One of the country's most trusted leaders offers time-tested and real world advice for leading in economic hard times. From business giant Bill George, the acclaimed author of Wall Street Journal 's bestseller True North , comes the just-in-time guide for anyone in a leadership position facing today's unprecedented economic challenges. The former CEO of Medtronic draws from his own in-the-trenches experience and lessons from leaders (representing an array of companies) who have weathered tough economic storms. With straight talk and clear directions, George shows leaders specifically what they must do to become strong leaders and survive any crisis. His seven lessons include: Face Reality, Starting with Yourself; Never Waste a Good Crisis; and Be Aggressive: This is Your Best Chance to Win in the Market. Seven Lesson for Leading in Crisis is a survival kit for anyone in a leadership position.: A concise handbook for applying proven leadership lessons in tough times; Written by Bill George one of America's most trusted business leaders and author of True North and Authentic Leadership; Offers realistic actions leaders can take to put their companies on the right long-term path. Seven Lesson for Leading in Crisis gives leaders a solid strategy for staying the course.

Price: $19.95 USD

Get into the minds of consumers and increase your revenue!. Want to better understand why consumers think and act the way they do? This practical guide gives you the tools to identify the influences that affect their purchasing behavior. It also shows you how to apply that knowledge as you develop a marketing strategy that speaks directly to their needs. You'll see how to capture their attention, motivate them to purchase your products and services, earn their loyalty, and much more.: Why do they buy? — understand the decision-making process consumers go through when considering a purchase;. Apply behavior to marketing — learn the 4Ps of marketing and how consumer behavior plays a role in each;. Gain a deeper understanding of the individual consumer — gauge a consumer's motivation, emotions, perception, and attitude and use them to predict and change buying intentions;. Explore external influences on customers — from cultures to family life cycles to household structures and social groups, see how purchasing patterns are affected;. Craft your marketing strategy — use consumer knowledge to delve into market research, identify key segments, and launch into untapped markets;. Implement your plan — create powerful positioning strategies and reach customers where they're at with a message that motivates them. Open the book and find:.: Actionable, real-world insight and advice;. Tips to help you lead consumers from attention to action;. Research techniques and marketing tips;. How self-concepts and lifestyle change consumer behavior;. Methods for cultivating repeat business and loyalty;. Ways to protect against consumer misbehavior;. Advice on encouraging new product adoption;. Ten ways to enhance customer satisfaction

Price: $21.99 USD

The leading email marketing firm shows you how to create high-impact, low-cost campaigns. Email marketing is an incredibly cost-effective way to establish and build relationships that drive business success. But, it can also be a challenge because the inbox is a hostile environment. Whether your email is noteworthy—or an annoying waste of your customer's time—depends on your ability to stick to stick the fundamentals of good marketing and authentic relationship building. The Constant Contact Guide to Email Marketing presents best practices and relationship-building principles from America’s leading email marketing firm. With over 280,000 small business and non-profit clients, Constant Contact is constantly testing and learning what works and what doesn't, and it's all here. There's no other email guide on the market that provides this level of comprehensive, practical guidance. Whether you're starting your own small business or need to grow on a shoestring budget, this book will get you up to speed fast. Learn about: Ten email pitfalls that will get your business into trouble; Ten things your customers expect you to do; The "soft" benefits of email marketing; Using email in combination with other marketing efforts; How four types of permissions can make or break your strategy; Building an email list that is valuable and effective; Creating valuable content; Choosing an effective, professional email format; Ensuring your emails are delivered, opened, and read. With The Constant Contact Guide to Email Marketing , you'll learn to avoid the common mistakes of email marketing, give your customers content they love, and combine an effective email marketing strategy with your traditional marketing efforts—giving you way more bang for your marketing buck.

Price: $24.95 USD

Second only to e-mail, the most common activity for U.S. Internet users is searching for information. A few years ago, obtaining a high click-through rate within a search engine was solely based on search engine optimization, where web site design had to have elements that appealed to the search engines. While good web site design remains key to attaining listings in certain search engines, most search engines allow marketers to buy specific keyword positions in addition to, or instead of, programming their way to the top. This new advertising opportunity means that small businesses can compete directly with large corporations without having bigger, better web sites. Paid search engine listings can point to any page within a web site. So today, a top keyword position is less about luck and more about strategy and businesses with out a strategy are losing sales. Fortunately, with a little education and pre-planning, any company can launch a search engine advertising program - within days. This book reveals how to effectively buy a top position on the major search engines and directories. Readers will discover how to avoid common pitfalls such as poor-performing ad copy and low visitor-to-buyer conversions. This book teaches novices how to immediately market their web sites in search engines. It also offers tips for advanced marketers to evaluate and improve their current results.

