Posted by Elena del Valle on January 25, 2013
The Money Code
After finding what he thought was “the pinnacle of the American dream” Joe John Duran, a financial planner originally from Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), realized that instead of finding freedom from money he was becoming enslaved by it. This caused him to seek change and evolved thinking. He believes decisions about money are usually emotional and affected by people’s personal histories and way of looking at things which in turn affect how they make decisions and the quality of those decisions. To obtain financial success it is necessary, according to him, to separate emotional and logical motivation.
In The Money Code: Improve Your Entire Financial Life Right Now (Greenleaf Book Group Press, $14.95) he outlines the path, he believes, leads to lasting financial solutions; a way to pass from what people say they want to what they are doing to get there. He sets out to help readers discover their attitudes toward money and identify a “road map for making sound financial decisions.” He proposes that money serves three main purposes: avoidance of pain by protecting what a person values in the future, feeling good by facilitating access to things that make a person happy, and providing the means to help others.
In the 155-page softcover book, he presents his five Money Secrets: tough choices are part of life, how someone makes decisions determines his entire life, a person’s biases affect every decision he or she makes, inconsequential distractions come along, and a good process is required to make good decisions. He relies on hypothetical situations, a fictional character and check-lists to illustrate his points in eleven chapters.
Duran, founding partner of United Capital, a wealth counseling firm, previously served as president of GE Private Asset Management. He holds the Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) designation and earned MBA degrees from Columbia University and UC Berkeley. The the author of two other books, he lives in Laguna Beach, California, with his wife and daughters.
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Posted by Elena del Valle on January 18, 2013
Hal Becker’s Ultimate Sales Book
Hal Becker, once the top salesman out of a salesforce of 11,000 at Xerox, and now a consultant, with Nancy Traum, president and chief executive officer, Solon Chamber of Commerce, published Hal Becker’s Ultimate Sales Book (CareerPress, $15.99) last year. In the 254-page softcover book written to be a “sales book and a sales training course rolled into one,” they outline ideas to assist readers in improving their sales skills.
Chapters address: What Great Salespeople Know; The Importance of Listening; Preparing for the Sales Call; The Importance of Questions; Increasing Your Sales; Cold Calls, Phone Selling and Other Contact Options; Time Management; Handling Objections; Closing the Sale; Customer Care; Role-Playing; and You’ve Earned a Bonus. The chapters feature lessons and quizzes.
In his opinion, a good sales person prepares to start selling once he or she meets with their customer while a great salesperson prepares for the sale in advance of the meeting. Preparing for a sale or negotiation is important, he stresses in Lesson 10. “The more prepared you are, the better your chance for success,” he says. In that lesson he suggests reviewing goals, making sure to have notes ready, paying attention to a prospective client’s office, being real and leaving cell phones and electronic devices behind to avoid being distracted during the meeting.
According to promotional materials, Becker conducts seminars or consults for 140 organizations a year, including IBM, Disney, United Airlines, and AT&T. He is the author of Can I have 5 Minutes Of Your Time?, Lip Service, and Get What You Want.
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Posted by Elena del Valle on January 11, 2013
Entering the Shift Age
Photo: Sourcebooks
In his most recent book David Houle, a self described futurist, examines the historic transformation of humans. He explains that our society has been transformed by a series of eras each with its own characteristics. First, the Agricultural Age brought about organized cultivation and permanent settlements in lieu of the nomadic lifestyle humans had had for thousands of years. He discusses how the Industrial Revolution led to yet other dramatic changes in the world; and most recently the Information Age transformed work and personal environments in the United States and later internationally with record speed. He is convinced that now we are in a new era which is having a dramatic impact on society.
Houle, author, Entering the Shift Age The End of the Information Age and the New Era of Transformation (Sourcebooks, $8.69), a soon to be published e-book of 3,431 tablet length pages, believes we left the Information Age behind in 2006 following the Threshold Decades and transitioned quietly to what he calls the Shift Age which is still being created and defined by three dominant forces: the Flow to Global, the Flow to Individual and Accelerating Electronic Connectedness.
