Financial Customer Service: A Guide to Making Smarter Business Decisions

Book Description

The only A-to-Z guide to creating, managing, and leveraging an incredibly powerful new competitive tool Financial Customer Service A leading expert in the field, H. A. Schaeffer Jr., clearly explains how a financial customer service function works and how it can give your company an unbeatable competitive edge. You'll get everything you'll need to plan, implement, and manage a financial customer service department. Drawing upon his own experiences and those of managers at numerous Fortune 500 companies, Schaeffer provides step-by-step guidance on:
* Making a business case for a financial customer service department
* Laying the groundwork
* Determining computer capabilities and needs
* Integrating resources
* Setting up a phone system
* Staffing and training
* Managing the transition
* Creating a policies manual
* Maximizing the potential of the new department
* And much more!

Customer Reviews:

Financial Customer Service - A real-life solution.......2000-03-22

Great concept - great book - wish I'd heard of it sooner. It would have saved my company a lot of grief - and money!

Book Description

Just in Time Leadership is a highly innovative approach to management founded on extensive, timely research. The basic assumption of Just in Time Leadership is quite simple: the new economy will increasingly demand that companies move beyond static long-term staffing models toward a more fluid model; in response, most successful companies will organize themselves around small core groups of longer-term employees and rely on large fluid talent pools. For managers, this will mean drawing on the fluid talent pool as needed to staff projects, tasks, and responsibilities; consequently, a whole range of management practices will undergo fundamental changes.

Just in Time Leadership gives leaders and managers a running start on these changes. The practices it outlines are best practices for getting the advantage by maximizing human talent in the unpredictable, high-speed, high-tech, knowledge-driven, fiercely competitive, new global economy.

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Just in Time Leadership Workshop

Book Description

In this completely revised and updated edition of the most authoritative book on world hunger, three of our foremost experts on food and agriculture expose and explode the myths that prevent us from effectively addressing the problem. Drawing on and distilling the extensive research of the Institute for Food and Development Policy (Food First), Lappé, Collins, and Rosset examine head-on the policies and politics that have kept hungry people from feeding themselves around the world, in both Third and First World countries, as well as the misconceptions that have obscured our own national, social, and humanitarian interests. Written in a straightforward, easy-to-read style, World Hunger: Twelve Myths shakes many tenaciously held beliefs; but most important, it convinces readers that by standing together with the hungry we can advance not only humanitarian interests, but our own well-being.

Customer Reviews:

This book can be used as a fertilizer.......2006-06-19

A friend of me, who lives in Europe, lent this book to me, some months ago.I'm an agronomist and I live in Brazil.As an agronomist, I found this book so bad, that I didn't read all of it.
On chapter 5, this book claims that "Green Revolution" wasn't an answer.In fact the "Green Revolution" gave food fo billions of people in the world.Today, because of modern agronomy there's more per capita food than any other time in world history.
On chapter 7, this book is against free market, as a good solution.Well even recognizing the failures of free market, I should tell you that any other possiblity is far worse.We must remember that Lenin, Stalin,Hitler and Mao Tse-Tung killed more than 100,000,000 people, by hungry.And any of these marxist was using "free market" to produce all this famine.
In fact,modern agronomy ( mecanization, fertilizers, bigger farms, transgenic seeds,etc.) gave to the mankind better and cheaper food.
Another fact is that old agriculture produces food at a very high price and low quality also.If we return to agriculture from about 100 years ago, the majority of world population will be sentenced to death by famine.
Claiming absurds about agriculture, this book can be used as a fertilizer.

"Famines are not natural disasters,but social disasters".......2005-09-09

This book is only 270 pages including about 75 pages of notes and references and tries to cover a massive issue.Not only is the solution to hunger a huge problem but is different all over the world,even different issues within a single country or area.Therefore it will require the wisdom of Methusala and the strength of Goliath to make inroads.
The world abounds in theories and agendas of how to end hunger and all efforts are hampered by power structures,politics and on top of all that,injustice.
The authors tackle what they claim are generally accepted myths about hunger.They are:
1 There's Simply Not Enough Food.
2 Nature's to Blame.
3 Too Many Mouths to Feed.
4 Food vs. Our Enviroment.
5 The Green Revolution is the Answer.
6 Justice vs.Production.
7 The Free Market is the Answer.
8 Free Trade is the Answer.
9 Too Hungry to Revolt.
10 More US Aid will Help The Hungry.
11 We Benefit From Their Hunger.
12 Food vs. Freedom
Overall an excellent effort to dispel many commonly accepted myths.

