|
Showing 1 - 25 of
53 matches in All Departments
This book provides a guide to the complexities of modern finance.
It describes the basics of investment and the sophisticated
innovations of the modern financial system. It explains how the
follies of finance have threatened the stability of the world
economy, and describes an environment that is complex and
sophisticated, but greedy, cynical and self-interested. This book
explains how to put your finances in the only hands you can
confidently trust - your own. Readers will learn everything they
need to be their own investment manager. They will recognise their
investment options, the institutions that try to sell them, and how
to distinguish between fact and fiction in what companies say. They
will discover the principles of sound investment and the research
that supports these principles. Crucially, they will learn a
practical investment strategy and how to implement it. Leading
economist and hugely successful investor John Kay uses his academic
credentials and practical experience to lay out the key principles
of investment with characteristic clarity and dry humour. This is
the only book about finance and investment anyone needs, and the
one book they must have.
Why are some countries rich and others poor? Why does a farmer
in Sweden have a higher standard of living than a farmer in South
Africa? Why does a schoolteacher in Switzerland earn more than one
in Chicago? According to leading economic theorist John Kay,
economic markets are key to the wealth or poverty of the world's
nations. In Culture and Prosperity, Kay explores why market
economies outperform socialist or centrally directed markets -- and
why the imposition of market institutions often fails. His search
for the truth about markets takes him from the shores of Lake
Zurich to the streets of Mumbai, through theories of evolutionary
psychology and moral philosophy to the flower market at San Remo
and Christie's salesroom in New York.
Witty, engaging, and grounded in cutting-edge economic theory,
Culture and Prosperity is essential for understanding the state of
the world today.
Most business books are bland or dull, or both. This volume is
neither. John Kay combines insightful analysis with wit and verve.
In this book, we meet heroes as diverse as Sun Tzu, Jacques
Derrida, and Jack Welch. We study businesses as diverse as Honda
Motors, the grandes marques of Champagne, and Jenners department
store in Princes Street, Edinburgh. We learn why size doesn't
matter, why brakes are different from signals, how to value
businesses, and why the author was wrong to tell students that
Boeing's position in the civil aircraft market was unassailable. In
less than two hundred pages, John Kay provides a lively
introduction to business strategy and a guide to many of the key
issues in business today.
Shortlisted for the Orwell Prize 2016 We all depend on the finance
sector. We need it to store our money, manage our payments, finance
housing stock, restore infrastructure, fund retirement and support
new business. But these roles comprise only a tiny sliver of the
sector's activity: the vast majority of lending is within the
finance sector. So what is it all for? What is the purpose of this
activity? And why is it so profitable? John Kay, a distinguished
economist with wide experience of the financial sector, argues that
the industry's perceived profitability is partly illusory, and
partly an appropriation of wealth created elsewhere - of other
people's money. The financial sector, he shows, has grown too
large, detached itself from ordinary business and everyday life,
and has become an industry that mostly trades with itself, talks to
itself, and judges itself by reference to standards which it has
itself generated. And the outside world has itself adopted those
standards, bailing out financial institutions that have failed all
of us through greed and mismanagement. We need finance, but today
we have far too much of a good thing. In Other People's Money John
Kay shows in his inimitable style what has gone wrong in the dark
heart of finance.
If you want to go in one direction, the best route may involve
going in another. This is the concept of 'obliquity': paradoxical
as it sounds, many goals are more likely to be achieved when
pursued indirectly. The richest men and women are not the most
materialistic; the happiest people are not necessarily those who
focus on happiness, and the most profitable companies are not
always the most profit-oriented as the recent financial crisis
showed us. Whether overcoming geographical obstacles, winning
decisive battles or meeting sales targets, history shows that
oblique approaches are the most successful, especially in difficult
terrain. John Kay applies his provocative, universal theory to
everything from international business to town planning and from
football to managing forest fire.
The Economics of Business Strategy is an authoritative collection
of the most important published articles on the economic basis of
business strategy. John Kay - who himself has made seminal
contributions to the field - has selected articles that illustrate
the origins of familiar concepts in business strategy - the
experience curve, the portfolio matrix, the 'five forces' while
also presenting the foundations of the modern resource based theory
of strategy.The volume will be of particular interest to economists
who wish to learn how the subject has been used in business and to
people working in business who wish to learn of the economic basis
of the concepts used.