People will arrive at a point where they will consider that they are part of a global community, rather than an international one, he points out in Chapter Three. This is due in part because the speed of communications has shrunk the world, opened borders driving world politics inward and increasing multicultural integration, he explains in the book.
Houle is convinced that during the Shift Age a greater number of people will migrate than during previous ages in part because there are more people and in part because a higher percent of the population will migrate. At the same time, due to the global economy, he says in Chapter Twenty-Seven, “increasingly we will look globally for employment or contract work.” In the future, people will work together in project and then separate.
Millenials he has met have a strong desire to experience the world, planning to spend up to ten years working at various places around the globe. Digital Natives are ever more interconnected into the global community, he says. They are the group with least place-base identity. Africa is poised to enter a golden age in 2020 and such a boom will impact mass migration, he says toward the end of the book.
While the book was legible in a tablet the formatting was riddled with odd line breaks, some words with a random mix of lowercase and uppercase letters that did not follow a standard publishing style, and hard to read figures due to the odd formatting display on the tablet screen.
Houle, a strategist and keynote speaker, won a Speaker of the Year award from Vistage International. According to his biography, he has spoken to or advised more than two thousand chief executive officers and business owners in the past four years.
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Posted by Elena del Valle on December 14, 2012
Unselfish World book cover
For ten years Richard Sasso, chief executive officer, MSC Cruises of Fort Lauderdale, Florida had an idea he wanted to develop. He wanted to encourage others to pay attention to their surroundings. Doing so would help them realize all people share a common bond and lead them to be giving, he thought. Last year he brought his idea to a wide audience with the publication of UnselfishWorld (self published, $27) and the establishment of a non profit foundation and related website.
Sasso believes that although the human instinct is to be selfish it is possible to counter our instinct in order to be unselfish. Becoming unselfish, he says in the Forward of the book, can make a difference in the world “to the protection of our homes, our families, and even reach for the possibility of world peace.”
The 83-page hardcover book is divided into 15 chapters where he addresses the main questions of Why, Who, What, When, Where, How and goes on to explain his overall concept. He believes when we do kind things we should not do them seeking a reward but says that “life has some interesting was to reward us, even when we least expect it.”
The mission of Unselfish World, listed as a non profit organization with a Miami address on the website, is “to create an environment for you to become the most unselfish person you can be. Once you change your own behavior, you can also help others do the same.”
Visitors to the website are invited to sign up, share unselfish acts, contribute (two corporate sponsors are listed) to benefit three organizations, purchase the book and related stickers. Sasso, a cruise industry veteran with 40 years of experience including founding and leading cruise lines, believes his life has been nearly perfect. According to the book’s bio, his priorities are his family and friends and his passion to see his new project succeed.
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Posted by Elena del Valle on December 7, 2012
Looking for Esperanza book cover
Photos: Benu Press
While watching the news the attention of Adriana Paramo, an author and anthropologist, was drawn to a story about an immigrant mother who had carried her dead daughter’s body with her through a tough desert journey from Mexico with her family. Perhaps because she is an immigrant herself or because the plight of others touches her the woman’s case drew Paramo. She spent 18 months searching for Esperanza, the woman in the news, immersing herself in the world of undocumented workers in the small town where she thought Esperanza might live.
Across Florida, in vegetable fields, citrus groves, ferneries, and packing houses, she encountered “an underground subculture of hungry undocumented women, a hidden world of wage slaves, a microcosm of false names, false Social Security numbers, and false hopes.” During that time, she met many people and heard about many unfortunate women and their sorrow filled stories.
She stopped writing following the death of her mother due to her extended bereavement. Eight years after she began her search for Esperanza Looking for Esperanza: The Story of a Mother, a Child Lost, and Why They Matter to Us (Benu Press, $24.95), a 142-page softcover book about her experience, was published. The book chronicles the plight of undocumented women living in Florida who took great risks hoping for a better life for those they love.
