Strategy

Easy to read and a must for food manufacturers, retailers, and students of the industry. This is one of those rare business books that really creates a new paradigm for a mature industry.

This book will open your eyes to what is wrong, why it is wrong, and offers ideas on what it will take to fix the grocery business.

Glen's style of using cartoons to illustrate key points works well. It is clear that his years of involvement in the food industry has given him a perspective that is accurate and has crediblility.

Every executive in the food industry must read this book to understand what is happening around them, and, eventually to them, if they do not lead their organizations through the necessary changes that the new net economy enables.

To quote Tofler..."the illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who can not read or write, but will be those who can not learn, unlearn and relearn..."

This book will force you to unlearn and then relearn...GET IT TODAY!

Highly recommended before longer works like Art of Attack by Vukovic. It's perfect for club players, or those of us who find Mark Dvoretsky's serious works on similar topics tough to absorb.

This is still available as a new book at amazon.co.uk, and it may be worth getting there even for US players, as it's getting rare and pricey on this side of the Atlantic.

One excellent chapter follows another. Chapter two details his characterizations of the game as having two "personalities": fighting chess and technical chess. This brings to mind the usual strategy versus tactics argument. Strategical operations seem to be what the author likes to term "fighting chess" (the jockeying for a better position) and once that is achieved, launching tactical operations (his "technical chess"). Crouch does a very good job of explaining the differences and goes on to give examples with well-annotated games. The wonderous thing is the precise brevity with which he explains that which some other authors have wasted reams of paper on. He is to be commended. After these come the following chapters: Sacrifices and Combinations; Piece Mobility: Breaking the Symmetry; Piece Mobility: The Center and the Flank; The Initiative; The Attack Goes Wrong and finally, Quizzes. In all these chapters, Crouch, to show proper attacking technique, uses the games of (then and still) rising superstar Alexander Morozevich as he hacked his way through the 1994 Lloyds Bank Masters tournament, ending with a 9.5/10 score against titled players!

The whole book is dotted with good advice on how to carry out attacks (and importantly, without prejudice to either the kingside or the queenside, a point he stresses and one that is well worth remembering). He highlights each important point with italicized text, a nice addition to an already superlative effort. In all, I would recommend this book to anyone who would like to start playing clean, surgical but imaginative chess. The kind of chess that creates tournament winners. The final "Quizzes" chapter enables the reader to show how well understood the text was (or wasn't!). A fitting companion to the attacking Bible: The Art of Attack by Vukovic.

Here is a player who competed in 15 Soviet Championship Tournaments in the span, 1949-1969. (Something of a record.) He won the Premier Championship in 1954. His score, with more wins than draws, (+ 10, = 9, - 0!); ... has few parallels in the history of this grand tournament. (Source: "The Soviet Championships," by B. Cafferty and Mark Taimanov.) He was in the "Top 10 Players" in the world in 1959, according to Jeff Sonas's website. And according to ELO, (in his book); Averbakh's best 5-year rating peak was 2615. (Adjusted for inflation, this would be at least 2675, in terms of FIDE ratings for 2003.) And Keene and Divinsky, in their fascinating but controversial book, "Warriors of The Mind," rank him as the TWENTY-FIFTH (# 25) greatest chess player who ever lived.

He is also a very distinguished player, an expert on end-game theory, (He has written over a dozen books on this topic.); a respected opening theoretician, (One Russian player told me, in an e-mail, that Averbakh has contributed material to literally thousands of articles in various Soviet magazines!); a widely read author, a judge of chess compositions, a FIDE arbiter, etc. (The list is almost endless!) He holds several titles in Russia to include "Master of The Sport of Chess," and also "Honored Chess Trainer."

So by now, you should realize that here is a player you should listen to and learn from. He has taken a volume of his games that was published in the USSR back in the 1950's, and enlarged and expanded it for a (new) publication in the press.

In the end, you get his 60 most memorable and best games (1943-1975) that was played over a career that has spanned some seven decades, although he plays very little now due to advancing age.

I received this book about a year ago ... many thanks to the {former} Internet student that sent me this book so that I could review it. I have played over all the games in this book, and studied about 10-15 relatively carefully. (I have also annotated a few of these games; they can be found on my various web sites.)

My conclusion is that this is an OUTSTANDING book, I was so pleased with it, I decided to reward it with five stars. The games in here are clean, accessible, and thoroughly explained. (A few of the lines are a shade dated, at least by the standards of modern opening theory.) But in the end, I think that the average player could definitely learn a great deal by a close study of the contests contained within this book.

In closing, I would like to add that I sent out a survey to many of my Internet students. The three or four who bought the book and responded had this to say about this volume: "Excellent games, my Internet rating has gone up over a hundred points since I started studying this book," or "I think studying all the end-games in this book will make me better in that phase of the game," and finally, "I am really enjoying this book. The games are carefully explained in a manner that even I can follow!"

