Category Archives: BOOKS and BOOK CHAPTERS

Posts inspired by books I have read

Book Review:Managing Risks in Supply Chains

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Revised on: 2015-09-13

To make up for yesterday’s perhaps overly harsh critique of just one article from this book, this is a full and proper content review. Managing Risks in Supply Chains: How to Build Reliable Collaboration in Logistics, edited by Wolfgang Kersten and Thorsten Blecker, is a collection of articles by various researchers from mostly Germany and Austria, and lo and behold, Marco Moder, whose PhD on Supply Frühwarnsysteme has been reviewed on this blog previously, is also among the contributors. This book has been out for a while, but I didn’t discover it until recently, and now my library finally bought a copy for me to read and review for the readers of my blog.

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One bad apple…

Revised on: 2015-09-10

…spoils the barrel? Yesterday I sat down to prepare a review of this book, Managing Risks in Supply Chains: How to Build Reliable Collaboration in Logistics, edited by Wolfgang Kersten and Thorsten Blecker. The book is a collection of articles by various researchers from mostly Germany and Austria, and while many of the articles/chapters maintain an excellent academic standard, one of the chapters does not at all hold up to any standard. In fact, it is so bad it makes me wonder how this could have slipped by editorial control?
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Book Review: Managing Supply Chain Risk and Vulnerability

Revised on: 2015-09-09

Another book by someone from the ISCRiM group? No, not this time, or perhaps, yes, after all. Managing Supply Chain Risk and Vulnerability: Tools and Methods for Supply Chain Decision Makers by Teresa Wu and Jennifer Blackhurst sounds like ISCRiM, but it’s not. If it were, it should have been noted in the ISCRiM Newsletter, but it wasn’t. Nonetheless, several of the ISCRiM members have contributed to the chapters in this book, which is well worth taking a closer look at, particularly if risk modeling and decision-making is your field.

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Book Review: Single Point of Failure

Revised on: 2015-09-11

Just out a few days ago, Single Point of Failure is a fascinating read. The author, Gary S. Lynch, is Global Leader, Supply Chain Risk Management Practice at Marsh Consulting, so he knows what he is talking about. The book’s tagline reads “The 10 Essential Laws of Supply Chain Risk Management” and what Gary Lynch is trying to convey is that there are certain basics every manager should know, understand, and act upon. Lynch breaks down Supply Chain Management into ten basic laws, neither founded in academic theories or mathematical formulas, but simple basic principles that anyone can appreciate.

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Supply Chain Risk – Jetzt auch auf Deutsch

Revised on: 2015-09-11

Unbeknown to me – or perhaps I really should have known better – there appears to be a large body of supply chain risk research written in German, as I just recently discovered. Lucky for me, I am fluent in German, and today I am presenting a PhD dissertation that I came across recently. Supply Frühwarnsysteme: Die Identifikation und Analyse von Risiken in Einkauf und Supply Management by Marco Moder, a PhD student at the European Business School, published in 2008. There are some 400 good reasons to get hold of it, particularly if you speak German, wonder why?

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Transportation Hazards

Revised on: 2015-09-11

This is an updated and extended review of the Handbook of Transportation Engineering by Myer Kutz (editor) which I have reviewed in a previous post 4 years ago: Book Review: The Handbook of Tranportation Engineering. While rummaging through references for a journal article I came across an old copy of the chapter on Transportation Engineering in the above book and to my surprise I discovered a recent acquaintance I had forgotten that I already had met 4 years ago: The risk definition by Kaplan & Garrick (1981). For supply chain risk researchers, this risk definition has it all.

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Is Dynamic Supply Chain Alignment the way of the future?

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Revised on: 2015-09-11

Dynamic Supply Chain Alignment. That is the magic formula that runs like a red thread through John Gattorna‘s latest book, where he demonstrates how there are four types of supply chains, based on four types of customer behavior. This is a well-written and excellently illustrated book, which I will take a closer look at, chapter by chapter, in order to answer the question: Is Dynamic Supply Chain Alignment the ultimate formula for streamlining your supply chain for the utmost performance?

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Book Review: Global Supply Chain Management

Revised on: 2015-09-11

The Handbook of Global Supply Chain Management is an excellent book. My interest in it stems from the fact that it contains a chapter on risk management. It was after reading Manuj and Mentzer’s articles on Global Supply Chain Risk Management and Global Supply Chain Risk Management Strategies that I came across this book, when searching for more papers from Mentzer and/or Manuj, and naturally, I decided to see if there was something on supply chain risk in it. There was.

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Book Review: Managing Risk and Resilience in the Supply Chain

Revised on: 2015-10-14

This book is a gem. To me. Where Helen Peck in her article Reconciling supply chain vulnerability, risk and supply chain management takes a holistic academic perspective on supply chain risk and business continuity, the late David Kaye in his book Managing Risk and Resilience in the Supply Chain takes on a holistic business perspective to explain the concept of the extended supply chain. Seldom have I read a book that captured my attention from the beginning to the end. It is not a textbook for the academic, nor is it a handbook for the manager, but it is an easy read.

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Book Review: Virtual Teams

Revised on: 2015-09-18

This is another post resulting from my literature review when researching background material for my book chapter on managing risks in Virtual Enterprise Networks, something that seems to have caused a barrage of seemingly never-ending book reviews on this blog. In The Handbook of High Performance Virtual Teams: A Toolkit for Collaborating Across Boundaries, Jill Nemiro and her co-editors have put together a 764-page monster of a book. It’s not a handbook, it’s a handbrick.

