Showing posts with label business. Show all posts
Showing posts with label business. Show all posts

Never Better: How Legionnaire's Disease Gave Meaning to My Life Review

Never Better: How Legionnaire's Disease Gave Meaning to My Life
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Never Better: How Legionnaire's Disease Gave Meaning to My Life ReviewTruly an amazing and touching story. This was one book I could not put down. I will definitely re read this book over again. I have suggested it to everyone I know, and strongly urge anyone and everyone to go get your own copy. You won't be disappointed. Amazing writing, amazing story, amazing book.Never Better: How Legionnaire's Disease Gave Meaning to My Life Overview
Cal King had it all: charm, affability, a body chiseled by rigorous workouts, and a successful career as a financial service executive. But that all changed dramatically during the first week of August in 2000. On a business trip to Chicago, he contracted Legionnaire's Disease.

Within a few dreadful days of contracting the disease, he narrowly escaped death, lost the ability to speak, and saw his rising star plummet. Never Better narrates the story of his efforts to overcome the devastating effects of this disease, including speech impairment, a weakened body, and depression that threatened to consume his life.

It is the story of his single-minded determination to talk, resume his career as a successful call center executive, and rise above the hurtful looks from people who believed he was mentally-challenged in the wake of Legionnaire's Disease. Never Better demonstrates the importance of faith, perseverance, and bravery. It reveals the inner spirit of a man destined to overcome nearly insurmountable odds to find new meaning in his life.


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Business Confronts Terrorism: Risks and Responses Review

Business Confronts Terrorism: Risks and Responses
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Business Confronts Terrorism: Risks and Responses ReviewBusiness Confronts Terrorism: Risks And Responses by Washington DC political consultant Dean C. Alexander provides the reader with an informed and informative overview of terrorist threats to business both abroad and here at home. Alexander also explains the ways in which terrorists take advantage of our ordinary, everyday economic system to finance their activities. He goes on to explore corporate security measures; analyses the relationship of the public and private sectors as they collaborate to defeat terrors groups; and reveals how the threat of terrorism has affected American labor, management, and business in general since September 11, 2001. Simply put, Business Confronts Terrorism should be considered mandatory reading by every American private citizen, business owner, labor leader, and government policy maker.
Business Confronts Terrorism: Risks and Responses OverviewCentral banks and stock exchanges are bombed. Suicide bombers ravage cinemas, nightclubs, and theaters. Planes crash into skyscrapers and government buildings. Multiple bombs explode on commuter trains. Thousands of people are killed and injured while millions are terrorized by these attacks. These scenarios could be part of a future Hollywood movie. Sadly, they are representative of previous terror attacks against industry and government interests worldwide. Moreover, they are harbingers of global terror threats. Industry constitutes a prime target of contemporary terrorism. This timely book analyzes the threats companies face due to terrorism, industry responses to these dangers, and terrorism's effects on conducting business in the post-9/11 environment. Dean C. Alexander details the conventional and unconventional terror capabilities facing industry. He describes the activities of terrorists in the economic system and the ways they finance their operations. Alexander discusses how companies can reduce terrorist threats and that corporate security can minimize political violence. He outlines the dynamics of the public-private partnership against terrorism: government aiding industry, business supporting government, and tensions between the two. He also delineates terrorism's effects-financial, physical, and emotional-on workers and employers. He highlights the negative financial and economic consequences of terrorism. He discusses the impact of terrorism on traditional business practices and concludes with an assessment of future trends.

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The Ultimate Competitive Advantage: Secrets of Continually Developing a More Profitable Business Model Review

