Industry Books

An extremely helpful short book on the important concepts and specific details of Robert's Rules. Authoritative, yet easy to understand. Points you in the direction of the 600 plus full edition if you need more info. We've bought it for all our committee chairs.

Concise and clear which is the purpose of Robert's Rules of Order. Meetings conducted in this format are much more productive with less turmoil and emotional distraction.

Perfect brief overview for anyone running meetings or participating in them. Unlike the reputation they sometimes have, Robert's rules are designed to facilitate discussion and decision-making, not to tie the group down to a set of rules. Give this a read, and you will see how cleverly and comprehensibly it sets out the entire process. Perfect for any organization, large or small. Highly recommended.

This brief is a great introduction to Robert' Rules. Easy reading. Many nuggets that I did not even find in the full edition. I recommend it to all those who are on boards and commissions and associations.

Well written summary -- this is the abbreviated version and it is very useful. Helps to have the full-up version as well, for details, but this one is a super guide.

If you are an enterpreneur and you want to know how to price your product, don't look any further this is the book you are looking for. The chapter about costs has an MBA level and it will give you a lot of good ideas of how to improve your busines operation.

I updated from the 2nd edition I bought years ago. I'm glad to see the focus on value-based pricing. I was a little disappointed that it gets a bit repetitive on calculating price changes and it would be useful to see more examples on calculating the initial price when you really don't have much data to go on.

This book is one of the best in pricing. It is used as a textbook in business schools and highly recommended by consultants.
Unfortunately, it took 10 days to arrive using standard shipping.

I have spent over 30 years in computer software sales, pricing, and terms and conditions. This book resonates with me, specifically with it's emphasis on sustained company profitability rather than get rich quick pricing. It's comprehensive, not specialized to any specific product set or industry, and nothing I read failed to make sense to me, based on my experience.

If you are interested in this topic, there is no better work I know of to give you both practical and good theoretical advice.

This is the reference book of many of the best MBA courses in US, and when I started the reading, I realised why. It's written in a very easy way, and covers all the topics on pricing: strategy of pricing, segmentation, unbundling products and finally emotional pricing.

I have never readen any princing book before. At first, I thougt it would be hard to read, difficult to understand and almost all full of mathematics. This book is not so. In fact, the authors try to explain all the topics by words, not by numbers.

Actually, princing managers tipically try to find diverse formulae to apply to price their items. Nevertheless, this book teaches you that it is one of the ways, but pricing a product is much more than using a formulae...it is strategy and psicology as well!!!

This CD set took me from working the night shift at our town's local 7-11 straight to the lofty heights of the music business. Its a downright miracle. Its no coincidence that every single other reviewer gives this CD series 5 stars and as well as heaping on well deserved praise. If I didn't know Ty's work to be the message from God that it is, I would question the veracity of all these testimonials and wonder whether Ty or Ty's mother has a lot of email accounts. But since we know that's not true, we can go on enjoying the veritable gold nuggets of wisdom about today's music business crammed onto these CDs. I only hope that we can get Ty to turn his mighty mental powers to solving some other of the world's great challenges such as poverty and disease. If he does, these calamities won't stand a chance.

Are you tired of getting turned down by music companies? I was. I got this book from a friend for my birthday. So, I figured, `what have I got to lose?' The book surprised me. Cohen gives you everything you need to know about getting a start in the music industry. It has useful contacts and insider tips that give you an edge on the everyday musician. If you're serious about your music and want to get it in the right hands, get this book.

Ty Cohen has done it again. He has made the music industry so easy to understand and anyone can use the strategies that he provides. Cohen is able to show us all that being a musician with your own record label is possible and easy. Through a simplified process, any aspiring musician can implement these plans and put them into action within 21 days. If you are in the music industry, there is no better guide for getting a record label running on a small budget but still be successful and make money. My business is in a better place since "stumbling" across Ty Cohen's resources.

Thank you for putting together this resource for the music business. It certainly has given me some additional contact info and some other little surprises I'll keep secret.

The e book will be on my desktop to compliment some other resource books I have aquired in the last several months.

Thanks Ty for a great resource...

Lou
BackStage Pass

Great resource for any musicians out there that need to get their product into the right hands. Loaded with tons of useful contacts for all aspects of the music business from sales,distribution, legal etc. Easily downloaded and excellent customer service form Ty Cohen and his team at Platinum Millenium!

good book for the people who are already in to business or planning to start

Form any startup, the founding team must commit to a getting it right - for it is not easy to getting your market and product right - what you need is likely what I needed for my latest startup - Pay Parade [...] - author and entrepreneur Paul Hawken provides an insightful tale of how to farm your newly seeded company - whereas I thought of this book to help me with marketing, I ended up learning that it often takes more of a cultivated farming sensibility than any hard marketing science. Go ahead and treat yourself to a gift that keeps on giving - purchase yourself a copy of Growing Your Business.

What a spectacular little business bible for a world that has forgotten that business and people are one and the same. Read this book.

