Supervisory roles are changing to match new market demands, specially organizations that have moved from a mechanistic structure to a team structure. For example roles have changed from a directing, dictating and competing behaviors to a more guiding, participating and cooperating approaches. A supervisor success depends on the ability to work effectively through people. Similarly, employee's abilities to grow personally and expand professionally depend on the encouragement of their supervisors. Coaching is defined by Robert W. Lucas as "a simple process used to develop employees through on going one-on-one communication, where supervisors and employees jointly strive to identify, develop, and reach performance goals". Where effective coaching does not exist or fail to be continuous, then issues such as high turnover, disciplinary and performance problems arise affecting the employee/supervisor relationship and the organization as a whole. By using coaching, you set up a potential win-win environment for yourself and for your employees. The major characteristics of an effective coach are cited: excellent communication/listening skills, technical proficiency, receptivity to feedback, goal orientation and team player mentality. Some of the most common benefits of coaching are a reduction on costs and turnover, improved quality and quantity of work, enhanced employee growth, improved problem-solving ability, increased likelihood that goals will be reached, and enriched transfer of training. When you have any type of change in your organization then you must consider using coaching (For example, a merger, downsizing expansion, or relocation is ocurring within the organization). One of the changes that every organization faces is when a new employee join the team. The initial taks of greeting and orienting new employees are very important for you to delegate, so ensure that general company orientation and specific work-unit related guidance is provided. Another opportunity for coaching is by encouraging employees to strive for more responsibility and potentially replacing you on a temporary or permantent basis. It would help a coach to take vacations, special assignments and even promotions since a qualified association is ready to step into his/her position. The Coaching Process Model (CPM) as a systematic process needed by supervisors when coaching. Eight phases compound this model: 1. Establish Goals 2. Collect Performance Data 3. Analyze Performance 4. Review and Modify Performance Goals as Needed. 5. Identify Developmental Resources 6. Develop an action plan 7. Implement Strategies 8. Evaluate Performance. Most of the above tips deal with communication skills, so a solid on-one communication needs to be present. A two-way communication model is described where a sender, message, reciever and feedbak are key elements. If any of these elements are missing, interpersonal communication can not take place and relationships will break down. Failure to send a clear message , listen carefully or to provide feedback ends the exchange of information. Feedback is given by written correspondence, verbal communication, non-verbal communication and trappings. When using feedback try to ask questions such as Is this the right time to provide this feedbak? Is this the right place? Is this the appropriate person to whom I should give this feedback? What is the best way to communicate my message? Giving and receiving possitive and negative feedback are important to be managed by coaches so everyone in the organization benefits from it. If you use good communication skills then you would develop sound relationships with employees, peers and your own boss. What motivated employees thirty years ago does not always work today. Employees in today's workplace are more independent, better educated, more traveled, and less likely to stay in one job their entire career. That's why a coach needs to identify associates' individual and group "hot buttons" or what inspires them. Once a coach have determined the factors that affect employee performance then can address performance gaps. Your focus should be only on performance-related issues, and you should refer employees' personal problems to human resouces or other qualified sources. Employees fail to perform or meet goals generally for the following; 1. They Won't. They are not motivated or they have a poor attitude (lack of concern for work quality, low initiative, and lack of involvement). 2. They Can't.They lack the ability, outside factors impede them (co-workers, technology, procedures, policies, etc,) or inadequate supervisory guidance. 3. They Don't Know How. Lack of technical or job knowledge. This book also analyzes the dealing with superstars. A superstar can be either very helpful or terribly frustrating, depending on a number of factors. These are employees who exceed deadlines, constantly volunteer for additional assignments, help others, test your coaching abilities, etc. This sounds excellent ah? But if their only purpose is to make themselves look good at the expense of you and their team then you have a problem. If this is happening, then put them in leadership positions (team leaders, coordinators, project managers), expand their job responsabilities, listen them as peer coaches and involve them in decision making...

The author has provided a really effective, yet easily understood overview of performance coaching. Included are many activities, tips, models and other useful tools to help in coaching employees on the job. This is an excellent resource for self-study or use in a classroom environment.

Although this book is intended to show how to better service the customer and how that will help businesses, its techniques and theories can be applied to dealing with all people.

It is a very engaging book and will help identify unique traits among people (customers or not) along with unique traits about yourself. Next it shows how to use your uniqueness and tailor it to each situation to effectively deal with people, even with people you would normally avoid. Each chapter is preceded by business people in a variety of fields who emphasize the importance of customer service. Each chapter is ended with questions covering the topics discussed and problem scenarios to apply your new knowledge in dealing with the scenarios.

I found this book to be an eye-opener in how well I know myself and others. I feel that I have matured and developed a better respect for all people. This book could help make you a better service provider, a customer, and a person.

Customer service or customer care is defined as anything that we perform for the customer which enhances his experience of doing business with us. It is his overall feeling of contentment with the complete interaction he has had with the product / service package purchased by him.

The book "Customer Service, Skills and Concepts for Success" by Bob Lucas is truly a feeling of contentment. To be able to understand customer service from the heart and thereafter translate the learning onto action is what this book has done for me. There are several good books on the subject of customer service however they mostly talk about empirical situations in the world of the service provider. However this book by Bob Lucas is unparalleled as it is perhaps the only book which talks about the profession, the skills that are needed to be an ace customer service provider etc.

