Ready Fire Aim: The Mainfreight Story

Ready Fire Aim: The Mainfreight Story
Author: Keith Davies
Publisher: Penguin Random House New Zealand Limited
Total Pages: 213
Release: 2013-08-16
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1775533468

The lively, insider story of the rise and rise of New Zealand's most successful logistics company. This is the story of a company built on the belief that with passion anything is possible. As they say at Mainfreight, 'Go anywhere as long as it is forward'. Mainfreight was founded in 1977 by the visionary Bruce Plested, who set out to make the company a family, a team, where everyone has a share in the riches and where the word 'management' is banned. The Mainfreight instruction manual is short: Feel the fear but do it anyway. This is a world where budgets are deemed ‘bullshit’. Why spend time preparing figures that are invariably out of date before the ink is dry? Just make more than last year. It's also a world based on generosity: Mainfreight is the backing force behind Books in Homes, and offers tertiary scholarships to the children of all its employees. Did the rise to NZX sharemarket darling all go smoothly? Not for a minute. Initially there would be catastrophic ventures in Australia and America and finally a jaw-dropping moment in Europe when Don Braid and his team made their biggest purchase ever only to see most of the turnover and half the profit walk out the door. This book takes you on a warts-and-all exploration of Mainfreight's journey from small transport company at the bottom of the world to truly successful global logistics company.

The Currency of Empire

The Currency of Empire
Author: Jonathan Barth
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 248
Release: 2021-06-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 150175579X

In The Currency of Empire, Jonathan Barth explores the intersection of money and power in the early years of North American history, and he shows how the control of money informed English imperial action overseas. The export-oriented mercantile economy promoted by the English Crown, Barth argues, directed the plan for colonization, the regulation of colonial commerce, and the politics of empire. The imperial project required an orderly flow of gold and silver, and thus England's colonial regime required stringent monetary regulation. As Barth shows, money was also a flash point for resistance; many colonists acutely resented their subordinate economic station, desiring for their local economies a robust, secure, and uniform money supply. This placed them immediately at odds with the mercantilist laws of the empire and precipitated an imperial crisis in the 1670s, a full century before the Declaration of Independence. The Currency of Empire examines what were a series of explosive political conflicts in the seventeenth century and demonstrates how the struggle over monetary policy prefigured the patriot reaction to the Stamp Act and so-called Intolerable Acts on the eve of American independence. Thanks to generous funding from the Arizona State University and George Mason University, the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access (OA) volumes from Cornell Open (cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open) and other Open Access repositories.

Simple Architectures for Complex Enterprises

Simple Architectures for Complex Enterprises
Author: Roger Sessions
Publisher: Microsoft Press
Total Pages: 243
Release: 2008-05-07
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 0735646058

Dismantle the overwhelming complexity in your IT projects with strategies and real-world examples from a leading expert on enterprise architecture. This guide describes best practices for creating an efficient IT organization that consistently delivers on time, on budget, and in line with business needs. IT systems have become too complex—and too expensive. Complexity can create delays, cost overruns, and outcomes that do not meet business requirements. The resulting losses can impact your entire company. This guide demonstrates that, contrary to popular belief, complex problems demand simple solutions. The author believes that 50 percent of the complexity of a typical IT project can and should be eliminated—and he shows you how to do it. You’ll learn a model for understanding complexity, the three tenets of complexity control, and how to apply specific techniques such as checking architectures for validity. Find out how the author’s methodology could have saved a real-world IT project that went off track, and ways to implement his solutions in a variety of situations.

City Economics

City Economics
Author: Brendan O'Flaherty
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 616
Release: 2005-10-30
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780674019188

This introductory but innovative textbook on the economics of cities is aimed at students of urban and regional policy as well as of undergraduate economics. It deals with standard topics, including automobiles, mass transit, pollution, housing, and education but it also discusses non-standard topics such as segregation, water supply, sewers, garbage, fire prevention, housing codes, homelessness, crime, illicit drugs, and economic development. Its methods of analysis are primarily verbal, geometric, and arithmetic. The author achieves coherence by showing how the analysis of various topics reinforces one another. Thus, buses can tell us something about schools and optimal tolls about land prices. Brendan O'Flaherty looks at almost everything through the lens of Pareto optimality and potential Pareto optimality--how policies affect people and their well-being, not abstract entities such as cities or the economy or growth or the environment. Such traditionalism leads to radical questions, however: Should cities have police and fire departments? Should tax preferences for home ownership be repealed? Should public schools charge for their services? O'Flaherty also gives serious consideration to such heterodox policies as pay-at-the-pump auto insurance, curb rights for buses, land taxes, marginal cost water pricing, and sidewalk zoning.