This book was my constant companion when I first started my company 12 years ago. I underlined, starred and highlighted countless passages and dog-eared the corners of numerous pages. The underlying philosophies still guide me--be in it for the long haul, create legendary service, you can never rush the rules of the field, and focus, focus, focus. This is especially true in light of the Internet where everything happens at lightning speed. But business is still about people and relationships. Nurture them. Whenever I meet someone about to start a business, I send them a copy of this book. It's the best advice I can give them: read it.

1. Tire of spending too much time looking for natural foods, Hawken starts Boston's first natural food store. In the first year, the company was grossing $300 and it was fun. "As the years rolled by, the company made money, lost it, hired hundreds of employees, bought railroad cars, opened stores and warehouses on both coasts, set up wholesale and manufacturing facilities, flirted with bankruptcy, and engendered a host of lean and hungry competitors-some of them friends and former associates."
2. The more exposure I gained to the "official" world of business, the more I began to doubt that I was in business at all. I seemed to be doing something different.
3. I believe that for a new and growing business, too much money is a greater problem than too little.
4. Being a good human being is good business.
5. There is no institute in American life that is freer to do what is wants to do than a business, and that includes creating its own jobs. The self-owned and operated business is the freest life in the world.
6. I believe most if not all, the successful business operate with values that go beyond opportunism.
7. Entrepreneurial ideas spring from a deep immersion in some occupation, hobby, or other pursuit, spurred by something missing in the world. The entrepreneur is often the first one to spot the opening, and if things work out that person will have a successful business.
8. To find the beginning, reduce your business idea to its apparent essence. Then reduce it again.
9. If a business is to grow you have to own it-the acts, habits, functions, jobs, and grunt labor.
10. A time will come when the primal fears emerge: What have I done? Isn't someone else doing it, too, and better? You will feel a strange loneliness.
11. Fear of failure may or may not be helpful but it is rationale. Every businessman, no matter how intelligent and resourceful, can and will fall prey to delusion and misjudgment.
12. As a businessperson you will encounter some of the strangest behavior you've ever seen. You will be incredulous to see people you thought you knew and trusted-good people, really become remarkable manipulators of truth and reality. Business is people. Expect the unexpected.
13. You have to gone into business to discover, change, serve, inform, transform, improve, and delight someone. You won't sell to this person otherwise. The entrepreneur asks, "Why not".
14. Business is about practice. It is not about theories or the testing of revolutionary ideas.
15. The major problem affecting business is a lack of imagination, not capital.
16. If money could solve problems, there would be no small business because the big business with plenty of money would run everything.
17. When your business encounters problems and messes stay with them. Find something valuable down in the dreck. One of the greatest errors of much business literature today is its attempt to instill certainty with checklists, must-dos, the motherhoods, ten principles, axiom galore, and other assorted truisms.
18. A good business has interesting problems, a bad business has boring ones. Good management is the art of making the problems so interesting and their solutions so constructive that everyone wants to get work and deal with them. Good problems energize.
19. From 1978 to 1986, GM grew sales from $63 billion to $102 billion but the company's share of domestic car market fell from 48 percent to 39 percent. Price increases, inflation, and acquisitions were the source of GMs growth. The point, every company dies.
20. Information is nothing more than how to make or accomplish something in the best way: more useful, longer lasting, easier to repair, lighter, stronger, and less energy consuming.
21. Global paradox, every small business has the potential advantage because big business, government, labor unions, schools, often don't deliver the goods.
22. If we are in economy that is organized increasingly around the amount of information that I in products, rather than around the amount of stuff, then the ability to create difference in manufacturing and delivery of goods and service will be the key to success.
23. Imagination and creativity are more useful than aggressiveness.
24. Big business are not more efficient, productive, or innovative than small businesses.
25. To consume means to use up, to waste, to destroy. Real income has fallen. As consumers, we can not afford to waste, so we buy products that are better and last longer. It is our demand for a better designed and operated world that is behind the tumultuous change we see in the marketplace today.
26. The American consumer is inherently dissatisfied. My business has started from my being a customer and not liking what I could buy. I suspect your business will begin that way too.
27. Good business ideas provide people with something that was right there-or not right there-all the time, but no one recognized it. When you recognize and provide it, they'll buy it.
28. Buy as directly as possible, sell directly as possible, and reduce overhead as much as possible.
29. After you have a business idea, I recommend that you subject it to the scrutiny of a business plan. A business plan broadly describes the nature of the business, the type of product being manufactured or service offered, and the advantage or benefits the product offers. A business plan is a test of the depth and thoroughness with which you have thought out your idea. The temptation is to fudge your plan toward what you believe the reader wants to read, rather than what you want to do. A well-developed business plan must be true to your own vision and purpose in order to be a useful tool.
30. Businesses lull themselves into failure, and this often reflects their inability to learn what the immediate business environment is saying.
31. Every business plan paints a rosy future, but few people going into business closely examine the possibility and the results of this hoped-for triumph.
32. When writing a business plan image that you are writing to a friend whose opinion and intelligence you admire, but who knows nothing about your current venture.
33. For a new company, a good marketing plan is simple, to the point, and easy to follow.
34. A consistent mistake companies make is not including their employees as owners.
35. Equity, whether in the form of incentive-type options, ESOPs, grants, loans, or pooled interests, should have the single purpose of creating a sense of shared conditions: we are in this together and will act accordingly.
36. If you are offered cash, loans, or advice, accept only the latter.
37. Friends are the first source of money for most small businesses.
38. SBA is the lender of last resort.
39. We keep our investors informed, not with the volume of information we produce, but with its accuracy.
40. Money goes to the least embarrassing situation.
41. Generosity, ampleness, and abundance draw money to ideas, people, and businesses.
42. A seasoned businessperson never presumes to know the truth of today. An experienced businessperson always asks questions. A green one will always have the answers.
43. Many people in business with little or no education or training nevertheless succeed-in good part because they have an intuitive sense of these numbers.
44. The more experience you have in business, the more money you can spend on a new business. Profit is the cost of doing business.
45. To grow, your business you must earn the permission of the marketplace.

