Essential Managers: Achieving Excellence

Amazon.com

If you're in search of career or managerial excellence in 72 short 'n' sweet pages or less, you'll love this visually snappy, pintsize guide to doing just that, from setting goals to developing the determination, energy, and skills required to achieve them. Here, you'll learn not only how to network effectively and make the most of your time, but how to master practical techniques for improving your memory, sharpening your mental agility, thinking creatively, and reducing stress. Lots of fun checklists and flow charts help you get a grip on such key building blocks to excellence as guided risk-taking, staying in top physical and mental shape, writing and speaking more fluently, prioritizing, and influencing others. Granted, if you're looking for very specific or in-depth guidance, you may find this book too cursory and general in its approach. But if you're looking for a thumbnail guide to the basics, it'll do you just fine.

It's worth mentioning that the book is also part of reference publisher Dorling Kindersley's Essential Managers series--20 itty-bitty li'l books on business and career topics ranging from communication, leadership, and decision making to the management of time, budgets, change, meetings, people, projects, and teams. Combining the For Dummies book series's talent for breaking down a lot of information into bite-size bits and sidebars with Dorling Kindersley's signature design style of crisp, classy graphics on a gleaming white backdrop, they don't represent the cutting edge of business thinking and they don't necessarily reflect any unique individual perspective. Instead, it's as though someone collated the best general thinking on these 20 topics and rolled them out into 72 brightly designed and easy-to-read pages, studded along the way with boxed tips, color shots of a multiracial cast of "coworkers" animatedly hashing through the workplace issues of the day, and a self-test of one's skills in the topic at hand on the last few pages of each volume. Again, they're not for anyone looking for more in-depth or focused help on any of the subjects they cover, but they're perfect as a quickie general-interest reference... and let's face it, they're so damned cute and look so smart in a neat little stack or row that you'll probably want to buy a whole bunch to give as gifts to your entire staff or department. --Timothy Murphy

Book Description

Practical techniques show you how to form realistic ambitions, develop your skills, and achieve your objectives.

Learn all you need to know to make the most of your potential at work, from setting goals to developing the determination, energy, and skills required to achieve them. Achieving Excellence not only shows you how to network effectively and make the most of your time, but also provides practical techniques for improving your memory, sharpening mental agility, thinking creatively, and reducing stress. Power tips help you to overcome every obstacle in the quest to fulfill your ambitions and achieve success in the workplace. The Essential Manager have sold more than 1.9 million copies worldwide! Experienced and novice managers alike can benefit from these compact guides that slip easily into a briefcase or a portfolio. The topics are relevant to every work environment, from large corporations to small businesses. Concise treatments of dozens of business techniques, skills, methods, and problems are presented with hundreds of photos, charts, and diagrams. It is the most exciting and accessible approach to business and self-improvement available.

Customer Reviews:

Realistic Ambitions.......2001-06-20

Since excellence in today's highly competitive workplace demands more than knowledge of your field, people skills are essential.

If you want to develop your management skills and achieve your objectives, take a peek at this tiny resource book. While it isn't an all encompassing management book like the Essential Manager's Manual, it is easy to read and you can deal with one specific issue at a time. There are many books in the Essential Managers Series.

Robert Heller will show you how to build key attributes, develop confidence, master risk taking, lead effectively, stay in shape, increase learning, think more effectively, write and speak more fluently, boost your creativity, choose priorities, understand money, reduce stress, reassess your goals, find a mentor, take the lead and plan ahead.

I especially enjoyed the little hints placed in yellow boxes throughout the book. Here are some of my favorites:

Hint 97: Avoid changing your opinions to match those of the majority. Hint 42: Do not confuse wild, far-out, impractical ideas with creativity.

So, how will you know if you have achieved success in a particular area of your personal management qualities portfolio? Page 66-69 is a self-assessment which you can take to evaluate your achievement. As you work towards excellence, realize this is a lifelong challenge.