The Ultimate Competitive Advantage: Secrets of Continually Developing a More Profitable Business Model
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The Ultimate Competitive Advantage: Secrets of Continually Developing a More Profitable Business Model ReviewOn an attentive reading of this book I must say it does not live to its rich promise as far as I am concerned. And it promises a lot which even transpires from its elaborate and frankly immodest format of introductions to introductions and forewords to forewords. No assurances of authors that the reader is dealing with a break-through knowledge can - though - replace the hard earned content. And the content shows surprisingly little home work done on the promised in-depth analysis of a hundred successful business entities. Instead one gets a series of real life business stories related. Not a very creative thing to write if you read business press today. Comparing this book to those of Mr.Collins who so meticuosly presents results of his research of the best companies or to such a thorough job on business models as that done by Mr. Slywotzky in his rich and clear "The Profit Zone : How Strategic Business Design Will Lead You to Tomorrow's Profits" leaves one truly unsatisfied.The Ultimate Competitive Advantage: Secrets of Continually Developing a More Profitable Business Model OverviewAuthors Donald Mitchell and Carol Coles conducted a ten-year study of companies that had grown the fastest over a three-year period. Their research reveals that while unsuccessful companies doggedly apply outdated business models, the successful ones improve their models every two to four years.
The Ultimate Competitive Advantage provides a straightforward, systematic method any company can use to review and improve its business model and each of its key components: pricing, costs of doing business, and benefits added. Dozens of concrete examples from companies of all sizes and types are provided.

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Chaucer on the Nile: A Pilgrim's Progress Review

Chaucer on the Nile: A Pilgrim's Progress
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Chaucer on the Nile: A Pilgrim's Progress ReviewA expansive, enlightening and optimistic book, packed with crisp travel tour descriptions, financial insights and advice, and held together with a captivating story. Suitable for all readers young and old. You won't be sorry! This is an enjoyable read.
TOUR EGYPT:
A "feel like you were actually there" tour of Egypt and descriptions so vivid you can almost smell and feel the sun and sand, and clearly picture the monuments.
LEARN ABOUT GLOBAL FINANCE:
An engaging overview into the area of global finance. The college course global financial lessons described herein, could help an entrepreneur decide if their business is ready for world wide outlets, and what financial planning needs done when considering expansion.
READ A CAPTIVATING STORY:
Finally, a good story, with suspense, humor, romance, adventure and "daring-do," written from the perspective of a curious young student willing to slip outside a tour's scheduled travels to see and learn all he can. Of course it gets him in trouble.
Chaucer on the Nile: A Pilgrim's Progress OverviewChaucer Jeffries is a college student and developing writer who wants to be 'the kind of person on whom nothing is lost."On a study-abroad trip in Egypt just before the Mubarak regime implodes, he has been training his attention on international business and the tourist scene in Cairo and along the Nile, when he blunders into a terrorist plot-and the results are explosive.Overnight, Chaucer finds himself a ‘person of interest' at the center of a web of international intrigue being spun by forces he cannot easily identify. Ultimately, these forces draw Chaucer's crew into a conflict between the leaders of two terrorist factions and the thuggish Amn al-Dawla-the government's internal security service-a conflict whose resolution hinges on one disaffected software programmer's desire and ability to do the right thing with what he knows.In the process of extricating himself and his friends from danger, Chaucer not only gains some practical knowledge of international business and international terrorism, but learns a bit about negotiating borders in love and friendship as well.Chaucer on the Nile is a tragicomic story, full of interesting characters, in the tradition of The Canterbury Tales, and a moral tale in the tradition of Dante's The Divine Comedy and Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress-a work of immediate political and social relevance in our efforts to manage the tension between international competition and international community.

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Typo: The Last American Typesetter or How I Made and Lost 4 Million Dollars Review