Real customer service does not happen by accident but will only happen through planning and by practising. This book is practical and action oriented. It has shown me how to keep my customers satisfied and become more profitable while having fun without much stress.

The book should become a basic reading in all colleges and for all frontline sales personnel as well as all frontline customer service representatives so that their induction into the world of customer care is charted out correctly.

Not the book to buy if you are looking for indepth information regarding presentation skills, but exactly what you need if you want to use for self-development or a good class outline on the subject. It covers all the main topics surrounding the subject, but doesn't go into great detail on any one topic. It is well written, easy to read, and provides many useful exercises.

Effective Interpersonal Relationships is an excellent guide for developing or improving your interpersonal skills. It uses realistic scenarios that you can easily relate to. It shows you ways that you can build trust and respect through better communication. This book will teach you valuable skills that you can use not only in the work place but in your personal life. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book.

Comics like "Two-Fisted Science" serve nothing but a good purpose. They remind us that comics - like other art forms - can be about anything, and are not captives of the humor, fantasy and adventure genres.

A science-themed comic is especially appropriate, as the art-text combination inherent to comics would seem perfect for conveying complex/cosmic ideas. This collection features some terrific artists - notably Bernie Mireault, David Lasky, Colleen Doran and Sean Bieri - but I was a bit disappointed in the writing. Ottaviani's stories so intent on being unorthodox and different that they instead become meandering and confusing. Oftentimes I was unsure of what exactly was at stake for each story and why we should care about what was being told. And I would expect to actually learn more about SCIENCE in such a book. Also, the organization of the book into seemingly random sections, and the clumsy, unimaginative publication design diminished the effect.

I give the book high marks for effort, nice artwork, and the especially interesting portraits of Richard Feynman, but overall I'd rate "Two-Fisted Science" a noble failure.

We have given this book to various friends who have enjoyed the hard science topics in the 'comic book' format. We also have given it to nieces and nephews, who may not realize that they are being exposed to science and history. We can chat with them about it later, to see how much they have absorbed and to encourage them to reread it (comics are fun after all).

Local governments are abusing their power in many places because courts usually don't enforce private property rights guaranteed by our Constitution. This is the story one man's 5 year struggle bouncing from court to court, costing hundreds of thousands of dollars to save his land.

The surprise ending shows the extent of the evil in some people. The only part of the book I didn't like was the section of verbatim court testimony.

The book is also partly an autobiography and Lucas has led an interesting life.

All the information you need to find in this one book. History in the making

Covers some good material needed for modern macro analysis, but gets so excited about the math that it forgets to actually do much economics. This book may be mainly authored by Chicago types, but it is Minnesota to its core. Yuck.

A good book if you think you are smarter than most and like to show that off. A bad book if you like to do economics and want to see the payoff that actually (really!) can result from learning some reasonably complex math.

But I do conceed, can be a useful reference and despite all the greek, a few interesting points fall out in between the equations.

If you want to do modern dynamic models of macroeconomics, and need the basic tools, this is an essential part of the toolkit. The book has been out for a while, and there have been developments in the field that probably need to be in the next edition. But it does present the basics of what could be described as the CarnegieMellon-Minnesota-Chicago approach to modern dynamic macroeconomics developed by Lucas and Prescott in the early seventies, the work that led to the Rational Expectations Revolution and current work in Real Business Cycle Theory. This is what you need to read papers in Econometrica or the Journal of Economic Theory. This is a standard graduate macroeconomics text. Some reviewers have criticized it without fully understanding the objectives of the authors. For instance, read Chapter 5, with its careful, and explicit examples of how to use these methods in constructing simple and parsimonious models. Yes, some of it is a rehash of standard theorems in dynamic programming, and measure theory, and so on, but the goal was to provide these in one location, so that you don't have to learn these by digging through the appendices of Bob Lucas' papers, or the first 100 pages of Dunford and Schwarz's Linear Operators or Halmos, or the Annals of Mathematical Statistics where Blackwell published the results that are now used.

I would recommend Sargent's books as an useful accompaniment, and also perhaps the Exercises by Sargent and Manuelli.

SLP is now a standard text in serious, modern economics. It seriously and thoroughly explains the tools that will be useful for economists in decades to come. No doubt it will "aquire the stature of Samuelson's Foundations or Hicks's Value and Capital". It's nosense that those who can't understand it say "oh, no, too technical". Please! The same was said of Marshall's Principles!

The book covers nothing in depth. Its attempt at offering tuition on how to build expert systems hardly scratched the surface. Generally a very dissapointing buy.

I have used Mastering Prolog for several years as a introductory text for undergraduate students being introduced to logic programming for the first time. I find it a very clear practical book with easy to follow exercises that logically build on one another. I feel that the previous reviewer who critised the book for it's lack of depth and shallow treatment of expert systems was missing the point. As an introductory text it is precisely its simplicity that makes it so useful, compared with many others, for the beginner. The book is not a guide to building expert systems. This topic is merely covered in order to illustrate the kind of application that the language is appropriate for, and to suggest, at an appropriate level, how the contruction of such applications may progress. My only criticism is that there remain some errors in one or two of the exercise solutions.