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Bookshelf with an overview of Welch's career and the sweeping changes he instituted at GE. It closes with a bibliography of sources. In between is an analysis of the concepts behind the words that helped create the most famous CEO of our times. (McGraw Hill, 210 pages, hardcover, $19.95) The Words of Jack Welch For anyone who ever wondered about the true definition of "boundaryless," The Jack Welch Lexicon of Leadership will be invaluable. This volume gathers up all the phrases for which Welch has become famous during his reign at GE and explains both what they mean and how they affected his strategy of rein- venting the company. Some of the entries—such as "Six Sigma" and "Work-Out"—already may be familiar to anyone who has fol- lowed the CEO's career, but author Jeffrey A. Krames relates them to Welch's key initiatives and explains why they're important. The book opens down the kinds of attention available—front- of-mind, back- of-mind, cap- tive, voluntary, and so on—and make a distinction between time management and atten- tion management. They sprinkle the text with brief case studies of compa- nies that experienced attention deficit and suggest solutions to the problems. The book itself is something of a authors make their points about what customers really want: honest prices and the dignity of being treated like individuals. They admit that some of their conclusions surprised even them, but their premise deserves a look. People Are Reading… If you think you have a hard time sort- ing out all the information coming at you from e-mail, voice mail, cell phones, and other sources, you're not alone. Many people and institutions are suffering "organizational ADD" as a result of too much input, according to The Attention Economy, a new hard- cover by Thomas Davenport and John Beck (256 pages, $29.95, Harvard Business Press). The authors point out that we have unlimited access to information, cus- tomers, and markets, but that what's in short supply is the attention of con- sumers and employees. They break 56 BizEd NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2001 product selection, does it need to offer the best price? Maybe not, according to the authors of The Myth of Excellence, published in hardcover this summer by Crown Publishing (320 pages, $27.50). Truly great companies excel at only one of five critical parts of mar- keting, suggest authors Fred Crawford and Ryan Mathews: access, experience, price, product, and service. According to Crawford and case study in attention overload, with its bright purple-and-black rays on the cover and its pulsating pop art chapter openings. Almost every page features an inset sidebar or footnote with relat- ed information. Still, the information is thoughtfully presented and itself worth some attention. If your company offers the best International Research Two 2001 hardcover books available from Quorum Books, Westport, Conn., take scholarly approaches to the challenge of gathering interna- tional research. International Business Scholarship, edited by Brian Toyne, Zaida L. Martinez, and Richard A. Menger, sums up its intent and its col- lection of essays with the subhead Mathews, the best companies develop a strategy for excelling at one of those five attributes, differentiating them- selves on a second one, and maintain- ing a respectable industry average on the other three. Using charts, con- sumer inter- views, case stud- ies, and refer- ences to a raft of well-known companies, the "Mastering Intellectual, Institu tional and Research Design Challenges." A host of guest authors presents a series of academic papers on how to deter- mine if your institution is prepared to conduct international research, what the internal and external barriers might be, how to assemble and work with a team on an international project, how to conduct interviews and collect data in foreign countries, and what to do with the research once you've complet- ed it. Essays by the editors bracket the book and introduce major sections. They have pegged the importance of globalization in the business education field and taken an analytical approach to explaining how to successfully achieve it. (255 pages, $69.95) Developing Global Business Leaders, edited by Mark E. Mendenhall,