The Murdoch Mission: The Digital Transformation of a Media Empire

Book Description

A dramatic narrative by a top journalist about the transformation of one of the world's greatest media empires.

The Murdoch Mission gets inside Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. and documents the media mogul's strategic forays in digital media and broadcasting and new Internet-based businesses. Among other giant highlights is the creation of his new $40 billion company, the mammoth Sky Global Networks.

Wendy Rohm provides an up-close look at how Murdoch's youngest son, James Murdoch, is changing his father's fortune in the megamarket of China and other world markets. She shows the impact these forays will have on international trade and the media world at large. Based on her personal time with James in Hong Kong and Beijing, interviews with Rupert Murdoch himself as well as Murdoch's corporate officers, senior executives, colleagues, confidants, and competitors, Rohm provides a larger-than-life, colorful account of how one of the most powerful media lords on the planet leads his global corporation into the digital age. The Murdoch Mission delves into Murdoch's successes as well as his disasters while also providing a glimpse into the impact he and his company are having on the cultural and media landscape of the world.

Wendy Goldman Rohm (Chicago, IL) is the bestselling author of The Microsoft File, a Business Week, Barnes & Noble, and New York Times bestseller. A prolific writer, she has been a correspondent for many publications, including Wired magazine, Upside, the New York Times Syndicate International, Chicago Tribune, Red Herring, the Los Angeles Times, and others.

Customer Reviews:

Disgraceful.......2004-11-30

I'm not sure who commissioned this book to be written, but it is completely disgraceful the lack of any formal criticism or challenges that confront the Murdoch empire. I would get more insight reading a brochure about the company than from this book. Truly disgraceful.

A lively narrative and a great read full of fascinating info.......2002-11-05

The is a surprisingly good read, the narrative is lively and informative, and the information is fresh and based on exclusive interviews with the Murdochs and those inhabiting their inner sanctum.

Don't Waste Your Money.......2002-10-29

Do Not waste your money on this book, particularly if you are in the business and/ or have even a little working knowledge of News Corp. The book is contains no insight into the Murdoch way of doing business, is full of factual errors and was apparently not edited at all. It is full of mistakes, omits context and timing and ignores many of the key executives who actually make and made things happen at News Corp.
How does stuff like this get published?

Not enough criticism.......2002-03-01

I bought this book in anticipation of a learning something new about Murdoch and I unfortunately did not. The books seems mainly to deal with the last two years of News Corporation and while it did provide some behind the scene information a large amount of the information could be gleamed out of reading the news articles that have come out about the Sky Global deal. The author never had anything to say bad about Murdoch or raise any new information but instead rehashed a large amount of news clippings.

Additionally, I agree with the reader that stated the author needed to check some facts because you will see mistakes such as when she comments one of his sons started working in 1977 at News but on the next page says that he was born in 1973. Even Murdoch's sons are allowed to have some childhood.

Poorly edited puff piece.......2002-01-15

Wow - a big-time publisher like John Wiley and they don't even hire a decent editor to cull through Wendy Goldman's galleys? Page after page of errors litter this book. One page, Rupert is walking into his third floor office - next page his office is on the fourth floor. Then back and forth. Goldman has people working at the wrong companies, James - Rupert's son - meeting his future wife at age six (not 26)... and on and on.

In addition, Goldman hardly has one bad word to say about anyone in News Corporation. Throughout his career, Rupert Murdoch has never tried to stifle criticism of him nor his actions. Never tried to block a particular book or article. But a book full of this sort of adoration and adulation isn't necessarily going to win Ms. Goldman any points with him.

What carries this book is not Goldman's writing, her insights nor the publisher's editing. What carries in the end is the fascinating scope of News Corporation's activities worldwide.

Book Description

This book looks at changing managerial styles in business and the predominance of risk aversion behavior over risk taking behavior. The author explores the various reasons (regulation and media scrutiny among them) that corporations are becoming more timid and analyzes the consequences this could have on the future of innovation and technological development in the business future.

Download Description

This book provides a much needed critical intervention in the governance and risk management mania that has characterised corporate regulation in the past ten years. Benjamin Hunt challenges us to reinterpret the mantras of brand management, customer focus, stakeholder dialogue, shareholder value and many more as products of an anxious society populated by defensive corporations, fearful of markets and led by empty political systems. The Timid Corporation is refreshingly provocative, and offers a timely reminder of the paradox of corporate regulation in the post-Enron world which can never restore trust. This book is essential reading for managers, politicians and academics concerned with the consequences of a culture of corporate risk aversion for genuine innovation."" Michael Power, P.D. Leake Professor of Accounting, and Co-Director, ESRC Centre for Analysis of Risk and Regulation, London School of Economics

Customer Reviews:

This book needs a foundation of Ellsberg,Keynes,and Mandelbrot .......2005-07-14

Hunt could have easily written a 5 star book by basing its major conclusions,the current dearth of both long run investment and innovation by most major corporations,on a foundation composed of the theoretical work of D.Ellsberg,J.M.Keynes, B.Mandelbrot ,and the mathematical modeling of Dixit and Pindyck's"real options"approach(see their 1993 book "Investment under Uncertainty") as a replacement for the badly flawed neoclassical EVA(economic value added) approach that essentially degenerates into a purely short run,short sighted,pennywise,poundfoolish labor cost cutting(a la "chainsaw"Al Dunlop)policy that ignores revenue generation through innovation in new products,services,technologies,industrial processes and/or improvements in current products,etc.The crucial distinction that Hunt tries to make between risk and REAL risk[ risk(mild risk) versus uncertainty , ambiguity,or wild risk] was made by Keynes in his A Treatise on Probability(1921)and in Chapter 12 of his 1936 General Theory,by Ellsberg in a 1961 Quarterly Journal of Economics article and his (2001) book,Risk,Ambiguity and Decision,and by Mandelbrot in a series of books and articles written since 1955[see his (2004)The (Mis)Behavior of Markets,with Hudson].Hunt is certaintly correct that the EVA rule"...is a frenzied attempt to formalize things that cannot easily be formalized..."(Hunt,p.116).Hunt needs to integrate the work of the thinkers pointed out in this review into the corpus of his book in a revised edition,probably an extended appendix.