Doing Business 2008

Doing Business 2008
Author: World Bank
Publisher: World Bank Publications
Total Pages: 208
Release: 2007-09-26
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0821372327

Regulations affecting 10 areas of everyday business are measured: starting a business, dealing with licenses, employing workers, registering property, getting credit, protecting investors, paying taxes, trading across borders, enforcing contracts, and closing a business. 'Doing Business 2008' updates all 10 sets of indicators, ranks countries on their overall ease of doing business, and analyzes reforms to business regulation - identifying which countries are improving their business environment the most and which ones slipped. The indicators are used to analyze economic outcomes and identify what reforms have worked, where and why. 'Doing Business 2008' focuses on how complex business regulations dampen investment, growth and job creation in all businesses, and especially opportunities for women entrepreneurs.

South America

South America
Author: James Bryce Bryce (Viscount)
Publisher:
Total Pages: 490
Release: 1912
Genre: Latin America
ISBN:

This book describes a journey through western and southern South America from Panama to Argentina and Brazil via the Straits of Magellan.

The Geography of Transport Systems

The Geography of Transport Systems
Author: Jean-Paul Rodrigue
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 432
Release: 2013-07-18
Genre: Science
ISBN: 1136777326

Mobility is fundamental to economic and social activities such as commuting, manufacturing, or supplying energy. Each movement has an origin, a potential set of intermediate locations, a destination, and a nature which is linked with geographical attributes. Transport systems composed of infrastructures, modes and terminals are so embedded in the socio-economic life of individuals, institutions and corporations that they are often invisible to the consumer. This is paradoxical as the perceived invisibility of transportation is derived from its efficiency. Understanding how mobility is linked with geography is main the purpose of this book. The third edition of The Geography of Transport Systems has been revised and updated to provide an overview of the spatial aspects of transportation. This text provides greater discussion of security, energy, green logistics, as well as new and updated case studies, a revised content structure, and new figures. Each chapter covers a specific conceptual dimension including networks, modes, terminals, freight transportation, urban transportation and environmental impacts. A final chapter contains core methodologies linked with transport geography such as accessibility, spatial interactions, graph theory and Geographic Information Systems for transportation (GIS-T). This book provides a comprehensive and accessible introduction to the field, with a broad overview of its concepts, methods, and areas of application. The accompanying website for this text contains a useful additional material, including digital maps, PowerPoint slides, databases, and links to further reading and websites. The website can be accessed at: http://people.hofstra.edu/geotrans This text is an essential resource for undergraduates studying transport geography, as well as those interest in economic and urban geography, transport planning and engineering.

Leadership in World Shipping

Leadership in World Shipping
Author: I. Theotokas
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 362
Release: 2009-04-29
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0230233538

A new look at the leadership of Greek ship owners in world shipping in the second half of the twentieth century. This book examines the fundamental factors of the dynamism of Greek entrepreneurship in family businesses and provides evidence for the organization, management and strategies of Greek family shipping companies.

Commodity Option Pricing

Commodity Option Pricing
Author: Iain J. Clark
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 356
Release: 2014-03-05
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1444362410

Commodity Option Pricing: A Practitioner’s Guide covers commodity option pricing for quantitative analysts, traders or structurers in banks, hedge funds and commodity trading companies. Based on the author’s industry experience with commodity derivatives, this book provides a thorough and mathematical introduction to the various market conventions and models used in commodity option pricing. It introduces the various derivative products typically traded for commodities and describes how these models can be calibrated and used for pricing and risk management. This book has been developed with input from traders and features examples using real-world data, together with relevant up-to-date academic research. This book includes practical descriptions of market conventions and quote codes used in commodity markets alongside typical products seen in broker quotes and used in calibration. Also discussed are commodity models and their mathematical derivation and volatility surface modelling for traded commodity derivatives. Gold, silver and other precious metals are addressed, including gold forward and gold lease rates, as well as copper, aluminium and other base metals, crude oil and natural gas, refined energy and electricity. There are also sections on the products encountered in commodities such as crack spread and spark spread options and alternative commodities such as carbon emissions, weather derivatives, bandwidth and telecommunications trading, plastics and freight. Commodity Option Pricing is ideal for anyone working in commodities or aiming to make the transition into the area, as well as academics needing to familiarize themselves with the industry conventions of the commodity markets.