Typo: The Last American Typesetter or How I Made and Lost 4 Million Dollars
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Typo: The Last American Typesetter or How I Made and Lost 4 Million Dollars ReviewThe book certainly held my interest, and I enjoyed reading it. The blow-by-blow story of how an American company is crushed by industry forces (in this case, failing to adapt to low wage off-shoring competition) is compelling.
And yet, after finishing the book, the more I reflected on it, the less I liked it, and the less comfortable I felt with the author. One the plus side, he comes across as being forthright, and I give him props for baring his soul about how his company failed under his watch. Not many people would do that.
At the same time, Silverman did not seem to have much respect or empathy for his employees. He goes out of his way to make derogatory comments about their appearance or habits. The whole state of Iowa is portrayed as a grotesque backwater ... there are gratuitous digs taken against other locations ... indeed, if I recall correctly, no place away from the East Coast gets his respect. And that actually doesn't bother me much, except, that (i) I'm not sure that Silverman ever reconciles his utter failure to reach his employees with his lack of appreciation for them, and (ii) who in their right mind would buy a company in small-town Iowa and expect it to be driven by hard-charging cutting-edge types? That's not a knock on Iowa; the hard truth is that in small towns, opportunities are limited, so many ambitious, intelligent people leave, setting up a negative cycle where it's hard to start a new business because the labor pool isn't right.
Beyond that, there's a little too much of a victim mentality in the book, as if the company would have been fine if Fortuna hadn't thrown all these cataclysms into its way. And yet, the challenges the company faced were fairly prosaic: competition, unscrupulous salesmen, customers who backed out of contracts, employees who were incompetent, obstructionist, and/or resistant to change. Significant challenges to be sure, but ones that should have been expected all along.
There appears to be an element of axe-grinding in this book, which makes me treat it cautiously. That's understandable; as Silverman says, he lost his life savings, his father's life savings, and his father and friend passed away during that time.
Finally, I agree with a previous reviewer: the subtitle is misleading, as Clarinda was not the last American typesetting company, and the obfuscation of the name of Silverman's previous company is curious; it at least should have been explained.Typo: The Last American Typesetter or How I Made and Lost 4 Million Dollars OverviewTwo months before David Silverman's 32nd birthday, he visited the Charles Schwab branch in the basement of the World Trade Center to wire his father's life savings towards the purchase of the Clarinda Typesetting company in Clarinda, Iowa. Typo tells the true story of the Clarinda company's last rise and fall - and with it one entrepreneur's story of what it means to take on, run, and ultimately lose an entire life's work. This book is an American dream run aground, told with humor despite moments of tragedy. The story reveals the impact of losing part of an entire industry and answers questions about how that impacts American business. The reader sees in Clarinda's fate the potential peril faced by every company, and the lessons learned are applicable to anyone who wants to run his or her own business, succeed in a large corporation, and not be stranded by the reality of shifting markets, outsourcing, and, ultimately, capitalism itself.

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Manual of Travel Agency Practice, Third Edition Review

Manual of Travel Agency Practice, Third Edition
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Manual of Travel Agency Practice, Third Edition ReviewBook seems okay; however it is written for someone who wants to be employed for a travel agency; not for the agency. I was looking for a book to help describe the practice within an agency (back office management, business practices, etc.).Manual of Travel Agency Practice, Third Edition OverviewNow in its third edition, this successful must-have manual is thoroughly updated with new chapters and material, covering issues including:* Technology development - the different types of travel agency systems available, what they do, how they do it and how to use them* The Internet - how it is used to book travel, forecasts for its future use and how travel agenets stand in relation to it* Global distribution systems - how to make bookings, and the new windows-based environment* A full endorsement by Travel Weekly The manual demonstrates correct methods for processing travel reservations, identifying business client needs and suitable documentation. It also shows key facts for the profitable planning, organization and operation of the retail travel agency. Each chapter contains exercises pertinent to the topics covered.Students on any of the large number of courses in travel and tourism (ICM, City & Guilds, ABTA, IATA, UFTAA, BTEC, SCOTVEC, University of Oxford Certificate, Diploma of Vocational Education) will find this book invaluable.* Fully revised edition, absorbing the repurcussions of new technology within the industry.* Practical know-how for anyone seeking a career that involves travel agency work.* Clear and comprehensive - designed with the needs of the student in mind.

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Business Models: A Strategic Management Approach Review

