The Handbook of Global Outsourcing and Offshoring - Ilan Oshri, Julia Kotlarsky and Leslie P. Willcocks

The global outsourcing market for IT and business services exceeded $485 billion in 2011 and is set to grow at 8-10% per annum until 2015.
Of this, $65 billion was offshore outsourcing where some estimates suggest an annual growth rate of 15-20% over the next five years.
Furthermore, over 50 % of the Fortune Global 500 had offshored IT and business process activities through captive centers, representing $ 9 billion of business.
The expansion of outsourcing and offshoring and the emergence of new sourcing models are challenging existing management practices.
 It has become increasingly important to understand the phenomena, not least as a basis for suggesting what directions it will take, its impacts, how it has been conducted, and how its management can be better facilitated.

This book offers a broad perspective on various issues relating to the sourcing of IT and business processes and services in a company, national and global context. 
The authors examine both the client's and the vendor's involvement in sourcing relationships by putting the emphasis on the capabilities that each side should develop prior to entering a relationship but also that they should develop as a result of their interactions with each other.
 [Source: Inside Front Cover of the book ]


Goodreads Rating - 3.0 out of 5 (2 Ratings; 0 Reviews)

My Review:
A pretty useful book for organizations that are looking for outsourcing IT and business processes. It will guide them in getting the fundamentals of outsourcing right. Has some good case studies. Sort of dry read though.

Links:

• Preview of the Book  

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Today We are Rich by Tim Sanders

Harnessing the Power of Total Confidence
Are you just hanging in there? 
Have life’s curveballs thrown you off balance? 
Do you feel as if your life is going sideways?

Best-selling author, leadership coach, and former Yahoo! executive Tim Sanders knows how you feel. 
His father’s unexpected death put him in a downward spiral for fifteen years—what he calls his “sideways years.” 
A photo of a dusty water tower in Texas finally woke him up in 1996. 
That’s when he realized he needed to go home to his rock—his grandmother Billye, who had taken him in as a child to raise as her own.

Rediscovering the lessons she taught him as a child turned his life around and, in less than four years, catapulted him to financial security and an officer-level role at an S&P 500 company at the center of the Internet revolution. 
Today, his promise to himself is, “I will never forget those lessons. The price is too high.” 
Join Tim as he rediscovers the classic principles of confident living that some of the most successful and joyful people you know live by:

1 – Feed Your Mind Good Stuff
2 – Move the Conversation Forward
3 – Exercise Your Gratitude Muscle
4 – Give to Be Rich
5 – Prepare Yourself
6 – Balance Your Confidence
7 – Promise Made, Promise Kept

In Today We Are Rich, Sanders updates Napoleon Hill, Dale Carnegie, and Dr. Norman Vincent Peale to tackle a new world, where social media and transparency present unique challenges to our sense of confidence, sanity, and faith.
[Source: www.goodreads.com ]


Goodreads Rating - 4.04 out of 5 (453 Ratings; 70 Reviews)

My Comments:
Principles of confident living described in this book are what we call as common sense (but which is actually not so commonly seen). 
Book is rather autobiographical in nature mainly extolling author's grandma who lived by these principles. 
Nice and quick read but you won't miss anything exceptional even if you don't read it.

Links:

• Author's website
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• Download the free e-book 

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Why Life Speeds Up as You Get Older - Douwe Draaisma

How Memory Shapes Our Past
Is it true, as the novelist Cees Nooteboom once wrote, that 'Memory is like a dog that lies down where it pleases'?
Where do the long, lazy summers of our childhood go? 
Why is it that as we grow older  time seem to condense, speed up, elude us, while in old age, significant events from our distant past can seem as vivid and real as what happened yesterday?
 In this enchanting and thoughtful book, Douwe Draaisma, author of the internationally acclaimed Metaphors of Memory, explores the nature of autobiographical memory. 
Applying a unique blend of scholarship, poetic sensibility, and keen observation, he tackles such extraordinary phenomena as deja-vu, near-death experiences, the memory feats of idiot savants, and the effects of extreme trauma on memory recall. 
Raising almost as many questions as it answers, this fascinating book will not fail to affect you at the same time as it educates and entertains.
[The above book description is as per the one on the book cover]


Goodreads Rating - 3.70 out of 5 (124 Ratings; 7 Reviews)

My Comments:
Certainly this book has essays on lots of interesting topics on memory. And that's the reason I picked up this book from the library after reading the above description on the book cover.