This book is an excellent tool. It focuses very specifically on effectively creating a business presentation. The tips were valuable to be and I have been creating presentations for several years. It will also be very easy to reference in the future.

This book is about making CONSCIOUS decisions for balancing the story board itself for hard facts, visual, ethical and psychological aspects, politicily correctness etc. but of course doesnt stop there.

The book shows and discusses which elements you need to convey your story and why you use certain presentation technics over others to achieve your goals.

The book is devided in 14 chapters. Each chapter is focused on either

a) How to create or develop your basic story or on
b) How to enhance it

(by using the described technics and its implications and reactons it will provoke).

What makes this book standing out is the careful analyzation of the aspects that came into play when giving an presentation.

That obviously includes the analytical skills itself but also the time and effort to explicitely mention and discuss (dis)advantages of each element.


The carefully chosen presentation samples will be disassembled throughout the book and taken apart into its peaces, analyzed, explained and put back together.

Where required, the example will be (dis)assembled several times to bring the points across.

Its the analysation of those presentations and its aspects to a granular level and putting the gained knowledge into a conscious presentation creation process that make the book so valuable.

Most books tell you just how to use software to make graphics etc. but this book tells you what you have to present to your adience to actually win them over.

The fact that the many aspects are explicitely explained helps you visualize the options you have at your disposal and the reason why you chose one presentation form over another.

While this book focuses on presentations that show off your assets and the art of persuasion. There is also a companion book "In the line of Fire" which focuses more on the defense to hardball questions.

I do also want to recommend a third book - "Dan Roams: Back of the Napkin" which focuses more on the technical aspects of how to find your story, and a strong focus on visualizing it fool prove and providing rock solid hard facts that wont be beaten.

What Jerry*s books does express very well is the fact that giving a presentation is like being an athlet.
You will have to exercise "verbalize" regularly to be in top form when it counts.

Good luck to you !!

We've all sat through presentations that dragged on forever, but led nowhere. What's worse, we've probably even given a few. As the author puts it, "The problem is that no one knows how to tell a story...and no one knows that they don't know how to tell a story."
Author Jerry Weissman boils it down to telling a compelling story. That's easy to say, but hard to do. With this book's guidance, you can become an effective communicator--whether convincing employees of the need to change, persuading prospects that you have the best solution or leading skeptical community groups to support your cause.

Presenting to Win overflows with practical advice on how to engage an audience by telling your story with a focus on what's important to them. You become an `audience advocate' whose concern for your listeners' needs puts them at the heart of your presentation. As Weissman describes it:
"Persuasion is the art of moving your audience from Point A, a place of ignorance, indifference, or even hostility toward your goal...navigating them through an unbroken series of Aha!s...to Point B, a place where they will act as your investors, customers, partners, or advocates, ready to march to your drum."

By following Weissman's detailed roadmap, we can learn how to tell stories that move and motivate our listeners by keeping them engaged from a compelling start to a big finish.

Silicon Valley Presentation Guru

Weissmann's first career was as a Hollywood producer and screenwriter. His friendship with venture capitalist, Ben Rosen, led him to his second career as a presentation guru. In 1988, he launched a business that taught high tech executives to move from feature-laden, techno-speak dissertations to engaging, listener-centric presentations. Yahoo, Intuit, Cisco, Microsoft, and Intel all benefited from his teachings.