Business Models: A Strategic Management Approach
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Business Models: A Strategic Management Approach Review
Early in this book the author tells us that business models are about making money. They are sometimes called business concepts or profit models. The author warns us to not confuse revenue models with business models. Revenue models are merely a part of a business model and describe how revenues are obtained, i.e., advertising, auction, markup, production, or subscription. On the other hand, business models are described by answering the following 5 questions:
1. What product are you going to make or what service are you going to provide? And how will you do it?
2. How will you generate revenues from what you make or provide? (revenue model) And how will you market what you have to offer?
3. What are your costs?
4. How will you price it?
5. Why will customers use you (or keep using you) rather than your competitors?
Business models are usually not all that hard to document. Take any store on the main street, in which you live and answer the above 5 questions about that company. Many of the answers can be found just by looking at the store while walking down the street. And some of the answers will require a little investigation or research. But the pieces of the puzzle will fit together not too long after the project was started. And what you will have is a diagram of an existing business at a specific point in time making a certain profit on a certain amount of gross sales.
Once armed with the documented business models for the competitors in the market you want to start your business, then you are in a position to create a business model for your new business so it will be able to compete with those competitors. And to actually transform your business model document into a real life business, then all you will need to do is write a 25-35 page sound business plan which you can then implement.
Now that I think I have adequately described what a business model is (and is not) I have to say that much of the book does not stick to talking about business models. The book has 13 chapters, and I did not find the following five chapters to be relevant to the subject at hand:
2. Customer value and relative positioning
7. Executing a business model
11. Financing and valuing a business model
12. Business model planning process
13. Corporate social responsibility and governance
They covered customer analysis, business plans, business plan topics, and business ethics. None of which are directly relevant in a discussion of business models. They don't relate to any of the five questions listed after the first paragraph above.
And I did not find ANY of the cases in Part II of the book to relate to the subject at hand: business models. The case studies simply described certain products or services offered by various companies. It never dissected the business models used in these cases.
I had hoped that the author in this book would have dissected the following generic business models in detail:
>>Retail businesses
>>Service oriented businesses (part service and part product)
>>Product oriented business (part product and part service)
>>Personal service business (all personal services)
>>Distribution companies
>>Internet companies
But this book did not do what I had hoped it would. And unfortunately for me I still haven't found a book that does. All in all, this book was a disappointment. 3 stars!Business Models: A Strategic Management Approach OverviewBusiness Models: A Strategic Management Approachby Allan Afuah represents a new kind of book. Business models are about making money and most firms are in business to make money (a profit). It is therefore no surprise that the phrase "business model" is increasingly finding its way into CEO speech after speech and in business school functional areas from accounting to finance to marketing to strategy. Because strategic management is inherently integrative in nature and increasingly more focused on firm performance, strategy textbooks have come closest to addressing the subject of business models, but only implicitly and partially so. Business Models: A Strategic Management Approach draws on the latest research in strategic management to explicitly and fully explore business models. It draws on the latest research on to explore which activities a firm performs, how it performs them, and when it performs them to make a profit. It offers an integrated framework for understanding the relationship between the set of activities that a firm chooses to perform, its revenue model, its cost structure, its resources and capabilities, the competitive forces in the firm's industry, and its ability to sustain a competitive advantage even in the face of change. It provides the link between resources, product-market positions and profits―how resources and product-market positions are translated into profits. (Existing strategy texts demonstrate correlation between resources or product-market positions and profits, not their translation into profits). Additionally, it explores the relationship between business models and corporate social responsibility as well as the international component to business models. It offers a definition of business models that is deeply rooted in the resource-based and product-market theories of strategy.

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Open Services Innovation: Rethinking Your Business to Grow and Compete in a New Era Review

