Books About Business

Sitemap (Add to Favorites) Index About Executive Blueprints Articles Books About Business Case Studies Coaching Code of Ethics Headline News Institute for Advanced Leadership Job Search K-12 Education Privacy Policy Reciprocal Links Samples Services Shopping Testimonials The Trusted Advocate Tools for Trainers TOSHIBAlumni Travel Tips Video Vault Weekly Tips Workshops 101 Great Ways to Improve Your Life	Must Read Business Books, Best Business Books, and Business Leadership Books	Target           Free e-Books from The Institute for Advanced Leadership   Resume Design Instructions Ten Steps to designing a Stellar Resume. Shopping for employment is a hybrid of automated filter applications and "good old fashioned" human interpretation. To be effective you need to design a Resume for all of these areas. This ten step process is intended to provide useful instruction for developing meaningful, accurate and compelling personal profiles.   Interview for Excellence Use position descriptions to create Job Requirements. Design a template to track key skills and behavioral traits during the interview process so you can compare results and hire the person best equipped to perform a specific role. Are you getting the best talent for each position? How do you know?   Standards of Performance Create Position Descriptions with Goals, Objectives, Responsibilities, Levels of Authority and Performance Reports. Useful for tracking performance with employees and management, conducting yearly performance appraisals, preparing Job Descriptions for effective Interviews and New Hire Training.   Communication Skills Based on the critically acclaimed seminars of specialist Mitch Simons of the Simons Alliance, this presentation and companion guide were developed specifically for trainers, coaches and consultants. Incredibly powerful instructions for confronting the primal barriers to communication and to openly share fierce conversations. Once the obstacles are identified and removed, open and highly effective communication can occur.   Active Listening Train yourself to hear and Understand Content and Feeling of the speaker's message. Important skill for leaders, managers, sales, customer service and working with colleagues. Course covers Listening Habits, Attending Skills, Reflecting Skills, and Barriers to Effective Communication. Certificate of Completion.   Risk Management Are you prepared to handle an unexpected event? This insightful and practical guide provides methodology, principal factors and helpful hints to manage risk, Learn how to measure and calculate risk so you can determine when and which controls to put in place. Louis Mehrmann has extensive first hand experience from helping Fortune 500 companies identify, measure risk with quantitative results, fundamental simplicity and usability. This research is available and invaluable to business.   Change Management The Art of Progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order. Review the rules to change, the challenge and the reaction cycle. Learn how to introduce change, deal with resistance and plan for success. Are you planning properly to cope with change?   Security is a Management Issue This is a short tutorial with a very comprehensive workbook and checklist for managing security, preparing for emergencies, hardware and software integrity, and disaster response. Securing your valuable company data includes preparation for hurricanes, theft, accidents and vandalism. Protect confidential data of your customers and employees, your financial records, and your strategic designs or presentations. Be aware, be prepared, stay alert, take action and enjoy the benefits.   Ownership and Classification Information Ownership and Classification - Protecting Vital Information Assets. How high does your wall need to be? Practical guidelines for classifying information for Internal Use Only, Confidential information, Restricted information and Registered Confidential Information. This guide reviews characteristics, ownership, users management and responsibility in easy to apply summary steps. It also contains implementation and review checklist. Lou Mehrmann draws from years of industry experience and knowledge to provide insightful business applications for protecting information assets.   Essential Elements for Effective Marketing Build your brand or business message with simple and effective checklist. Apply the FABIO Principle to define your products or services. Powerful and easy to use, a necessary cycle for small business owners, web commerce, and entrepreneurs. Are you getting the results that you expected from your marketing dollars?   Investing in Customer Loyalty "Customer Loyalty Sales" includes tools to identify current and target markets, define your approach to key decision makers. You will learn the importance of anxiety questions and building credibility, climb the customer loyalty ladder, and understand the cost of customer loyalty by customer type. Use customer information and coordinate your actions. Are your current sales techniques right for your target customers? Do you know the cost of your target markets?   