The Opening Gambit is Just the Beginning
Weissman offers plenty of real world anecdotes, how-tos, and helpful graphics that convey how to grab and keep your audience. His opening gambit concept typifies his approach. He first offers the rationale, supports it with multiple success stories, and describes a broad range of opening gambits.
To engage an audience, an opening gambit pulls them out of a state of disinterest or suspicion about you and your presentation. Asking questions is one of seven such gambits discussed. In 1993, Scott Cook founder of Intuit (maker of Quicken and QuickBooks) faced a jaded audience of investment bankers. Rather than launch into a feature packed discussion of his new product, he asked two questions:
* How many of you balance your own checkbooks?
* How many enjoy doing it?
After a round of chuckles, he continued, "You're not alone. Millions of people around the world hate balancing their checkbooks. We at Intuit have developed an easy-to-use, inexpensive home finance tool named, Quicken." With this `Aha' moment, Cook was off and running.
Beyond the Opening Gambit--Components of Successful Presentations
Equally insightful chapters on presentation essentials provide a level of detail and clarity that leaves nothing to chance. They include:
* Story development
* Graphic design
* Delivery skills
* Tools
* Q & A techniques
In each case, Weissman

Presenting to Win: A Blueprint Worth Following

Weissman demonstrates that even those of us who aren't naturals can present to win. Learning what he teaches requires significant effort because his approach contains such a broad range of interrelated elements--and includes variations that differ depending on purpose, topic, and audience. Making it easy for our audience is hard for us. But, as Microsoft, Intel, Cisco, Intuit, and Yahoo learned, the effort is well worth it.

Presenting to Win is a terrific book. I got a clear, structured, sensible system to create presentations that will skyrocket the level of mine. I will keep this handy every time. Thanks for sharing your wisdom, Jerry.

Jerry Weissman is one of those rare people who has written an authoritative sounding book about how to present and has the real experience and background to justify every claim he makes.

The book starts with the premise that the presenter must focus on the audience and that he must make them focus on him. He must understand the mental point they are at (Point A) and moves them to Point B. He must understand what is in it for them (WIIFY) and constantly use it as he constructs every slide to walk them to Point B. He must also understand the setting of the audience, and his main points of argument. Finally, he must tie those points together with a flow structure that fits his argument.

That's the first half of the book and as someone who has through some awful presentations, I can only wish reading this book were the equivalent of a driver's license for public speakers.

The back half of the book draws on his background in television and employs standard cinematic techniques to improve the appearance of PowerPoint. It's easy to overlook this part, but it makes a huge difference as well.

I've now had a chance to see people who have used these techniques for years present, and it makes a huge difference. I have also seen someone present in a tough situation using these techniques for the first time. This person is level-headed and not given to fads. His comment? "I wish I had run to Jerry's book ten years earlier."

If you speak in public, this is the one book you have to read, and re-read. It is common sensical, based in fact, and surprisingly intuitive.

Ms Muir is a great storyteller. I was interested in the topic and prepared to slog through boring text to learn something, but this was AMAZING. Read like a novel. She sees inter-relationships and draws conclusions which taught me a lot. Now I want to read everything she's written. I was sorry when I finished this book.

It is hard to imagine how Reflections in Bullough's Pond could have been better written. Diana Muir gives an account of the interplay between New England's economic history and its environment in a lapidary prose which never leaves the reader behind. By the end of the book we are enlightened about the ebb and flow of these matters over the five hundred-odd years from early European settlement to modern times without ever being overwhelmed, for Ms Muir always wears her erudition lightly.

She breaks new ground in her treatment of the environment as both an economic resource and as a complex-often vulnerable-amalgam of ecosystems. Her thesis is that we are living on capital, be it fossil fuel, topsoil or forest-she is particularly compelling on the vulnerable biochemistry of these last. Unusually, however, Ms Muir is scrupulous in her use of statistics and fastidious in her argument. She never seeks to undermine the legitimacy of the economic impulse, though she does not flinch from her conclusion: an argument for restraint in economic activity and population.

Nor does she lose sight of the propensity of ecosystems to renew themselves, albeit often in new forms: she is pleased-almost amused-by the return of the beaver and the moose, while regretting the extinction of the elm and the emergence of local spruce monocultures. Indeed Ms Muir expresses herself more forcefully on the loss of flora than fauna. Perhaps this is because the long life cycles of the former make it harder to take an optimistic view of their capacity to renew themselves. Alternatively it may be because the collapse of agriculture in New England following the opening up of the West, has stimulated the return to southern New England of so many species formerly evicted to Canada.

Reflections in Bullough's Pond is no naïve elegy for a Paradise Lost; it never loses sight of a human interplay with the landscape which long antedates industrialisation, not to say European settlement. In a particularly ingenious section of the book, Ms Muir reminds us that in the middle of the nineteenth century, the courts and legislatures altered common law doctrines of liability to free up industrial activity. This reflected the climate of the times. Ms Muir argues that the climate of our own times may well give rise to more extensive liability concepts to restrain the corporations, notions very much with the tail wind of popular and professional thinking.

Given the book's generosity and elegance, it seems curmudgeonly to cavil at any part of it. But a couple of issues do arise. First forests. Since the invention of agriculture, we have cleared them for the simple reason that we have better uses for the land. This has been going on in the Old World for millennia. Of course there have been local environmental disasters, eg in North Africa and Mesopotamia, but nothing sufficiently general to justify veneration of forests as a precautionary measure. This is an artefact of late-twentieth century sentiment in the New World. There such virgin forests as have not lost within living memory are being destroyed even now, thus the local salience of the issue. Over the past fifteen years their defenders have sought to enlist support by arguing that they served one or another vital purpose: producing oxygen, acting as feedstock for drugs, now Ms Muir points to their role in topsoil. The first two arguments are infrequently heard these days. As to the last, let me point out that where I grew up in the eastern part of England, the ground was cleared eight or nine hundred years ago, but the topsoil remains sufficiently fertile for the local farmers to get out record yields.