Open Services Innovation: Rethinking Your Business to Grow and Compete in a New Era
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Open Services Innovation: Rethinking Your Business to Grow and Compete in a New Era ReviewHenry Chesbrough literally "wrote the book" on Open Innovation years ago. Today (2011 timeframe) every firm is trying to understand how to gain more ideas from customers and business partners, and frankly, few have really figured it out. And that's just focused on product innovation and the pipelines and structures that Chesbrough introduced in his first book. Which makes Open Services Innovation interesting and problematic at the same time.
Problematic because so many firms are just really beginning to understand "open" innovation, and taking small steps to understand how to best interact with customers and partners. That means that the graduate level class of open services innovation is valuable, but probably beyond many firms at this point. After all, asking a firm to innovate around services or business models is difficult, and asking them to use open innovation is difficult. Combining the two is a huge leap for many firms. I suspect that this book will become really popular in three to five years, once the frameworks for open innovation have been accepted and become more established.
The book is interesting because it assumes that the reader is familiar with and has implemented some aspects of open innovation, and it spends far much more of its time and focus on service and business model innovation. In fact it does a lot of what White Space Innovation by Mark Johnson did, only without Johnson's framework. The book is valuable because it discusses innovation in areas where many firms are only getting started - innovation in processes, services, business models and customer experiences. So in that regard, a firm or individual new to innovation can pick up the book and ignore the "open" aspects, which are relatively few, and learn a fair amount of innovation in services, business models and experiences, which is equally valuable and in fact is probably best suited for many firms.
The book also points out what I consider to be a real problem with book publishing. Chesbrough has a good idea and conveys it in four or five solid chapters. After that, he is forced to stretch the material to consider Open Services Innovation for Large firms, Open Services Innovation for Smaller Firms, Open Services Innovation for Services Industries, and so forth. I don't think these concepts add a lot to the discussion and they feel like filler in order to stretch the content to legitimate book length. You can get all the value you need from this book by reading the first 130 pages. That's not a critique on the content, but a comment on the format and the expectations of a publisher.
Chesbrough is to open innovation what Christensen is to innovation in general, and his concepts and ideas are spot on. What's possibly unfortunate about this book is that he is covering a subject that is akin to quantum physics for many firms, who are still trying to get the grasp of the Newtonian Physics of simple, open innovation. Many firms will buy this book, but I suspect most of them won't be able to use it effectively until they have a better grasp of "open" innovation, unless they toss out the open focus and think through innovation around services and business models.
One brief complaint - Many open innovation practitioners fail to communicate effectively that Open Innovation is a generic term for a number of different approaches to working with clients and customers to gather and manage ideas. You can see different types of Open Innovation in IdeaStorm, from Dell, IdeaJams, from IBM, Innovation Contests like the X-Prize, technology transfer organizations and solution providers like Innocentive. Be careful when considering Open Innovation, as it is only a catchall phrase for a lot of different tools and techniques, which have different applications and different downstream implications. I wish that authors writing about Open would address this. I've written a short chapter on this in the book A guide to Open Innovation and Crowdsourcing edited by Paul Sloane: [...]Open Services Innovation: Rethinking Your Business to Grow and Compete in a New Era OverviewThe father of "open innovation" is back with his most significant book yet. Henry Chesbrough's acclaimed book Open Innovation described a new paradigm for management in the 21st century. Open Services Innovation offers a new approach that demonstrates how open innovation combined with a services approach to business is an effective and powerful way to grow and compete in our increasingly services-driven economy. Chesbrough shows how companies in any industry can make the critical shift from product- to service-centric thinking, from closed to open innovation where co-creating with customers enables sustainable business models that drive continuous value creation for customers. He maps out a strategic approach and proven framework that any individual, business unit, company, or industry can put to work for renewed growth and profits. The book includes guidance and compelling examples for small and large companies, services businesses, and emerging economies, as well as a path forward for the innovation industry.
"Whether you are managing a product or a service, your business needs to become more open and more inclusive in order to be more innovative. Open Services Innovation will be an invaluable guide to intrepid managers who commit to making that journey."—GARY HAMEL, visiting professor, London Business School; director, Management Lab; and author, The Future of Management