Invaluable, Illuminating, Empowering.......2002-09-15

World Hunger: Twelve Myths clearly identifies the root causes of hunger as stemming from inequity and lack of true democracy, dispelling entirely the common belief that inadaquate food production is to blame. In their plain spoken and positive eloquence, the authors overwhelmingly succeed in conveying otherwise dauntingly complex global social and economic dynamics that contribute to world hunger and how each must be changed to honestly address the plight of the poor.

World Hunger: 12 Myths should have a permanent home in school curricula, libraries, and in the hands of people of all ages wishing to better understand and improve the world in which they live.

An excellent resource.......2002-05-17

Over the years, many myths have emerged about the subject of world hunger. People think that if this or that should happen, hunger will disappear, and no longer will westerners have to look at pictures of starving babies in Africa. This book explodes many of those myths.

Some people think that population (or overpopulation) is the problem. Others think that there simply isn't enough food available, or that nature, with her floods and droughts, is the culprit. Still others think that the solution lies with free trade, or letting the market provide, or with the Green Revolution, with its heavy emphasis on pesticides and other chemicals. Other possibilities are that the poor are simply too hungry to revolt, or that the US should increase its stingy foreign aid budget.

The authors place the blame elsewhere. All over the world, there has been a huge concentration of land in fewer and fewer hands, forcing poor and middle-class peasants off the land (in the US, witness the decline of the family farmer). Structural adjustment programs from places like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (part of the requirements when asking for a loan) require a country to reorient its agriculture toward items that are easily exportable rather than items that can feed their people. Another requirement is the removal of internal tariffs and other barriers to the import of grain and other foodstuffs. It results in a flood of cheaper (usually American) agricultural products reaching the market, driving local farmers out of business. The countries that one thinks of when hearing "famine" actually produce enough food to feed their people. The only problem is that much of it has to go overseas to help pay the foreign debt.

This book is excellent. It presents a potentially complex subject in a clear, easy to understand manner. It contains a list of addresses to contact for more information, and is a great activism reference.

Excellent Warning Against Market Fundamentalism.......2002-04-03

This book does an excellent job of showing how despite the economic growth that has been spurred worldwide thanks to deregulation, liberalization of trade and finance, and improvements in information technology, adherence to market fundamentalism has contributed to creating stark disparities in the distribution of wealth between developed and developing nations, as well as within those nations themselves.

Nevertheless, globalization, for whatever faults it possesses, has made the people of the nations of the world feel more connected than ever (In fact, I'm writing this from Japan, where I have lived for seven years). this book sensibly points out that In order to come up with a food policy that will minimize hunger worldwide, naturally poverty must also be reined in. It seems to me that in order to significantly reduce poverty, all nations must make a fundamental shift in their foreign policy away from acting for the benefit of national interests and toward the benefits of the human race as a whole. I cannot say whether mankind is ready for such a change at this juncture.

However, The book concludes that the freedom to eke out a living (the problem of the poor) supersedes the right to accumulate unlimited wealth (the hoarding of wealth by a small number of people). While this is most certainly true, it also seemed to oversimplify the problem of disparity of income based on the very facts presented in the book. While the book did denounce communist regimes at one point in the book, I felt that the conclusion of the book unneccessarily demonized wealthy individuals and major companies and called the proletariat of the world to unite.

For this weakness in its conclusion, I can only give this work four stars, but still I do strongly recommend giving a careful read to this text for the invaluable information it provides on this terrible problem.

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World Hunger: Twelve Myths
Frances Moore Lappe
Manufacturer: Grove Weidenfeld
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000NQJU6Q

Book Description

This volume contains papers based on the main lectures, oral communications and selected posters presented at the 4th International Conference of Polymer-Solvent Complexes and Intercalates held as the 63rd meeting of Prague Meetings on Macromolecules in Prague in July 2002.

Many aspects of the polymer-solvent interactions, structure and dynamics in solution, gels, solids and interfaces are discussed in detail. Also illustrated is evidence of the growing impact of this field on various research areas.

Customer Reviews:

Don't be Fooled by the Title: The Best APL Primer Around.......2004-12-22

Reiter broaches what is often viewed a multi-faceted task in a manner so as to make functioning in APL (A Programming Language) straightforward, practical, and useful. Basics are taught first, both Monadic and Dyadic use of the elementary operators, later introduction to Del, programming and the advantages of the branch. Mathematical concepts, including the basic linear, and the less familiar higher-order regression techniques are presented along with the APL equivalents of the algebraic technique for simultaneously solving equations.

I appreciated the updated reference for some of the more antiquated terms which may appear in other volumes of earlier vintage. No longer is fuzz tolerance, stack clear, clear stack, or such antiquated terminology present to confuse the reader. No more thorns, here. A simple )RESET sets everything clear.

