Roberts Books

"Roots Demystified" is a great read, which you wouldn't expect from a gardening/horticultural book about roots. Kourik gives amazing information that I'd never heard before, lining up his drawings with the facts about how roots feed the tree. I've already changed my method of watering and feeding a tree further from the root to make these roots spread out wider. There are many personal touches that make the book fun to read. I highly recommend. Barbara Baer, Forestville CA

Familiar with Kourik and with his work, I can honestly say this is my favorite of his books because it shows, better than any, the results of his many years working in the soil as a gardener and working at the typewriter and computer as a writer. Unlike many, if not most, writers about such topics, Kourik knows, from personal experience, what is best for both soil and soul, what to do and what not to do, with shovel and heart.

I found Robert Kourik's "Roots Demystified" to be a great gardening book! The information was very useful, the humor kept a potentially drab topic interesting and fun, and the additional tidbits and side discussions were all relevant to my gardening life. The book was also terrifically useful in conjunction with one of his earlier books, "Drip Irrigation For Every Landscape and Climate", reinforcing and expanding on many of the concepts of the earlier book.

Gardening expert Robert Kourik is the author of ten books addressing topics that have ranged from drip irrigation, environmentally-sound homes, edible landscaping, and lavender. Now he turns his attention to the necessity of health roots (and thereby healthy plants) for successful gardening and agriculture. Superbly written and thoroughly 'user friendly', "Roots Demystified" is profusely enhanced with twenty-five illustrative graphics showcasing extraordinary illustrations of excavated root systems in their entirety. A compendium of practical, comprehensive, and exceptionally well organized information, advice, tips, and observations that will benefit novice gardeners and seasoned professionals alike, "Roots Demystified" is an excellent and strongly recommended addition to personal, professional, academic, and community library Gardening/Agriculture/Horticulture reference collections and supplemental reading lists.

Roots Demystified: Change Your Gardening Habits to Help Roots Thrive, by Robert Kourik.

A good introductory book to the growth of tree, shrub, and plant roots. Has some material on other things that grow in the soil that interact with roots, and some basic soil science, including a brief chapter on fungus and symbiotic relationships. There are sections on vegetables, shrubs, and trees, how their roots grow and differ, with good planting and care advice. If you have other books with sections on roots, there is little new here. If not, it is a good book to start with. It has a good reference section of current books that we can actually purchase or borrow.

I have read the book, and thumbed through it several times more, and I am still not sure what the author's recommendation for changing my gardening habits to is, there does not seem to be a conclusion or summary. I think, I may be wrong, that he recommends double digging if the soil is poor or compacted, then move on to compost, mulch, and shallow tilling only.

The book is recommended by John Jevons, the "Grow Biointensive" double digging proponent, and it often mentions Ruth Stout, the no dig no work gardening advocate of thick mulching. He draws on the work of John Weaver in the 1920's and 30's, which is good, as Weaver's books are not readily available.

All in all a good book, easy to read presented with a dry sense of humor, solid information, a book I may go back to read again for inspiration, and a bit of reference.

I have bought this book at the begining of my pathology residency. Decision proved to be wise. It is concisely writen, language is plain and easy to understand. Photomicrographs are clear, subtitles are informative. But of course this book alone shall not make you master of the craft. The real value is shown, when using the book as the companion to daily practice. For novice path residents, combined with sound knowledge of general pathology it should make "pimping behind the scope" bearable.

I enjoyed reading this edition of this book. As a pathologist in practice, I occasionally buy new editions of books as a review. Much better than going to a meeting for CME. The material in this book is particularily "real world" and directly applicable to everyday practice. Highly recommended also to new pathologist or those in training.

An excellent and concise review of the common endometrial biopsy. Simply a must-have for pathology residents!

This is a concise and easy-to-understand overview of the topic. Unlike a lot of textbooks, this one can be read cover-to-cover without too much effort. Once you've read it, you're equipped to handle endometrial currettage specimens in your daily pathology practice. The only down-side is that many of the pictures are in black-and-white. But there are color photos as well. Overall, this is a wonderful book!

I ordered this book when I needed to master the diagnostic criteria for a wide ranger of endometrial pathology commonly seen in biopsies. I was amazed by how easy a read it is, as well as how informative and useful the book has been. A little pricey, but definitely worth purchasing.