"I tore out page after page to share with my leaders. Chesbrough has pioneered an entire rethink of business innovation that's rich in concept, deeply explained, with tools ready to use in every industry."—SCOTT COOK, founder and chairman of the executive committee, Intuit
"Focusing on core competence often tempts managers to keep continuing what succeeded in the past. A far more important question is what capabilities are critical in the future, and Chesbrough shows how to ask and answer these issues."—CLAYTON CHRISTENSEN, Robert & Jane Cizik Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School, and author, The Innovator's Dilemma
"To thrive, businesses will need to master the lessons of open service innovation. Here is their one-stop guidebook with important lessons clearly and compellingly presented."—JAMES C. SPOHRER, director, IBM University Programs World-Wide
"Open Innovation pioneer Henry Chesbrough breaks new ground with Open Services Innovation, a persuasive argument for the power of co-creation in the world of services."—TOM KELLEY, general manager, IDEO, and author, The Ten Faces of Innovation, The Art of Innovation
"With his trademark style of beautifully explained examples, Henry Chesbrough shows how open service innovation and new business models can help you escape this product commodity trap and bring you to the next level of competition."—ALEX OSTERWALDER, author, Business Model Generation
"Open Services Innovation shows how a business can redefine itself as a service organisation and tap into faster growth through shared innovation."—SIR TERRY LEAHY, chief executive, Tesco
"Chesbrough shows how innovating openly with a services mindset can make you a market leader."—CHARLENE LI, author, Open Leadership, and founder, Altimeter Group Case Study:Car2Go from Daimler-BenzOpen Services Innovation provides an alternative way to think about products like cars.It is important to realize that people are usually buying the utility provided by a product and the product itself is only a means to this end.So, with automobiles, one is really obtaining transportation services.Most of us only drive or utilize our vehicles a small portion of each day (typically less than 10%) and the rest of the time it just sits idle. Yet, we bear 100% (!) of the costs associated with this expensive asset (acquisition, service, parking, insurance, etc.).An Open Services approach seeks to exploit utilization differentials like this to get more value or ROI from underutilized assets.Raising the utilization of a car to even 50% can spread the many costs of owning and operating it over many more hours and people. Daimler makes the world-renowned Mercedes Benz vehicles and most of them are sold in traditional ways, through dealers. And customers purchase or lease them, using them mostly for themselves. But Daimler is innovating an alternative way for people to obtain transportation services. Called Car2Go, this service allows customers to pick up a car at a nearby location, use it for as long as they wish, drop it off wherever they like, and they are only charged for the miles they accrue.An intelligent sensor and GPS system allows Daimler to locate their vehicles and show the location of all available vehicles to interested customers online.There is no membership fee to sign up or drop-off fee.This is a very flexible, convenient service. First tested in Ulm, Germany in 2008, this service was launched in Austin, Texas in 2010. While it is too early to measure success, offering highly flexible transportation services where customers can customize the offering and co-create value is a perfect example of Open Services Innovation (more examples of utilization differential in the book). Case Study:Mint.com's Answers CommunityThe Great Recession of 2008 and 2009 traumatized many investors. Even now, after the carnage has subsided, investors remain wary about what to do with their money. And the advice of many 'established" brokers and advisors has shown to be unhelpful for many people, creating a hunger for good information about options for saving and investing money. Mint.com (which is owned by Intuit) is a rapidly growing website that serves this hunger for information and unlike traditional brokerage and financial advisory services, Mint.com takes an open services approach to supplying it. The website has an entire section called Mint Answers that allows users to post questions that are puzzling them, and enables anyone in the Mint.com community to post answers to those questions. For example, one recent user asked 'I have a mortgage that has an interest rate of 5.25%.I have the cash to pay it off.Should I?"To this question, Mint Answers shows three different answers to the question from different people in the community.Each person raised a question that the user needed to consider in making their decision and together these answers were more helpful than any single one. To highlight the best, the user can assign a point for any answer they found to be helpful. Mint Answers also tracks who the most active contributors of answers to the site are and shows which contributors have accumulated the most points.Notice that all Mint.com is doing is supplying a medium or platform for its viewers to search for and provide information.It costs Mint very little to provide this service (just the cost of the website and tracking the points). The site becomes more valuable the more people use it, as more questions are asked, and as more answers are given. This example illustrates the idea of using Open Services Innovation to create a platform others build on (more examples in the book).

