Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/63444
Bookshelf To Market, To Market New products are the lifeblood of any business, but how does a com- pany decide how much time, money, and manpower to allocate to any new product? In the second edition of Portfolio Management for New Products, authors Robert G. Cooper, Scott J. Edgett, and Elko J. Kleinschmidt reward, the probability of technical success, and market attractiveness. Several charts—some of them based on actual models used by existing companies—illustrate how each model might be used. The authors also give a detailed explanation of Cooper's Stage-Gate evaluation process, in which proposed new products are analyzed at various points before they are allowed to go through the next "gate" and on to the next stage of development. The book is filled with acronyms point the way. The book exhaustive- ly examines various approaches to portfolio management, from finan- cial models to scoring models, and walks the reader through their processes, strengths, and weaknesses. According to these authors, the three goals of portfolio management are maximizing value, achieving a balance, and aligning with the com- pany's strategic goals. Sometimes, however, it's difficult to see how these often conflicting goals can be brought to bear on deciding, for example, whether to move ahead with a new product or kill it. The authors show a multitude of models to help the businessperson understand what the product might bring to the company and what it might cost. Various models analyze factors such as the expected com- mercial value, the risk versus the 58 BizEd MAY/JUNE 2002 and catchphrases, from NPV (net product value) to Monte Carlo simu- lation, in which computer programs estimate a number of possible out- comes for a project. Yet each concept is explained clearly and understand- ably, so that the next tier of informa- tion makes logical sense. The book as a whole hangs together seamlessly. Business owners who have failed to organize their new—and existing— products into any kind of cohesive plan of launch and upgrade may be inspired to look at their portfolio of products and get a better grasp on what they're bringing to market. (Perseus Publishing, $42.50) Business Environments, author Kamal Dean Parhizgar aims to help those managers understand their workers. This ambitious book attempts noth- ing less than to explain all the factors The Multicultural Employee As business expands globally, work- forces become more multicultural. Managers attempting to meld together workers from disparate backgrounds, religions, nations, and ethnic groups are sometimes over- whelmed by the variances in person- alities and belief systems represented by their employees. In Multicultural Behavior and Global that go into making an individual— from basic psychological interpreta- tions of personality to a dissection of the forces and attitudes that shape national culture—and how that individual might fit into the work environment. "This search for why humans behave the way they do is based upon their conceptions, per- ceptions, values, attitudes, beliefs, ideologies, faiths, social influences, and leadership. As these topics indi- cate, multiculturism can be studied interdisciplinarily through all bodies of knowledge," Parhizgar writes. His journey takes him from an examina- tion of emotion through Maslow's hierarchy of needs to a discussion of morals and ethics. At each stop, he analyzes how different cultures view emotions, needs, physical character- istics, and attitudes about earning a living, and how these might affect an employee's behavior in the work- place. The book is dense and laced with references to much other research done on a wide range of topics, from psychology to business theory. It does not set out to examine the major cultures of the world and how they interrelate. Rather, its goal is to give an in-depth picture of the forces that make up human beings across the planet, and allow readers, by extrapolation, to understand how these forces may have shaped the individuals in their employ. The book is a lot of work, but many of