I was also left uncertain as to the course Ms Muir might prescribe for the several billion who have never seen Bullough's Pond, and whose habitats have been profoundly altered by economic activity for millenia rather than centuries. The residents of Asia's great river valleys cleared the forests long before Columbus saw the New World. They have to eat-with luck raise themselves above thoughts of the next meal. Ms Muir has practical suggestions as to how the courts might restrain US corporations, but nothing on how to restrain the aspirations of those who dream of a fraction of American prosperity. I suspect she is wise enough to know that there is nothing to be done on this score. In a rare nod towards the nether reaches of environmental alarmism, she hints that she expects nature to impose population restraint, if we do not. I am more sanguine. In whatever might come to pass as in what has come before, we will wade through. As we must.

Other reviewers have discussed the virtues of the book, so I will only add that the lessons to be learned from this well written and fascinating study are relevant to the entire planet, not just New England. As such, the book is highly recommended to anyone anywhere who is interested in mankind's relationship to the environment and its effects on culture and economics.

This is one of the best books I have ever read- period! At the core of the book is Ms. Muir's message that we are part of nature, not separate from or above nature, and we have a great responsibility to maintain the integrity of the environment. Granted, this message is not new. Where this book is very different is how Ms. Muir leads up to this message. She shows how the New England landscape changed from one where farming dominated to one that was a mixture of many different types of mills and factories. You learn the consequences of everything that was done along the way: the consequences to fish and birds of damming rivers; the consequences to forests and to the air we breath of heavy logging; the consequences of catching too many of one type of fish, etc. What is great about this book is that Ms. Muir does not deal in hazy generalities. She takes you step by step and shows you specifically how certain actions cause certain changes in the environment, often unforseen. There is nothing simplistic in her observations and she knows there are no easy answers. She lays out the data for you and you can come to your own conclusions. But what really takes this book to another level is the fascinating biographical information that Ms. Muir provides concerning the many, many New Englanders that invented the machines of the Industrial Revolution and kept the economy vibrant as the importance of agriculture diminished. The way this book is put together is very unusual, due to the combination of all of the above factors and in the space of 248 pages you will learn a great deal of information. The research Ms. Muir must have done in writing this book is staggering and her knowledge across many different areas is amazing. Don't miss reading this book.

Using a pond near her home in Newton, MA as a backdrop, Diana Muir weaves a compelling view of New England history, which she argues is a series of ecological crises.

From pre-Columbian times, Muir says, New England was populated by individuals struggling on a land that was not conducive to making a living. Radical solutions to unsolvable problems were their only escape. In the 1790s, when farming was the only occupation, a growing population and a soil spent by generations of misuse, resulted in a dearth of farmable land. With no prospects and no future, individuals like Eli Whitney and Thomas Blanchard, were forced to look for creative solutions to society's problems and set in motion an industrial revolution.

I was particularly intrigued by the story of Frederick Tudor, the man who in 1806 introduced ice to Martinique. It is one thing to sell ice to people who because of their location, understand the concept. It is quite another, to sell ice to people who have never experienced it, to say nothing about the practical necessities of ice houses to warehouse the product.

His father's real estate speculation losses left Tudor with nothing but ambition and a house with a pond in Saugus, MA. He succeeded after two difficult decades. There was always a wrinkle to be solved before a fortune could be built. Iceboxes had to be designed and then marketed in southern ports to people who had to be taught how to preserve it.

This phenomenon explains why there so many Crystal and Silver Lakes dot the New England landscape, relics of an enterprising age. Savvy ice dealers understood that attractive names sell products. For a brief period even Muir's Bullough's Pond was briefly renamed Silver Lake.

Diana Muir e-mailed me twice during the past two years introducing her book to me. Having read her book, I am grateful for her persistence. If you enjoy reading unique looks at our history, I implore not to wait for her to contact you. Read her book; you will not regret it.

I had an original post WWII copy of this book and gave it away when I moved from W.Va..... Boy, was that ever a mistake!!!! I needed a copy for an event here honoring the Veterans, and so I was very pleased to see this one in print..... Bill looks at war from the dogface's perspective, and I'm quite sure there's a Bill Mauldin in Iraq somewhere.... but he's tied to the Internet and I'm not sure if we'll get good pen and ink sketches outta him now..... Bill had the way of seeing the ironic, the humerous, and the just plain sorry, in the average G.I.'s battle to survive....... I'd recommend it to school teachers for a look at WWII (AND I'd hustle up some of the last survivors... that first hand look isn't going to be with us much longer).............the Students would actuall LEARN something useful!!!

