economics-times

Stretch! is an excellent roadmap for business executives to return their companies to an upward growth trajectory.
Written in an engaging style, the book takes the premise
that any company, in any kind of financial or competitive situation, can achieve and sustain profitable growth.
Deans and Kroeger use insightful case studies to
illustrate their four-stage growth model, and emphasize
that strong execution, not strategy, separates the winners
from the losers. Highly recommended!

Forget the jargon and fad theories. This book hits straight at the heart of today's biggest barriers to growth--and offers well-reasoned, straightforward advice on how companies can get back on track. The four-step approach, which is the core of the book, pinpoints growth opportunities in every aspect of how a company functions. The best part, however, is the examples that the authors pull from all industries, around the world. They not only make it an interesting read, they hammer home just how "doable" everything is.

This book really offers helpful and easy to accomplish ideas on getting paper and computer files organized. I have taken my desk at work from mounds of undistinguishable paper to a few, very practical, files where I can at least find the info I need WHEN I need it. Also teaches how to efficiently use a personal calendar along with your files to accomplish your goals. GREAT BOOK!

We all make excuses for not getting organized. This book will help you get thru your excuses and finally get the process underway.

Peter Athens provides an excellent comparison between the rigors of the world of golf and sales. By using his own personal experiences in sales and golf, he is able to probide an insightful look at the striking similarities between the two in a clear and concise manner. This book will provide an excellent reference for sales professionals to keep with them throughout their carrers.

Peter Athens using everyday sales and golf terminology engages the reader consistently. Each section is concise and to the point. Sales can be a specific science based on your product. Mr. Athens transcends any possible product line. Golf as we all know is sweeping the nation. Your average golfer is now more cognizant of circumstance and strategy. Parallels and analogies throughout the book lead the reader to the intent, "golf and sales are conceptually interchangeable". This book is an easy read. Nowhere in the text is the jargon so golf/sales specific that cross cultures cannot follow along. Mr. Athens uses personal humility and " lessons learned" to share the risks of sales and golf. Books of this nature grab me when self disclosure is used in proper doses. Experience and reflection combined with his choice of analogy make this a great read. I recommend this book to all sales trainers. What better teacher than a man telling " his story".

Similar to Steven Covey (7 Habits of Highly Effective People, etc.) principles, but stated in a fresh way and making insightful observations about life at the turn of the 21st century - why it's so stressful, and what we can do about it. I bought this book for one friend and recommended it to several others.

Six strategies for taming the 'new world of work' address the problems inherent in the breakdown between barriers between work and home life. Readers who find themselves working not only harder but all the time will find Thriving In 24/7 a practical guide to adjusting routines and recognizing the hidden obstacles to success at home and at work.

I read this book when it first came out, and I really loved it. I still refer to the facts I learned within; just last week I was explaining Lapsang Souchong to an Irishman. I was left feeling that I knew Mr. Goodwin, and contemplated finding him and making him my husband, primarily so we could travel together.

This book is WONDERFUL! Be forewarned, however: you WILL begin to guzzle litre after litre of tea during the reading of this book. Mr. Goodwin gives an absolutely wonderful first-person account of his often hilarious travels investigating the tea trade, from its' beginnings in Canton to the present day. A MUST for anyone who loves tea - and I'd rate Mr. Goodwin's writing style on a par with Pico Iyer's. A good read, full of humour and information...

It is not a dry, office orientated time management book, it is for you and me to help us work out what we really want from our lives and then get it! I've always been organised and efficient, but found it difficult to set personal goals. This book provided the crucial questions to ask myself in order to work out what is really important to me. Once motivated, getting what I wanted was relatively simple! Highly recommended for people who want to make the most of their lives.

Speaking as one with 25 + years in the corporate (specifically manufacturing) world, I found this book to be a superb and thorough compilation of the ways in which any manager's time can be wasted. Mr. Croft has very obviously 'been there', and presents his unique and compelling solutions with great insight and razor sharp wit. Highly educational, and as entertaining as a good novel.