This is a great book. It is set up so that all the cases are sort of mixed up so, if you read it straight through, you get a lot of variety not just 20 MDD cases in a row which can be kind of boring. However, if you wish there is an index in the back so if you want to just read cases on Bipolar I it will tell you what pages they are all on. I do wish that they put in the ICD-9 code for the disorders that they talked about. They reference the page number in the DSM4-TR book but then you have to got to that and look up the code. It is a great board review book and a great practical review for the practicing clinician.

Great case book. Clear, interesting, insightful. Good for brushing up on your diagnostic skills.

its ok... it has scenarios of every disorder..it brings them to life, making it easier to get the picture. :)

Great way to see how the DSM-IV criteria apply to real cases. Beware, this is the exact same (with exception to the references to the DSM-IV-TR page numbers) as the 1994 DSM-IV Casebook. So, if you already own the older version, don't bother wasting your money.

This is a great book with real-life case vignettes illustrating presentations of most of the diagnoses in DSM-IV-TR. Though initially skeptical, given the contrived case names, the book is excellent. Each case is followed by a discussion of the DSM-IV diagnostic issues raised. An especially neat part of the book is a presentation of historic cases from Blueler, Freud, and others, as well as international cases. Each case is self-contained so the book can be read in a three minute sitting.

Recently, the publisher released the "Treatment Companion to the Casebook." I bought this as well but am a little disappointed that it contains only a subset of cases which are reprinted with discussion from the "Casebook." I would have preferred a true companion book and am annoyed by the redundancy. I have been reading the book together with the "DSM-IV-TR Guidebook" which complements it well, explaining the history of the diagnostic criteria, areas of disagreement among experts, and how the criteria are meant to be interpreted and applied.

What a special book! It appeals to both the head & the heart. I have always wondered what goes on inside of my dog's head & now I know. I love getting an idea about the parent's world through the eyes & experiences of Shilo, especially Halloween's "chicken feet"! I am also impressed with his writing abilities, recounting others stories, & observations of all things around him. A must read for any canine adorer!!!!!

a great read though not ment for someone who dos'nt like to pick up a dictionary. i enjoyed the book and learned some new words along the way.

Behind the amusing, touching and sometimes hilarious thoughts of golden retriever Shilo is a deep spirituality that makes one stop and think. This is a beautifully written book with lots of fun photos. I read it twice and will read it again.

This is a delightful read. Susan Lustig must have been a dog in her previous life. She is most insightful into a dog's mind. It is deeper than one thinks initially. It is humorous and elicits many chuckles. I highly recommend it to readers of all ages, from children to the elderly.
Enjoy!

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this story. This book is a winner on multiple levels. It's short, sweet, has lots of priceless photos and makes for great reading, over and over again. The premise is very clever and laugh-out-loud funny. While this book is entertaining, I enjoyed it's softer, more poignant side as well. Hope to hear from this team again with more pet antics and adventures.

This collection of papers and presentations, published posthumously, is a companion to Rosen's earlier books "Life Itself" and "Anticipatory Systems: Philosophical, Mathematical and Methodological Foundations". This is probably the most accessible of his work to those without a fairly solid mathematical background. Not that this should prevent people from reading the earlier work since there are many sections that will be quite clear; I just feel that unfortuntely the crucial points of "Life Itself" might be lost due to the seeming technical nature of the explanation.

This is truly paradigm-shifting, moreso than anything else you are likely to read about in science. The Sante Fe crowd such as Stuart Kauffman obviously did not even grasp what Rosen was talking about when they met back in 1994 and that is even more tragic. So much time has been wasted with such money-wasters like the genome mapping fiasco when it could have been going into exploring new axioms for science.

For you see, this is what Rosen so eloquently points out in his work: the present axioms of science are much too limiting to explain anything we really would like to know about the universe. It is very interesting to see that Rosen grasped the implications of what also caught Einstein and Schrodinger's attention: the problem of inertial and gravitational mass. Rosen also points out the myriad of other areas where science has been busy putting band-aid after band-aid on the present set of theories to try to make them predict real phenomena.