Those familiar with the Interactive Approach would appreciate that A Rose is a Rose, and the standard for much of what we do, but for the newly initiated into the Magic of APL, Reiter makes all of the initial steps very )CLEAR.

The thema thoughout the excellent text/reference/adjunct to mathematical course is that set theory, Boolian Algebraic processes and APL work hand-in-hand.

After demonstrating basic skills in monadic and dyadic operators, the reader can go to DEL and really begin to gain the experience of just what APL is all about.

Again, )SAVE APL ! with all of its factorials and permutations. Reiter has certainly helped to do so by providing a work which will hopefully introduce a whole new generation to APL.

An excellent work by an erudite writer.

Jerrell L. Driver, Ph.D.
Licensed Psychologist
Health Services Provider Certified
Missouri PY00099
APL

An efficient introduction to mathematical solutions in APL........1999-09-28

This excellent 200 page book describes itself as an "introduction to APL", and it does contain an efficient and orderly introduction to APL functions, operators, syntax, and arrays. By page 30 or so, however, it begins to use APL to solve some serious math problems--integration, Netwon's Method for solving roots of equations, the Power Method for estimating eigenvectors and eigenvalues, as well as common statistical methods. Instruction in APL language is integrated throughout with the exposition of these math problems.

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An honest look back ...

the medic: life and death in the last days of WWII

Not your usual combat medic

A Not So Happy Ending After All

Excellent Writing; very personal memoir.

The Medic: Life and Death in the Last Days of Wwii
Leo Litwak
Manufacturer: Thorndike Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

General | Europe | History | Subjects | Books
General | World | History | Subjects | Books
General | World War II | Military | History | Subjects | Books
Personal Narratives | World War II | Military | History | Subjects | Books
History | Large Print | Formats | Books
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A Medic's War: One Man's True Odyssey of Hardship, Friendship, and Survival in the Second World War

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Medic!: How I Fought World War II with Morphine, Sulfa, and Iodine Swabs

ASIN: 0783896085

Book Description

Leo Litwak was a university student when he joined the Army to fight in World War II, "a na've, callow eighteen-year-old son prepared to join other soldier boys being hauled off to war." In 1944 he found himself

in Belgium, in the middle of the waning European war, a medic

trained to save lives but often powerless to do much more than watch

life slip away. It was hard fighting that took Litwak and his rifle company into

the heart of Germany at the close of the war. But Litwak learned there was more to war than fighting, more to understand than maps and ammunition.

In the final months of the war, he watched the men in his company tenderly serve food at a Passover seder for a dozen brutalized Jewish women newly liberated from slavery. He watched those same men

torture and execute defenseless German soldiers. He fell in love at the Moulin Rouge in a scene straight out of a Toulouse-Lautrec painting.

The men in his company were dreamers, thieves, friends, killers, revolutionaries, and heroes. They were the men of their time: sometimes brave, sometimes compassionate, sometimes cruel, sometimes loving, usually scared. They were held together by loyalty, only to be scattered by the war's end.

THE MEDIC is the gritty, wise, bighearted, and unflinching account of one man's quest to find sense in war and its aftermath.

Customer Reviews:

An honest look back ..........2003-12-08

Leo Litwak's recollections of his service in WWII as a combat medic is not what I had expected. I had anticipated a memoir - instead the book is essentially a collection of vignettes and impressions the author had during his service in Europe in the final year of the war. Litwak admits in his foreward that unit names and places had been changed, and that some individuals mentioned in the book were composites of personalities he knew. I appreciated his honesty.

After reading the book, I also appreciated his honesty in presenting his perspective on the war. The graft and looting by "our boys." The whoring around. The detached neutrality of working on the wounded, and the non-chalance of seeing so much death so often. Not everyone who served in the European Theater of Operations (ETO) saw combat; and not everyone who saw combat in the ETO was there from the Normandy landing to V-E day. Litwak was honest about his service, his experiences, and his impressions.