I am very satisfied with my purchase.The book itself is a pleasure to look at.The drawings are just as funny as I found them as a kid.The writing itself is new to me,but superb.It will allways be among my favourit books.Again marvellous

Indispensable depiction of the face of the Second World War. War and the pity of war. The humour is in the pity.

It's a gift, the ability to draw, to have perspective, to create, to be able to portray human misery as humor, for a reader to see the image and words and turn to laughter. Bill Mauldin had this gift that gained prominence in a time of war where talents rise to their greatest heights or sink to their lowest depths.

Truth is portrayed in humor or the humor isn't funny. Sergeant Bill Mauldin, an infantryman, barely twenty, and serving in Italy picks up a pencil and anything he can draw on, and begins to sketch two characters named Willy and Joe, two, brave, disheveled, irreverent, likeable and crusty infantry soldiers that give meaning to the names infantrymen were referred to as: ground-pounders, dogfaces, legs, and grunts. Mauldin portrays their grim and grimy existence with fatalistic pictures and captions--or grunts. One called "Breakfast in Bed" finds one of them waking up under a cow's utters, or the one where both are in a rain-filled foxhole and Willie touches Joe's shoulder saying, "Joe, yesterday ya saved my life an' I swore I'd pay ya back. Here's my last pair o' dry socks," or with rain pelting down on a scrawny dog facing the opening of their make-shift shelter, one of them says: "Let'im in. I wanna see a critter I kin feel sorry fer." My all-time favorite is a drunk German staggering toward a hidden Willie and Joe, holding a bottle of schnapps, unaware that he is wandering into American lines: "Don't startle `im, Joe. It's almost full."

These cartoons show the comradeship that soldiers developed for each other that would last a lifetime. Each man knew each other better than his own family or spouse ever would, and they could see the good and the bad in everything. They would carry a wounded lieutenant back to safety because he wasn't a "salutin' demon," or curse the Germans as vile, evil Nazis for scuttling a large keg of cognac before their retreat. These soldiers were miserable without being despondent. They were scared without being cowardly. They complained about their predicaments, but carried out their mission as American soldiers always do--attacking silently. The viewer cannot help but feeling empathy and admiration for soldiers who sometimes spent thirty months "in the line."

Mauldin goes further than just making us laugh at the miserable existence of two men trying to stay alive. His real success is that his humor defines the very best and most humane in the human character when it is engaged in its most destructive behavior. It is also timeless. Seventy years later, civilians and servicemen can still see the gallows humor in Willie and Joe's death-defying predicaments.

"Up Front" is Mauldin's account, of what he was doing when he created a particular drawing, why he made sure to include medics, engineers, chaplains, and even Tommies. The writing is matter of fact, well-written, and interesting, but without fascination. That was saved for the cartoons. The author is explaining each one in his text. It's the drawings and the captions that make this book a winner and a conversation piece.

Bill Mauldin died January 22, 2003. Willie and Joe occupying a foxhole filled with water and several cubic feet of complaints, live on.

Think about this the next time you put on a pair of dry socks, and marvel at the simple pleasure of just how good they feel.



May 26, 2008 Memorial Day (observed)

In Memory of the Fallen and all our Gold Star Mothers--especially today.

Of course, this is not a novel. It's a collection of cartoons as they appeared in the Armed Services newspaper Stars and Stripes. The cartoon began to appear in 1944 as the invasion of Europe was underway and millions of Allied troops were fighting their way through Italy and France and into the heart of the third reich.
After a few false starts, Mauldin settled on two characters, Willie and Joe-infantry men. Willie and Joe (who were barely distinguishable from each other) were concerned with all the things that veterans said concerned them during the war. Lousy food was as much of a concern as enemy artillery, fear of cold, wet feet as annoying as the fear of death.
The cartoons, and Mauldin's self-effacing recollections together form a kind of narrative that is at once immensely personal and deeply historical. Mauldin was a pioneer. It was ten years before Cornelius Ryan The Longest Day: The Classic Epic of D-Dayturned personal narratives into history and almost forty before Ken Burns came along.The War - A Film By Ken Burns and Lynn Novick
Mauldin was, in effect, the only war reporter who was relatively uncensored. Since his cartoons carried no strategic information, his only worry was the military's possible perception that he might be lowering troop morale with his swipes at the brass and the rear-echelon. Fortunately, some American sensibility that 'it's good to laugh at the boss even if the boss is us' prevailed.

Up Front was one of the few books that my parents kept by their bedside. This is the book that helped the post-war generation remember the war as it was fought by the men who did the hard work. A quiet masterpiece.

Lynn Hoffman, author of bang BANG: A Novel

As the wife of a homebrewer, I often pretended to listen to my husband's dreams of one day starting his own brewery. After five years of pretending, I realized he was serious when he handed me Beer School and said, "If you're ever going to get on board, you've got to read this book." As a medical professional, the idea of reading a "business" book made me yawn. To my surprise, I couldn't put it down. I felt as if Tom and Steve were sitting across the table, telling me their story over dinner. Their honesty was both eye-opening and inspiring. I learned so much from Beer School and enjoyed every second of it. Reading this book gives you a good idea of how difficult it is to be successful in starting and running your own business, all the while making you feel like you can do it.
BTW-after reading Beer School, I finally got on board with my husband....founder of Tallgrass Brewing Company!