Adriana Paramo, author, Looking for Esperanza
“Although I write almost exclusively about women, I hope my readership is comprised by both men and women. Anyone with a beating heart, anyone with a shred of humanity in them, anyone with hope for a world where justice and equality rule our immigration policies and our relationship with food, is a good target for my book,” said Paramo in response to a question about the target audience for her book.
She believes the book “has brought awareness to the appalling living and working conditions of our undocumented farmworkers” and has also “created a sort or urgency, a need for the reader to say ‘what can we do?’ or ‘how can we change this?’” Two college professors plan to use the book in their classroom.
“My biggest challenge was to accept my limitations as an anthropologist. As a social scientist all I could do was to observe, document and report. With each story told to me, I wanted to do something tangible and immediate; I wanted to have the power to find them better housing, better food, to give them access to the same resources I have access to. It was very hard to realize and accept my own helplessness,” said Paramo when asked about challenges and rewards of writing the book. “To have the book published. Holding the book in my hands makes me feel that I have done something relevant, that Paulina, Laura, Griselda, Rosa, Cristina and Esperanza are no longer faceless, voiceless wetbacks, but women like me.”
Paramo, a non fiction writer born and raised in Colombia, won the 2011 Benu Press Award for Social Justice for this book. She is a resident of Florida.
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Posted by Elena del Valle on November 30, 2012
Ethics of Big Data book cover
Photos: O’Reilly Media
Big Data, the gathering of enormous sets of information on individuals, has become part of doing business. Retailers rely on it to offer products their customers have browsed or purchased in the past based on individual profiles and detailed information they keep on their customers activities on and offline in proprietary websites, social media sites and from other sources. In some cases retailers have developed the ability to guess a customer’s interests based on certain behaviors. This was the case earlier this year when it became known that a chain store was able to guess when a customer was likely to be pregnant causing a wave of controversy.
A recent The Washington Post article (Who are the doctors most trusted by doctors? Big data can tell you.) by Ki Mae Heussner explored what doctors think of their peers in a big picture way. According to that article, an activist is examining referral information gathered from government sources through a Freedom of Information Act request and creating a DocGraph designed to outline the relationships between physicians. The graph seeks to chart, relying on Big Data, how doctors interact with each other, refer patients and select doctors for themselves.
In Ethics of Big Data Balancing Risk and Innovation (O’Reilly Media, $19.99) Kord Davis and and Doug Patterson, ask readers about their organization’s policies for gathering and using huge datasets of personal information. In the 82-page softcover book the authors examine Big Data ethical questions and propose to readers that businesses should take into account issues of privacy and identity when making policy decisions about data gathering and storage.
They believe a company’s use of data can directly affect brand quality and revenue. As examples they point to Target, Apple, and Netflix. They suggest companies should align their behaviors with company values in order to preserve the trust of customers, partners, and stakeholders. The book is divided into four chapters: Big Data, Big Impact; Values and Actions; Current Practices; and Aligning Values and Actions
Davis, former principal consultant with Cap Gemini, has spent nearly 20 years providing business strategy, analysis, and technical consulting to 100 organizations including Autotask, Microsoft, Intel, Sisters of Mercy Healthcare, Nike, Bonneville Power Administration (BPA), Northwest Energy Alliance (NEEA), and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Patterson has experience teaching business ethics and as a facilitator of conceptual topics.
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Posted by Elena del Valle on November 16, 2012
Political Public Relations book cover
Photos: Spiro Kiousis, Jesper Stromback
In Political Public Relations: Principles and Applications (Routledge, $49.95), a 338-page softcover book published in 2011 targeting an audience of students and practitioners with an interest in the developing field, fifteen men and three women, many of them in academia, discuss political public relations. The editors of the book, Spiro Kiousis, PhD*, and Jesper Stromback, PhD, believe that although political public relations plays an important role in society little theorizing or research takes place.