Creating Corporate Ethics Follow the step-by-step process to design an Ethics Statement that represents your commitment to your customers, your employees, your shareholders and builds trust. Develop Standards of Conduct to promote a positive and ethical environment with guidelines for decisions and actions. It is more than regulations and compliance, it defines your company character.   Harassment & Discrimination An effective Harassment & Discrimination course must encompass harassment, discrimination and retaliation regarding sex, race, religion, age, disabilities and national origin. The course must be interactive, dealing with the issues, avoidance and response. This course includes reference to actual cases, with thought provoking questions and opportunities for discussion.   Six Sigma Process Improvement Six Sigma Process Improvement removes the mystery from Six Sigma Quality Circle techniques and provides a layman's introduction to begin using the most common and effective techniques for effective process improvement in a concise and easy to use reference manual.
	The Trusted Advocate: Accelerate Success with Authenticity and Integrity The Fundamental Guide to Achieve Extraordinary Sales and Sustain Loyal Customers By John Mehrmann and Mitchell Simon   The sales environment has been forever altered by e-commerce and price-centered commodities. Competition has become stiffer, and quotas have become higher. The demand for performance has created brutal pressure in a lonely profession, and increasing the number of cold calls is not enough to survive. Success requires closing a higher percentage of opportunities and growing existing business. But how can you achieve such lofty goals?   The Trusted Advocate: Accelerate Success with Authenticity and Integrity is a revelation of fundamental principles that empower maximum success through authenticity and integrity. John Mehrmann and Mitchell Simon combine their experience in management and leadership development to provide you with proven, cutting-edge management techniques and leadership skills to unlock individual potential and empower personal success. You'll learn how to:      * Increase sales and retain loyal customers    * Train the sales force, or train yourself    * Identify and unleash your talents    * Turn knowledge into power    * Build your pipeline    * Create a revolutionary process    * Earn a reputation for being trustworthy Designed to revitalize sales professionals, The Trusted Advocate: Accelerate Success with Authenticity and Integrity is perfect for managers, coaches, consultants, and trainers to help rapidly accelerate individual or group performance. Use your strengths as a competitive edge, enjoy your profession, and advance your career!   >> Look inside the book << >> Order a copy from Amazon << >> Read the testimonials! << Join the Trusted Advocate Network on LinkedIn   http://www.linkedin.com/e/gis/83826/03792148A71A   Playing the Right Cards: How to Successfully Market Your Small Business or Professional Services By Mike Coleman   At some point everyone who owns a small business or provides professional services struggles with their marketing. This is usually a result of not having a solid foundation in place that properly supports the business. This book will provide you with a clear, concise overview of marketing that will help you build that foundation. You will learn how to:   * Overcome both the internal and external barriers to marketing your business * Overcome both the internal and external barriers to marketing your business * Clearly articulate what you do and who you serve * Build strong, long lasting relationships * Differentiate yourself and your services from the competition * Put systems in place to build a better business * Create the proper mindset for running a business. You will also be introduced to the CARDS System. This system contains the five essential elements for building a successful business   About the Author: Mike Coleman is a speaker, writer, and marketing consultant. He helps small business owners and professional service providers improve their marketing and build better business   Servant Leadership : A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness By Robert K Greenleaf   The phrase “Servant Leadership” was coined by Robert K. Greenleaf in The Servant as Leader, an essay that he first published in 1970. In that essay, he said: "The servant-leader is servant first… It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first. Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead. That person is sharply different from one who is leader first, perhaps because of the need to assuage an unusual power drive or to acquire material possessions…The leader-first and the servant-first are two extreme types. Between them there are shadings and blends that are part of the infinite variety of human nature."   "The difference manifests itself in the care taken by the servant-first to make sure that other people’s highest priority needs are being served. The best test, and difficult to administer, is: Do those served grow as persons? Do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants? And, what is the effect on the least privileged in society? Will they benefit or at least not be further deprived?"   