I've no great interest in the brewery business, but I do enjoy well-written, instructive tales of entrepreneurship. 'Beer School' definitely falls into that category. One-time journalist and co-founder Steve Hindry can really write. No surprise there. The pleasant surprise is that ex-banker and fellow co-founder Tom Potter's chapters are just as enjoyable. Like their beer, the chapters go down smooth. The arrangement of the book makes it clear who's written what parts - the chapters are given names that start with either "Steve Tells..." or "Tom Tells...". Where Steve has written a chapter, we get Tom's viewpoint with "Tom Weighs In," and vice-versa. Sounds sort of clunky, but it's well executed by the co-authors. They clearly worked very closely in shaping a final, cohesive product. As a result, the format works well.

What drew me to the book originally was the forward by Mike Bloomberg. His endorsement is good enough for me.

By nature, I am not a "reader"... I have a large stack of books that I've picked up over the years to pacify me while traveling. Most still have their respective airline ticket stubs safely marking the spot where I left off reading. So yes, it's a tad ironic that I'm now leaving a book review here... However, I read this cover-to-cover in two (long) evenings (that alone will tell anyone that knows me that this was a really good book!) so I'm at least qualified to comment on THIS one.

I've homebrewed for a couple of years and am in the early stages of investigating the feasibility of trying to make a living out of brewing. The story in the book really struck close to home for me... My potential partner and I work in fields that really couldn't be further from the brewing industry, much like the authors. While I know that the odds are against us, it was refreshing to read a story of someone that took a swing at it and hit a home run.

The book is by no means a step-by-step business plan for starting a brewery. It is much more a story of the trials and tribulations that faced them as they progressed from a crazy dream to a crazy success. It's a story about partnership. It's a story about taking a leap of faith. So don't purchase it expecting a step-by-step recipe for you to go out and quit your day job, but do purchase it and expect a general high-level look at starting a brewery, some good general business ideas that you may not have thought of, and a good story to tie it all together.

I found it to be a very honest, open story... The authors take turns writing chapters, and there were at least a couple of times that they were so honest that I caught myself thinking "Jeez, I'm pretty sure that the other guy's going to read this... Are you sure you wanted to say that?!" As you progress through the book though, you learn that this is just the relationship that they've built over the years... Very honest and open with one another whether it is good news or bad. I think that reading about the partnership was really one of the biggest take-aways that I got out of the book, but it certainly has more to offer than that.

In summary, I really enjoyed this book and would have no issues whatsoever giving it a very high recommendation for anyone that is considering starting ANY new business, brewery or not.

I just finished Beer School and thoroughly enjoyed it. As a beer lover, and a fan of Brooklyn Brewery's products, I enjoyed learning about how the beer came to life, as well as the birth (rebirth?) of craft brewing in the United States. Mayor Bloomberg was right in the introduction, the book will make you thirsty.

As for the business aspect, I teach high school economics and intend to use some examples cited in Beer School to illustrate my lessons. If I taught on the college level, this book would be one of the required readings. It is a great example of entrepreneurship, economies of scale, marketing, start-ups, and business plans.

Just from a title perspective, this book was too good to pass up... Beer School: Bottling Success at the Brooklyn Brewery by Steve Hindy and Tom Potter. But even better, the book delivers the goods on a number of levels. One of the most enjoyable business book reads I've had in awhile...

Contents: Steve Tells How Choosing a Partner Is Like a Second Marriage; Steve Discusses the Importance of Building a Solid Team; Tom Talks about Creating the Business Plan - A Money-Raising Tool and More; Tom Asks, "What's the True Mission of the Business?"; Steve Discusses the Keys to Successfully Motivating Employees; Tom Tells the Story of Their Dot-Com Revolution - Fishing for Finance and Failing; Steve Talks about Building a Brewery in Brooklyn; Steve Discusses Publicity - The Press Wants You!; Steve Reveals How the Revolution Kills Its Leaders First; Tom Talks about Cashing Out and Reinventing the Business, Again; Tom Wants to Know If You Have What It Takes; Timeline; Index

Hindy was a foreign correspondent for a news agency, and Potter was an executive at a bank, but both felt as if they wanted to do something different in their lives. Their love of home-brew beer gave Hindy the idea of starting a brewery in their hometown of Brooklyn, a city rich with brewery history. Potter was less convinced about the whole project until he visited a homebrewer's convention in 1986. This was right at the start of the microbrew phenomenon, and they decided to seriously pursue their dream. The book chronicles their work from 1986 through 2005, while also distilling what they learned about entrepreneurship along the way. And since this is beer "school", each chapter ends with them giving themselves a grade on how they did in that particular area. Unlike many business books that make the principals all-knowning and omniscient, Hindy and Potter are brutally honest about what worked and what didn't, where they were skillful and where they got lucky. It's a fascinating read, both for the brewery story and for the business insights.