For this is the problem with the present-day paradigms: they are only useful for predicting the N+1 state for some dead (and therefore uninteresting) mechanistic universe. The evidence has been staring us in the face for quite a while and I am not sure why Rosen should have been the first to analyze where the problems lie; it is even more surprising why his work appears to be so little known.

I also like the fact that this book is much more polished than his previous work. The index is mostly complete and there is also a list of references. I didn't note very many editorial erros and the language is quite friendly. This is a very high-quality science book and I suspect the first editions will be going for large prices in about 20 years when the "establishment" finally figures out where they went wrong.

Buy this and read it. And read it again. Then wonder why we are rushing pell-mell to "engineer" the world when we don't understand it at all.

This collection of essays, along with Rosen's other book _Life Itself_, are mandatory reading for any scientist or any astute layperson interested in biology, physics or philosophy of science.

Rosen was a very insightful and technically capable theoretical biologist. His work - first as a student of physicist and theoretical biologist Nicholas Rashevsky, and later as professor emeritus at Dalhousie - is unquestionably of the level of importance of Einstein's Special/General Theory of Relativity, or Godel's Incompleteness Theorems. This is a grand claim to make, but once you read Rosen's work, you will see for yourself.

These are not the easiest books to read, despite Rosen's excellent writing skills. The difficulty is two-fold. First and foremost, the new concepts and paradigms presented are of such breadth and profundity that it can take several readings to begin to fully grasp them adequately. Secondly, Rosen is mathematically (and otherwise) quite astute. The reader will encounter to some degree: category theory, topology, catastrophe theory (Rosen dedicates a chapter on genericity in _Essays_ to Rene Thom), differential equations, dynamical systems, Godel, Church-Turing, as well as philosophical topics of epistemology, ontology, and foundations of biology, mathematics and physics.

This should not, however, deter even the non-professional. Particularly in _Life Itself_, Rosen progresses carefully and patiently, even including a short intro to Category Theory. One can gloss over some of the math and still garner most of the insights from the text alone. _Essays_ utilizes a wider range of math skills, since that book covers a broader range of topics, but it is still quite accessible to the careful and astute reader.

In _Life Itself_, Rosen was investigating the question posed by Erwin Shrodinger originally in his 1943 lecture "What is Life?". Rosen's search led him to peel back in careful detail the foundations of Newtonian mechanics and reveal the underlying tacit assumptions of a state/phase-based physics and the repercussions for science in general, and biology in particular.

By setting aside state/phase-based physics, Rosen then proceeded to layout the groundwork for an atemporal relational biology based on functional organization and to methodically investigate the theoretical limits of mechanistic systems, including along the way: simulation, Turing machines, and the epistemology and ontology of such systems. The distinction eventually becomes clear that any such algorithmic mechanisms cannot embody the kinds of impredicative complexity that are characteristic of an organism. Because the syntax of Newtonian physics can express no such closed loops of entailment, "life" cannot even be described in that model of physics, much less modeled in any complete way. Thus it is that biological organisms are not a mere subset of current physics, but are representative of complexities that require physics to be enlarged.

In _Essays on Life Itself_, Rosen uses his considerable abilities across a broad spectrum of topics to continue the ideas from _Life Itself_. It is difficult to describe how topics as diverse as the assumptions of Pythagoras, the Turing test, universal unfoldings, morphogenesis, mind-brain problem, and more can be in the same book. Mostly, they all in one way or another accomplish one task: to look beyond the limits of how a problem is currently being viewed, and to see it from a larger perspective. Often, these perspectives take Rosen into terrain others would avoid, since they sometimes lead into the non-algorithmic / noncomputable, or the breakdown of the presumed subject-object division, or other kinds of "messy" scenarios.

Often they lead into "complex systems", where Rosen uses the word "complex" to define a certain class of systems - those systems have symptoms of being: impredicative, non-algorithmic, context-dependent, semantic, nonformalizable. This classification is not a desire for obfuscation or ineffability, but is as rigorous as the nonformalizability of Number Theory or the unsolvability in closed form of the n-body problem. It is a complexity akin to the size of a transfinite number: it is not simply a matter of merely being hugely complicated, it is rather an entirely different order of system structure.

