"Your customers are only satisfied because their expectations are so low and because no one else is doing better. Just having satisfied customers isn't... good enough anymore. If you really want a booming business, you have to create Raving Fans." This, in a nutshell, is the advice given to a new Area Manager on his first day--in an extraordinary business book that will help everyone, in every kind of organization or business, deliver stunning customer service and achieve miraculous bottom-line results. Written in the parable style of The One Minute Manager, Raving Fans uses a brilliantly simple and charming story to teach how to define a vision, learn what a customer really wants, institute effective systems, and make Raving Fan Service a constant feature--not just another program of the month. America is in the midst of a service crisis that has left a wake of disillusioned customers from coast to coast. Raving Fans includes startling new tips and innovative techniques that can help anyone create a revolution in any workplace--and turn their customers into raving, spending fans.

Ten Lessons for the Fiction WriterWriting successful fiction is a balance between trusting one's own instincts and making the right conscious choices.... In By Cunning & Craft, award-winning novelist and short-story writer Peter Selgin shows you how to combine the instinctive process of creation with sound technical ingenuity. With precise instruction and examples from classic and best-selling works, this authoritative guide helps you master the ten essential fiction-writing elements: inspiration; character; point of view; structure and plot; theme; dialogue; description; scenes, summary, and flashback; voice and style; and revision. Whether you're facing the blank pages of a first draft or trying to revise a completed manuscript, By Cunning & Craft provides you with the guidance you need to outfox common writing pitfalls and make sure your work isn't wanting in wit - or perfection.

In By Design, twenty prominent feature film production designers talk about their careers, their relationships with Hollywood directors, and how they... formulated and executed the technical and aesthetic designs of their film projects. The interviews explore production design techniques and the total process of establishing the visual look of a feature film, including the design and creation of sets, finding locations, establishing the color scheme or palette of a film, and supervising the costumes, hairstyles, and makeup. The designers discuss in detail their work on many highly acclaimed and seminal works in the field, including North by Northwest, Chinatown, Barry Lyndon, Reds, Amadeus, Brazil, Blade Runner, and The Last Emperor. The interviewees talk about their relationships with the producer, director of photography, art director, construction crew, set decorator, property master, and costume designer, and how the team helps bring the director's vision to the screen.The interviews are presented in an order that gives the reader a historical perspective on the development of production design, from the studio era to contemporary productions. LoBrutto includes biographical background and a complete filmography of each subject, plus a glossary of terms that concern the design process. By Design investigates the visual style of films in a pragmatic and detailed manner usually overlooked by conventional film analysis, and will prove especially useful to film students and scholars and all aspiring and experienced producers and directors.

Do students who work longer and harder learn more in college? Does joining a fraternity with a more academic flavor enhance a student's academic... performance? When are the results from an innovation that is tried on one campus applicable to other campuses? How many students and faculty members must participate in a research project before findings are valid? Do students learn best when they study alone or in small groups? These are just some more than fifty examples that Richard Light Judith Singer and John Willett explore in By Design, a lively nontechnical sourcebook for learning about colleges and universities. These authors believe that careful design of research on college effectiveness is the single most important step toward producing useful and valid findings. In that spirit, By Design is a pathbreaking textbook of modern research methods that both practitioners and students will find useful.

Tragedy and innocence coexist in this delicate reconstruction of the author s childhood during Lebanon s civil war In 1975 I was seven years old, and... loved the Bazooka bubble-gums my mother would buy for Walid and me in Spinney s supermarket...Beirut in the 1970s is a paradise. Wealthy families ride escalators and fill shopping carts with imported food and luxury products from Paris and New York. Lamia Ziadé, seven years old, dreams of banana splits, American candy, flying on Pan Am Airways and visiting the local cinema. Considered by the elite the Paris, Las Vegas or Monaco of the Middle East, Beirut was in reality a powder-keg, waiting for a spark. On April 13, 1975 Lamia and her family returned from lunch in the countryside to find a city in flames.Looking back on the golden days before the war, and its immediate, devastating effects, Bye Bye Babylon positions an elegiac and shocking narrative next to a child s perspective of the years 1975 79: of consumer icons next to burning buildings, scenes of violence and sparkling new weapons painted in vivid Technicolor war as pop.It is both a lament for a home transformed by a destructive madness, and an inventory of the concrete objects of her childhood: the objects, details and fragments of memory which combine to capture the impossible reality of war. Part artist s sketchbook, part travel notebook and part family album, Bye Bye Babylon is a unique graphic memoir, and an important visual record of a terrible war.