'A brilliant new book' Daily Telegraph 'Well written . . . and
often entertaining' The Times 'A sparkling analysis' Prospect When
uncertainty is all around us, and the facts are not clear, how can
we make good decisions? We do not know what the future will hold,
particularly in the midst of a crisis, but we must make decisions
anyway. We regularly crave certainties which cannot exist and
invent knowledge we cannot have, forgetting that humans are
successful because we have adapted to an environment that we
understand only imperfectly. Throughout history we have developed a
variety of ways of coping with the radical uncertainty that defines
our lives. This incisive and eye-opening book draws on biography,
history, mathematics, economics and philosophy to highlight the
most successful - and most short-sighted - methods of dealing with
an unknowable future. Ultimately, the authors argue, the prevalent
method of our age falls short, giving us a false understanding of
our power to make predictions, leading to many of the problems we
experience today. Tightly argued, provocative and written with wit
and flair, Radical Uncertainty is at once an exploration of the
limits of numbers and a celebration of human instinct and wisdom.
'A brilliant new book'
Daily Telegraph
'Well written . . . and often entertaining'
The Times
'A sparkling analysis'
Prospect
'Entertaining and enlightening . . . This is a necessary critique and
they make it with verve, knowledge and a wealth of stories'
Financial Times
When uncertainty is all around us, and the facts are not clear, how can
we make good decisions?
We do not know what the future will hold, particularly in the midst of
a crisis, but we must make decisions anyway. We regularly crave
certainties which cannot exist and invent knowledge we cannot have,
forgetting that humans are successful because we have adapted to an
environment that we understand only imperfectly. Throughout history we
have developed a variety of ways of coping with the radical uncertainty
that defines our lives.
This incisive and eye-opening book draws on biography, history,
mathematics, economics and philosophy to highlight the most successful
- and most short-sighted - methods of dealing with an unknowable
future. Ultimately, the authors argue, the prevalent method of our age
falls short, giving us a false understanding of our power to make
predictions, leading to many of the problems we experience today.
A Financial Times Book of the Year, 2015 An Economist Best Book of
the Year, 2015 A Bloomberg Best Book of the Year, 2015 The finance
sector of Western economies is too large and attracts too many of
the smartest college graduates. Financialization over the past
three decades has created a structure that lacks resilience and
supports absurd volumes of trading. The finance sector devotes too
little attention to the search for new investment opportunities and
the stewardship of existing ones, and far too much to
secondary-market dealing in existing assets. Regulation has
contributed more to the problems than the solutions. Why? What is
finance for? John Kay, with wide practical and academic experience
in the world of finance, understands the operation of the financial
sector better than most. He believes in good banks and effective
asset managers, but good banks and effective asset managers are not
what he sees. In a dazzling and revelatory tour of the financial
world as it has emerged from the wreckage of the 2008 crisis, Kay
does not flinch in his criticism: we do need some of the things
that Citigroup and Goldman Sachs do, but we do not need Citigroup
and Goldman to do them. And many of the things done by Citigroup
and Goldman do not need to be done at all. The finance sector needs
to be reminded of its primary purpose: to manage other people's
money for the benefit of businesses and households. It is an
aberration when the some of the finest mathematical and scientific
minds are tasked with devising algorithms for the sole purpose of
exploiting the weakness of other algorithms for computerized
trading in securities. To travel further down that road leads to
ruin.
Two of the UK's leading economists call for an end to extreme
individualism as the engine of prosperity 'provocative but
thought-provoking and nuanced' Telegraph Throughout history,
successful societies have created institutions which channel both
competition and co-operation to achieve complex goals of general
benefit. These institutions make the difference between societies
that thrive and those paralyzed by discord, the difference between
prosperous and poor economies. Such societies are pluralist but
their pluralism is disciplined. Successful societies are also rare
and fragile. We could not have built modernity without the
exceptional competitive and co-operative instincts of humans, but
in recent decades the balance between these instincts has become
dangerously skewed: mutuality has been undermined by an extreme
individualism which has weakened co-operation and polarized our
politics. Collier and Kay show how a reaffirmation of the values of
mutuality could refresh and restore politics, business and the
environments in which people live. Politics could reverse the moves
to extremism and tribalism; businesses could replace the greed that
has degraded corporate culture; the communities and decaying places
that are home to many could overcome despondency and again be
prosperous and purposeful. As the world emerges from an
unprecedented crisis we have the chance to examine society afresh
and build a politics beyond individualism.
|
Albion (Paperback)
John Kay; Cover design or artwork by Bragga L Anna
|
R255
R215
Discovery Miles 2 150
Save R40 (16%)
|
Ships in 10 - 15 working days
|
|
You may like...
Loot
Nadine Gordimer
Paperback
(2)
R398
R330
Discovery Miles 3 300
|