was relieved that he need not carry out the order to use brute force with the least or smallest sign of opposition from the Dutch.

After the Dutch Republic was invaded by France in 1794, merchants from the recently independent US came to the aid of the Dutch and American merchant ships and started sailing to the Japanese city of Nagasaki in 1797.

‘Visible Cities: Canton, Nagasaki and Batavia and the coming of the Americans’ (2008), by Leon Blussé, published by Harvard University Press, 133 pgs., $ 25.95.

Henry Hudson arrived in America with 'halve maen'

Through a rich but embittered Amsterdam merchant named Isaac le Maire, who had been thrown out of the VOC, Hudson had provided the French with all the information which he had also given to the VOC about his previous expeditions to the North. A silent battle had been taking place to hire the explorer Henry Hudson. Dutch journalist and historian Geert Mak describes this fascinating intrigue in part one of his book ‘1609: The forgotten history of Hudson, Amsterdam and New York’, which is published by the Henry Hudson 400 Foundation and can also be downloaded for free.

The second part of the book deals with the events after Henry Hudson finally sets sail out of Amsterdam. Russell Shorto, a writer for The New York Times, presents a lively picture of what it must have been like on the Half Moon. He sees the threat of mutiny as the primary reason that Hudson neglected the VOC’s instructions to sail a north-easterly route around Russia and, instead, headed westward toward the newly discovered America. Hudson was convinced that this was the shortest route to the Sea of Japan. In those days, the best calculation of the size of the earth estimated it to be about one-third smaller than it actually is. Hudson first sailed to a friendly English settlement in what is now Virginia, before sailing up what we now know as Hudson River, which has tides and is therefore salty, under the mistaken belief that it was a passage that would lead to the Pacific Ocean. Once he and his crew discovered that the river was not, in fact, the much sought-after route to Asia, he sailed back to Europe.

On a subsequent voyage, Hudson’s crew finally mutinied and forced him and his son into a small open boat and set them adrift in what would later become known as Hudson Bay, where they are assumed to have died an icy death. Based on the discovery from Hudson’s first trip, the Dutch Republic had laid claim to a broad strip of land along the east coast of North America. The newly established West India Company established the colony of New Netherlands there, which encompassed five future US states, and it established the settlement of New Amsterdam on Manhattan Island. Under the leadership of Governor Peter Stuyvesant, this tolerant melting pot of many nationalities flourished; it was granted a charter in 1653 – the official year that the subsequent City of New York was established. In 1664, English battleships appeared in the harbour of New Amsterdam and Stuyvesant reluctantly surrendered his command and the colony.

‘1609: The forgotten history of Hudson, Amsterdam and New York’ (2009), by Geert Mak and Russell Short, published by Henry Hudson 400 Foundation, 77 pgs. Free download at: www.hudson400.com (About Us, Projects & Events).

Strategies and tactics by Raschid Ijioui, Heike Emmerich and Michael Ceyp

The book concludes with a number of interviews about the use of SCEM. These make it clear that while the term SCEM is not often used as such, many elements of it are embedded in underlying processes. At Ford, for instance, SCEM is embedded through the use of EDI with both internal and external partners. The important thing is to create transparency and to monitor business processes – and this book provides plenty of pointers for that.

Measuring the Value of Supply Chain by Enrico Camerinelli

Camerinelli arrives at these three issues after having explained the basis of supply chain management and having linked it to the influence of supply chain operations on the financial aspects, like shareholders’ value, financial indicators, profit and loss account and the balance sheet.

In the second part of the book, he discusses various measurement methods; the second chapter is dedicated to the SCOR model. This is how Camerinelli succeeds at providing the CFO and the supply chain manager with a toolset for finding a joint principle for measuring the value of the supply chain. This book, too, concludes by expressing the necessity for a new type of collaboration that focuses on trust, speaking the same language and sharing value.

Hidden Champions by Hermann Simon

The added value of materials and services is an average of 42% for these companies. ‘Hidden champions’ focus more on service, the needs and wants of customers and on excellent performance rather than on price and marketing. Other companies would do well to follow their example, also in terms of the integration of systems and the realisation of lasting collaborations with other companies. This book was written for those who are interested in international business operations and for managers of all types of companies, but it provides many examples of business situations that are directly related to the set-up and implementation of the supply chain in terms of market focus, globalisation, innovation, leadership, employees and strategy.

The Contract Scorecard by Sara Cullen

The many field cases give a clear idea of just what can go wrong if it is not recorded what the two parties expect from a contract: breach of confidence, long drawn-out lawsuits and very high costs. Cullen repeatedly stresses the importance of communication between the parties involved, and gives a number of practical pointers to this end in the chapter ‘relationship’. In addition to the cases, the many examples of KPIs and documentation are extremely useful if you mean to evaluate a contract yourself.

Think Again. Why Good Leaders Make Bad Decisions and How to Keep It From Happening to You

The three authors, who work at renowned business schools, give examples of disastrous decisions by nevertheless capable leaders, like the acquisition of soft drink producer Snapple by Quaker, which eventually led to Quaker being taken over by PepsiCo. They also discuss strategic military mistakes, like Operation Market Garden and the Battle of Midway.

The causes for these wrong decisions are misleading experiences, misleading prejudices, inappropriate self-interest and misplaced attachment. In order to avoid making such mistakes, five types of safety precautions should be taken: new experiences, data & analyses, challenging group debates, governance teams and a monitoring process. These recommendations are extensively discussed in the (anonymous) case of a Germany company that considers moving its global headquarters. Fascinating stuff.

Mastering the Hype Cycle by Jackie Fenn and Mark Raskino

They mention the Dutch 17th century tulip craze and the international success of the online bank ING Direct as telling examples. With the STREET process (Scope, Track, Rank, Evaluate, Evangelise and Transfer) they provide a practical approach to directing innovation.

New Age Innovation by C.K. Pralahad and M.S. Krishnan

To this end, organisations will have to collaborate with the customer and develop global networks. Within the own organisation, the development of the talents of individual employees and reduced hierarchies should take priority.

Silicon Dragon How China is Winning The Tech Race by Rebecca Fannin

The chapters about Baidu, Alibaba, Dangdang.com, Chinacars.com and Oak Pacific Interactive mainly inform the reader that these companies are mostly successful because they copied the western online concepts of Google, Yahoo!, eBay, Amazon.com and MySpace to the Chinese market: an interesting read, but not very new. In the second part about investors in China, Fannin writes that  the world has never seen a bigger investment craze since the Dutch tulip hype in the seventeenth century.. In the third part of the book, Fannin discusses the companies that she considers to be innovating and developing. In reality, however, most of these IT companies’ ideas are little more than combinations of Google Earth, Verizon, Skype and Microsoft Explorer. Perhaps this note of criticism applies not merely to these Chinese companies, but also to all of the companies in this sector. Only LatticePower, developer of highly energy-efficient LEDs, seems to come up with its own technology. Various experts express the opinion in the introduction of this book that it will take quite some time (‘ten to twenty years’) before China will actually become a threat in terms of high tech.

The central, convincing message of ‘Operation China: from Strategy to Execution’, by two McKinsey directors in Beijing and Shanghai, respectively, is that the western multinationals must win the competitive struggle in China. If they cannot survive that extremely competitive market, then they will not succeed in the rest of the world either. If they fail there, then they risk being beat at home by either a Chinese or a Western competitor. Managing raw materials and parts in China is not only essential if one is to reach the enormous market of the local middle class, but also to succeed on the global scale.