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Book Review: Creative Destruction

Revised on: 2011-03-10

Like with so many of my other recent book reviews I came across Nolan and Croson’s book, Creative Destruction: A Six-Stage Process for Transforming the Organization when researching my book chapter on risks in Virtual Enterprise Networks. This book triggered my interest when I became aware of the concept of “creative destruction”, where some businesses must die for others to be (re-)born. Popularized by Joseph Schumpeter, “creative destruction” is a concept that makes perfect sense to me.

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Enterprise-wide Risk Management

Revised on: 2015-09-15

Coming from a crisis management and business continuity background, I really enjoyed reading Enterprise-wide Risk Management: Strategies for linking risk and opportunity by DeLoach has a refreshing new approach to risk management that is is cross-functional, integrated and adaptable in the face of constant change, simply because traditional risk management approaches are no longer adequate in today’s rapidly changing world in where traditional risk management is too fragmented and function-driven.

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Supply Chain Risk – the forgotten discipline

Revised on: 2015-09-03

No, it’s not that supply chain risk is a forgotten discipline, it’ is well and alive an kicking, it’s just that I forgot to write my post on the chapter on supply chain risk in Martin Christopher’s book, which I said I would do in my review of his book Logistics and Supply Chain Management. I remembered my promise while preparing my book chapter on Risks in Virtual Enterprise Networks, because I used Christopher when discussing those risks. Below are some of the highlights from the chapter on supply chain risk in Christopher’s book, and some personal reflections.

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Book Review: How Nature Works

Revised on: 2015-09-26

How Nature works is a fascinating book. I first heard of the late Per Bak and his sandpile theories when I some time back read an article by Koubatis and Schönberger (1995) on Risk management of complex critical systems. At that time I had just discovered the International Journal of Critical Infrastructure, and I was perusing their archives for articles I could use in my research on transportation vulnerability. Koubatis and Schönberger actually consider Per Bak’s “sandpile” model to be as relevant to business and society as Adam Smith’s legendary “invisible hand”. When I read that I was simply compelled to investigate more.

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Book Review: Cooperative Strategy

Revised on: 2015-09-09

Cooperative strategy is the attempt by organizations to realize their objectives through cooperation rather than in competition with them, focusing on the benefits of cooperation. I used Cooperative Strategy in preparing for my book chapter on risks in virtual enterprise networks, where two chapters in this book were particularly useful: Networks (Chapter 8) and Virtual Corporations (Chapter 9). My review focuses on these two chapters. I did browse the other chapters in the book, although I did not read them as intensively as chapter 8 and 9, which obviously were the chapters I read most.

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Risk in Virtual Enterprise Networks

Revised on: 2015-10-03

Done…I finally made it! Today I submitted my full chapter for the book on Managing Risk in Virtual Enterprise Networks: Implementing Supply Chain Principles. All I can do now is anxiously await the reviewers’ verdict. Followers of this blog will already have noticed some of my posts on Virtual Enterprise Networks, and wonder why I am suddenly deviating (albeit only slightly) from the main thrust of my blog, namely supply chain risk and transportation.

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Book Review: The Full Costs and Benefits of Transportation

Revised on: 2011-06-13

This book, The Full Costs and Benefits of Transportation: Contributions to Theory, Method and Measurement, edited by David L. Greene, Donald W. Jones, and Mark A. Delucchi is a welcome addition to the field of cost-benefit analysis in transportation, albeit first published more than 10 years ago. It contains individual contributions from 20 or so respected academics, each describing a separate field of study. I have seldom seen a fuller and more holistic approach to cost and benefits in transportation research. But is it really worth buying? I borrowed it from my library and I’m not so sure I would recommend you to put it in your shopping cart. It IS a good book, that is for sure, but at what cost?

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Book Review: Transportation Security

Revised on: 2011-06-13

Instead of Transportation Systems Security, which I reviewed in an earlier post, I should have settled for this book, I realize that now. Transportation Security by Clifford Bragdon has all the stuff that I was looking for in Transportation Systems Security. Where that book fails, this book succeeds. Why? Because this book, unlike the other mentioned, gives a holistic view of our world’s transportation security processes and operations, in all modes. Although at times heavily US and homeland security oriented, this book still manages to capture me, the international audience, to the full. As editor, Clifford Bragdon has managed to put together an excellent book and I can only commend him on his achievement.

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Jumpstart your VEN adventure

Revised on: 2011-03-06

This is a terrific book. As you will know from my post the other day, I am currently writing a book chapter on risks in Virtual Enterprise Networks (VENs), and I have used The Networked Enterprise by Ken Thompson as what I would call THE reference on how to manage VENs. The goal of a VEN is to connect Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) into peer networks, supported by appropriate collaboration practices and technologies, to give them the capabilities and competitive advantages of large global enterprises. How is this possible?

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Understanding risks in Virtual Enterprise Networks

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Revised on: 2011-07-06

Today’s unstable and highly competitive business environment has created a shift in how enterprises are established and managed, where past “traditional” enterprises are replaced by new “virtual” enterprises, forming temporary networks of independent companies or Virtual Enterprise Networks (VENs) that share skills, costs and access to each other’s market. I am currently writing a book chapter for the book Managing Risk in Virtual Enterprise Networks: Implementing Supply Chain Principles, which is about risks in Virtual Enterprise Networks (VENs), and here are some the ideas that have come to my mind when trying to connect risks in supply chains with risks in VENs.

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