Five Recent Arrivals from the Business Section:
Marketing from the Trenches: Your Guide to Retail Success – Rudolf J. Waldner
Marketing from the Trenches is a must read for every retail business owner, manager, and entrepreneur. Through anecdotes, real-life experiences, and documented growth trends, the book reveals to the reader proven methods that will grow their business. The increasing endorsements are a testament to the author’s growing list of followers. The author’s three “P”s are far more relevant than the scholastic marketing model’s four “P”s, most especially for those in retail operations. The writing style is casual with an ever present tongue-in-cheek sense of humor that won’t allow the reader to put the book down.
Please note that Mr. Waldner will give a talk at the ABC Treehouse in Amsterdam on June 25th, 2012!
Debt: The First 5000 Years – David Graeber
Anthropologist David Graeber presents a stunning reversal of conventional wisdom: he shows that before there was money, there was debt. For more than 5,000 years, since the beginnings of the first agrarian empires, humans have used elaborate credit systems to buy and sell goods–that is, long before the invention of coins or cash. It is in this era, Graeber argues, that we also first encounter a society divided into debtors and creditors.
Graeber shows that arguments about debt and debt forgiveness have been at the center of political debates from Italy to China, as well as sparking innumerable insurrections. He also brilliantly demonstrates that the language of the ancient works of law and religion (words like “guilt,” “sin,” and “redemption”) derive in large part from ancient debates about debt, and shape even our most basic ideas of right and wrong. We are still fighting these battles today without knowing it.
End This Depression Now! – Paul Krugman
The Great Recession is more than four years old and counting. Yet, as Paul Krugman points out in this powerful volley, “Nations rich in resources, talent, and knowledge all the ingredients for prosperity and a decent standard of living for all remain in a state of intense pain.” How bad have things gotten? How did we get stuck in what now can only be called a depression? And above all, how do we free ourselves? Krugman pursues these questions with his characteristic lucidity and insight. He has a powerful message for anyone who has suffered over these past four years a quick, strong recovery is just one step away, if our leaders can find the “intellectual clarity and political will” to end this depression now.
What Money Can’t Buy – Michael J. Sandel
Should we pay children to read books or to get good grades? Should we allow corporations to pay for the right to pollute the atmosphere? Is it ethical to pay people to test risky new drugs or to donate their organs? What about hiring mercenaries to fight our wars? Auctioning admission to elite universities? Selling citizenship to immigrants willing to pay?
In What Money Can’t Buy, Michael J. Sandel takes on one of the biggest ethical questions of our time: Is there something wrong with a world in which everything is for sale? If so, how can we prevent market values from reaching into spheres of life where they don’t belong? What are the moral limits of markets?
In recent decades, market values have crowded out nonmarket norms in almost every aspect of life—medicine, education, government, law, art, sports, even family life and personal relations. Without quite realizing it, Sandel argues, we have drifted from having a market economy to being a market society. Is this where we want to be?
In his New York Times bestseller Justice, Sandel showed himself to be a master at illuminating, with clarity and verve, the hard moral questions we confront in our everyday lives. Now, in What Money Can’t Buy, he provokes an essential discussion that we, in our market-driven age, need to have: What is the proper role of markets in a democratic society—and how can we protect the moral and civic goods that markets don’t honor and that money can’t buy?
The global bestseller Business Model Generation introduced a unique visual way to summarize and creatively brainstorm any business or product idea on a single sheet of paper. “Business Model You” uses the same powerful one-page tool to teach readers how to draw “personal business models,” which reveal new ways their skills can be adapted to the changing needs of the marketplace to reveal new, more satisfying, career and life possibilities. Produced by the same team that created “Business Model Generation,” this book is based on the Business Model Canvas methodology, which has quickly emerged as the world’s leading business model description and innovation technique.
This book shows readers how to: Understand business model thinking and diagram their current personal business modelUnderstand the value of their skills in the marketplace and define their purposeArticulate a vision for changeCreate a new personal business model harmonized with that vision, and most important, test and implement the new model
When you implement the one-page tool from “Business Model You,” you create a game-changing business model for your life and career.
Tags: Business, new titles, This Just In