There aren't too many business books with stories about being robbed at gunpoint of $30000, visiting a metal fencing operation to get a fork-lift battery charger back, and getting a visit from organized crime and union leadership, intent on getting a piece of their business. Even if you dropped the business lessons, the narrative of the Brooklyn Brewery would be enough to make this a recommended read. When you add in the small business information, this becomes a must-read for anyone dreaming of starting their own business. And if you're already interested in homebrewing or microbrews, then this book will probably end up being read in a single sitting.

An excellent read on a number of levels...

The Business Playbook: Leadership Lessons from the World of Sports by Brandon Steiner does a tremendous job of explaining why it is important for one to set goals, as well as telling you what steps you can take to help you in achieving your goals. The book is well written, with a good amount of actual sports stories featuring some of the biggest names in sports. One downside is that many of the athletes discussed in the book play or played on teams based in New York. I would assume that is because the Steiner's business is located in New York and therefore these are the athletes he has the most contact with. The stories that he does tell about the athletes, however, are closely related to the lessons he is trying to teach in his book. Seeing the success that these athletes have had is a great motivator for the reader to try to accomplish much the same success in business instead of on a playing field.

The book is broken down into chapters, and each chapter essentially highlights a different principle that one can use on the road to success. Within each chapter every principle is broken down even further into various sub-topics. Although some of the sub-topics may not flow together as well as they could have, this style made the book very easy to read as well as understand. None of the information in the book is too complicated for the average reader to comprehend, and all of the information is explained very well.

By associating success in business with success in sports Steiner does a tremendous job in offering a book that is fun to read as well as a book that offers real lessons in business and leadership. Everyone who is at least in part a fan of sports and works in a business field should take the time to read this motivational book. By reading this book you will be able to tie aspects of sports into your business career in ways you may have never even felt were possible.

The Business Playbook is hands down the best motivational book I have ever read! Anyone who reads this book will take at least one valuable lesson that they could use in both their business and personal life! Mr. Steiner has a true sports marketing mind, and in my opinion is the best in the business! Keep up the good work!!!!!!!

I thought this book was very intuitive. It really made think about my future goals, and how I should approach them. It is a good reading for anybody who wants to be successful in what ever they want to do. Being that I am a big sports fan I really appreciated the sport figures and events that brandon used as analogies. It should be required reading for buisness students and for anybody who wants to move forward in life. Great book!

This book does a nice job of motivating you toward your leadership aspirations, but many times I felt like I was back in Jr. High school and was listening to my teacher tell me stories of when he was growing up. With all the author's experience and interaction with such high-profile icons of this generation (and a few past), I would think he could have transferred his leadership skills in a more adult and interesting way. Overall, the book was OK.

I was lucky enough to read this book after the CEO of my company asked me to purchase it and write him up a quick synopis. It was a quick but powerful read and by the end of that same weekend my senses were ablaze with newly kindled hope and inspiration!

Brandon Steiner has a great sense of motivational ability, and unlike some who give advice with an heir of condescension, he has an amazing ability to strike a chord with the reader through highly assimilable, digestible prose and imagery. He presents a theme and then illustrates it anecdotally. In his line of business one can only imagine the stories you'd have after working so closely with such colorful clientele. At the end of each chapter there is a summary and a closing paragraph or two which ties all the subject matter together.

The book is divided into key principles: "Start with a road map; Find your niche; Wake up nervous!; Know your purpose; Go the extra mile; You never know; Get focused!; Nothing changes if nothing changes; It's not what happens, it's what you do with what happens; and finally, See success as a habit." I saw so many points therein which had immediate relevance to my life and my future goals.

I am very glad to have read "The Business Playbook" and strongly advocate to anyone who reads this to pick yourself up a copy. You'll be glad you did.

Michael G.
NY, NY

I have found that most books about marketing are about someone's one success in the past and just discuss the barriers they had to break to make their winning strategy work...they tend to be egocentric. I have wanted a book that really lines out the steps to take to create people loyal to a brand. I am not looking for a magic step-by-step I know everything takes time, but this book is doing a great job explaining practical things to do to create a loyal following. I got turned on to this book by their blog which is amazing...check it out at http://www.churchofthecustomer.com/

Ben and Jackie have written a great book about how to harness the power of your happy and loyal customers to build relationships with new customers. Their authentic ideas allow brands to build trust with customers.

Dr. Karen Mishra
Author, "Trust is Everything: Become the leader others will follow"

I have the original hard cover book and absolutely love it, it is my bible. So I bought this new one to share it. Looks updated but still has all the good stuff in it. This book has amazing ideas and examples that really work when you put them to use.

This book provides all the research needed to help you easily find customer evangelists! It's a great book, I highly recommend it.

This book is a perfect companion for wannabe-evangelists, or simply to understand the mechanisms behind some kind of "marketing" efforts (such as Dallas Mavericks' or O'Reilly Media's) that can be unclear at first.
I suggest it, a great purchase!