Average customer rating:

Ahead of the Market

Earnings Matter for 300 pages

Good book for those interested in earnings estimates

Watch Out for Zacks Spam

And the meat is still in Zacks' own pocket

Ahead of the Market: The Zacks Method for Spotting Stocks Early -- In Any Economy
Mitch Zacks , and Mitchel Zacks
Manufacturer: Collins
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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It's When You Sell That Counts

Screening the Market

Fire Your Stock Analyst: Analyzing Stocks On Your Own (Definitive Guides (Financial Times/Prentice Hall))

Martin Zweig Winning on Wall Street

High Probability trading

ASIN: 0060099682
Release Date: 2003-03-18

Book Description

Beat the Pros at Their Own Game

All too often, you learn about good stocks far too late to profit from the information. By the time you actually buy a stock, professional investors have already been there, bought the stock, driven up the price, and are just waiting to unload it at an inflated price.

All That's About to Change. . . .

In Ahead of the Market, Mitch Zacks shows investors how they can spot stocks that are poised to take off long before the rest of the crowd learns about them. How? By unlocking the gems of priceless information buried in Wall Street's often self-serving research.

Ahead of the Market is the first book, ever, that enables you to profitably use the analyst stock research for which Wall Street firms pay more than one billion dollars annually. Many investors have rightly felt misled in the past by analysts who continued to hype stocks as prices plummeted. You may have even concluded that Wall Street research is totally worthless. But it's not.

In Ahead of the Market, Mitch Zacks shows that analysts actually provide a wealth of market-moving information that can generate exceptional returns if interpreted correctly. The key is to use the research produced by Wall Street analysts the same way the professional money managers do.

Pioneered by the firm Zacks Investment Research and based on more than twenty years of intensive analysis, the investment strategies revealed in this book are indeed the same ones used by successful professional investors everywhere.

In these pages you will learn how to form an investment plan by locating stocks that are poised for price appreciation and avoiding stocks heading for a fall. Zacks shows how you could have prevented being burned when the recent bubble burst, if you had known how to use analyst research correctly and teaches you the rules of the research game so you will not fall victim the next time around. In sum, this book is your guide to picking the right stock at the right time.

Mitch Zacks's groundbreaking research provides new insights and new strategies to:

Use revisions to analysts' earnings estimates to predict the rise and fall of stock prices
Interpret the real meaning behind analysts' stock recommendations
Employ the "cockroach" phenomenon and other methodologies to predict earnings surprises before they occur
Determine how to react when a company reports earnings and how to profit from "post-earnings announcement drift"
Understand and profit from "analyst creep" -- the reason that earnings estimate revisions occur incrementally over time
Avoid being duped by the games that companies play with their earnings reports

Whether the economy is healthy or stalled, whether the market is up or down, by focusing on the strategies contained in this book you will always come out ahead. Well-picked individual stocks will always carry the day. Now with Ahead of the Market, you will finally have the same tools institutional investors have and will be able to find great stocks in any market environment.

Download Description

How can individual investors sort through the technical talk of Wall Street analysts, avoid self-serving nonsense, and find the gems that will guide them to the right stocks at the right time? Based on years of experience and extensive statistical analysis, Mitch Zacks' proven formulas allow the average investor to invest like pro.

Customer Reviews:

Ahead of the Market.......2007-01-20

One of the best books written on stock investment.
A very rigorous approach which combines economic theory behavioural finance and investment practice.

Earnings Matter for 300 pages.......2004-09-28

This is a marketing ad for Zack's and the only thing the book offers is that earnings matter (past, present and future) and oh yes Zack's algorithm is the best so subscribe.

Good book for those interested in earnings estimates.......2004-03-07

I believe that combining the strategies discussed in this book with CANSLIM provides a very powerful approach.

Like O'Neil, Zacks bases his research on real data; this data has been collected by the Zacks Investment Company for 15+ years.

