Surprise! A sales book tops my list of negotiation resources. But this sales book focuses on the most basic communication strategies which, if mastered, form the basis of any interaction--including negotiation. Sales Effectiveness Training is an offshoot of Gordon's earlier book, Parental Effectiveness Training (PET), itself an invaluable negotiations resource. But I didn't think that even I could convince people to read a parental training manual to improve their negotiation skills. For extra credit, check out PET; it's well written, by Gordon alone; he develops his examples in greater depth than is done in Sales Effectiveness Training. What's exciting about Sales Effectiveness Training is its unique emphasis on skills we'd otherwise overlook. When most people come to me for advice, they want to know what to say, and how to say it. But the most important thing is how you listen, not what you say. This book puts the importance of listening skills -- both as a technique for understanding and as a method of creating rapport in the context of sales effectiveness. Other Batna.com articles will examine these principles in the specific context of negotiations; but the material in Sales Effectiveness Training is highly valuable as is.

When in presence of a salesperson I have the impression he/she leads the discussion where he/she wants to go. The main difference with Sales Effectiveness Training is that the client leads: the salesperson acts as a consultant, faciliator to help the client make his/her own decision. That brings trust and make THE difference

This book is a story about two Clown Anemonefish and their lives. It takes place near Papua New Guinea in the great barrier reef. They live in sea anemone tentacles for safety. It tells about life under the sea with the animals and the plants. And at the end the two fish lay eggs. It has big, colorful illustrations and is fun and interesting to read.

Even though I am ten years old, I still enjoy this book. It is about a little wolf pup who wants to be the leader of his pack. One day, while chasing a mouse, he gets lost. Even though it was written for tots, I loved it!

This book has been a valuable resource in presenting the teaching of physics to elementary school teachers. Getting off on the right foot is very important in any endevor and physics is no exception. Because many elementary educators are not well grounded in physics, they often do not get students started on the best foundation. This book presents a simple framework for teaching the basics starting with the 3 undefinables of Length, Time and Mass. All other concepts in physics build on these through operational definitions. Kids and teachers can grasp this approach easily. The book also presents a fun overview of the development of basic measurement and physical science over the past few thousand years.

The authors begin their review of the 17th-century Hobbes-Boyle controversy by declaring their intent to take a strongly pro-Hobbes stance, so it is not surprising that they end by concluding that "Hobbes was right". (About what, is not clear.)

Their stated reason for adapting this biased perspective is that the opposite view (that Hobbes was wrong) has been so thoroughly documented that not much new could be added. Only by adopting a "charitable" view of Hobbes, and a critical view of his opponents, could they make a significant new contribution. In other words, they wanted to make a splash, not a ripple.

Their bias is expressed by selective omission of information unfavorable to Hobbes. For example, in Hobbes's "Dialogus Physicus", his fallacious solution of the cube-duplication problem has been deleted, without mentioning that it was fallacious. Also, the reader is not informed that a "Torricelli apparatus" and a "mercury barometer" are functionally identical; the height of the mercury column varies with weather conditions. This variability was a problem for Hobbes, but not for Boyle. But it is not mentioned, except in connection with a suggestion that the experimentalists may have fudged their data.

Also, the authors should have noted that Hobbes's a-priori rationalist philosophy is not a viable alternative to experimentalism, because it is based on an elementary logical fallacy: you cannot make up definitions and postulates arbitrarily AND claim that deductions from them give certainty about the real world.

The public perception of Jack Welch's tenure at General Electric has been that he focused business effort on his company's core competencies, and thus rewarded the long term shareholder with great financial returns. Tom O'Boyle peers behind the curtain to reveal the darker side of Wizard Welch and his disastrous tenure at one of America's great industrial treasures. Yes, Welch increased GE's stock value; but Welch did it with a draconian management style that failed to pay all of the bills along the way. It is easy to look rich when you don't pay your bills.

O'Boyle identifies some of the unpaid bills, including:

1) The human cost of GE's massive layoffs througout the 1980's. Welch embraced and greatly popularized the "layoff" approach to business: lay off bodies, save money, show more profit. But for every dollar the company profited, others lost. Much of the cost of the layoffs fell on individuals, families and communities that saw jobs at US-based GE operations vanish. This caused untold hardship to both families and governments, which had to rebuild shattered lives and communities. Not all survived, literally.

2) Welch took a rich and deep GE culture of research and development into technological fields, and utterly gutted it. GE's R&D abilities formerly covered a spectrum from steam turbines to appliances to jet engines to railway locomotives. Under Welch, GE's R&D arm became so weak and atrophied that the company's product lines lost the once commanding technological lead they formerly enjoyed. The company's future is betrayed. (Not satisfied with merely gutting GE's R&D, Welch purchased RCA and stripped its assets as well. Only NBC television remains in the GE fold as a major, former-RCA asset. Shockingly, NBC spends more each year to broadcast basketball games than GE spends on R&D. It is so sad, when you think that the only man-made object ever to leave the solar system, Voyager spacecraft, carries a camera that bears the RCA logo.)

3) GE's continuing failure to clean up the PCB's and radioactivity it has left behind in its numerous manufacturing operations; while at the same time making a business unit out of cleaning up PCB's and other pollution for other customers. The unpaid bills also do not include the people who remain afflicted with industrial illnesses from their exposure to chemicals in the GE workplaces over the years.

