Customer Reviews

The Ideal Enterprise: Managing by the Law of the Sphere

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
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This funny and often witty book reminded me of one of my favorite books by N. C. Parkinson entitled "Parkinson's Law". I enjoyed every minute of Baumann's book and I learned a lot to boot.

This book confirmed the experiences I had in my previous jobs regarding company inefficiencies. On the positive side it taught me how to manage better, what fads to avoid, and how to motivate my employees. Best of all, this book avoids all the usual platitudes of the typical management advice literature.

As an active investor, I found this book extremely interesting.
In very simple terms it explains, why companies become less
efficient with growth; why most mergers fail, and what is really
wrong with the Japanese economy. A real eye opener!

This book is written in a delightful style.It is written for the layman who dreams of starting or buying his own business, or, for the ambitious MBA who wants to contol a business. The author is logical, easey to understand, witty, fun to read. He laughs at the futility of mergers, their power struggles, and the eventual decapitation of one of the two merging CEO's. How to keep drowning in e-mail is worth the book.
In clear language he discusses start-up money, free cash flow, leasing, attorneys, and, for making money- "small is better".

The Ideal Enterprise is astonishing reading because it successfully attacks so many sacred cows of the contemporary business world. Smaller is better, vertical integration may not be all it's cracked up to be, simple geometrical relationships may govern complex business sytems in ways similar to those regulating biological systems. I am a lay reader, an artist by profession, but I wish I had read this book twenty years ago! My investment decisions might have been smarter if I had. It should be required reading.