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Smart Packing for Today's Traveler Review

Smart Packing for Today's Traveler
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Smart Packing for Today's Traveler ReviewI have been a traveler for 30 years and each time I pack, I make the same mistakes and end up with a sore back from toting to heavy a suitcase, until I read Susan's book. Her packing tips are foolproof..and I admit being the fool! However what helped me the most was her checklists. For example on page194-95, she gives the reader lists of important documents like one's medical history and information on drugs that you take daily and reminds you to make copies of all you take to leave behind with your support person, in time of emergency. Her emergency takealong medicine chest list worked for me and for once I got on the plane feeling competent on my way to Bali that I wouldnt need to see a Doc unless it was a fourstar emergency. Simple as it may seem, Susan's instructions on in-transit creature comforts, page176, saved me so much grief up during my trip. I trashed my vanity and showed up for an international flight sans makeup..and for the first time, I had sense to use lotion, waterspray and lipbalm instead and emerged energized at the end of my flight. Thanks Susan. If you can do it, I can do it. Fly like a Pro that is...Smart Packing for Today's Traveler OverviewImagine traveling with all the right things without carrying five suitcases! Sound impossible? In Smart Packing for Today's Traveler, packing expert Susan Foster shares how-to secrets discovered during hundreds of business and pleasure trips:. Learn to pack for every trip - for business or vacation, for men, women and children, for any place in the world. . Discover how to dress for all seasons at any destination. Know which fabrics and styles are comfortable and packable. . Find out which type of luggage works for each trip, and the best packing methods for any bag.The Third Edition of Smart Packing for Today's Traveler answers all your planning and packing questions:. How to travel light. Airport security tips. When to check your bag and when to carry on. How to pack less to meet airline bag weight and size rules. Which clothing is best for a cruise. What to pack for adventure trips or sports vacatons. Information on packing toiletries, cosmetics, electrical appliances, the best in travel gadgets.Plus critical information on health and safety.

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The Best-Laid Plans: How Government Planning Harms Your Quality of Life, Your Pocketbook, and Your Future Review

The Best-Laid Plans: How Government Planning Harms Your Quality of Life, Your Pocketbook, and Your Future
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The Best-Laid Plans: How Government Planning Harms Your Quality of Life, Your Pocketbook, and Your Future ReviewIn his 48 chapters O'Toole covers a wide range of government planning efforts. Rather than a complaint only about the disastrous consequences of a specific government planning effort, he shows why such efforts are doomed by the very incentives that motivate government.
He has many years of first-hand exposure to the Congressionally mandated planning process for our national forests. He argues that the planning process has wasted over a billion dollars and severely impeded the management of those public lands. It has defocused the Forest Service so badly that they are marginally effective.
He description of the various fads that run through the ranks of urban planners are sufficient to suggest they should be called congestion enhancers. Many urban plans in the guise of "traffic calming" actually make congestion worse in the hope that people will chose a high density lifestyle. Like most urban planning this runs counter to peoples wishes. It just makes commutes more time consuming , increases gas consumption, and increases pollution.
"Smart Growth" is anything but smart and relies on substituting planners pipe dreams for the citizens personal plans and cost sensitive traffic engineering.
He includes a number of examples from Portland, Oregon where urban growth boundaries have run home costs up enough that many people settle in Washington instead. When citizens voted overwhelming against more light rail, Metro chose alternate financing and decided to build anyway. That same Metro opines "Congestion signals positive urban development."
His chapters on "The Rail Transit Hoax" and "The Benefits of the Automobile" are worth the whole cost of the book. There have been so many invalid cost comparisons that one can only assume some promoters of rail and transit are willing to lie to get even close to the cost parameters of personal transportation.
He spends 6 chapters explaining the reasons government planning fails. The result is incredibly higher costs, and often a solution more dangerous to the citizen.
His final 9 chapters suggest replacements for government planning and ways Congress could dramatically improve the management of those public functions that remain in government.
This brief outline just lightly touches on a few of the many topics that O'Toole so ably discusses.
Every legislator should read this book! The information in this book will help every citizen hold their government realistically accountable.The Best-Laid Plans: How Government Planning Harms Your Quality of Life, Your Pocketbook, and Your Future OverviewDrawing on 30 years of experience reviewing hundreds of government plans, Randal O'Toole shows that, thanks to government planners, American cities are choked with congestion, major American housing markets have become unaffordable, and the cost of government infrastructure is spiraling out of control. The book makes the case for repeal of federal planning laws and closure of government planning offices. Every American who worries about the insidious growth of the Nanny State must read this book.

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The Administrative Professional: Technology & Procedures Review

The Administrative Professional: Technology and Procedures
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The Administrative Professional: Technology & Procedures ReviewI purchased this book for my classes. I have to say that I really love this book. Many tips and real-life demonstations are very helpful. The lessons are very thought-provoking and helped me in different areas of my life. The book is easy to follow and straight to the point.The Administrative Professional: Technology & Procedures OverviewAdministrative Procedures is a capstone course for students majoring in Office Technology.It integrates the software applications skills they have learned previously, business communication skills, critical thinking, and concepts and activities that address the workplace environment, customer service, mail, travel, meetings, and events, records management; Students take this course because they'll be entering the workforce as administrative professionals and need to learn about office procedures, communication styles, financial factors and methods, meeting preparation, and office technology among other topics.