However, guided by Rosen, one does not feel uneasy following his path. Rather one feels enriched both in knowledge and in paradigm. Distinguishing the broader generic case from the degenerate or special is a characteristic theme in Rosen. The unfamiliar terrain he argues to is thus not some void, but a grander scale that subsumes the orthodox view.

In that grander view, it may become more clear that some problems are based on incorrect assumptions, while some are more difficult or complex than in the more limited original view. However, it is apparent that Rosen is uninterested in making problems appear simpler by ignoring those difficulties - he is interested in where the science leads. It is an immensely richer, complex view of the physical world that one comes away with. As such, it presents some difficult challanges, but it also opens up vast opportunities - opportunities not visible in the neat and tidy fantasy model of science that generally prevails where it is assumed that with enough effort everything can be reduced or calculated.

Rosen writes deliberately and with precision, and is both a critical and a profound thinker. I hope that he one day receives the recognition and admiration he rightfully deserves.

This book is a powerfil critique of reductionist and/or simulation (modeling) approach to mind/body problem, and "what is life" question. Rosen builds his case against Church Thesis, arguing that contemporary mathematical and, more generally, scientific rigor, which bans impredicative loops from scientific discource, would not allow us to build what he calls "new science", which is needed to account for life and consciousness.

More than once he mentiones Goedel Theorem, as well as various paradoxes, encountered by science over the centuries, emphasizing the fact, that they all are directly related to the impossibility to draw definite border between an observer and her object (not just in quantum physics).

Although the book was very interesting for me, i felt that some essays essentially repeated the material, already covered in other parts of the same book. Also, this "new science", which Rosen thought is needed to deal with open systems, is never really described in any way, so we are left with critique only.

I am not sure i fully agree with Rosen's view of the Turing Test, which he only sees as a simulation approach to the mind (intelligence) problem. My understanding is that Turing Test should be rather understood in the "observer/object" context, meaning that the participant makes a judgement, being, at the same time, fully incorporated into the system.

In one of the essays Rosen says: "If somebody wants to call this 'vitalism' - then ... so be it." With no constructive theory in site it's a bit like this, to my understanding.

Dr. Rosen was a great man and this collection of essays follows on a number of foundational and classic works. The essays expand on, and clarify, a number of key issues that are present throughout Rosen's work. These include the Church-Pythagoras thesis, the mind-body problem, reductionism, syntatics and semantics, and biology and technology.

My main contribution to what has already been said in other reviews is to note that this work might be best viewed as a complement to Rosen's earlier work, Life Itself. Or, said differently, it might be best to read Life Itself first (if you haven't already). These are very complex topics that are explained from the standpoint of biology and mathematics and those without a previous foundation in Rosen's work--as I was when I bought this book--may find they have to establish that foundation first.

Robert Rosen died in December of 1998 after a long bout with diabetes and its complications. He left a significant quantity of unpublished notes and had this book in the publication process. His last "writings" were hand done on paper with great effort due to extensive peripheral neuropathy. It was a mixed blessing to be among the first to read his last works both this manuscript and the next, unfinished one. I am saddened by our loss even as I feel his presence through his writings.

Bob was an eloquent speaker and reading this set of essays is almost as good as hearing him in person. The essays were written to be published in a number of places, usually as invited talks, yet they may as well have been set down to be a book from the start. There is a thread of continuity that makes this the case. In addition, even though I had read many of the essays as they appeared earlier, their juxtaposition in this volume proves that "the whole is more than the sum of its parts"!

His stated purpose of this collection is to, in a sense, "flesh out" arguments in Life Itself (LI) that had to be short or even omitted for what might be called "logistic" reasons. In my opinion the essays do that at least. In LI he began with a caveat with which I am totally sympathetic. He warned the reader that he was weaving a very intricate cloth with a single linear thread and therefore much was being laid upon the reader's shoulders. My own experience is that it took numerous readings to begin to see how the weave was manifest. Once there, things fell into place more and more quickly, yet still a lot more was required because the design is so highly interconnected and rich in levels of meaning. I hope this book of essays will spare others that struggle. It will never be my place to evaluate that possibility since I can never go back.

The first part deals with the relationship of biology and physics within science, which can sound like an innocent enough topic until one understands that it is a revolutionary view.

