Andrew R. Thomas – författare

Soft Landing: Airline Industry Strategy, Service, and Safety covers the immediate past, present, and future of the airline industry and its effects on consumers and the economy. 

Aviation receives a disproportionate amount of news coverage in the popular press—not to mention chatter at cocktail parties and workplaces around the world. And why not? Aviation represents a sector of the U.S economy, for example, exceeded in size only by the real estate, healthcare, and automotive industries. Furthermore, hundreds of millions of people fly each year, including 80 million Americans. 

So we all have airline stories—experiencing a delay and losing a business deal, spending a night or three in the airport, dealing with ornery airline personnel, losing money on airline stocks, or being involved in a near miss. (Or, as George Carlin more accurately put it, a “near hit.”) 

But things might be on the upswing. Knocked to its knees by 9/11 and a decade of falling revenue and rising losses, the industry’s “flying cheap” strategy and organizational efficiencies based partly on outsourcing have appear to have helped passengers and profitability return. As this book explains, we can look forward to better technology and infrastructure, speedier—and easier—travel, more effective and less invasive security measures, and more jobs in the air and on the ground.

Turbulence is always a possibility. Rising fuel costs, economic uncertainty, and future terror attacks could cause tumult once again. Plus, airline companies intend to charge us extra for everything from the weight of our own bodies to use of the bathroom. But as the industry has discovered, we’ll put up with that—and more—if we can make it to our destinations with bags intact and a smaller dent in our wallets.

Soft Landing will:

Romania stands at the crossroads of Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. Since 1990, when the country experienced the bloodiest revolution of all of the Warsaw Pact members, Romania has gone through withering change. While the formal transition from a totalitarian, communist state was completed in 2007 with Romania’s accession into the European Union, the adaptation of the nation’s people and business climate to a market-based economy is a daily occurrence.

In the 2000’s, in the lead up to EU accession, Romania was one of the largest recipients of Foreign Direct Investment in the world. While multinational corporations poured in hundreds of billions of dollars, there was also a restructuring of the way business was conducted. Western systems of management and organization—foreign to most Romanian academics and business people—almost overnight transformed the way the marketplace was perceived.

Romania’s entrepreneurs were quick to adapt to the new ways, leveraging new opportunities in the environment. Fortunes were made. Multinationals also burgeoned in Romania. Companies like Microsoft, General Electric, Timken, Kraft, P&G, Renault and dozens of others successfully took advantage of the possibilities created by a relatively well-educated population that was moving into the middle class.

For the most part, however, researchers and scholars were caught off guard by the quickening pace of business change in Romania. Only until very recently has the academic community at large been able to wade through the murkiness and begin to see what the new landscape looks like.

It is the purpose of this edited volume, which includes the work of some of Romania’s finest business scholars, to provide even greater clarity to the current and future scene. Moreover, the experience in Romania helps shed light on the dynamics of economic and business transition throughout Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and other emerging regions, withimplications for practice, policymaking, and research.

American business is dysfunctional. Companies of all sizes follow the mistaken belief that their products and services are best sold through mega-customers with pervasive market reach, such as Amazon and Walmart. Far too many business leaders fail to realize—until it is too late—that the relentless pursuit of volume at all cost is not the key to long-term profits and success.

The Customer Trap: How to Avoid the Biggest Mistake in Business is Thomas and Wilkinson’s sequel to The Distribution Trap: Keeping Your Innovations from Becoming Commodities, which won the Berry-American Marketing Association Prize for the best marketing book of 2010. The Distribution Trap contended that cracking the big-box channel is not necessarily the Holy Grail that many marketers assume it is. The Customer Trap takes this thesis to the next level by arguing that all companies, regardless of the industry there are in, should maintain control over their sales and distribution channels. Volume forgone by avoiding the mass market is more than offset by higher margins and stronger brand equity.

The Customer Trap shows that giving power to a customer who violates "the ten percent rule" sets a company up for ruin. Yet, when presented with the opportunity to push more sales through large customers, most decision-makers jump at the chance. As a result, marketing has come to resemble a relentless quest for efficiency and scale. Demands from mega-customers in the form of discounts, deals, and incentives erode the integrity of the brand and what it originally stood for. Lower margins become the norm and cost-saving compromises on quality take over. In time, the brand suffers and, in some cases, fails outright. Stark examples from Oreck Vacuum Cleaners, Rubbermaid, Goodyear, Levi’s, and others illustrate the perils of falling into the "customer trap."

This volume presents new theoretical insights, practical strategies, and policy initiatives in the rapidly evolving field of global supply chain security. As businesses, governments, and society at large have become increasingly dependent on a global network to provide goods and services, protecting global supply chains has become an issue of vital importance for industries, nations, and regions. The "supply chain" encompasses all the links connecting a manufacturer to end users of its products. Links may take the form of plants, supplier warehouses, vendor facilities, ports or hubs, retail warehouses or facilities, and outbound shipping centers. Links also involve all the ways goods are moved-by truck, ship, airplane, or rail car.

A great deal can go wrong in the supply chain due to company or systemic mismanagement and inefficiency, criminal activity, employee or technology errors, or terrorism, to name just a few of the threats. Then there are government regulation, industry or association oversight, and security agencies (both public and private) keeping track. Globalization, stricter security regimes, and increasingly sophisticated criminal activity have made cross-border cargo movements more complex, putting the integrity of end-to-end supply chains at much greater risk. This is why the security of the supply chain has become such an important issue for business people: there is too much at stake to let problems proliferate or stagnate. It has been estimated, for example, that thieves now steal $50 billion in goods each year from various points along the supply chain.

Synthesizing the most current research, practical application, and policy, Global Supply Chain Security covers a range of emerging topics—from risk assessment to technology deployment to continuity planning—and will serve as a useful resource for anyone concerned with supply chain security issues, including scholars, students, business executives andpolicymakers.

This book explores the relationship between the Panama Canal and the evolution of the global economy. It details the role the Canal played in America’s ascendancy and the development of modern globalization. Then, it explores how the Panamanian people have brought the Panama Canal into the 21st Century, making the nation an ever-bigger player in multi-modal transport and international trade. It concludes with a deep dive into the future of globalization and what it ultimately means for the Canal.

This volume focuses on the spotlight on Romania and Moldova, two distinct nations that share a common language, history and culture. Romania is a NATO member since 2004 and a fully integrated nation into the European Union since 2007, while The Republic of Moldova (a former Soviet republic) is attempting to join both international organizations for security and development reasons.

Ever since the Iron Curtain fell on Europe at the end of World War II, the term “Eastern Europe” has been used without much regard for the diversity of the region. Given the geographical proximity, perhaps this is an understandable error. However, moving forward into the twenty-first century, and considering the highly sensitive geopolitical, security and development issues playing out in the region, we believe each nation should be treated with the unique distinction it deserves.

Building a mosaic of the most current research, practical application, and policy, the authors, who represent unique, insider perspectives, cover a range of emerging and timely topics from Black Sea security to cultural analyses, organizational development and risk assessment shedding light on social, political and economic challenges of rapid transition in the region, while considering the implications for research, practice and policy in other front-line regions around the world.