These are just a few of the topics. The book is profound, and will shock the unitiated. O'Boyle is a historian of American industrial history. He takes the reader on a trip through time, from the laboratories of Edison; to the early workshops of Ford; to the mills of Carnegie; to Tom Watson's IBM; to Rickover's nuclear navy; and so much more.

O'Boyle spent eleven years with the Wall Street Journal, and he knows how to dig out the story and tell it in the best journalistic style. Also, as the notes reveal, O'Boyle has met and talked with many of the luminaries and leaders of American and European industry of this era. O'Boyle has captured the essence of an American tragedy, which was GE's abandonment of its research-oriented, manufacturing legacy to satisfy the ego of one man.

Jack Welch started at GE selling plastics, and he has become his own product. It seems that Jack Welch, who came into control of one of the nation's greatest industrial enterprises, really wanted only to run a credit card company as his life's ambition. Today he has his wish, but the nation has lost.

When GE's massive downsizing took place in Pittsfield, MA, I was a frustrrated local official trying to find out what was going on. GE officials furnished little information. Eventually it was thought the GE must have done it to simply stay competitive in the new global economy. Thomas O'Boyle furnishes the answer. The layoffs and plant closings were Jack Welch's idea of a corporate revolution. He was at the cutting edge of a major business philosophy which discarded post-WW II corporate paternalism in favor of downsizing chic. Layoffs and plant closings, formerly the last options of businesses in trouble, became fashionable fiist options in the pursuit of higher profits. Welch, according to O'Boyle, created a work place of purposeful job insecurity. The profit outcome mattered more than people. GE managers had to hit a home run to be number one in profits or they were out. This quest to be number one, wrote O'Boyle, was a major reason for GE, as one of the Pentagon's 100 largest defense contractors, to become the leading corporate criminal in cheating the government to show larger profits. GE could have remained in my city and stayed competitive in comsumer electronic products, but the profits would not have been high enough for Welch's quest to be number one. My city is a long way from recovering from the economic blow of losing about 9, 000 GE jobs. I take serious issue with such revewiers as NY Times, Roger Lowenstein that O;Boyle is wrong and that , "America has reaped a huge dividend (from the layoffs and plant closings): the added goods and services that GE's former workers contribute in other lines of work" Mr. Lwenstein should come to my city to see how wrong he is. Unfortunately GE's corporate practices are now the standard for business in this country. And so long as GE's and other stockholders are happy with their returns on a surging stock market these corporate practices will continue. However, O'Boyle has shown the bad effects of this corporate practice and one has to hope that hope that eventually some corporate leaders, and there are some according to O'Boyle, who will begin to realize they have a duty to their workers and the community and not only stockholders. O'Boyle raises the interesting question of who will follow Welch soon as the new CEO at GE and more importantly what will be his management style. GE does not have to be number one in profits. It can and should show the way in leading us back to a corporate world of responsibiltiy for its workers and the communities it does business in. I hope the next GE leader takes O'Boyle's book seriously and tries to remedy the bad employee and communtiy practices of Welch

Is the most profitable and valuable US company spiritually dead? That seems to be Thomas O'Boyle's thesis in "At Any Cost." His riveting book is the first that I have read which chronicles the dark side of Jack Welch's restructuring of the General Electric Company. In an introductory note, O'Boyle expresses regret that Welch and other executives "were unwilling to be interviewed" or to respond to his serious efforts to solicit their comments to issues and concerns raised in his book. His note is to explain the extremely negative views of Welch and GE that O'Boyle gleaned from mountains of court and government records and from interviews with restructuring and down-sizing loosers. Predictably, corporate and business reviews dismiss the book as "muckraking." It is also predictable, however, that this book will have an impact on the eventual replacement of Welch and re-restructuring of GE.

Although O'Boyle closes his book speaking of Welch and GE in the past tense, I believe that his objective is to help. If O'Boyle and Welch haven't, I urge these Irish-Catholic gentlemen to read "The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism" by Michael Novak, a leading Catholic theologian. I am not a student of such matters, but Novak's and O'Boyle's books arrived on my bedstand almost simultaneously as result of absolutely unrelated activities. The possibility that this confluence of books was ordained prompts me to share my observations.

This book is not worth the time. Only libraries, craving other points of view, should buy this.

It's not just that Thomas Austenfeld expands our understanding of American literature by grouping together for the very first time four remarkable women writers. Nor is it simply that in discussing the respective experiences of Katherine Anne Porter, Kay Boyle, Jean Stafford, and Lillian Hellman in Nazi Germany he creates a more comprehensive picture of the American expatriate experience. Ultimately what makes this intelligent and sprightly volume so enjoyable and worthwhile is the way in which Austenfeld writes a completely new chapter of American literary history in a manner that is informed, judicious, wise, and imminently readable.

This book is laborious, overwritten and poor quality. It is as if the author is trying to demonstrate how many words one can fit into a sentence. For insight into Otters, at a child's reading level, choose a different book.

Otter On His Own: The Story Of A Sea Otter is a children's story by Doe Boyle about a young otter growing up in the natural world. From learning how to eat sea urchins to exploring the underwater cove near where he was born and the world beyond, Otter On His Own is a scientifically accurate, highly enjoyable tale. Simple yet inspiring color illustrations by Robert Lawson add depth to the watery world of the otter pup.