How to Build Better Boards

"The Family Circus", Bil Keane's winsome cartoon strip, focuses on the daily ups and downs of life in the often chaotic home of a young family.

Regular readers of the strip have learned that in addition to mother, father, four young children, and three pets, there are two other residents in the household who make regular, if furtive, appearances. Whenever the mother finds a broken dish, a piece missing from a birthday cake, or muddy footprints tracked through the house, we know that the ghostly characters "Ida Know" and "Not Me" are lurking nearby. All the mother has to do whenever she finds something broken, missing, or in disarray is confront her youngsters with the question, "Who is responsible for this?" to elicit the collective response, "Ida Know!" or "Not Me!"

These two troublemakers have apparently expanded their families and sent their children off to inhabit the most senior executive offices of many of the world's best known corporations. Their names are on the tongues of virtually every executive who has had to explain why his or her corporation has collapsed. Listen to the CEOs of Enron, Polaroid, Global Crossing, Warnaco, or Arthur Andersen, for example. The top executives of each of these companies have assured us that they themselves had nothing to do with the collapse of their companies, putting the blame squarely on "Ida Know" and "Not Me" in virtually every case.

Exasperated shareholders wonder whom ultimately to hold responsible for the collapse of these companies and their investments. Ever so slowly, the glare of the lights is shifting to the boards of directors, as questions are raised about board accountability and responsibility. The boards of these companies all seemed to have been napping as they waited for their options to vest.

For all the time, energy, and resources organizations put into training executives, it appears that they put considerably less into training directors and helping them to understand their responsibilities. Type the words "board of directors" or "corporate governance" into the search engine at Amazon.com and you will see a fraction of the number of books that you would find had you typed the word "leadership."

Among the books that stand out are two by Ralph D. Ward: The 21st Century Corporate Board and its follow-up, Improving Corporate Boards. Ward, the editor of Corporate Board magazine, has filled the pair with well-written and insightful case studies, along with specific recommendations for changes in practices and procedures. Together they make an excellent handbook both for companies and for individual directors. In fact, "required reading" is the term that best describes them.

The 21st Century Corporate Board focuses on the turbulent era of the early 1990s, which saw a series of sackings of CEOs at corporate giants GM, Kodak, IBM, and American Express, among others. The frenzied era of hostile takeovers and leverage buyouts in the 1980s was still fresh in the minds of corporate boards. If a CEO failed to keep his company's stock price high enough to ward off potential raiders, boards were not hesitant to send CEOs packing.

Ward divides the book into two sections - an examination of how things got so bad as boards grew increasingly somnolent, and then a prescriptive section, with specific recommendations for changes. Among his most powerful suggestions is that the board have its own office and staff within the organization. Typically most boards rely on assistance from the CEO's or corporate counsel's office. The board needs more independence and autonomy, especially as the prospect of increased government oversight grows.

His more recent book, Improving Corporate Boards, provides more detailed and specific recommendations for improving each branch of a board's function. The audit committee of Enron's board might have spared themselves and the rest of the company more than a little trouble had they read Ward's pithy chapter entitled, "Smarter Audit Committees." Two suggestions seem especially on point: "Make sure the company is looking at the real numbers" and "Learn where right and wrong really are for the company's financials."

Polaroid CEO Gary DiCamillo managed to work the stock price of his company consistently down over his six-year tenure: from a high of ... per share to its recent value of pennies following the company's bankruptcy. Amazingly, near the end of DiCamillo's initial three-year contract, with the stock price at half of what it had been when he first took over as CEO, Polaroid's board paid him a ... cash bonus, extended his contract, and affirmed their support for him. DiCamillo banked the bonus and bankrupted the company. He is still CEO. We can only surmise what might have happened had Polaroid's board members read through Ward's two books and then acted on even a small number of Ward's sound suggestions. As it is, the board has no doubt provided Ward with an unfortunate but instructive case study for a future edition of either of these two solid handbooks. ...

That means that 99% of people fail to improve their results via books/courses!

Having said that I absolutely enjoyed this book because of is its simplicity, written in true "little book" form. I really like these books as they are quick reads by cutting through 90% of the (...).

They key to getting long-term value out of a book like this is to practice what you read. I know that when I was applying various techniques I learned in the past my results went up on a consistent basis so I am going back to the books and applying the techniques/skills on a more consistent manner.

Whether you like it or not you are selling everyday. You are selling yourself regardless of what you do for a living. You sell yourself to your family, friends, co-workers, etc. You are creating an image in that person's mind of what they associate you with (pain or pleasure).

Another insightful book on sales is How to be a Rainmaker, by Jeffrey Fox and Successful Selling by Brian Tracy.

-ski

The first half of the book explores various factors that create an addiction to hurry including running away from God, running away from our fears, and running away from ourselves.