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The Business of Event Planning: Behind-the-Scenes Secrets of Successful Special Events Review

The Business of Event Planning: Behind-the-Scenes Secrets of Successful Special Events
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The Business of Event Planning: Behind-the-Scenes Secrets of Successful Special Events ReviewPlanning a corporate party or special event? Don't lift a finger until you've read The Business of Event Planning. In this highly practical book, author Judy Allen covers every aspect of the process in exhaustive detail. Allen, an author, writer and experienced event planner, contends that events are more than just feel-good activities. Events, she says, must be staged as strategic tools with return-on-investment potential. If you want to know how, she covers all the basics. Even though the book is geared toward large events, the principles can be applied to functions of any size. Allen includes details of proposal writing, itineraries, contract negotiations, fee setting, high tech applications and security concerns in a post-September-11 world. We from getAbstract recommend this logistical guide to corporate staffers or event planners who want to master the fine details.The Business of Event Planning: Behind-the-Scenes Secrets of Successful Special Events Overview

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The Informant: A True Story Review

The Informant: A True Story
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The Informant: A True Story ReviewOn the rare occasions when the banal details of corporate crime are uncovered, developed and prosecuted, the inside story is sometimes difficult to believe. Even more often, these stories, particularly those involving complex financial chicanery, fail to survive the conversion to film or print.
An obvious exception is "The Informant," Kurt Eichenwald's extraordinary new book about the Archer Daniels Midland Company price-fixing scandal in the mid-1990s. Mr. Eichenwald, an award-winning journalist at The New York Times, has balanced a cast of a nearly unimaginable characters with meticulous reporting and sourcing built on endless of hours of government tapes, documentary evidence and interviews.
Mr. Eichenwald's masterfully constructed narrative describes how ADM, the self-styled "Supermarket to the World," conspired with international competitors to corner food additive markets. The book focuses on Mark Whitacre, the wildly contradictory former ADM executive whose secret cooperation with the FBI apparently was intended to hide his own crimes. As Mr. Eichenwald writes, the book is about the "malleable nature of the truth," and how nothing in the ADM case was necessarily what it appeared to be. Along the way, the story is told in a way that "lend[s] temporary credence to the many lies told in this investigation," according to Mr. Eichenwald. In the end, the book accomplishes what few of its kind have: it has woven an otherwise tedious collection of technical and legal details and deceptions into one of the best tales of corporate crime in the past 20 years.
As the federal government found in its development of the ADM case, it's difficult to humanize corporate schemes, whether in civil or criminal litigation, or in the news or entertainment media. Mr. Eichenwald not only overcomes this obstacle, he has succeeded in producing a book that reads like a thriller. At one point in the book, in fact, a few of the characters even question whether Mr. Whitacre is acting out scenes from a John Grisham best-seller, "The Firm." Mr. Eichenwald also is fortunate to inherit an amazing cast of characters that includes not only Mr. Whitacre, the Andreas family, and high-level law enforcement agencies but also ADM's political network -- which at various times has included Ronald Reagan, Mikhail Gorbachev, Bob Dole, Dan Quayle, former Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney, and powerful Washington and New York law firms, among others.
My admiration of the author emanates in part from his reporting of the Prudential-Bache financial scandal in the early 1990s, both in The New York Times and in his book "Serpent on the Rock." As a part of the legal team that successfully represented 5,800 victimized investors in civil litigation against Pru-Bache, I believe Mr. Eichenwald was unequalled among journalists in his command of that subject matter. Even then, where "Serpent on the Rock" succeeded nicely in chronicling the Pru-Bache scandal, "The Informant" excels.
I believe that this book puts Mr. Eichenwald into the elite company of Jonathan Harr ("A Civil Action"), James B. Stewart ("Den of Thieves" and "Blind Eye"), Ken Auletta ("Greed and Glory on Wall Street"), and Bryan Burrough and John Helyar ("Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco").The Informant: A True Story Overview

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