While the content is good , the book did not meet my expectation probably because the translation from the original book in Dutch language was not up to the mark.

There may be better books than this on this subject.Need to hunt around.

Links:

• Table of contents

• Excerpts from the Chapter 1 - Memory is the dog that lies down where it pleases

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From Complexity to Simplicity by Simon Collinson & Melvin Jay

Unleash Your Organization's Potential
Complexity is one of the biggest challenges facing modern business. 
It is slowing companies down, costing them over 10% of their profits and harming employee morale.
Yet very few people are offering practical advice on how to solve this problem.

From Complexity to Simplicity will equip you and your business with the understanding, tools and inspiration you need to identify and eradicate harmful complexity from your company or organisation. 
Based on cutting-edge research, it takes you through real business case-studies and offers a practical 'how to' approach to tackling this growing problem. 

• What is complexity? What is simplicity? 
• The true financial costs of complexity
• The impact of complexity on managers,employees and different parts of the business
• How to change the behaviors that create business complexity
• How to identify where complexity is hurting you most
• Clear guidance on how to remove harmful complexity from processes, organization design, strategy, product and service portfolios
• How to reduce the everyday complexity of work life

From Complexity to Simplicity will show you how to start your own simplicity revolution and achieve business success. 
[Source: As per the description on the book cover]

Goodreads Rating - 3.75 out of 5 ( 4 Ratings; 1 Review)

My Comments:
The first two chapters of this book explore the causes and consequences of complexity and provide guidelines to diagnose complexity and to develop a generic simplification strategy.
The subsequent six chapters are dealing with how to simplify -
 i) People Complexity
ii) Organization
iii) Strategy
iv) Processes
v) Product and Services
vi) Everyday work
The appendix of the book has three case studies about complexity in the Pharmaceutical , Banking and Insurance sectors.

A useful book to understand and deal with complexities in our working life.
 

Links:
Visit  http://www.simplicity-consulting.com/ for more details on simplifying the complexity.

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Tamarind City - Where Modern India Began by Bishwanath Ghosh

Madras (now Chennai)-  the city where I used to spend my school holidays when I was a kid; the city where I spent almost 8 years (M.Tech, Ph.D) pursuing my higher education in the esteemed institution IIT-Madras; the city where my grandpa worked and had a house (sadly sold off 20 years ago); the city where my parents got married; the city where many of my uncles, aunts and cousins had lived or still live !
I have  pleasant memories of this first city of modern India.
It is always a pleasure to read anything about Madras/Chennai, especially if it has to do with its history and its culture.
The author Bishwanath Ghosh has come up with a delightful narrative about his life in this city.
A must read for  Chennaiites!

Book Description [Source: Back Cover of the Book]
‘While in other big cities tradition stays mothballed in trunks, taken out only during festivals and weddings, tradition here is worn round the year.’

This is just one of the author’s many keen observations of Chennai. With mordant wit, this biography of a city spares neither half of its split-personality: from moody, magical Madras to bursting-at-the-seams, tech-savvy Chennai. 
And, a minute into the book, the reader knows they are inseparable-and Bishwanath Ghosh refuses to take sides.

And yet, he tells us, while Chennai is usually known as conservative and orthodox, almost every modern institution in India-from the army to the judiciary, from medicine to engineering-traces its roots to Madras’s Fort St George, which was built when Delhi had only just become the capital of the Mughal Empire, and Calcutta and Bombay weren’t even born. 
Today, the city once again figures prominently on the global map as ‘India’s Detroit’, a manufacturing giant, and a hub of medical tourism. 
There have been sweeping changes since pre-Independent India, but even as Chennai embraces change, its people hold its age-old customs and traditions close to their heart.
‘This is what makes Chennai unique,’ says Ghosh, ‘the marriage of tradition and technology’.

Bishwanath Ghosh wears a reporter’s cap and explores the city he has made his home, delving into its past, roaming its historic sites and neighbourhoods, and meeting a wide variety of people-from a top vocalist to a top sexologist, from a yoga teacher to a hip transsexual, from a yesteryear film star to his own eighty-five-year-old neighbour, from the ghosts of Clive, Wellesley, Hastings and Yale to those of Periyar and MGR, two people who redefined the political skyline of Tamil Nadu.