In the second half of the book, Jones introduces a method he calls "Living life at a savoring pace." The discussions around The Savoring Pace Alternative focus on "seeing more clearly," "listening more carefully" and "thinking more deeply." Jones gives us a wonderful road map for the discipline to manage life at a savoring pace.
Jones combines a scholarly mind with a profound imagery of language to challenge his readers to "relish" rather than "rush" through life. The use of poetry, scripture, famous quotes and anecdotal experiences from the author's personal pilgrimage make this work jump off the page and into the reader's frenzied lifestyle. One gets the impression that Jones has lived every one of his illustrations to the fullest.

This book is a provocative and challenging exploration of our compulsion to hurry. The author prepares us with his profound insight and equips us with chapter-by-chapter learning exercises. Learning exercises at the end of each chapter are important to fully comprehend the value of the author's presentation.
Jones uses a quote from an unknown author to illustrate one of his savoring pace alternatives, the art of listening more clearly. "The work will wait while you show the child the rainbow, but the rainbow won't wait while you do the work."

Anyone who needs to take a long, deep breath during his or her busy day will benefit from this easy but life-changing manuscript. Published by Judson Press, the manuscript is one hundred twenty pages in length.

This review was completed by Dr. Jim Royston, Executive Director/Treasurer of the Baptist State Convention of NC.

In Addicted to Hurry, Kirk Byron Jones examines our need to hurry from one project to the next. Filled with biblical teachings as well as quotes from notable figures, his book also includes exercises to examine your own way of living to help you discover ways to slow down, and utlimately become more fulfilled.

Jones starts the book with a look at how much speed has been incorporated into our daily living by looking at some of the "fast phrases" we use: "I'm going as fast as I can," "The sooner, the better," "ASAP," and others. He then discusses the seven sacrifices that we all make as a result of our addiction to speed: patience, judgment, depth, joy, dialogue, personhood, and spirituality.

From there, we are given a list of reasons why we are in such a hurry, with a special emphasis being placed on running away from aches and fears, running away from ourselves, and running away from God.

We then get down to the meat of the book: how to overcome our need to hurry. Jones discusses how to imagine and choose a less hurried life, and how to maintain your new pace once you've made this decision. He shows us how to become more in tune with this pace by making a conscious effort to really see the marvelous things going on around us and to listen carefully to all that life has to offer--whether it be a loved one's voice or the sounds of nature or accepting silence, which many of us are uncomfortable doing.

Finally, Dr. Jones ends with a chapter entitled "Savoring Pace Life Lines," which talks about the importance of self-coaching and gives us memorable statements to counter the cues we are given by society to move faster. Based on this idea,Jones developed a fifty piece card collection to help family and friends change their pace of living, one thought at a time. He gives us a peek into this collection by offering fourteen Life Line reflections including: "Welcome the Day," "Stop Sleepwalking Through Life," and "Discover the Fullness of Being Empty."

Jones has done an excellent job of giving us insight into taking the time to savor all that life has to offer based on sound biblical principles and life-changing exercises. The fact that the book is short and straight to the point is an added bonus, although after reading it, many may want to go back and savor the book's insight and wisdom, and re-examine their own lives more closely.

Chapter Two "The Facts About Hostility" discusses the various important studies done not only on "Type A" people and behavior but also the medical evidence of the health risks of anger.

Chapters Three though Nineteen give one each of the 17 strategies, including: Reason with Yourself, Distract Yourself, Meditate, Avoid Overstimulation, Assert Yourself, Care for a Pet, Listen!, Be Tolerant, and Laugh at Yourself. Each chapter is organized into these sections: When to Use This Strategy, How to Use This Strategy, Why This Strategy Works, The ABCs of [e.g., Reasoning with Yourself], and Exercises.

It is obvious that ANGER KILLS is a labor of love as well as expertise. The Doctors Redmond (a husband and wife team) use examples from their own lives (not just the lives of their patients/clients) and relationship. Their writing style is clear, easy to follow, and empathic. Throughout the book, cartoons and quotations are used to illustrate key points. On the expertise side, he is director of behavioral research at Duke University Medical Center, and she is an author and historian.

ANGER KILLS is an easy-to-use guide to helping one's life become both healthier and happier.

Kimberly Borrowdale - Under the Covers Book Reviews

Logical advice is presented as 17 "survival skills" that include topics such as: Reason With Yourself, Meditate and Assert Yourself. But the life prolonging advice doesn't stop there, Anger Kills also illustrates how to deal with your own anger and the anger of others while you work at making positive changes.

I liked the message in Anger Kills so much I included it in the suggested reading list of my book, Rat Race Relaxer: Your Potential & The Maze of Life

Miles Paul
LA

He does touch on cycle theory and Elliot wave briefly. He list many sentiment and breadth indicators to look at or calculate. Some can be gotten through data services, others you have to calculate by hand from data from sources like Barrons. I was expecting a lot more from someone with his reputation. There was no solid material here.