They participated in the book project to encourage integrative theory and research to connect public relations, political communication, political science and related fields. Stromback is Lubbe Nordström Professor and chair in Journalism, and professor in Media and Communication at Mid Sweden University, Sundsvall, Sweden. Kiousis is associate professor and chair of the Department of Public Relations, College of Journalism and Communications, University of Florida.
Spiro Kiousis, co-editor, Political Public Relations
“The recent presidential election campaign highlighted the ongoing importance of effective public relations and communication in winning an election. While the temptation to relegate traditional strategies and tactics as obsolete is high, the success of each candidate at different phases of the campaign rested on their ability to use both traditional channels (such as debates) or social media channels (such as YouTube), said Spiro Kiousis, co-editor, Political Public Relations by email.”
The book includes fifteen chapters. The first two chapters define political public relations and identify its roots. The next two are about news management, agenda indexing and building. The next chapters address political campaigning and presidential elections. The remaining chapters discuss corporate issues, political marketing, strategic framing, crisis communication, relationship management, government communication, digital issues, research and future issues as well as diplomacy, foreign relations and global political public relations.
“Oftentimes public relations in politics is misunderstood as being only about spin och news management, but at heart, political public relations is about organizations seeking to establish, build an maintain beneficial relationships and reputations with its key publics to help support its mission and achieve its goals. As such, public relations has always been an intrinsic part of politics and is key to long-term success both when campaigning and governing, and this book highlights both the principles and applications of public relations in politics,” said Stromback by email.
Jesper Stromback, co-editor, Political Public Relations
The book’s definition of political public relations is “the management process by which an organization or individual actor for political purposes, through purposeful communication and action, seeks to influence and to establish, build, and maintain beneficial relationships and reputations with its key publics to help support its mission and achieve its goals.” A book related website, political-public-relations.com, most recently updated September 2012 and run by the editors, extends the conversation beyond the book.
In addition to Kiousis and Stromback, the contributing authors are Paul Baines, PhD, W. Timothy Coombs, PhD, Mathew Eshbough-Soha, PhD, Guy J. Golan, Kirk Hallan, Robert Heath, PhD, Nigel Jackson, John A. Ledingham, PhD, Paul S. Lieber, Darren G. Lilleker, Diana Knott Martinelli, PhD, Juan Carlos Molleda, PhD, Karen Sanders, Kay Sweetser, PhD, John C. Tedesco, PhD, and Damion Waymer, PhD.
*Elena del Valle and Spiro Kiousis serve on the University of Florida Public Relations Advisory Council
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Posted by Elena del Valle on November 9, 2012
The Connected Company book cover
Photos: O’Reilly Media, Dave Gray photo by Maia Garau, Thomas Vander Wal photo by Matt Balara
Many companies today are divided internally according to function which is fine in a stable environment but in an uncertain environment these companies become brittle, say Dave Gray and Thomas Vander Wal. To overcome uncertain times companies need to sort their organizational structure into Holarchies that function independently forming a Connected Company which they believe is flexible, strong and adapts well to change.
Gray is the author with Vander Wal of The Connected Company (O’Reilly Media, $24.99), a 287-page hardcover book published this year. In it they discuss the changes they see taking over the business environment and how they believe companies need to respond to them. Organizational and management innovation are necessary in order for the essential business model innovation and adaptation required to match today’s fast pace, Alexander Osterwalder proposes in the book’s Foreword.
Dave Gray, author, The Connected Company
“The driving principle of the industrial revolution was the division of labor. The driving principle of the next revolution is connection,” said Gray by email in response to a question about who would benefit from reading the book.
Change is essential, the authors say, because customers are embracing disruptive technologies faster than companies are able to adapt. The book is divided into five sections: Why change, What is a connected company, How does a connected company work, How do you lead a connected company, and How do you get there from here.
According to the book, connected companies should be more like organisms than like machines. As such they should learn, have a purpose, obtain feedback from customers, and experiment. They should be made of networked pods with control of their own fate.
Companies that gravitate toward this model will have an advantage, the authors say. To do so they must embrace organic growth, leader driven change, pilot pods and network weaving.