The Breakthrough Company: How Everyday Companies Become Extraordinary Performers By Keith R. McFarland The vast majority of small businesses stay small—and not by choice. Only the most savvy and persistent—a tiny one tenth of one percent—break through to annual sales above $250 million. In The Breakthrough Company, Keith McFarland pinpoints how everyday companies become extraordinary, showing that luck is a negligible factor. Rather, breakthrough success turns out to be associated with a clearly identifiable set of strategies and skills that anyone in any business can emulate—from small startup to industry leader. Encouraged by experts such as business legend Peter Drucker and Good to Great author Jim Collins to identify the drivers that enable a company to push past the entrepreneurial phase, McFarland spent five years building and analyzing the world’s largest growth-company performance database and interviewing more than 1,500 growth-company executives on four continents. His goal was simple: to identify the secrets of breakthrough. The Breakthrough Company is the result. Winnowing a study pool of more than 7,000 companies down to nine that have made the transition to major-player status, McFarland highlights real-world tools and myth-busting insights that can be used by anyone wanting his or her business to join this exclusive circle. Among the book’s takeaways: • Common wisdom holds that the founders and core entrepreneurial leaders of a company must step aside for the business to reach the next level. Not true—as long as founders “crown the company” instead of themselves. • It’s not reckless to make ever-escalating bets on your company’s future, even going nose to nose with competitors many times your size. In fact, it turns out that the only safety comes in constantly upping the ante in exactly this way. • A Business Bermuda Triangle does exist, gobbling up companies on the verge of breakthrough. Presented here are three ways to navigate this potentially deadly hazard successfully. • However good you are—or think you are—you can’t do it alone. Learn how to surround your company with networks of outside resources, aka “scaffolding,” and how to enlist the aid of “insultants”—people who are willing to question a firm’s existing assumptions and ways of doing business.   Managing the Customer Experience: Turning customers into advocates By Shaun Smith   How much more profit could you make if you had customers who couldn't imagine doing business with anyone but you? In your dreams! Tell that to Virgin Atlantic or Harley Davidson.   How great would life be if 40% of your new business simply knocked on your door without you having spent a cent advertising for it? Impossible! Tell that to First Direct. The companies in this book have managed to turn customers into advocates. Advocates who constantly refer their friends and colleagues to those businesses. Why? Because those companies have created a Branded Customer Experience. They have managed the relationship to the point where customers can't imagine wanting to do business with anyone else. How can you gain this unbeatable competitive advantage? Managing the Customer Experience shows you how. It takes you through the step-by-step process of creating Loyalty by Design. It shows you how to re-think your business from the customer's point of view and then design and deliver a customer experience that drives loyalty and profitability. Customer Satisfaction is no longer enough. 80% of customers who switch suppliers express satisfaction with their previous supplier. To lead the market companies need customers who are enthusiastic 'advocates', customers who are highly loyal and drive new business to the company. For example 38% of First Direct's business comes from customer referrals. Advocacy comes from creating a customer experience that becomes synonymous with the brand, what Forum calls a Branded Customer Experience. Research for this book with organizations like Amazon.com, Virgin, Pret A Manger, Krispy Kreme, Harley-Davidson, Manchester United, and many others has identified the 'Uncommon Practices' that help these organizations create a Branded Customer Experience. Such an experience requires Marketing, Operations, and Human Resources to work together to deliver the brand creating a common strategic agenda within the organization.   Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die By Chip Heath   Mark Twain once observed, “ A lie can get halfway around the world before the truth can even get its boots on.” His observation rings true: Urban legends, conspiracy theories, and bogus public-health scares circulate effortlessly. Meanwhile, people with important ideas—businessmen, educators, politicians, journalists, and others—struggle to make their ideas “stick.” Why do some ideas thrive while others die? And how do we improve the chances of worthy ideas? In Made to Stick, accomplished educators and idea collectors Chip and Dan Heath tackle head-on these vexing questions. Inside, the brothers Heath reveal the anatomy of ideas that “stick” and explain sure-fire methods for making ideas stickier, such as violating schemas, using the Velcro Theory of Memory, and creating “curiosity gaps.” In this indispensable guide, we discover that “sticky” messages of all kinds—from the infamous “organ theft ring” hoax to a coach’s lessons on sportsmanship to a product vision statement from Sony—draw their power from the same six traits. Made to Stick is a book that will transform the way you communicate ideas. It’s a fast-paced tour of idea success stories (and failures)—the Nobel Prize-winning scientist who drank a glass of bacteria to prove a point about stomach ulcers; the charities who make use of the Mother Teresa Effect; the elementary-school teacher’s simulation that actually prevented prejudice . Provocative, eye-opening, and funny, Made to Stick shows us the principles of successful ideas at work—and how we can apply these rules to making our own messages “stick.”   