Insightful!.......2004-06-09

This book offers a passionate and stupendously irreverent slap in the face to virtually every management orthodoxy and business shibboleth. Nothing escapes the scathing criticism of this corporate Jeremiad. Managing for shareholder value? Woe to you, sinner! Think the brand is important? Out with you, infidel! There's plenty to find fault with in author Benjamin Hurt's presentation of his case. He's vengefully biased, and never lets a silly fixation like "balance" get in the way of a good zinger. He's set himself to dig holes in the dikes that hold the wild waters of skepticism at bay. This book will make you mad, make you protest, may even make you throw it against the wall in disgust. But any book that makes you react that way has something going for it. At least, it's a bracingly different perspective from anything else you'll read about management, marketing or finance. With that caveat about balance firmly in mind,
We suggest reading this decidedly eccentric, provocative original, if you dare to take the risk.

A contrarian view.......2003-11-03

A contrarian view of risk management that has overtones of 'the emperor has no clothes'. The author argues that business has become obsessed with risk and self-regulates to the point that genuine (and risky) innovation is stifled. He offers a lot of evidence that undue concern with risk, coupled with a desire (largely for safety) to 'offer customers what they want' and 'build customer loyalty' actually works against the best interest of customers and the business.

While it is clear that the author is against undue caution, he believes that this is affecting most business and makes a good case for his arguments, it is less clear what he is for. There is a risk (!) that the book will simply be used by those who are interested in preventing government regulation and ridiculing self-regulation. It is usefully provocative but ignores or ridicules some real risks that require careful management. The author's cavalier dismissal of environmental concerns is a good example of this.

Book Description

The volume, in which the concerns of one author are taken up by others, advances current debate on two interconnected levels. First, it contains original and ground-breaking discussions of questions lying at the heart of contemporary feminist theory. At the same time, it contains a more reflexive strand of argument about the intellectual resources available to feminist thinkers, and the advantages and dangers of borrowing from non-feminist traditions of thought. It thus provides an exceptionally rich examination of contemporary legal and political feminist theory.

Customer Reviews:

The Game is Not Over.......2003-08-08

In the developed world, the great battles over sexual discrimination have been won by the feminists, as the 20th century ended. The suffragettes of the 19th and 20th centuries did not strive in vain. Where elections are held, women can vote, and at the same starting age as men. Contraception and abortion are mostly accessible. Women can exist as legal entities, not just as adjuncts of their spouses.

Overt barriers to women have been abolished. Surely feminists can declare the game over? Well not quite. And this is really what the book is about. It has papers from a conference at Cambridge, Britain, with researchers from political science, philosophy and law. The mood seems to be of a field uncertain of its direction. Issues of pay inequity still persist in every country and most professions. At the managerial level, men still vastly outnumber women. Thus too in parliaments. In some contexts, like pregnancy, women might not have full legal status, on a par with men.

How to redress these? The issues lack the rallying clarity of (say) a denial of suffrage, and thusly too there is a lack of consensus on possible solutions. In that, the book seems a good representative of current feminist thought.

Book Description

The book discusses the ideas and creates a framework for building toward a theory of paleoclimate. Using the rich and mounting array of observational evidence of climatic changes from geology, geochemistry, and paleontology, Saltzman offers a dynamical approach to the theory of paleoclimate evolution and an expanded theory of climate.

Saltzman was a distinquished authority on dynamical meteorology. This book provides a comprehensive framework based on dynamical system ideas for a theory of climate and paleoclimatic evolution which is intended for graduate students and research workers in paleoclimatology, earth system studies, and global change research. The book includes an extensive bibliography of geological and physical/dynamical references.

Written by the late Barry Saltzman who was a distinquished authority on dynamical meteorology
This book provides a comprehensive framework based on dynamical system ideas for a theory of climate and paleoclimatic evolution
The book includes extensive bibliography of geological and physical/dynamical references

Dynamical Paleoclimatology: Generalized Theory of Global Climate Change (International Geophysics)

Average customer rating:

Dynamical Paleoclimatology: Generalized Theory of Global Climate Change (International Geophysics)
Barry Saltzman
Manufacturer: Academic Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000OH9GF4

Book Description

This book is about using graphs to understand the relationship between a regression model and the data to which it is fitted. Because of the new way in which models are fitted, for example by least squares, we can lose information about the effect of individual observations on inferences about the form and parameters of the model. The methods developed in this book reveal how the fitted regression model depends on individual observations and on groups of observations. Robust procedures can sometimes reveal this structure, but downweight or discard some observations. The novelty in this book is to combine robustness and a "forward" search through the data with regression diagnostics and computer graphics.

Diagnostics and robust estimation when transforming the regression model and the response (Mimeo series)

Average customer rating:

Diagnostics and robust estimation when transforming the regression model and the response (Mimeo series)
Raymond J Carroll
Manufacturer: Dept. of Statistics, University of North Carolina
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Unknown Binding

Books:

Books Index

Books Home

Recommended Books