This book is filled with dozens of graphs to better explain the research. Just like the Zacks ranking system this book is largely focused on one of the few good things a market analyst can give you - earnings estimates.

I believe that in the upcoming years Ahead of the market will be a book that I will be referring back to since it is excellent. The research is practical and I believe is an interesting strategy.

In closing I just want to say that this is one of the books I have read which I found to be really good and have the potential to assist us in our investing endeavors.

Reed Floren

Watch Out for Zacks Spam.......2004-02-20

I learned a lot from this book about how earnings momentum is used to buy and sell stocks. Basically, momentum investors are looking for impending earnings surprises of a certain quality.

The book then induces you to try out the Zacks online service and get their daily earnings updates and eletters like "Profit from the Pros". Don't do it. Signing up will unleash a torrent of spam from Zacks for many of their services. I have unsubscribed numerous times and even emailed their customer service department. They did respond but I still get the crap. Even worse, they gave my name to a marketing partner and now I get even more garbage.

And the meat is still in Zacks' own pocket.......2004-02-14

With recommendations on the back cover from John Bollinger, Burton Malkiel and Victor Niederhoffer, I did have high expectation on this book but I had been a little bit disappointed. The recommendation or the content is very straightforward. As concluded by the author, they include 1) buy stocks that are receiving upward earnings estimate revisions and sell stocks that are receiving downward earnings estimate revisions owing to "analyst creep" and delayed price response. 2) buy companies that are reporting earnings better than expectations and avoid companies that are reporting earnings worse than expectations owing to post earnings announcement drift and "cockroach effect". 3) subscribe the Zacks Rank, which somebody did the homework of the above for you with a fee 4) focus on changes in analysts' recommendations over time. The catch is: I doubt only a very small percentage of home investors have the time or resources to execute any one of the recommendations above for long and as a result they can only go to Zacks Investment Research for help, and thus bringing the whole book to something not far from a sales talk.

In short, if you are already aware of the innate problem with any analysts' recommendation and you are not going to subscribe to any fee based research, this book is not for you. However, if you are a green hand in the investment game, prepared to shop for a research report and pick the stocks yourself, this book may still worth a read.

Average customer rating:
Ahead of the Market : The Zacks Method for Spotting Stocks Early -- In Any Economy
Mitchell Zacks
Manufacturer: Collins
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000OA4HVE

Average customer rating:
Ahead of the Market: The Zacks Method for Spotting Stocks Early -- In Any Economy
Mitchell Zacks
Manufacturer: Collins
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000OA93S6

Book Description

Few would dispute the notion that law has a tremendous impact on modern life. But social scientists who study the dynamics of family, work, medicine, and other institutions often ignore the pervasive influence of law. This introduction to the legal world and the sociology of law shows how social scientists can better account for the influences of legal issues in a wide range of social settings.

Incorporating historical and cross-cultural research in her book, Lisa McIntyre explains the general effects of law on interpersonal relations, the concept of a civil contract, and the relationship of law to social norms. Discussing the reasons some societies and some domains within societies have more law than others, she shows that, contrary to popular wisdom, law is not only a reflection of social values but also fundamental to the formation of those values.

Book Description

During recent decades, there has been a steady increase in the use of chemical pesticides in both developed and developing countries. This has caused widespread concern about their impact on human health and on the environment. This is particularly the case in less developed countries which may lack appropriate resources to minimize the risks and rectify problems. The purpose of this book is to provide a review of:information on the scale of manufacture, import, export and use of chemical pesticides; examples of direct risks to human welfare in terms of acute poisonings caused by occupational exposure and pesticide residues in food; examples of problems with the storage of obsolete stocks of pesticides in developing countries. The focus is on acute problems in developing countries, particularly in Latin America, Asia and Africa, but some information is also provided about developed countries.