Forget all the stuffy text books on this subject - this has to be THE BOOK.

Nigel Kelly

This is a trainer's dream! It gave me everything I needed to develop and present a highly effective, two-day time management workshop. Very thorough, with excellent content that also helped me with my own time management issues. I would highly recommend this book!

Patricia Haddock's Time Management Workshop: A Trainer's Guide was a revelation -- it helped me rethink my own work patterns and become more effective and gave me the tools I needed to guide my staff so that they could be more productive (with less stress and complaining!). It's such a logical and clear approach that everyone understood the points and was able to take action. Follow through was easy! Hats off to Patricia Haddock!

Ever wonder how a company can spend something close to the national budget of Belize developing and bringing a product to market, only for us the consumer; after purchasing it and using it, to discover it's a piece of junk.

I myself have a drawer full of track balls, mice, ergonomic and semi-ergonomic keyboards, and other such devices that were each, at one time in someone's mind, or group of minds, going to be the product that revolutionized an industry. They were cleverly designed, packaged and hyped; shrunk wrapped, bubble packed, bundled, and ballyhooed. Yet they all sank to the bottom of the new product ocean faster then an armor plated Edsil.

Or worse yet, maybe you have been a development team member or even a project manager responsible for bringing a new product to market, only to find that once in the marketplace the product developed all the interest and had the life cycle of a fruit fly. You, if lucky enough to have kept your job, could not show your face at the water cooler again.

In Time-to Profit Mr. Fern posits that it is not just getting an idea to market; but rather, it is the perfection, and proper management of all the activities that are a new product that make an idea work, and thus a profitable product. In Time-to-Profit, he gives us a set of tools based on his trademarked Ten-P Paradigm, ™ that while not guaranteeing success, can go a long way to eliminating failures.

While reading Time-to-Profit I found it easy to visualize the Ten-P Paradigm™ and its sources of value being used as a powerful overlay template for a product development project. This overlay would allow the project manager and members of the project team to sharpen the fuzzy edges generated as a new product morphs from a creative concept to a finished good or service. I visualized the Ten-P Paradigm™ doing this by means of helping identify and compartmentalize all activities that are the new product. In turn, this compartmentalization would help focus the development team away from several common emotional issues I have found hamper new product development. For example: The personality of a strong project champion; or the highly leveraged political power of a marketing division; or even the fact that the new product concept was developed by the boss's son or daughter who was interning on their fifteenth summer vacation from the local two year community college. Instead, the Time-to-Profit approach would, I believe, tend to keep the team focused on the product development process and its perfection.

Additional tools are provided in the Time-to-Profit methodology that matrix with the Ten-P Paradigm™, and serve to extract all the power that its sources of value have to offer. In particular the stage, phase, and gate methodology is very strong. By segmenting the product development into four stages: Incubation, elaboration, adaptation and contention, then breaking each stage into phases, the Ten-P Paradigm sources of value are juxtaposed in an X Y axis against them. This is far too complex to review here, but thankfully Mr. Fern has the ability to think visually and presents very clear and simple to understand charts, along with a concise narrative that makes understanding the logical concept simple.

Also, as one doing work with start up and turnaround ventures, I have been required to developed countless Gantt charts and PERT networks. I found the Design Structure Matrix for information dependencies covered in chapter five very valuable as an approach to identify the dependencies and interdependencies required to start developing those type documents.

Specifically, it is not just the charts, methodologies, or Ten-P Paradigm by themselves that I found as the real strength of this book. It is the integration of all these plus other elements taken from organizational behavior and system learning, into a tight system that gives Time-to-Profit its punch.

In general, I especially liked the "Real World" examples and analysis of some famous product successes and failures used to substantiate the need for the Time-to-Profit Ten-P Paradigm™ approach. I also enjoyed Mr. Fern's clear and non-superfluous writing style, a refreshing change from some other authors in the business category. Additionally, the appendices and bibliographies will keep you reevaluating, researching, and web surfing for quite some time.