The Effective Executive by Peter F. Drucker   What makes an effective executive? The measure of the executive, Peter F. Drucker reminds us, is the ability to "get the right things done." This usually involves doing what other people have overlooked as well as avoiding what is unproductive. Intelligence, imagination, and knowledge may all be wasted in an executive job without the acquired habits of mind that mold them into results.   Drucker identifies five practices essential to business effectiveness that can, and must, be learned:  * Managing time  * Choosing what to contribute to the organization  * Knowing where and how to mobilize strength for best effect  * Setting the right priorities  * Knitting all of them together with effective decision-making   Ranging widely through the annals of business and government, Peter F. Drucker demonstrates the distinctive skill of the executive and offers fresh insights into old and seemingly obvious business situations.   The 360 Degree Leader: Developing Your Influence from Anywhere in the Organization by John C. Maxwell   In his nearly thirty years of teaching leadership, John Maxwell has encountered this question again and again: How do I apply leadership principles if I'm not the boss? It's a valid question that Maxwell answers in The 360 Degree Leader. You don't have to be the main leader, asserts Maxwell, to make significant impact in your organization. Good leaders are not only capable of leading their followers but are also adept at leading their superiors and their peers. Debunking myths and shedding light on the challenges, John Maxwell offers specific principles for Leading Down, Leading Up, and Leading Across. 360-Degree Leaders can lead effectively, regardless of their position in an organization. By applying Maxwell's principles, you will expand your influence and ultimately be a more valuable team member.   Never Eat Alone: And Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship at a Time By Keith Ferrazzi   Do you want to get ahead in life? Climb the ladder to personal success? The secret, master networker Keith Ferrazzi claims, is in reaching out to other people. As Ferrazzi discovered early in life, what distinguishes highly successful people from everyone else is the way they use the power of relationships—so that everyone wins. In Never Eat Alone, Ferrazzi lays out the specific steps—and inner mindset—he uses to reach out to connect with the thousands of colleagues, friends, and associates on his Rolodex, people he has helped and who have helped him. The son of a small-town steelworker and a cleaning lady, Ferrazzi first used his remarkable ability to connect with others to pave the way to a scholarship at Yale, a Harvard MBA, and several top executive posts. Not yet out of his thirties, he developed a network of relationships that stretched from Washington’s corridors of power to Hollywood’s A-list, leading to him being named one of Crain’s 40 Under 40 and one of Davos’ Global Leader for Tomorrow.   Ferrazzi's form of connecting to the world around him is based on generosity, helping friends connect with other friends. Ferrazzi distinguishes genuine relationship-building from the crude, desperate glad-handling usually associated with “networking.” He then distills his system of reaching out to people into practical, proven principles. Among them:  * Don’t keep score: It’s never simply about getting what you want. It’s about getting what you want and making sure that the people who are important to you get what they want, too.  * “Ping” constantly: The Ins and Outs of reaching out to those in your circle of contacts all the time—not just when you need something.  * Never eat alone: The dynamics of status are the same whether you’re working at a corporation or attending a society event— “invisibility” is a fate worse than failure.   In the course of the book, Ferrazzi outlines the timeless strategies shared by the world’s most connected individuals, from Katherine Graham to Bill Clinton, Vernon Jordan to the Dalai Lama.   Chock full of specific advice on handling rejection, getting past gatekeepers, becoming a “conference commando,” and more, Never Eat Alone is destined to take its place alongside How to Win Friends and Influence People as an inspirational classic.   The Elephant and the Dragon: The Rise of India and China and What It Means for All of Us By Robyn Meredith   A compelling look at the major changes in store as America faces increasing competition from two emerging Asian giants. In the streets of India, camels pull carts loaded with construction materials, and monkeys race across roads, dodging cars. In China, men in Mao jackets pedal bicycles along newly built highways, past skyscrapers sprouting like bamboo. Yet exotic India is as near as the voice answering an 800 number for one dollar an hour. Communist China is as close as the nearest Wal-Mart, its shelves full of goods made in Chinese factories. Not since the United States rose to prominence a century ago have we seen such tectonic shifts in global power; but India and China are vastly different nations, with opposing economic and political strategies—strategies we must understand in order to survive in the new global economy. The Elephant and the Dragon tells how these two Asian nations, each with more than a billion people, have spurred a new “gold rush,” and what this will mean for the rest of the world.   