Eras Books

You get five excellent books for the price of one with Clicks and Mortar. Let me explain.

This is the first book that I have read about innovating with e-commerce that truly straddles the divide between existing business principles and the new economy. Unlike many of the books on e-commerce which are written by consultants, pundits, Web site designers, and technologists, this book is written by business people who have successfully made the transition into using the Internet to enable all their stakeholders. That perspective alone makes this book a valuable contribution to the literature, because it allows everyone to understand the overall business perspective of how to think about this new technology.

Beyond that benefit, the book also serves as a fine best practice example of developing e-commerce businesses based on the successful experiences of Charles Schwab. The details of this example are much more complete than I have read elsewhere, and Charles Schwab is one of a handful of firms that have successfully changed their business models. In fact, the company has appeared on my CEO 100 list more times than any company other than Clear Channel Communications and Tellabs.

Third, this book is valuable for focusing on people (customers, employees, suppliers, partners, and regulators) as the basis for thinking about technology and new business opportunities. The book does so in a sound and thoughtful way that will be helpful to companies that are not challenged by new technologies, as well as those that are. If you are a humanist, or someone who believes that business starts with creating a customer, you will find that this book expands your perspective on great ways to do that. The authors understand that passion for a larger purpose is the glue (the mortar of the title) to bring people together to advance service for customers (using clicks, in this case, through computer technology).

Fourth, this book also has value in filling in gaps in the perspective of most business people, technologists, and new business developers. The beauty of the book is that it does so in a way that will encourage the dialogue and community across narrow perspectives to build something better.

Finally, the book transcends its narrow example base of Charles Schwab by referring to other books, studies, and companies to provide a full perspective on effective ways to drive innovation and improvement in a large or small organization.

The book is easy to read and interesting. Although financial services is not my favorite subject, I enjoyed what the authors had to say about Charles Schwab. The rest of the material was even more compelling and useful.

The book is also very well organized. Summaries of key points are interspaced with more fully developed arguments and examples. The authors alternate in presenting their ideas and experiences, so you also get the benefit and the interest inherent in two voices and speakers. That was very well done. It is a device that more co-authors should consider using.

Finally, the book did something that almost no case history books ever do. It took a moment to look ahead for the next 20 years. The final section is a roundtable discussion with 8 experts in the field. I would give the book 5 stars, just for the idea of including this section. The execution is also excellent.

This book is one of my nominees for top business book of 2000. Get it right now! Read it immediately!! Live it every day!!!

Lewis's short monograph is an engaging study of wealthy Southern men and women's experiences in Virginia resort communities between the American Revolution and the Civil War. Lewis's bent towards gender history is evident throughout, but she also pays careful attention to class relations, taste and gentility, medical issues, and the not-so-hidden role that slaves and slavery played in these communities. Her work is academic in tone, with frequent references to the historiography of antebellum planter society, yet the writing is clear enough and entertaining enough to make the work appealing to general readers.

The book can be read in about an hour and a half, so it's really short. The storytelling in this short read, however, is magnificient. The histoire and recit is not complex at all, letting the reader immerse him/herself into the themes of the book. You'll fall in love with some of the characters, and Carlitos will probably remind you of yourself when you were a child.

En muy pocas páginas, Pacheco nos cuenta la historia de México en los años 50 por los ojos de Carlos, un hombre quién está recordando su adolesencia en la Colonia Roma, D.F. En este bildungsroman, encontramos de nuevo el primer amor y la entrada al mundo adulto, un mundo en que uno se lucha contra la perdición.

I've read this book as a reference for my thesis for my graduation, and it is one of the most important readings about women fighters in the Mexican Revolution.
It is written by one of the most important Mexican writer and intellectual and she gives an insight of a side of Mexican history and society that helps to understand more about that country and its identity.

Overall, the amount of exposure American policy toward Latin America receives in the media is sorely lacking. The public remains ignorant of our government's role in shaping the internal politics of Latin American countries. Wright documents how the US government responded to the Cuban revolution and the revolutionary/reformatory movements that arose as a result of it in other Latin American countries. Avoiding sensationalism and sentimentality, Wright recounts how in instance after instance, America chose to support pro-American governments while bringing about the downfall of anti-American governments, or any administration that might possibly have socialist or communist leanings. Although information dense, this book is both compelling and easy to read.

When I read this novel I felt I was in that era, living with its people.
The novel discusses complicated issues by simple style and focus on the sequence of events.
It discusses serious issues like deficit, poverty, justice, and persecution,
all that in only 100 pages.
It is an interesting, unique, and wonderful novel.
I recommend all readers to read it....

"This book analyses the social, political and religious roles of confraternities -- the lay groups through which Italians of the Renaissance expressed their individual and collective religious beliefs -- in Bologna in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Confraternities shaped the civic religious cult through charitable activities, public shrines and processions. This civic religious role expanded as they became politicized: patricians used the confraternities increasingly in order to control the civic religious cult, civic charity, and the city itself.

This book examines in detail how confraternities initially provided laypeople of the artisanal and merchant class with a means of expressing a religious life separate from, but not in opposition to, the local parish or mendicant house. By the mid-sixteenth century, patricians dominated the traditional lay confraternities while artisans and merchants had few options beyond parochial confraternities which were controlled by parish priests."

Disclosure: I know John Renesch socially, although I don't believe it has influenced my star rating, it's only fair to tell the reader.

Leadership is hard to define in these changing times where organizations are evolving to become flatter and more fluid as the marketplace becomes more global and information-based. This compilation of 23 essays, organized into five thematic sections, does an amazing job of bringing a diversity of viewpoints, concerns and approaches to such an amorphous, but no less critical, topic.

Although some of the essays make specific recommendations, this is not a step by step "how-to" book like so much of the literature on business topics. As Stephen Covey points out, management and leadership are distinct skills - this book is NOT a management text. Rather, it is a spark of inspiration to light your own leadership fire and prompt reflection wherever you might be stuck. Many of the articles emphasize the role of a spiritual dimension in business and in leadership. Authenticity, listening, cultivating awareness and personal growth are recurring themes throughout the essays.

In places, some readers may find the essays too "new age" or contradictory. I'd encourage them to remember that ambiguity and paradox are the very challenges that most require leadership and adaptation without reliance on the hard, proven, old certainties. By contrast, the fourth essay, Ann Morrison's "Diversity and Leadership Development", takes a very precise and hard-nosed approach to a topic that I've seen most companies attack with a flurry of fluffy symbolic lip-service and inept half-measures. Morrison describes a model for how leaders develop, identifies the challenges faced by "nontraditional" candidates in that model, and, outlines specific steps companies can take to avoid common pitfalls if they are truly committed to building diversity at the top and throughout the organization.

My favorite single quote, which should give the reader a good feel for the overall book, is the following by James Autry in the first essay: "Or could it be that those who believe in the greed of the marketplace have just found a convenient excuse for their own greed or for their own unwillingness to concern themselves with the human spirit?"

The book was for a college-level political science course that fulfilled the course requirements.