In conclusion, I can recommend Time-to-Profit to not only project managers, team members and new product developers, but also to anyone who may have even a subsidiary involvement or stake in bringing new products through their development cycle. This includes CEO's Finance people, Engineers, and Production Managers. Time-to-Profit provides a comprehensive and tightly packaged toolkit. It is certainly a set of tools worth checking out.

Time-to-Profit Project Management: A Primer for Project Managers in Commercial Product Development

Reviewed by David S. Jacob, Principal, Doren Associates, President PMI-Orange County Chapter

To borrow a thought from the CEO of Microsoft soon-to-be published latest book, Bill Gates' New Rules, "If the 1980s were about quality and the 1990s were about re-engineering, then the 2000s will be about velocity." - then Edward Fern's new book, "Time-to-Profit Project Management", is a "must-read" for project managers who aspire to lead and rapidly deliver successful product development projects in the next millennium.

Mr. Fern has placed a new perspective on the word "profit", by infusing it with a non-traditional meaning. As he points out, "profit is the total benefit that a company receives from its customers in exchange for the value it delivers to them. In this context "profit" is not merely the traditional measure of the difference between revenue and expense. Rather, when juxtaposed with "time", ... "it empowers a company to build relationships with customers that transcend the incidental purchase of a product".

The first two chapters define what is "time-to-profit" and stresses the validity and importance of its use. The author provides a rich collection of anecdotal situations - both follies and successes -to support and validate the need for the time-to-profit process. To attest to the universality of "time-to-profit", these anecdotes range over a wide array of industries, such as the demise of McDonnell Douglas as an independent aircraft manufacturer, the fierce competition amongst several drug companies in their rush to market "quit- smoking" products, and Chrysler's initial and continued dominance in the mini-van automobile market.

Chapter 3 introduces the reader to the novel concept of the Ten-P ParadigmTM for new product development, including:

1. Positioning - identifying and distinguishing your new product from your competitors.

2. Planning - organizing your product development activities into development stages.

3. Partnering - identifying and enlisting strategic partners.

4. Producing - identifying and securing capabilities to successfully penetrate the market. 5. Processing - identifying and developing ancillary processes to achieve success.

6. Packaging - determining the extent and nature of bundling, appropriate for the market.

7. Pricing - determining the pricing structure to maximize revenues and profits.

8. Promoting - identifying and implementing the appropriate means of heightening market awareness of the product.

9. Placing - identifying, enlisting and training appropriate marketing channels.

10. Pleasing - identifying and supporting customer service requirements.

Each of the these Ten-P ParadigmTM elements are viewed as "sources of value" within what the author defines as the four distinct stages of the time-to-profit "race":

1. Incubation stage- subgrouped into idea capture and incubation, product conceptualization, preliminary and detailed investigations and preliminary development.

2. Elaboration stage - subgrouped into Alpha product development, alpha production, testing & validation and test marketing.

3. Adaptation stage - subgrouped into design modification, beta development, production, testing & validation and marketing.

4. Contention stage - subgrouped into delivery & support, product discontinuation and project closeout.

Chapter 4 comprehensively develops a stage, phase and gate methodology in the form of a matrix, relating the Ten-P ParadigmTM elements to the four time-to-profit stages. The matrix demonstrates what impact each of the Ten-P ParadigmTM sources of value has on each of the development subgroups, by establishing whether it is mandatory, elective or prohibited. This chapter is replete with illustrations and a well-written narrative to articulate the methodology.

As with all emerging project management concepts worth their salt, Chapter 5 demonstrates how "time-to-profit" seamlessly integrates within the Project Management Institute's, A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge, encompassing integration, scope, time, cost, quality, human resources, communications, risk and procurement.

The book concludes with an excellent discussion in Chapter 6 on an array of proposed techniques - including a triple loop learning technique - to improve any company's product development systems and processes.

But that's not all! There is an superb set of appendixes, starting with Appendix A, which provides a set of checklist questions for each of the Ten-P ParadigmTM sources of value, to preclude overlooking key elements in a project plan. Appendix B provides a rich bibliography, including a series of related websites.