The Speed of Trust: The One Thing That Changes Everything By Stephen M. R. Covey   According to Stephen M. R. Covey (son of the bestselling author Stephen R. Covey), there is one thing that is common to every individual, relationship, team, family, organization, nation, economy, and civilization worldwide. It affects every effort in which humankind is engaged, changing the quality of every present moment, and altering the trajectory of every future moment, both personally and professionally. This one thing, which changes everything, is trust—the foundation of the most powerful governments, the most successful businesses, the most thriving economies, the most influential leaders, the greatest friendships, or the deepest loves. The Speed of Trust challenges the assumptions that trust is merely a soft social virtue and articulates why it has become the key leadership competency of the new global economy. Covey demonstrates how to quickly and permanently gain the trust of clients, coworkers, partners, and constituents so as to make organizations more profitable, people more promotable, and relationships more energizing.   Now, Discover Your Strengths By Marcus Buckingham and Donald O. Clifton Unfortunately, most of us have little sense of our talents and strengths, much less the ability to build our lives around them. Instead, guided by our parents, by our teachers, by our managers, and by psychology's fascination with pathology, we become experts in our weaknesses and spend our lives trying to repair these flaws, while our strengths lie dormant and neglected. Marcus Buckingham, coauthor of the national bestseller First, Break All the Rules, and Donald O. Clifton, Chair of the Gallup International Research & Education Center, have created a revolutionary program to help readers identify their talents, build them into strengths, and enjoy consistent, near-perfect performance. At the heart of the book is the Internet-based StrengthsFinder® Profile, the product of a 25-year, multimillion-dollar effort to identify the most prevalent human strengths. The program introduces 34 dominant "themes" with thousands of possible combinations, and reveals how they can best be translated into personal and career success. In developing this program, Gallup has conducted psychological profiles with more than two million individuals to help readers learn how to focus and perfect these themes. So how does it work? This book contains a unique identification number that allows you access to the StrengthsFinder Profile on the Internet. This Web-based interview analyzes your instinctive reactions and immediately presents you with your five most powerful signature themes. Once you know which of the 34 themes—such as Achiever, Activator, Empathy, Futuristic, or Strategic—you lead with, the book will show you how to leverage them for powerful results at three levels: for your own development, for your success as a manager, and for the success of your organization. With accessible and profound insights on how to turn talents into strengths, and with the immediate on-line feedback of Strengths Finder at its core, Now, Discover Your Strengths is one of the most groundbreaking and useful business books ever written.   Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't By Jim Collins   The findings of the Good to Great study will surprise many readers and shed light on virtually every area of management strategy and practice. The findings include: Level 5 Leaders: The research team was shocked to discover the type of leadership required to achieve greatness.   The Hedgehog Concept (Simplicity within the Three Circles): To go from good to great requires transcending the curse of competence.   A Culture of Discipline: When you combine a culture of discipline with an ethic of entrepreneurship, you get the magical alchemy of great results. Technology   Accelerators: Good-to-great companies think differently about the role of technology. The Flywheel and the Doom Loop: Those who launch radical change programs and wrenching restructurings will almost certainly fail to make the leap.   