Price: $27.99 USD

Thomsett introduces powerful, carefully chosen options strategies that can help even the most conservative stock investor consistently improve returns without taking on unacceptable risk, including covered call writing on carefully selected stocks, contingent purchase strategies, and powerful "combination" strategies that produce cash to bolster current income. He guides you through every strategy, one easy step at a time, using actual examples, portfolios, and graphs taken directly from today's markets. This thoroughly updated Second Edition includes a brand-new model portfolio that incorporates even more conservative investments; more coverage of downside protection, including options strategies that hedge against long portfolio positions; deeper coverage of the risks of volatility; and much more. No matter how cautious an investor you are, this book will give you powerful new tools for profiting in any kind of market - and achieving your financial goals without losing a moment of sleep.

Price: $27.99 USD

Professional investors have long understood the importance of bonds in a successful portfolio strategy. Now you can too. That's because Wall Street bond expert Michael Brandes takes a unique approach to this complex subject - he makes it simple . In Naked Guide to Bonds: What You Need to Know, Stripped Down to the Bare Essentials , technical jargon and complicated subject matter are translated into a straightforward, easy-to-read style with plenty of examples. What's more, rather than writing an all-inclusive book on the bond market, Brandes uses his expertise to eliminate the information that is not relevant to individual investors. The result is a practical and succinct guide that empowers you to make informed investment decisions. Naked Guide to Bonds is written so that each chapter builds upon the information that precedes it. That way you'll never be thrown for a loop. It begins with basic questions such as: Who issues bonds, and why? And how are bonds bought and sold ? Then you'll learn about the structure of these securities and the characteristics that distinguish them from stocks. Once you're armed with the fundamentals, you'll discover how inflation, interest rates, and changes in the economy impact bond prices. Naked Guide to Bonds also provides insights about different types of bonds, including those issued by the U.S. government and its agencies, municipalities, corporations, and international issuers. Most importantly, you'll understand how to identify the bonds that are most appropriate for you. In the final sections, you'll determine how to: Assess your risk profile and set goals Construct a portfolio to meet your objectives Implement a customized strategy Evaluate individual bonds and mutual funds Monitor and maintain your portfolio Avoid the most common mistakes Filled with helpful charts and informative "Bare Essentials" summary points at the

Price: $29.95 USD

Based on a decade of exclusive research, Lowell Bryan and Claudia Joyce of McKinsey & Company have come up with a simple yet revolutionary conclusion: Your workforce is the key to growth in the 21st century. By tapping into their underutilized talents, knowledge, and skills you can earn tens of thousands of additional dollars per employee, and manage the interdepartmental complexities and barriers that prevent real achievements and profits. This can only be accomplished through organizational design and redesign. That's the new model for survival in the modern, digital, global economy. With the right design, your organization will have the capabilities to pursue whatever strategy is necessary to compete on any scale, react to any market change, leverage any opportunity, and sail past the competition. In Mobilizing Minds , the authors distill their research into seven strategic ideas that shatter the complexity frontiers, have the potential to unleash enormous profits, and enable long-term success for every company. Bryan and Joyce outline innovative principles that enable corporations to: Manage complexity, bureaucracy, and redundancy; Use hierarchical authority to strengthen the authority of key managers and drive performance; Deliver operating earnings while implementing wealth-creation strategies; Allow formal networks, talent, and knowledge marketplaces to work in a large company; Motivate and reward wealth-creating behavior; Pursue organizational design as a corporate strategy; Increase worker satisfaction. It is imperative for corporations to put the same energy used for new products and processes into organizational design. That's where the money is. That's where the opportunities lie. That's the key to surviving and prospering in the 21st century.