Overall the writing style is easy to read from cover-to-cover, and can be readily used as a desk reference or as a textbook.

The premise that Gardiner and Pohlman speak of in their collaborative effort Value Driven Management is that the most valuable resource in the new economy is neither technology or information, but rather human attention. Managers and professionals of all types should be thinking about how their own attention is best allocated and how to harness the attention of their colleagues, customers and business partners. The key markets in the future will be those in which attention is bought and sold. It's an attention economy and those who succeed in it will be those who know how to manage attention. Using what the co-authors call "value drivers", the reader is given a guided tour of what the future may hold for the world of business for those managers who define, prioritize and give a support system that promotes achievement. Clarity is one of several key words used throughout the book. With clarity comes success and many companies have had some success using pieces of this concept, but the authors stress the fact that any business that intends to stay in business will have to grasp this concept and make it a ongoing part of their organizational life. "Value Driven Management "implies that plans, decisions, actions and rewards are all governed by a value focus" which is illustrated throughout the book. Without short-term wins, too many employees give up or actively join the resistance. Innovation is not flash of genius; it is hard work; building strong customer relationships begins with smarter employees, clients and partners. Value Driven Management is a must read for managers, real world warriors, business students as well as extremely potent motivational force for anyone. In these turbulent times, an organization's ability to survive will depend upon on a number of factors illustrated throughout VDM. Any manager would be wise to heed its message.

Whether managing a brick-and-mortar or click-and-mortar business, Pohlman's Value Driven Management is de rigueur for today's managers. The key to his theory is not repeating the past management gurus. In his book, he, too, has added value over time to the foundations on which yesterday's management strategies were founded. Pohlman's secret? Adding a component of long-term vision. His "Value over Time for Organizational Success" adds a new dimension to value driven management.

His successes in both academia and the business world are the test of his pedagogy. The proof is in the pudding, as they say.

This book is highly recommended for all levels of students of business: undergraduates, graduates, and real-world warriors.

I did not read every page of this book (my time management) but I did spend enough time reviewing it to see that this book breaks no new ground. It is a re-hash of basic and commonly used management techniques. Also, the techniques are not appropriate for every person.

Having said that this gives a lot of excellent advice on organizing your time, planning, managing, and delegating. A lot of managing is "mental" and more time and though in the management process is needed - including managing yourself. I still like Reagan's book "Reagan on Leadership" by James Strock and " The Art of Winning" by Dennis Conner that now only costs $5. I put together a "listmania" list of business books and put those two on the list. Both of the people were very underestimated as managers, and their ideas overlap this book. How can you argue with those two?

In any case this is also an excellent book, and the value of this type of book is always greatly undervalued. Reading one or two books can completely change your outlook and business success. Recommend.

Jack in Toronto

For years, I have enjoyed many of Brian Tracy's seminars and books. Brian has a way of making tough things easy. As author of the new book "10 Insider Secrets to a Winning Job Search: Everything You Need to Get the Job You Want in 24 Hours - Or Less," I couldn't help but notice how much of Brian's advice in Time Power is so applicable to people who are in the process of looking for a new job.

There are two chapters I particularly enjoyed, Chapter 5, Developing Work Habits to Get Things Done and Chapter 10, Saving Time When Dealing With Others. When it comes to the job search often people fail to treat the search like a job in itself. If they apply what Brian shares in this chapter, job seekers will really benefit and will optimize their search.

As for Chapter 10, perhaps the biggest mistake job seekers make is networking with the wrong people. They spend a tone of time with others who are also out of work, instead of networking with employed people who are in a much better position to help. Brian shares some great techniques that you can use to minimize wasting time with people who aren't going to help you.

Every time I read one of Brian's books I learn a ton and make myself more productive. I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to maximize every minute of their day.

I seem to always have too much on plate and can't find time to get everything done. Until now, that is. Brian has really helped me set my life back in order with Time Power. There are so many nuggets in this book. I am already reading it for my second time. This book is great for everyone as I know we could all brush up on our time managment skills.