As a combat medic from a later war, I had anticipated experiences and recollections similar to my own. While we had some experiences in common, we had many more differences as we served in two very different times. Nonetheless, the honesty with which Litwak writes of his time in Europe is not a romanticized or sanitized version of WWII. And aside from the obvilious shortcomings of his composites, it is real at an emotional (if not strictly historical) level.

the medic: life and death in the last days of WWII.......2003-10-23

I was disappointed in this book. Maybe I went into it with too high an expectation. I knew going in, it was a dramatized version of Mr. Litwak's experiences but I expected more insight into his job as a medic. there were relatively few scenes of his actually work. In that way, I would say the title is misleading. It really is a book of one man's army service in Europe during the later days of World War II. He seems to have disliked everyone he served with and Mr. Litwak has the right to be. there were more sex stories than medic stories. the Sgt. Lucca story I thought would help me gain more insight into the author. But it left me looking for more of an explanation of how Mr. Litwak really felt. Did he like the Sgt. or not? He seems to have been hurt by his death but I am not sure.
Thebook overall does help one experience WWII from a more realistic standpoint. But a non-fiction approach would have been more of a contribution.

Not your usual combat medic.......2003-05-26

I was expecting a more in-depth analysis into the combat and mental condition of a medic, but what I got was a long drawn out story of himself. There was no connection w/ his fellow men and if there was, it was just a misconception. Basically, he just want to forget about the war, the horror, and the cruelty behind it. If that is the case, then why write the book.

A Not So Happy Ending After All.......2003-04-30

"'Aid Man!' ... He ran up to me. He shouted in my face. 'Aid Man!' He grabbed my shoulders, his mouth agape, heaving air. 'A man got his leg blowed off. Let's go!'" This was Leo Litwak's first shot of many to come at saving a life. Leo was a young Jewish boy being trained as a medic in South Carolina. It was February of 1943, and, sooner than he would have preferred, Leo would be immersed in World War II. This is a true story and an excellent one as well. Leo Litwak does a wonderful job telling the truth in this book leaving no goury details out. His book shows all aspects of the war. He shows the soft side, dark side, romantic side, and even the surprising side. Gloria Emerson from the Los Angeles Times states, "[This is a] book that should be given to every schoolboy in the country at the age of thirteen." I must agree with this statement because all the reality and accuracy in this book will inform them that there's not always a happy ending and that war is nothing like Hollywood.

Excellent Writing; very personal memoir........2002-12-07

"The Medic" by Leo Litwak. Sub-titled "Life and Death in the Last days of WWII. Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2001.

This is a well-written story of a young man who had just finished his first year at the University of Michigan and was drafted,in February 1943. Leo Litwak was assigned to the medical corps with initial training with a detachment in South Carolina. The book covers the time from this training to his arrival in European Theater of Operations (EOT) in November 1944, until the end of the war. At the very end of his time in Europe, he recounts how his unit had to turn over the village (made-up name of "Grossdorf") to the Russians as it was on Soviet side of the occupation line. Litwak had studied a little German, so he was able to communicate in "bare-bones German" (P. 137) with not only the people in the occupied towns but also with the survivors of nearby concentration camps. The author devotes a long chapter to his assignation , while on leave in Paris (1945) with the hooker, Marishka, but the writing is done in a sensitive and quiet way.

Litwak's writing is generally excellent: Page 115, example " ...German Soldiers, whom we once considered awesome predators - well clad, well armed, well disciplined, red in tooth and claw". Now, as prisoners, the Germans were "... flock animals, indistinguishable from each other". The author has also done a good job of capturing the constant use of profanity in routine conversations in the military. There is profanity in the book, but not near as much as you would encounter in daily conversations. When I served in the U. S. Navy in the late 1950s, the sailors would answer affirmatively by saying, "F---ing `A'!", not just a simple "Yes!". My son served in the Marine Corps in the early 1990s, and he reports that the same amount of profanity was used. The author has included just enough profanity to capture the essence of routine military dialogue.

Finally, Leo Litwak ends the book with a summary that many probably felt, (Page 225): " Now I wanted us to be scattered and never reassembled. No more armies or divisions or regiments or battalions ... No veterans' groups, no reunions, no visits to old battlefields ... Let that all be in the past, cleansed by recollection."

Book Description

As visiting physician to Bethlem Hospital, the archetypal "Bedlam" and Britain's first and (for hundreds of years) only public institution for the insane, Dr. John Monro (1715-1791) was a celebrity in his own day. Jonathan Andrews and Andrew Scull call him a "connoisseur of insanity, this high priest of the trade in lunacy." Although the basics of his life and career are well known, this study is the first to explore in depth Monro's colorful and contentious milieu. Mad-doctoring grew into a recognized, if not entirely respectable, profession during the eighteenth century, and besides being affiliated with public hospitals, Monro and other mad-doctors became entrepreneurs and owners of private madhouses and were consulted by the rich and famous.
Monro's close social connections with members of the aristocracy and gentry, as well as with medical professionals, politicians, and divines, guaranteed him a significant place in the social, political, cultural, and intellectual worlds of his time. Andrews and Scull draw on an astonishing array of visual materials and verbal sources that include the diaries, family papers, and correspondence of some of England's wealthiest and best-connected citizens. The book is also distinctive in the coverage it affords to individual case histories of Monro's patients, including such prominent contemporary figures as the Earls Ferrers and Orford, the religious "enthusiast" Alexander Cruden, and the "mad" King George III, as well as his crazy would-be assassin, Margaret Nicholson.
What the authors make clear is that Monro, a serious physician neither reactionary nor enlightened in his methods, was the outright epitome of the mad-trade as it existed then, esteemed in some quarters and ridiculed in others. The fifty illustrations, expertly annotated and integrated with the text, will be a revelation to many readers.