Price: $29.95 USD

Many companies have developed solid sales strategies but without equally good pricing operations, those strategies alone will not add a dime to the bottom line. . The goal of pricing operations is to consistently control price deviations in transactions and contracts over time and across customer segments. This goal of ensuring the prices are not too low or too high in different transactions relative to guidelines lends itself perfectly to Six Sigma. Using the authors breakthrough Six Sigma-based approach, you can systematically eliminate pricing-related revenue leaks, driving higher profits without alienating customers. Youll learn how to define pricing defects, gather and analyze relevant pricing data, review pricing-agreement processes, identify and control failures, implement improvements, and then ensure continuous, ongoing improvement in price, profits and customer satisfaction. . The book reflects the authors pioneering experience implementing Six Sigma pricing. Whether youre a business leader, strategist, manager, consultant, or Six Sigma specialist, it will help you or your client recover profits that have been slipping through the cracks in pricing operations. . Learn why Six Sigma Pricing makes sense. Why you should target pricing operations, and how to do it . . Identify profit leaks from inefficient pricing operations. Why sloppy pricing occurs, how to find it, and how to root it out . . Illuminate your current pricing processes, so you can improve them. Understand your market-facing and internally focused pricing processes pertaining to product launch and lifecycle price management, price increases due to escalation in costs of raw materials, promotions, and discounting. . Set up your pricing operations for continuous improvement in line with your pricing and sales strategy . Use Six Sigma to improve and control processes, ensuring alignment with agreed-upon strategy for pricing and sales. . Create an orga

Price: $31.99 USD

How to turn company values into competitive advantage. We are inclined, for whatever reason, to treat values like works of art. We view them as nice to hang on the wall, and beautiful to look at, but we don’t act as though they truly mean much to us in the real world. In fact, the opposite is true. The best organizations understand their values, articulate them clearly, and hold them higher than any short-term concerns or short-cut methods. This does not put these companies at a competitive disadvantage. It is the source of their competitive advantage. If there's no clarity at the top about what values really mean, then there's no consistency at the management level or further down the organization. This means that there's no way to measure, coach, assess, promote or fire people in line with those values. Any organization that does not articulate its values concretely functions like a modern Tower of Babel. No one can be quite sure that they are speaking the same language at different levels or different locations within the organization. Decisions don't always make sense or feel right. Confusion reigns. No matter how compelling and inspirational the organization's vision may be, its aspirations fall far short in reality. Values are about achieving results in a way that is consistent with what an organization stands for. They provide a direct connection between the CEO, the factory worker and everyone in between; and form the basis of the organization's "brand" as understood by employees, customers, suppliers and even shareholders. When the work is done right, values provide an organizing principle, a directional compass that helps organizations succeed; they become a source of energy for an organization's vision, strategy and day-to-day efforts. Vision, strategy, market share, reputation and profits are all very important – but having a clear and consistent set of values is far more critical in predicting whether an

Price: $34.95 USD

Hospitals worldwide command the majority of any countries’ health care budget. Reasons for these higher costs include the aging of the population requiring more intensive health care treatments provided in hospitals, the relatively high costs of labor in this labor intensive industry and payment systems that may encourage inefficient behavior on the part of hospital managers and physicians. Governments are seeking to instruments to mitigate this cost rise. Liberalizing hospital markets, deregulation, changing budget systems and changing ownership are only a few examples of attempts to make hospitals more efficient. Hospital industry responds in various ways to changing market conditions and legislation. In most western hospital markets we observe hospital consolidation, acquisitions, mergers and the founding of several types of network and hospital associations. The question is whether this trend also contributes to more efficiency. In this volume a number of outstanding internationally known scholars in the field of productivity measurement and health economics provide the reader with an excellent insight in the complexity of the issue. They explain that there is no straightforward panacea or recipe for the issues addressed. It is shown that the composition of the demand for care, the economic context, environmental and geographical conditions affect the outcomes. Policymakers should therefore take these nuances into account. A policy of increasing productivity starts with knowledge and insights in the complexity of the issue. The book therefore advocates the development of a strategy of collecting relevant data and conducting academic research that meet the standard of the state of the art. The book provides two illustrative examples of such a strategy in Finland and Australia. The authors have avoided as much as possible the technical jargon and complex mathematics and statistics involved in this research area. Therefore the book is par excellence suitable f

Price: $327.00 USD