Underlying it all is the common notion that physics is the source of all scientific laws and that chemistry and biology somehow must utilize physics to be scientific. Rosen rejects this notion and thereby opens a Pandora's Box. He uses the now more than fifty year old essay by Schrödinger, What is Life? as a springboard to the revealing argument about biology's more generic character in comparison to physics. As he does this he develops his notion of complexity as a description of this more generic view promoted by biology in contrast to the kind of "simple systems" which are the subject matter of physics. None of this should sound new to anyone who has read his earlier work, especially Life Itself, except for the new connections and new depths to which the arguments are taken. The result is a more solid whole than ever before

His introduction to this part of the book is worth having here to get a flavor for where he is going: "I claim that Gödelian noncomputability results are a symptom, arising within mathematics itself, indicating that we are trying to solve problems in too limited a universe of discourse." This is a nice capsule version of Rosen's message. If nothing else comes from his writings, this alone should change everyone who understands the message.

The book develops this theme along with the idea that science has limited itself unnecessarily. It created a surrogate world and then insisted that any observations about the real world not compatible with this model were "unscientific". The consequences are many and he explores them systematically. Whether you agree or disagree, an honest reading will require you to re-examine your beliefs.

It's a great book if you want to quickly go through all the major points of accounting. I will recommend it.

The book covers the fundamentals of accounting in a very good manner by reviewing basic concepts repetitively.

I was first introduced to the seventh edition at our local library. This is an excellent training tool for accounting. For anyone who likes to learn on their own this is great!

I'm not an accountant and I recently started an MBA. Accounting is a very hard course and our textbook isn't very helpful at teaching how to do the calculations that underpin the preparation of financial statements. The Essentials of Accounting Workbook really dumbs down the concepts involved in making these calulcations to a very simple level. It has been a huge help. The format seems pretty childish at first, but it is designed to make very small incremental steps through each concept.

I have 2 masters degrees - I have not come across a book that does such a good job of explaining the fundamentals.

Additionally, the format of the book - read and answer questions 'fill in the blanks' style, helps you remember what you read.

If you want to get a great start in accounting, get this book.

I have enjoyed ALL of Rhys Bowen's murder mysteries. I write this review of the Constable Evans book because Rhys will no longer be writing this series. This is a big disappointment as I enjoyed the innate goodness of Constable Evans and his struggles with humanity in a small slice of earth that struggles with it's own history and growth. I have collected all the paperbacks of this series and I guess I'll just have to keep reading them over and over.

After finishing this thoroughly satisfying cozy, you'll feel as if you had an insider's visit to a charming little village of Llanfair in Wales. The characters actually breathe, the language is just plain FUN, these are people you've sure you have truly met. The writing is clever and inspired and the scenes are wonderfully painted. Constable Evan Evans is the policeman with both a heart and a brain, as well as a coodling landlady and enough love interest to keep tongues wagging. Dueling church billboards are a witty and delightful touch.

This reader is delighted that there is more of Evans and Llanfair waiting. If you have made it through the series and wonder what's next - then M.C. Beaton's Hamish MacBeth series of cozies might should be added to your reading list.

That's surprising given I've been to Wales and it was very foggy and damp -- but the Wales described in this book is a wonderful place indeed -- beautiful and filled with kind, caring people (who unfortunately for any outsider speak Welsh!)

This is the second book in the series -- I'm reading them in order -- and I think I liked it better than the first. I thought at first I had everything all figured out, and was disappointed, but as it turned out, I wasn't even close. That's a great mystery. Add to that a wonderful world you enter when you read this book...

The plot involves a summer resident (a retired Colonel living on a pension who comes to this tiny village in Wales every year for a holiday) who is found dead right after he's discovered some ruins. The local constable, Evan Evans, immediately believes he was murdered, but the police higher up the chain of command try to insist it's an accident. Then there is another death -- made to look like a suicide. Is there one killer or two? Evans gets involved in trying to find the connection between these two deaths as the key to discovering what happened.

All in all, a great book to curl up with when you have the time to read uninterrupted -- it creates a wonderful mood.

This series is set in the peaceful Welsh village of Llanfair and features Evan Evans, the local constable. When two recently arrived Londoners are murdered, Evans must sift through the rivalries that the victims were involved in. This is a well-crafted series with likable characters and well-written plots. Each entry in the series is better than the one before. If you like British procedurals, add this to your to-buy list.

