Every customer has access to prices and specifications from suppliers
anywhere on earth. Customers can play one supplier against the other.
Under those conditions, long-standing relationships and good products are
not enough.” How true, in a networked world! So, Ram Charan embarks on reminding us of the forgotten art of systematic personal selling celebrated in
the yesteryears by the...

Four books from Wiley capture the current financial crisis from four angles. Collectively, they offer interesting insights

It is common among businessmen, fund managers, analysts and sundry experts in the media to label the current financial crisis as something so sudden and virulent that “nobody could have predicted it.” This is not true. Peter Schiff did, at least partly, in Crash Proof,...

Two recent books on India written by authors of two different generationspresent an embrassingly rosy picture of India

As an assistant editor of Financial Express in 1989, I was asked to write about a new steel plant that was coming up in a place near Amethi, in UP, the constituency of the then prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi. My editor, Swaminathan Aiyar, wondered why a steel plant would come...