Who Moved My Cheese? An Amazing Way to Deal with Change in Your Work and in Your Life By Spencer Johnson and Ken Blanchard   Change can be a blessing or a curse, depending on your perspective. The message of Who Moved My Cheese? is that all can come to see it as a blessing, if they understand the nature of cheese and the role it plays in their lives. Who Moved My Cheese? is a parable that takes place in a maze. Four beings live in that maze: Sniff and Scurry are mice--non-analytical and nonjudgmental, they just want cheese and are willing to do whatever it takes to get it. Hem and Haw are "little people," mouse-size humans who have an entirely different relationship with cheese. It's not just sustenance to them; it's their self-image. Their lives and belief systems are built around the cheese they've found. Most of us reading the story will see the cheese as something related to our livelihoods--our jobs, our career paths, the industries we work in--although it can stand for anything, from health to relationships. The point of the story is that we have to be alert to changes in the cheese, and be prepared to go running off in search of new sources of cheese when the cheese we have runs out. Dr. Johnson, coauthor of The One Minute Manager and many other books, presents this parable to business, church groups, schools, military organizations--anyplace where you find people who may fear or resist change. And although more analytical and skeptical readers may find the tale a little too simplistic, its beauty is that it sums up all natural history in just 94 pages: Things change. They always have changed and always will change. And while there's no single way to deal with change, the consequence of pretending change won't happen is always the same: The cheese runs out. --Lou Schuler   The 4-Hour Workweek   By Timothy Ferriss What The 4-Hour Workweek Is About: First of all, I think the title of this book is a bit of a misnomer and is useful for grabbing attention. What this book actually is is the complete embodiment of the 80/20 principle into an individual’s professional life. The 80/20 principle is the idea that 80% of your productivity comes from 20% of your time, and the other 20% of your productivity eats up 80% of your time.   Ferriss argues that by eliminating that 20% of productivity that eats up most of your time, you can live in a much more efficient fashion, and the entire book revolves around that concept in various ways, hence the title The 4-Hour Workweek. In some ways, the book itself reads like a blog, as it’s broken down into lots of little pieces: some of them step-by-step advice, some of them anecdotal, and some of them philosophical.   First and Foremost Right off the bat, the book makes it clear that you should pick and choose from the material presented within, and that’s a vital caveat for any personal productivity book - but especially this one. A personal productivity philosophy created by someone else is designed around their own lives and the lives of the people they associate with, but not necessarily your own. Thus, when you read a book like this one, you need to be able to pull out the pieces that work for you. Why is that idea more true for this book than for others? Here, the different pieces of the book apply differently to different people. This is not like Getting Things Done, where the pieces can be applied in any life; many of these tips assume that you’re already wholly into the information age and that your methods of earning money are, too (or at least are comfortable enough with technology to easily move to that sort of approach).   The Tipping Point   By Malcolm Gladwell   Amazon.com Editorial Review "The best way to understand the dramatic transformation of unknown books into bestsellers, or the rise of teenage smoking, or the phenomena of word of mouth or any number of the other mysterious changes that mark everyday life," writes Malcolm Gladwell, "is to think of them as epidemics. Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread just like viruses do." Although anyone familiar with the theory of memetics will recognize this concept, Gladwell's The Tipping Point has quite a few interesting twists on the subject.   For example, Paul Revere was able to galvanize the forces of resistance so effectively in part because he was what Gladwell calls a "Connector": he knew just about everybody, particularly the revolutionary leaders in each of the towns that he rode through. But Revere "wasn't just the man with the biggest Rolodex in colonial Boston," he was also a "Maven" who gathered extensive information about the British. He knew what was going on and he knew exactly whom to tell. The phenomenon continues to this day--think of how often you've received information in an e-mail message that had been forwarded at least half a dozen times before reaching you.   Gladwell develops these and other concepts (such as the "stickiness" of ideas or the effect of population size on information dispersal) through simple, clear explanations and entertainingly illustrative anecdotes, such as comparing the pedagogical methods of Sesame Street and Blue's Clues, or explaining why it would be even easier to play Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon with the actor Rod Steiger. Although some readers may find the transitional passages between chapters hold their hands a little too tightly, and Gladwell's closing invocation of the possibilities of social engineering sketchy, even chilling, The Tipping Point is one of the most effective books on science for a general audience in ages. It seems inevitable that "tipping point," like "future shock" or "chaos theory," will soon become one of those ideas that everybody knows--or at least knows by name. --Ron Hogan   The China Price By Alexandra Harney   An excerpt from The China Price: The True Cost of Chinese Competitive Advantage by Alexandra Harney ($26, Penguin Press, 2008). Sam slides behind the wheel of his new black Honda and noses the car into Friday morning traffic. It's a hot, sunny June morning in Changsha, capital of central Hunan province, and everything seems to be falling into