Life in Llanfair is about to get another jolt. Colonel Arbuthnot is hit over the head and killed right after discovering an ancient ruin on the nearby mountains. Meanwhile, tensions build in the town when Evans-the-Meat announces a plan to put the village on the map and returning resident Ted Morgan announces plans to turn the old slate mine into an amusement park. Then a second body turns up. Constable Evan Evans finds himself overwhelmed with events and trying to find the pieces to make sense of it all. But if that's not complication enough, there's a new female resident in town, and she also has her eye on the eligible lawman.

I just discovered this series last month, and I've already read two of them. The characters and setting are charming. The author's obvious love of them comes through on every page. The plot is great as well. While I had some things figured out, there were still enough twists to keep me surprised until the end.

Anyone looking for a relaxing cozy mystery would do well to book some time in Llanfair. I'm hooked and look forward to many happy visits with Evan and his neighbors.

In this very readable text, Kegan provides descriptive, anecdotal examples of
his arguments, making his concepts easier to grasp.

A CLASSIC! A complex but excellent treatise by a contemporary star in developmental psychology.

Comprehensive, Brilliant, highly Creative and introduces a vocabulary for human development that plugs into so many important theoretical and practictical domains. A year before this book came out, Ken Wibler wrote "The Atman Project" which articulates a very similiar vision from a slightly different angel.

I'd be really surprised if there were many books as brilliant as this one on the subject of human development. It not only captures its subject in its very motion, but actually manages to show what is there in common between the great variety of forms it takes on different planes: compare for instance the self-assertions of a 5 year old uncompromising "imperialist" to an adult's exercises of control at his work settings. Or the undifferentiated merger of a child with her mother to the overwhelming dependency most people experience in their interpersonal experiences at a certain period of life: what do others think of me? Kegan sees these as recurring motives, spiralling movements between inclusion and autonomy with ever-widening "horizons" for meaning-making: the same motives are played in a different key in each phase, the specifics of which are described brilliantly.

These are all necessary and very normal stages in every human's development, with their complete and coherent ways of meaning-making which are to be respected in order to understand and come to contact with each other in a meaningful and supportive way. Putting the blame of egocentrism and "manipulation" on a 5 year old would not be much better than accusing animals of not feeling guilty over having caused other animal's suffering: it would reflect a similar incapacity and lack of sensitivity to others "otherness", that is to say - his different mode of making sense of the world, with its advantages in comparison to the preceding modes and shortcomings in relation to (from the point of view of) the future ones. But in addition to this at once obviously necessary and yet often difficult capability of empathy and respect for diversity summed up by "pluralistic relativism", what I found so great about Kegan's work is that it always considers another point of no less importance: not only are the different stages of meaning-making having quite their own legitimacy - which are to be respected and supported when they emerge, but the separation from which shall be equally supported when the time is ripe - but it is actually shown to be as natural a thing to be experiencing turbulent periods when there is a shift ("decentering") from one major "cognitive-emotional" stage to another. Though difficult and threatening, it might be necessary to be a little bit "sick", "out of your mind" sometimes - if one is to move on.

The general framework is built on piagetian developmental notions with decreasing ego-centrism as the central axis, but modified considerably to build a picture that incorporates many of the object-relations concepts, among others. It's flexible, growth-oriented and open-ended as a (constructive-) developmental approach should be, it's humane and avoids pathologizing and reification of mental states, and last but not least - very well written. The author's personal experience as a consultist firmly grounds the excellent theory at all times in a wealth of examples and stories. A masterpiece of developmental psychology.

I happened to read Kegan's, "In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life," prior to reading "The Evolving Self." While both books were very good, I don't think I gleaned a whole lot of additional insight from "The Evolving Self." So, if you are busy and can only afford to read one or the other of these two books by Kegan, I recommend you select "In Over Our Heads."

This book was really helpful to organize and explain metrics. The explanation of strategic and tactical views of the metrics was what I really needed. What was neat was how it explained the metrics with very practical examples that everyone can explain. One example of this is the use of a grocery store checkout to explain which metrics to use. Great book and great value.