It's been almost a century and a half since a critical mass of Americans believed that secession was an American birthright. But breakaway movements... large and small are rising up across the nation. From Vermont to Alaska, activists driven by all manner of motives want to form new states-and even new nations.So, just what's happening out there? The American Empire is dying, says Bill Kauffman in this incisive, eye-opening investigation into modern-day secession-the next radical idea poised to enter mainstream discourse. And those rising up to topple that empire are a surprising mix of conservatives, liberals, regionalists, and independents who-from movement to movement-may share few political beliefs but who have one thing in common: a sense that our nation has grown too large, and too powerfully centralized, to stay true to its founding principles.Bye Bye, Miss American Empire traces the historical roots of the secessionist spirit, and introduces us to the often radical, sometimes quixotic, and highly charged movements that want to decentralize and re-localize power.During the George W. Bush administration, frustrated liberals talked secession back to within hailing distance of the margins of national debate, a place it had not occupied since 1861. Now, secessionist voices on the left and right and everywhere in between are amplifying. Writes Kauffman, "The noise is the sweet hum of revolution, of subjects learning how to be citizens, of people shaking off . . . their Wall Street and Pentagon overlords and taking charge of their lives once more."Engaging, illuminating, even sometimes troubling, Bye Bye, Miss American Empire is a must-read for those taking the pulse of the nation.

On a warm September night in 2002, former acquaintances Alexis Maybank and Alexandra Wilkis reconnected at a mixer for new students at Harvard... Business School. Alexis had just ended a four-year run at eBay during the dotcom boom and bust. Alexandra had just spent three years as an investment banker at Merrill Lynch. Now they were entering the country’s top training ground for future titans of Wall Street and the Fortune 500.  Little did either suspect that five years later, they’d become famous not in finance or consulting or corporate management, but at the bleeding-edge intersection of fashion and technology. Gilt Groupe – launched by Alexis, Alexandra, and three colleagues in 2007 – is one of the most fascinating startups of recent years, with a valuation of more than $1 billion. And it all began with one bold idea: to bring sample sales online and change the way millions shop. As Alexis and Alexandra write about the day Gilt.com went live: “We had created a website that could potentially change the rules of retail, for both shoppers and brands. If shopping was traditionally a slow, leisurely activity that might consume an entire day, it would now be competitive, addictive, urgent, thrilling—a rush delivered at the same time each day. Shopping would become not just easier, but so much fun.” But turning that vision into reality wasn’t easy. Designers had long controlled their own sample sales by staging them in anonymous, makeshift locations and strictly limiting invitations. Those lucky enough to hear about a Marc Jacobs or Hermès sample sale would drop everything and run for dramatic, fleeting bargains. Why should elite brands support a new startup trying to replicate the experience online? And even if brands like Valentino, Christian Louboutin, and Zac Posen got on board, would shoppers embrace such a website? Would the kind of people who love high-end fashion really visit a new online sale each day? Was “accessible luxury” a breakthrough idea or an absurd oxymoron? Alexis and Alexandra share their perspective in this dramatic story of Gilt’s birth, rise, and evolution. They show how they juggled the conflicting needs of their suppliers, engineers, marketers, and potential investors. They explain how they blended their individual strengths and weaknesses and managed their rapidly growing team. They cover the growing pains of expanding into new categories like housewares, travel, and menswear. And they take us through the darkest moments of the recession when Gilt might easily have died. As you’ll learn from the true story of Gilt, anything is possible for those with the creativity to recognize a new opportunity and the perseverance to make it real.  

Steven Schier examines the shift in U.S. politics to activation—the political variant of niche marketing. This method encourages only a strategically... selected few to get involved, resulting in a decline of majority rule in American politics.

This book offers a revisionary account of key epistemological concepts and doctrines of St. Thomas Aquinas, particularly his concept of scientia... (science). It proposes a new interpretation of the purpose and composition of Aquinas' most mature and influential work, the Summa theologiae, which has traditionally been regarded as a work for neophytes in theology. John Jenkins' comprehensive and original study will be of interest to readers in philosophy, theology and medieval studies.

Spanning the years 1920 to 1956, this priceless collection shows Hemingway's work as a reporter, from correspondent for the Toronto Star to contributor... to Esquire, Colliers, and Look. As fledgling reporter, war correspondent, and seasoned journalist, Hemingway provides access to a range of experiences, including vivid eyewitness accounts of the Spanish Civil War and World War II. By-Line: Ernest Hemingway offers a glimpse into the world behind the popular fiction of one of America's greatest writers.

With this highly praised collection of short fiction, Lorna Goodison demonstrates why she may be one of literature's best-kept secrets. In the Pushcart... Prize-winning title story, humble Dottie thinks her luck has turned when she meets Frenchie, the best-looking, if not most reliable, man in the whole of Jamaica. In "The Helpweight," an accomplished woman must bear the burden of an old flame's renewed affections when he returns from a life abroad with his Irish bride in tow. And in "Henry," a young boy turned out of his house to make way for his mother's lover sells roses on the street to survive. On a whim, he bites off a bloom, which he can feel burning inside his mouth like a red pepper light, hoping it will take root and beautify his own life. Poetically rendered, these and over a dozen other evocative stories create a world in which pride can nourish a soul or be its ruin and where people are in turn uplifted and undone by love.