Customer Reviews:

Very Well Done!.......2005-05-19

Though it starts off slow, by Chapter 2 the enthralling story of John Monroe, one of several Monroes to be primary physician at Bethlem hospital in London, England, begins to unfold. This man spent four decades in his position at "Bedlam" which is likely why he is the one to be featured - as opposed to his father James, who held the position before him and his son Thomas, who came afterwards.

Though I was aware that John Monroe has somewhat of a bad reputation in our day and age, largely because of his work in mad-doctoring and that Bethlem hospital is associated with great horror and scandal.. I didn't reach that conclusion from this book. There was evidence of mistreatment and false confinement and a lack of much help beyond custodial-type care - it seemed more a symptom of the ages rather then an intentional practice.

It was obvious, however, that a motivating factor for people to become engaged in the business of lunacy by owning and operating madhouses (often without any credentials or experience) and catering to those pronounced mad was the profit to made from such. Though mad-doctors, it is said, were not well respected in the 17-18-19th centuries, John Monroe and others seemed to have reached quite a great height in their social status.

What I found most fascinating was the many stories of those deemed mad - most especially the story of "Mad Meg" near the end of the book. Along with these stories there is a great deal of pictures in the book with excellent descriptions by the authors. It is very clear from reading that the two authors know their subject well and have done a great deal of research. I was familiar with Skull's work prior to this reading but had not had the pleasure of reading Andrews. Both authors have several other titles on the subject that I have since picked up and look forward to reading.

The book ends abruptly with the death of John Monroe. I would have liked to hear about what happened with Thomas Monroe when he took over "the business" much like we were able to read about James Monroe's work. But, the book is about John Monroe so I suppose it makes sense to concentrate largely on his work and I believe the others are likely written about in greater detail in the other books available by these authors.

The book was a joy to read, I think you will enjoy it!

Mad-doctoring Monro.......2004-06-22

Monro's life and career have been satisfactorily documented, however this book attempts to bring forward more detail and evermore facts, and as such is a worthy treatise. In our day of analysts and a theory for everything, it is almost impossible to understand that in the eighteenth century one might be forever locked away for such diagnoses as truculance and intractability. Besides the awful Bedlam most associated with this era, there were also private, rather more poshy institutes that catered to the rich and the famous, to which Monro also applied his 'mad-doctoring' skills. By means of his profession, Monro was privvy to the social world, and made acquaintance with the aristocracy and assorted politicians, would-bes, also-rans, and dignitaries. The authors utilise a huge base of extant materials to draw this portrait of a fascinating time in medical history. Especially noteworthy are the exceptional mentioned drawings, which alone are worth the price of the book.

Wall Street Journal Review.......2003-02-08

See the review of this book in the Wall Street Journal, Thursday, January 30, 2003.

Undertaker of the Mind: John Monro and Mad-Doctoring in Eighteenth-Century England. (Reviews of Books).(Book Review): An article from: Albion

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Undertaker of the Mind: John Monro and Mad-Doctoring in Eighteenth-Century England. (Reviews of Books).(Book Review): An article from: Albion
Anita Guerrini
Manufacturer: North American Conference on British Studies
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Digital

Book Description

This digital document is an article from Albion, published by North American Conference on British Studies on March 22, 2003. The length of the article is 845 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Undertaker of the Mind: John Monro and Mad-Doctoring in Eighteenth-Century England. (Reviews of Books).(Book Review)
Author: Anita Guerrini
Publication: Albion (Refereed)
Date: March 22, 2003
Publisher: North American Conference on British Studies
Volume: 35 Issue: 1 Page: 130(2)

Article Type: Book Review

Distributed by Thomson Gale

Undertaker of the Mind: John Monro and Mad-Doctoring in Eighteenth-Century England (Medicine and Society)

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Undertaker of the Mind: John Monro and Mad-Doctoring in Eighteenth-Century England (Medicine and Society)
Jonathan Andrews
Manufacturer: NY
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000MUBQ4C

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