James Abbott has produced a handbook that is required reading for all Call Center Managers. It provides a step-by-step method for metrics creation and why improvement is not possible unless you can measure Call Center activity.

This book must be on every employees desk in the Call Center and the Metrics should be based on this book. The books 11 chapters are easy to read and understand. James clearly outlines the reasons why metrics must be real time and the benefit in performance associated with this method.

You should read this book, as I did, just to understand how implementation of this methodology will cut costs and improve customer satisfaction.

John Washburn
Colorado

From the introduction this book explains how metrics must be more than just numbers or report cards. They are proactive tools to get much more out of your call center. The book then sets out ways to create powerful metrics that lead to winning decisions for your center.
Chapter One: Having It All
The first chapter looks at why modern metrics are required in centers with numerous monitors. Old ways of thinking will not do. Everyday, real world examples are given to highlight critical metric sources. These are a must in balacing wait time, cost and performance.
Chapter Two: Call Center Metrics
This chapter begins with Abbott's signature approach to decision making and and the discussion of mstrics that compliment this approach. He introduces the unique Dependency Diagram and metric blueprint. On page 38 he lists six key proactive metrics.
Chapter Three: Monitoring Metrics
Chapter three makes cetain you are uaing clear thinking when monitoring your meticws. Again, real world examples and critical statistics are used to help you have a clear look at your center.
Chapter Four: Metric Dashboard
Using building blocks already mentioned this chapter begins putting together a call center dashboard. Who does what? How do we set it up? What is my part?
Chapter Five and Six: Tactical Decisions and Metrics
How do we know when real change has happened? What are the "alarms" to look for when monitoring the call center. We see how to read and use tactical metrics to avoid problems and run effective centers.
Chapters Seven, Eight, Nine, Ten: Strategic Decisions & Metrics
These chapters explain the strategic aspects of running your call center. They help you develop the strategic eye needed to bring your call center into the 21st century.

The book ends with a review of benefits that come from the effective use of metrics and how that is achieved. If you have the difficult responaibility of runing a call center, you need this book.

I purchased this book as I am a director of a Call Center Unit. This book was very informative and had a lot to offer. Great books for excutives in the call center business! The book is written in a easy to read format with lots of great examples!

This is a fantastic resource for anyone trying to figure out how to measure their Call Center performance. Because Call Center services and types vary so greatly, using the wrong metrics can send executives in the wrong direction and greatly impact the staff and performance of the Call Center. This book is a phenomenal resource in determining what Call Center Metrics are and what they are not.

Be forewarned, this is a textbook, not some easy-reading self-help book. The book explains that we erect defenses in relationships because of our mother, self-hate, and fear of death. It also explains how those defenses manifest themselves and how they are damaging to meaningful living. The book also relates how duality (saying one thing when we mean another) is damaging, in both adult relationships and with our children. There is a lot of explanation and insight here, but not a lot of direction for solving the problem.

many books of this nature havebeen revelations for me. however, this is THE one! if i hadto choose for you one book thatsays it all it is this one. thisis the one that through aprocess of reading, digesting andapplication will transform you.this is truly life changing stuff!first time through my mouth wasagape most of the time. virtuallyevery line was a light bulb experience.thank you dr. firestone!!!

One of the best, most powerful books ever writen. Reading this book will be painful, but worth it. It's worth at least 10 years of therapy.

This excellent book has changed my life, helping me to become a happier person and putting me on the road to my first good relationship. As I was reading it, I would come to new chapters and say, "well this certainly doesn't apply to me" (e.g. "Idealization of the Family"), but I quickly learned that those chapters did indeed apply. I now refer to it as my Bible because I so often talk about it to my friends and encourage them to read it. The section on Theoretcial Issues is probably too academic for most readers, and I am skeptical about how much schizophrenics can really be helped by these techniques. But I think the general population would be greatly helped by the ideas in the book.

I previously purchased a lot of books trying to figure out my partner's behavior. Nothing ever made sense. This book finally ties together all the pieces of the puzzle. Even after 2 years of therapy, the therapist couldn't explain my partner's behavior. I gave this book to the therapist to read, and she thought it was an excellent book. With direction from this book, the therapist is finally getting to the root of the problem.