What emerges is an evocative portrait of this unique city, drawn without reservation-sometimes with humour, sometimes with irony-but always with love.

Goodreads Rating - 3.71 out of 5 ( 120 Ratings; 35 Reviews)

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Twitter Marketing: An Hour a Day - Hollis Thomases

Book Description

The complete guide to a successful Twitter marketing campaign.
Twitter is a microblogging service that's changing the way we communicate. 
Marketers recognize its value, and Twitter Marketing: An Hour a Day offers marketers, advertisers, brand managers, PR professionals, and business owners an in-depth guide to designing, implementing, and measuring the impact of a complete Twitter strategy.
Expert author Hollis Thomases acquaints you with the Twitterverse, its conventions, and its fascinating demographics and statistics. 
She then teaches you step by step how to effectively craft successful branding and direct response strategies that can be scaled to any organization and its objectives. Twitter Marketing: An Hour a Day uses interesting case studies, success stories, anecdotes, and examples to demonstrate how to use Twitter metrics in order to inform strategic direction. 
You'll discover how top companies-large and small-have leveraged this exciting communications platform.

• Twitter has become a phenomenon with 32 million users, including major companies such as Apple, JetBlue, and CNN
• This step-by-step guide explains the demographics, shows how companies are using Twitter, and explains how to scale the approach to your enterprise
• The detailed coverage includes the basics for Twitter newcomers and explores all elements of a successful strategy
• Expert author Hollis Thomases shows how to set goals, develop and implement a plan, attract followers, and measure the impact of a campaign
• The in-depth book explains how to maintain momentum and explores such issues as contests, promotions, and crisis management

Twitter Marketing: An Hour a Day is the ultimate guide to succeeding one tweet at a time!
[Source: Amazon.com]

My Comments:

I am having a twitter account  (@gpnth) for almost 5 years. 
But I had been a casual user (about 4 or 5 tweets per month) till now. 
Though somewhat outdated, this book gave me a good insight into the twitterverse and prompted me to use Twitter more often.
I find sharing links, small nuggets of info, quotes in Twitter  much more easier than other social media sites.
The book has some very good tips for newbies and experienced user alike. 
Read the post-2010 edition  of this book so that you get the latest updates about Twitter.

Goodreads Rating - 3.39 out of 5 ( 28 Ratings; 6 Reviews)


 
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Sai Baba of Shirdi - M.V. Kamath & V.B.Kher

A Unique Saint
Sai Baba of Shirdi is a phenomenon.

In all of India's history,there has never been another like him.

He is not a conventional saint.

He wrote no critique of Bhagavadgita or the Upanishads or any other holy work.

He made no pretensions to scholarship yet he had a profound insight into both Hinduism and Islamic scriptures.

He founded no ashram or peetham,wrote no tome,initiated no disciple to take over from him.

He performed 'miracles' but in no manner of means to impress anyone,devotee or otherwise.

Sai Baba in every way remains unique. 

Born about twenty years before the 'Sepoys' mutiny in the 19th century in Marathwada,the home of medieval saints of Maharashtra,he came in his late twenties to Shirdi,an insignificant hamlet in Ahmednagar District and spent fifty years of his remaining life there until his mahasamadhi.

Shirdi is no longer an obscure village.

Today it is a centre of pilgrimage for lakhs of Sai Baba's devotees. 

This book is a complete account of his life and mission
[Source: Back Cover of the Book]

My Comments:

I was impressed by the research the authors have undertaken to trace the birth place and early life of Shirdi Sai Baba which was rather unknown before the publication of this book.
Also the chapters where lineage of Marathwada Saints to which Sai Baba belongs are very informative.

I have extreme regard and respect  for  Shirdi Sai Baba, truly one of the great saints of modern India.
I was expecting a biography which can provide me a better understanding of  Baba as a person, his nature and his core philosophy.
While these areas are discussed, the major portion of this book comprises of  hundreds of anecdotes about how directly or indirectly Baba came to the aid of his devotees when they were in trouble.
This makes the narrative very repetitive and several of these stories seem somewhat incredible to my rational mind.
Hence I was somewhat disappointed with this biography.
Nevertheless it is a good book to read, especially for the very pious and the faithfuls.

Goodreads Rating - 4.14 out of 5 ( 7 Ratings)


 
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