Showing results by narrator "Jeff Cummings" in All Categories

From taxi rides, hotel stays, car driving, to communicating and paying, business as usual is a thing of the past. This revolutionary model is the secret to driving profitability and growth in today's transformed business landscape. Free and abundant information, 24/7 connectivity, and the empowerment of everyone has transformed every company into an open-source organization and you must adapt in order to succeed.

Common sense and prudence have long been among the guiding tenets of society, but in today's economy they have been completely abandoned in the interest of blindly maximizing profits. Common-Sense Business shows that this current economic model is both detrimental and unsustainable, and that we must transform the global economy along the lines of common sense toward the common good.

Widely known as "master hairdresser of the seven seas," Sigismund Skrik is famous both as an artist of the scissors and comb, and as the soul of discretion. Not only will he give clients new, life-changing looks - he also gets to know all their secrets. But the days of transatlantic sailing are numbered. It's 1879, and Europeans immigrating to the United States are starting to prefer the huge new steamships that make the crossing ten times as fast.

Rollie Waters is the smartest guy in any room. He knows all the angles, and he’s never fewer than two steps ahead of trouble - a skill he learned from the con-artist father, Dan, who raised him, though he hasn’t seen him in years. Rollie’s childhood was a mesh of perfectly believable lies stretched so thin that he barely knows who he is. It’s only when he’s working undercover as a Marine, inhabiting a false identity, that Rollie is comfortable in his own skin. After he’s yanked out of his latest assignment and tossed in the brig, he’s only partly surprised when the officials in charge mention one name: Dan Waters.

Two years after the end of World War II, a director sets out to mimic real life by creating a film without a script, where the actors learn the story and their part in it as they go. The tale unfolds of a young couple on the run during the Nazi occupation, but soon the characters they play begin to take on lives of their own. As the lines between fiction and reality blur, the Secret Police become convinced that the director holds information that could compromise the nation’s security, and they decide to interrogate him about his fictional plot.

When Peter Drucker wrote Concept of the Corporation in 1946, he revealed what made the large American corporation tick. Similarly, The Art of Japanese Management by Richard Pascale in 1981 explained the unique practices developed by the Japanese to bring that country's economy out of the ashes. The emerging Chinese juggernauts - the Alibabas, Lenovos, and Haiers - need similar revelation since they are a different breed in their own right.

It really is true: What you say and how you say it speaks volumes about your professional promise and leadership potential. Whether it's giving an impromptu sales pitch or keynoting a major business conference, public speaking can make you or break you.

Ferdinand Brun hasn't always been a grumpy old man. Many years ago, he was a grumpy young man. Now he'd much rather spend time with his canine companion, Daisy, than any of his nosy neighbors. But as his behavior becomes increasingly peculiar, his daughter grows concerned and begins to consider moving him into a retirement home.

A young man falls instantly for a woman he spots at a summer backyard party. He knows nothing about her except that she's wearing a T-shirt of his favorite band but his imagination runs wild with the life he hopes they might share. The young woman ends up changing the course of his life as dramatically as he thought she would upon first sight, but in none of the ways he had hoped.

In Fix It, the authors present the startling results of their Workplace Accountability Study - conducted over three years, involving more than forty thousand participants from organizations across the globe: the most comprehensive study on workplace accountability ever conducted. When accountability is not working on the job, in the team or the organization as a whole, everyone is left asking how to fix it.

The dark history of Spring House, a beautifully restored plantation mansion on the outskirts of New Orleans, has long been forgotten. But something sinister lurks beneath the soil of the old estate.

Beginning in the 1980s, Elizabeth Tallent's work, appeared in some of our most prestigious literary publications, including The New Yorker, Esquire, and Harper's. Marked by its quiet power and emotional nuance, her fiction garnered widespread praise. Now, at long last, Tallent returns with a new collection of diverse, thematically linked, and deeply powerful stories that confirm her enduring gift for capturing relationships at their moment of transformation.

Social Security law has changed! Get What's Yours has been revised and updated to reflect new regulations that take effect on April 29, 2016. Get What's Yours has proven itself to be the definitive book about how to navigate the forbidding maze of Social Security and emerge with the highest possible benefits. It is an engaging manual of tactics and strategies written by well-known financial commentators that is unobtainable elsewhere.

Raised in a lower-middle-class, nonreligious family, Fred Sievert lived the American dream by exercising a strong work ethic with the classic symptoms of a type-A overachieving personality. In the process, he often neglected his family and friends as he doggedly pursued his socioeconomic ascent. But God revealed himself to Fred in a profound way early in life and remained present through many difficult personal and business struggles, challenges, and decisions.

Through strange metaphysical circumstances, failed screenwriter Brad Cohen finds himself caught in an infinite time loop, forced to relive the first forty years of his life again and again. Each "repeat," Brad wakes up in the womb on what was supposed to be his fortieth birthday, with full knowledge of what's come before. In various timelines, he becomes a successful political pundit, a game-show champion, a playboy, and a master manipulator of the stock market, but none of them seems to lead him out of his predicament.

Your reputation defines how people see you and what they will do for you. It determines whether your bank will lend you money to buy a house or car; whether your landlord will accept you as a tenant; which employers will hire you and how much they will pay you. It can even affect your marriage prospects.

What do shale gas, Elon Musk’s Tesla, and the global apparel chain Zara share in common? In Resource Revolution, management experts Stefan Heck and Matt Rogers describe how each in its own way exemplifies a resource revolution - a use of natural resources so effective it defies conventional wisdom and enables breakthrough performance where others see only limits and shortcomings.

It's not news that globalization and ever-faster technological innovation have increased the pace of change exponentially. Existing change models were devised to deal with individual changes, one by one, but that's not a luxury leaders have any more. Bill Pasmore, senior vice president at the Center for Creative Leadership and a professor at Columbia University, offers a four-part model that will allow leaders to deal with multiple changes simultaneously without drowning in the churn.

With the fall of the Berlin Wall, one economic model emerged triumphant. Capitalism - spanning a spectrum from laissez-faire to authoritarian - shapes the market economies of all the wealthiest and fastest-growing nations. The trouble is cracking its shiny veneer. In the US, economic growth is no longer matched by economic development. Wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few, natural resources are exploited for short-term profits, and good jobs are hard to find.

It starts with some innocent family fun. Writer Stephen Barrow's divorced wife, involved in a second marriage, has given Barrow custody of their six-year-old daughter, Penny. Father and daughter share a relationship that is tender, poignant, and funny. Their home life in a small upstate New York town is a happy and entirely wholesome one.