Book Description

The 2nd edition of "Groundwater Geochemistry – A practical guide to modeling of natural and contaminated aquatic systems" remains the comprehensive text book offering beginners and advanced modellers alike a minimum theoretical background and a strong focus on the practical solution of geochemical modeling with PHREEQC.

The new edition covers the possibility to use PITZER equation and the CD music concept within the new version of PHREEQC. Examples for reactive transport use PHREEQC´s 1d features with multicomponent diffusion as well as PHAST with the graphical user interface GoPhast on 2d and 3d examples. Implementing uncertainties of thermodynamically data is addressed by means of the program Ljungskile. As in the 1st edition, detailed descriptions on how to solve each problem step by step guide the user from basic to more and more advanced hydrogeochemical modelling.

Book Description

Elements of Quantum Optics gives a broad coverage of the basic elements necessary to understand and carry out research in laser physics and quantum optics. It presents a variety of theoretical tools and important results for two-level and semiconductor media, many of which could only be found in the original literature of in specialized monographs up to now. The text revearls the close connection between many seemingly unrelated topics, such as probe absorption, four-wave mixing, optical instabilities, resonance fluorescence and squeezing. The third edition includes new chapters on atom optics and cavity quantum electrodynamics, as well as expanded discussion of quantum mechanics, system-reservoir interactions and second quantization.

Customer Reviews:

A pleasant read.......2005-11-06

Good as an introductory monograph, poor textbook. All the information is present, but it is not well organized for self learning or course development. Nevertheless it is worth reading if you are interested in this field. If you are new to the material, start elsewhere, then come look at this book.

This book help me finish my Ph. D. disseration in Taiwan.......2000-10-13

Firstly, I would like to say thanks to the authors, I am an experimentalist who was lack of the theoretical training, I read the book by self-studying. The style of this book inherit the book ¡§Laser physics¡¨ (by Sargent, Scully, Lamb), which is also my favorite. Especially, in the new editing, Meystre update new topics in the field of modern quantum optics (such as cavity QED) which I think also very good for self-study. However, the new typesetting of the book makes me somehow uncomfortable since the spacing of the lines is too compact. I would appreciate the editing/typesetting of the second editing.

Average customer rating:

Couldn't put it down!

A beautiful story, wonderfully written

Beautiful story, poorly written

Absolutely Captivating!

Hallelujah: A Novel
J S Featherstone
Manufacturer: ACW Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

Contemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
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ASIN: 189252564X

Book Description

Anyone who has thrilled at hearing the Hallelujah Chorus will feel profound attachment to Handel's story of hope and redemption as timeless and poignant as the music itself.

Customer Reviews:

Couldn't put it down!.......2006-03-04

I enjoyed this book immensly. I looked forward to reading it everynight and didn't want to stop reading. I felt inspired by the story of Handel and loved the way Mr. Featherstone was able to put the music into the words of each chapter.

A beautiful story, wonderfully written.......2004-01-18

I'd like to rebut another amazon review that criticized Featherstone's writing style. Featherstone is one of those rare writers who brings a story to LIFE. His style is compelling and captivating.

I highly recommend this book!

Beautiful story, poorly written.......2003-11-10

This is a compelling story. Handel's life is the stuff of rich drama, and the coming forth of the Messiah is a miracle. Unfortunately, the writing here doesn't match the material. I kept reading because I loved the story of Handel. It would have been better if Mr. Featherstone had stuck to a non-ficiton account with a good editor. The fictional characters were not fully realized; they were sentimental stereotypes. The story is worth the read but one has to skim through quite a bit of dross to find the gold.

Absolutely Captivating!.......2003-05-04

This book is a must read for anyone who wants to learn more about the Baroque period or Handel. It is a blast to read and there is never a boring moment. I strongly recomend it.

