Bøker av John Kay

This ambitious and thought-provoking new work offers an overarching analysis of decision-making in all walks of life.

Whether overcoming geographical obstacles, winning decisive battles or meeting sales targets, history shows that oblique approaches are the most successful, especially in difficult terrain. This title applies the author's universal theory to topics ranging from international business to town planning and from football to managing forest fires.

In the world of Adam Smith and Karl Marx, capitalists built and controlled mills and factories. That relationship between capital and labour continued in the automobile assembly lines and petrochemical plants of the twentieth century. But no longer: products and production have dematerialised. The goods and services provided by the leading companies of the twenty-first century appear on your screen, fit in your pocket, or occupy your head. Ownership of the means of production is a redundant concept. Workers are the means of production; increasingly, they take the plant home. Capital is a service bought from a specialist supplier with little influence over customer businesses. The professional managers who run modern corporations do not exert authority because they are wealthy; they are wealthy because they exert authority. John Kay's incisive overhaul of our ideas about business redefines our understanding of successful commercial activity and the corporation - and describes how we have come to 'love the product' as we 'hate the producer.' This is a brilliant and original work from one of the greatest economists.

A leading business school economist lays bare the complexities of `strategic thinking' in business and offers a lucid and innovative analysis of the source of `competitive advantage'. Kay engages with and develops the work of Michael Porter, who is regarded by many as the pre-eminent authority on business strategy.

Capitalism faltered at the end of the 1990s as corporations were rocked by fraud, the stock-market bubble burst and the American business model unfettered self-interest, privatization and low tax faced a storm of protest. But what are the alternatives to the mantras of market fundamentalism?Leading economist John Kay unravels the truth about markets, from Wall Street to Switzerland, from Russia to Mumbai, examining why some nations are rich and some poor, why one-size-fits-all globalization hurts developing countries and why markets can work but only in a humane social and cultural context. His answers offer a radical new blueprint for the future.

Presents the work of John Kay with a two-volume edition of Kay's portraits and caricatures, originally published in Edinburgh in 1837-8. This title introduces Kay's life and achievement, emphasising how, with 'the impression of a passing glance', Kay created an engaging and unparalleled record of Edinburgh society during the Enlightenment.

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.

In this book Kay explores a number of topical business issues in his distinctive accessible, rigorous, and challenging style. His purpose is to show the proper application of economics to business analysis and throw light on the challenges facing the corporate world.