Thomas Vander Wal, contributing author, The Connected Company
Gray, senior vice president of Strategy, Dachis Group, is a management consultant who works with companies to develop and execute winning strategies. His previous book, Gamestorming (O’Reilly), sold more than 50,000 copies and has been translated into 14 languages, according to his bio.
Vander Wal, principal, InfoCloud Solutions, advises companies on social business, digital content, and personal-to-social information. He is on the steering committee of the Web Standards Project, and helped found the Information Architecture Institute, according to his bio.
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Posted by Elena del Valle on October 26, 2012
Smart Customers, Stupid Companies book cover
Photos: SmartCustomers.com
In Smart Customers, Stupid Companies why only intelligent companies will thrive, and how to be one of them (Business Strategy Press, $24.95), a book published recently, Michael Hinshaw and Bruce Kasanoff discuss how technology is feeding the needs of smart consumers, requiring companies to stay ahead of market trends to survive.
The 187-page softcover book in color with varied fonts and type sizes is divided into six sections: Smart Customers, Intelligence is Everywhere, A Perfect Storm of Disruptive Innovation, Stupid Companies, Get Smart, and Critical Steps. The project took the authors two years to complete.
The authors believe disruptive forces are affecting business and only companies that respond quickly and efficiently will remain viable in the long term. The four main disruptive forces they describe are: Social Influence, Pervasive Memory, Digital Sensors, and the Physical Web. They believe these forces offer consumers new services, better information, and more choices.
Bruce Kasanoff, coauthor, Smart Customers, Stupid Companies
“Two words: Michael Hinshaw. This was a true collaboration, but Michael was driven to make the book visually arresting, and I was driven to make it strategically impactful. We overlapped, of course, but Michael deserves the most credit for the look and feel,” said Kasanoff by email in response to a question about the color design and layout of the book.
“The book is about innovation vs. inertia. Smart wireless technologies are opening up nearly unlimited opportunities for innovative new services, but many companies are dragging along using the same outdated business models. Michael and I say that one-third of Fortune 500 CEOs are running the next Kodak, but they don’t know it yet,” he said in response to a question about the book and its target audience.
Michael Hinshaw, coauthor, Smart Customers, Stupid Companies
“We wrote the book to let CEOs know that customer experience should be one of their top priorities. Customers have radically greater expectations than even a few years ago, and your company’s future literally depends on your ability to meet or exceed those expectations,” said Hinshaw in response to the same question.
Kasanoff, a blogger at NowPossible.com, has raised $20 million in venture capital and built sales of a new product line to $20 million in three years, according to his bio. Hinshaw, president, Touchpoint Metrics, is also managing director of Mcorp Consulting.
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Posted by Elena del Valle on October 19, 2012
The Pocket Small Business Owner’s Guide to Negotiating book cover
Photos: Allworth Press
Richard Weisgrau makes his living as a photographer. He has done so for decades. When he first started out he didn’t know he could set the terms of his own work. He thought he had to accept the work clients offered him on the conditions they proposed. With time and experience and after seeking the help of colleagues he learned how to negotiate.
This year, he shared his hard earned insights in The Pocket Small Business Owner’s Guide to Negotiating (Allworth Press, $14.95) to empower small business owners to be more confident, successful and profitable. The 181-page softcover book is divided into twelve chapters in which he addresses negotiation, traits of a negotiator, planning for negotiations, preparing mentally, strategies and tactics, contracts, services, purchases, and resolving conflicts.
Richard Weisgrau, author, The Pocket Small Business Owner’s Guide to Negotiating
He believes a negotiator should be if nothing else a good listener. He or she should also be self confident, empathetic, inquisitive, patient, communicator, reflective, flexible, fact finder, organized thinker, visualizer, fair minded, good listener, have common sense, option oriented, decision maker, keep commitments, and have assessing and acquiring traits.
Weisgrau was the executive director of the American Society of Media Photographers and prior to that operated a commercial photography studio in Philadelphia.
Click to buy The Pocket Small Business Owner’s Guide to Negotiating
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