place. Beside him sits his wife Jasmine, eight months pregnant and radiant in a yellow dress. High school sweethearts, they married at 21. Now, at 23, they're about to start a family in a brand new gated community. Sam, whose name, like those of other members of his family, has been changed, is looking forward to making use of the development's two swimming pools and basketball court. In a few years, they plan to build a house in the mountains where they can entertain family and friends on the weekends. The Honda heads out of town into the verdant countryside toward Jasmine's father's towel factory. Towels, a key Hunan export, have been the family's mainstay for nearly two decades. Sam married into the job of overseeing the plant's $5 million in annual sales. The road narrows and Sam slows to accommodate farmers swaying on bicycles. On either side are rice paddies and family farm plots. That's where the first sign of changes ahead appears. Trees.   Several years ago, farmers on the outskirts of Changsha realized they could make good money growing trees. They planted family plots in Hunan's fertile soil and hung signs on trees near the road advertising their cellphone numbers. Soon enough, the farmers who worked at Sam's factory were demanding higher wages, because they could make better money from trees.   The factory, which relies mostly on local labor, had no choice but to capitulate. "Salaries are going up and up," Sam sighs from behind the wheel. The labor market has tightened, too, as other factories have opened in the area. The government is hiking the minimum wage in Changsha. Sam figures he has three, maybe five more years before his factory loses its competitive edge.   This is where the next boom in Chinese manufacturing is supposed to take place. Conventional wisdom holds that rising costs of everything from labor to land on the coasts are driving factories in labor-intensive consumer industries deep into the country's heartland, to provinces like Hunan, in pursuit of lower prices. But in China's fast-forward economy, investors are finding things aren't as cheap or plentiful as they used to be. And the workers aren't pushovers, either. Thanks in part to Chinese government policies, the country's labor-intensive export factories have for most of the past decade operated almost in defiance of the rules of economics, enjoying stagnant wages, ample coastal land near the ports, and a seemingly endless supply of pliant labor. Government incentives, including subsidized electricity and generous tax breaks, have helped keep the ordinary forces of a market economy at bay. The low prices that this produced earned China the enviable position of the world's dominant producer in a huge variety of products. But this fortuitous situation couldn't last. "This is an advantage that expires," says Arthur Kroeber, managing director of Dragonomics, a research and advisory group that specializes in the Chinese economy.   Jonathan Anderson, former head of Asian economics at investment bank UBS, calls it "the end of China's supposed absolute manufacturing domination." He argues that China will revert to a more normal trading pattern, where it gains market share in some areas and loses it in others. For any other country, this would be a natural assumption, devoid of drama. For the world's emerging superpower and a world hooked on its cheap products, it is anything but. See more at http://www.forbes.com/opinions/books/
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Keywords: The Trusted Advocate: Accelerate Success with Authenticity and Integrity, Trusted101, John Mehrmann, Mitchell Simon, Executive Blueprints, Simon Leadership Alliance, Books about Business, Best Business Books of All Time, Must Read Business Books, Business Books of 2008, Good Business Books, Business Leadership Books, Business Books to Read, Best Books on Business, Management Training Books, Sales Motivation Books, Miller Heiman Sales, Sales Technique Books, Sales Training Sandler, Sales Training Motivation, Sales Training Team, Sales PPT, Advocate Books, Books on ethics, Book on ethics, Sales Training Process, Sales Training Workbook, Good Self Help Books, the Best Self Help Books, Top 10 Self Help Books, Popular Self Help Books, Top Self Help Books, Books for Realtors, Books for Real Estate Agents, Insurance Training Books Servant Leadership : A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness, Robert K Greenleaf, The Breakthrough Company: How Everyday Companies Become Extraordinary Performers, Keith R. McFarland, Managing the Customer Experience: Turning customers into advocates, Shaun Smith, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, Chip Heath, The Effective Executive, Peter F. Drucker, The 360 Degree Leader: Developing Your Influence from Anywhere in the Organization, John C. Maxwell, Never Eat Alone: And Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship at a Time, Keith Ferrazzi, The Elephant and the Dragon: The Rise of India and China and What It Means for All of Us, Robyn Meredith, The Speed of Trust: The One Thing That Changes Everything, Stephen M. R. Covey, Now, Discover Your Strengths, Marcus Buckingham and Donald O. Clifton, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't, Jim Collins, The China Price, Alexandra Harney
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