Average customer rating:

ok
very disappointing
Moving, cinematic writing
Beautiful and Evocative

Featherstone: A Novel
Kirsty Gunn
Manufacturer: Houghton Mifflin
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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The Keepsake

ASIN: 0618246924

Book Description

Kirsty Gunn's first novel, Rain, was praised by the New York Times as "exquisitely written . . . every page expresses familiar feelings in ways that are unsentimental and entirely original"; "spellbinding," raved the Boston Globe. That same resonant magnetism and emotional depth infuse her new novel. Featherstone is the story of the mysterious disappearance from an isolated town in Scotland of a young woman whose absence still reverberates in the lives of everyone whose life she touched. When Sonny Johanssen looks up from his flower bed, he is sure that he has just seen the impossible. And yet he feels her: his niece, Francie, has come home. He's not the only one who senses her presence. Across town, Ray Weldon, Francie's long-suffering high school sweetheart, is anxiously scouring their old haunts, convinced that she has finally returned. But has she really come home, or is her presence some kind of resurrection in the minds of those who love her? It soon becomes clear that Featherstone is not a traditional tale of small-town life, but that the enigmatic Francie is a catalyst for a different, deeper story. Her homecoming disturbs the inhabitants of this community, unraveling a sense of security and stability and turning inward people's hopes and dreams with dangerous but ultimately regenerative consequences.

Customer Reviews:

ok.......2006-08-24

I loved her book " Rain" and couldn't wait to read this one. How dissappointing! There were parts of the book that had a wonderful dreamlike quality that I just loved. There were other parts that were so bazarre and confusing that I had no idea what was going on. I finally gave up and never finished the book. Kirsty has some amazing talent but needs to bring it down a few notches and write a book that has an actual plot and is understandable.

very disappointing.......2005-06-07

author seems to be in love with her own prose at the expense of telling an actual story. Talent is evident, but her stylized efforts at creating evocative effects were far too obvious.

Moving, cinematic writing.......2005-05-07

I agree with the other reviewer here - read this for the writing, not the plot.

The story's an old one, and somewhat predictable, but I found myself glued to the pages anyway, the tension builds and builds as you near the end of this great book.

Kirsty Gunn's writing style is unique, evocative, stellar. This book is written in 3rd person omnicient point of view - you can see what all the characters are experiencing, but she never resorts to the easy fallback of quotations. (Ex: Jane thought "I think I'll chase Spot today.") Gunn sometimes throws grammar and convention to the wind and writes freeform - like a thought or a dream or a stream-of-consciousness line or two or six. The result is that you get to live inside the characters' heads and you feel what they're feeling and you *relate* to them - even the ones you don't like. Any confusion you may feel over the allusions is I'm sure, deliberate. This writer is certainly one to watch.

Her other books (Rain, The Keepsake) are also well written, but neither made as big an impression on me as this one. This book reads like an independent movie screenplay - except you get a better look at the inner lives of the characters. Truly an amazingly written piece of literature.

If you've read her other books and liked them, I'd certainly pick up this one too. If you like to read (and reread) books for the writing style (think "The Outermost House" by Henry Beston) then you'll love this book. If you really want a fast-paced story with twists and details and subplots and all that - pass on this and pick out something different.

Beautiful and Evocative.......2003-06-26

Kirsty Gunn's Featherstone is a beautiful and evocative novel that is to be read more for the writing than the story itself. There are some wonderful novels that don't have much of a plot in there and Featherstone is one of them. If you like plot-filled novels, perhaps this one is not for you. If, however, you derive pleasure from pure, wonderful writing, give Featherstone a try. The novel opens as Sonny, an elderly gentleman from the town of Featherstone, is out gardening and believes he sees his niece Francie before him for a brief moment. Francie left town years ago, in search of greener pastures, more exciting times. Over the course of the weekend, the rumor of Francie spreads through the town and ultimately has an effect on people who never knew her. The writing here is just beautiful. There is a passage where Gunn describes the town as daybreak hits that is one of the better pieces of evocative writing I've read in a while. Featherstone is an enjoyable novel, a little short on plotting, but quite strong on writing. Enjoy.

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