The Big Book of Icebreakers or The Big Book of Customer Service Training Games

The Big Book of Icebreakers: Quick, Fun Activities for Energizing Meetings and Workshops

Author: Edie West

Leading a meeting? giving a presentation? Heading a workshop? Icebreakers are great for lightening up the atmosphere at the beginning of a meeting or event, and encouraging everyone to participate fully. This collection of 50 icebreakers is organized around common businesssituations and is designed to help leaders start every session, meeting, presentation, or workshop with a burst of energy and fun. Includes icebreakers for sales meetings, team building, complete strangers, introducing a topic, staff meetings, groups over 20, outdoor settings, and more. this latest book in the popular Big Book of Business Games series is the most fun yet!

Edie West (Fairfax Station, VA) is a trainer and speaker. She also creates and markets products for speakers, teachers, facilitators, and trainers that engage the audience in listening and learning. Edie is the author of 201 Icebreakers.

Table of Contents:

Introduction.

Icebreakers for Staff Meetings.

Icebreakers for Sales Meetings.

Icebreakers for Complete Strangers.

Icebreakers for Groups of 20 or More.

Icebreakers for Team Building.

Icebreakers for Pure Fun.

Icebreakers for Introducing a Topic.

Icebreakers for Outdoors.

Icebreakers for Self-Disclosure.

Icebreakers for Stuffy, Conservative Types Who Hate Icebreakers.

Icebreakers While Waiting to Start.

Icebreakers for Everyday Living.

Icebreakers for the Super Intelligent.

Interesting book: Grand Canyon Wild or Boston 2010 Entertainment Book

The Big Book of Customer Service Training Games

Author: Peggy Carlaw

Help your employees to excel in dealing with the public with this stimulating, fun-filled collection of customer service training games. Designed not only to teach important skills but also to spark enthusiasm and a high level of involvement in the participants, these games utilize entertaining and instructive techniques such as role-playing, charades, brainstorming, and debate. As a result of these exercises, employees will learn how to create a rapport with the customer, how to focus on the unique needs of individual customers, how to maintain a positive attitude, and more.

Designing Brand Identity or Bottomfeeder

Designing Brand Identity: A Complete Guide to Creating, Building, and Maintaining Strong Brands

Author: Alina Wheeler

This innovative approach -- blending practicality and creativity -- is now in full-color!

From translating the vision of a CEO and conducting research, through designing a sustainable identity program and building online branding tools, Designing Brand Identity helps companies create stronger brands by offering real substance. With an easy-to-follow style, step-by-step considerations, and a proven, universal five-phase process for creating and implementing effective brand identity, the book offers the tools you need, whether a brand manager, marketer, or designer, when creating or managing a brand. This edition includes a wealth of full-color examples and updated case studies for world-class brands such as BP, Unilever, Citi, Tazo Tea, and Mini Cooper.

Alina Wheeler (Philadelphia, PA) applies her strategic imagination to help build brands, create new identities, and design brand-identity programs for Fortune 100 companies, entrepreneurial ventures, foundations, and cities.

New interesting textbook: Singing for Your Supper or The Kitchen Gardens at Heligan

Bottomfeeder: How to Eat Ethically in a World of Vanishing Seafood

Author: Taras Gresco

An eye-opening look at aquaculture that does for seafood what Fast Food Nation did for beef.

Dividing his sensibilities between Epicureanism and ethics, Taras Grescoe set out on a nine-month, worldwide search for a delicious—and humane—plate of seafood. What he discovered shocked him. From North American Red Lobsters to fish farms and research centers in China, Bottomfeeder takes readers on an illuminating tour through the $55-billion-dollar-a-year seafood industry. Grescoe examines how out-of-control pollution, unregulated fishing practices, and climate change affect what ends up on our plate. More than a screed against a multibillion-dollar industry, however, this is also a balanced and practical guide to eating, as Grescoe explains to readers which fish are best for our environment, our seas, and our bodies.

At once entertaining and illuminating, Bottomfeeder is a thoroughly enjoyable look at the world’s cuisines and an examination of the fishing and farming practices we too easily take for granted.

Publishers Weekly

In this whirlwind, worldwide tour of fisheries, Grescoe (The Devil's Picnic) whiplashes readers from ecological devastation to edible ecstasy and back again. In disturbing detail, he depicts the "turbid and murky" Chesapeake Bay, where, with overharvested oysters too few to do their filtering job, fish are infested with the "cell from hell," a micro-organism that eats their flesh and exposes their guts. He describes how Indian shrimp farms treated with pesticides, antibiotics and diesel oil are destroying protective mangroves, ecosystems and villages, and portrays the fate of sharks-a collapsing fishery-finned for the Chinese delicacy shark-fin soup: "living sharks have their pectoral and dorsal fins cut from their bodies with heated metal blades.... The sharks are kicked back into the ocean, alive and bleeding; it can take them days to die." But these horrific scenes are interspersed with delectable meals of succulent Portuguese sardines with "fat-jeweled juices" or a luscious breakfast of bluefin tuna sashimi, "cool and moist... halfway between a demi-selBreton butter and an unctuous steak tartare"; the latter is a dish that, due to the fish's endangered status, Grescoe decides he won't enjoy again. The book ends on a cautiously optimistic note: scientists know what steps are needed to save the fisheries and the ocean; we just need the political will to follow through. Grescoe provides a helpful list of which fish to eat: "no, never," "depends, sometimes" and "absolutely, always." (May)

Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

School Library Journal

Adult/High School

A thorough investigation of the fishing industry. Grescoe's research carried him to major fishing ports across the globe, from the Chesapeake Bay to the Indian Ocean, where he spent time with and interviewed fishermen, fishmongers, chefs, restaurateurs, and scientists. Each chapter focuses on a different dish-"Shrimp Curry," "Bluefin Tuna Sashimi," "Fish and Chips"-telling the history of the dish as well as the legal, ethical, and health issues surrounding the seafood used to make it. The author then explains his own choices of what to eat and what not to eat. But what really drives the book is his love of cuisine. Whether it's something as ordinary as fish sticks or an exotic meal of jellyfish, he writes about it all with gustatory enthusiasm. The book concludes with a useful appendix listing alternative resources, questions to ask when buying seafood, a list of common fishing terms, and lists of seafood broken into categories so readers have a clearer idea of what is acceptable to eat. While it may not have the widespread appeal of Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation (Houghton, 2001), Grescoe's entertaining and informative book will arm anyone interested in a dietary change.-Matthew L. Moffett, Pohick Regional Library, Burke, VA

Table of Contents:

Introduction 1

1 The Rise of the Goblin: New York City - Pan-Roasted Monkfish 15

2 In the Kingdom of the Oysters: Chesapeake Bay and Brittany - Oysters 42

3 Panic at the Chippy: England - Fish and Chips 70

4 Small Pond: Marseilles - Bouillabaisse 96

5 Fish She Is Very Small: Portugal and France - Sardines 123

6 Wave of Mutilation: India - Shrimp Curry 147

7 Buddha Jump Over the Wall: China - Shark Fin Soup 176

8 Sorry, Charlie: Japan - Bluefin Tuna Sashimi 191

9 An Economy of Scales: British Columbia - Grilled Salmon 221

10 Fast Fish, Slow Fish: Nova Scotia - Fish Sticks 254

Conclusion 274

App Tools for Choosing Seafood 283

Acknowledgments 299

Sources 301

Index 315

Women and Money or The Science of Success

Women and Money: Owning the Power to Control Your Destiny

Author: Suze Orman

The #1 New York Times bestselling author's groundbreaking new book investigates the complicated relationship women have with money.

Suze Orman equips women with the financial knowledge and emotional awareness to overcome the blocks that have kept them from making more out of the money they have. In chapters such as "You are Not on "Sale," "No Shame, No Blame," and "The 8 Qualities of a Wealthy Woman" Suze delivers her signature mix of insight, compassion, and soul-deep recognition. At the heart of the book is "The Save Yourself Plan" - a streamlined, five-month countdown that delivers genuine long-term financial security. But what's at stake is far bigger than money itself; it's about every woman's sense of who she is and what she deserves, and why it all begins with the decision to save yourself.

New interesting book: You Are Thinking of Teaching or Capital Power and Inequality in Latin America

The Science of Success: How Market Based Management Built the World's Largest Private Company

Author: Charles G Koch

Praise for THE SCIENCE OF SUCCESS


"Evaluating the success of an individual or company is a lot like judging a trapper by his pelts. Charles Koch has a lot of pelts. He has built Koch Industries into the world's largest privately held company, and this book is an insider's guide to how he did it. Koch has studied how markets work for decades, and his commitment to pass that knowledge on will inspire entrepreneurs for generations to come."
—T. Boone Pickens

"A must-read for entrepreneurs and corporate executives that is also applicable to the wider world. MBM is an invaluable tool for engendering excellence for all groups, from families to nonprofit entities. Government leaders could avoid policy failures by heeding the science of human behavior."
—Richard L. Sharp, Chairman, CarMax

"My father, Sam Walton, stressed the importance of fundamental principles—such as humility, integrity, respect, and creating value—that are the foundation for success. No one makes a better case for these principles than Charles Koch."
—Rob Walton, Chairman, Wal-Mart

"What accounts for Koch Industries' spectacular success? Charles Koch calls it Market-Based Management: a vision that nurtures personal qualities of humility and integrity that build trust and the confidence to enhance future success through learning from failure, and a culture of thinking in terms of opportunity cost and comparative advantage for all employees."
—Vernon Smith, 2002 Nobel laureate in economics

"In a very thoughtful, creative, and understandable way, Charles Koch explains how he has used the science of humanbehavior to create a culture that has produced one of the world's largest and most successful private companies. A must-read for anyone interested in creating value."
—William B. Harrison Jr., Former Chairman and CEO, JPMorgan Chase & Co.

"The same exacting thought, rooted in the realities of human nature, that the framers of the U.S. Constitution put into building a nation of entrepreneurs, Charles Koch has framed to build an enduring company of entrepreneurs—a company larger than Microsoft, Dell, HP, and other giants. Every entrepreneur should study this book."
—Verne Harnish, founder, Young Entrepreneurs' Organization, author of Mastering the Rockefeller Habits, CEO, Gazelles Inc.

Table of Contents:

Preface.

Acknowledgments.

Chapter 1. Evolution of a Business.

Chapter 2. The Science of Human Action.

Chapter 3. Vision.

Chapter 4. Virtue and talents.

Chapter 5. Knowledge Processes.

Chapter 6. Decision Rights.

Chapter 7. Incentives.

Chapter 8. Lessons Learned.

Appendices.

Partial List of MBM Models.

Notes.

Bibliography.

Index.

Twilight in the Desert or The Fifties

Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy

Author: Matthew R Simmons

Twilight in the Desert reveals a Saudi oil and production industry that could soon approach a serious, irreversible decline. In this exhaustively researched book, veteran oil industry analyst Matthew Simmons draws on his three-plus decades of insider experience and more than 200 independently produced reports about Saudi petroleum resources and production operations. He uncovers a story about Saudi Arabia’s troubled oil industry, not to mention its political and societal instability, which differs sharply from the globally accepted Saudi version. It’s a story that is provocative and disturbing, based on undeniable facts, but until now never told in its entirety. Twilight in the Desert answers all readers’ questions about Saudi oil and production industries with keen examination instead of unsubstantiated posturing, and takes its place as one of the most important books of this still-young century.

Table of Contents:

1	The birth of a nation	5
2	The history of major Saudi Arabian oil discoveries	23
3	Saudi Arabia's road to oil market dominance	43
4	The veil of secrecy over Saudi oil reserves and production	69
5	Saudi Aramco	101
6	Oil is not just another commodity	129
7	Ghawar, the king of oilfields	151
8	The second-tier oilfields	181
9	The best of the rest	199
10	Coming up empty in new exploration	231
11	Turning to natural gas	245
12	Saudi oil reserves claims in doubt	265
13	Facing the inevitable	281
14	Reading between the lines of the latest news from Aramco	309
15	Aramco invokes "fuzzy logic" to manage the future of Saudi oil	325
16	In search of crisper truths among the confident Saudi claims	333
17	Aftermath	341

The Fifties

Author: David Halberstam

The Fifties is a sweeping social, political, economic, and cultural history of the ten years that Halberstam regards as seminal in determining what our nation is today. Halberstam offers portraits of not only the titans of the age: Eisenhower Dulles, Oppenheimer, MacArthur, Hoover, and Nixon, but also of Harley Earl, who put fins on cars; Dick and Mac McDonald and Ray Kroc, who mass-produced the American hamburger; Kemmons Wilson, who placed his Holiday Inns along the nation's roadsides; U-2 pilot Gary Francis Powers; Grace Metalious, who wrote Peyton Place; and "Goody" Pincus, who led the team that invented the Pill.

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

Library Journal

The Fifties were more than just a mid-point decade in a century; they were to be the crucible in which the rest of the 20th century was forged. Halberstam (The Next Century, LJ 1/92) here touches every thread in the warp and woof of the national fabric. This is the true drama of history: President Truman's firing of General Douglas MacArthur, the Eisenhower years, Senator Joe McCarthy's red-baiting, the early U.S. involvement in Indochina, the H-bomb, the purging of atomic scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer, the Supreme Court ordering the integration of schools, troops in Little Rock to enforce it, the Montgomery bus boycott, the rise of Martin Luther King, Russia's sputnik launch, and Castro's revolutionary Cuba. Halberstam also explores major social and cultural changes--the advent of national television, fast-food restaurants, the flight to the suburbs, huge cars with fins, the phenomenon of Elvis Presley, the contraceptive pill, and much more. A superb book; recommended for all libraries. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 2/1/93.-- Chet Hagan, Berks Cty. P.L. System, Pa.

Kirkus Reviews

In The Best and the Brightest, The Powers That Be, and The Reckoning, Halberstam proved that he can master intimidating subjects with aplomb—and in this massive tome on a convulsive decade in American life, he meets with equal success. Such a sprawling panorama can't be depicted coherently without selective use of material, and some of Halberstam's omissions are open to question. While rightly lingering over McCarthyism and the development of the atomic bomb, he skims over Communism's advances in Eastern Europe and China in the late 40's, leaving an inadequate sense of why Americans yielded so readily to national-security hysteria during the period. Halberstam also fails to explain fully America's role in reviving the postwar economies of Japan and Western Europe. And why is there nothing on the advances that put air travel in reach of the average American? Nevertheless, Halberstam keeps his narrative tightly focused by concentrating on the era's human instruments of change, including some famous (Eisenhower, Elvis, Brando, Kerouac, Milton Berle, et al.) and others more obscure (Kemmons Wilson and Dick and Mac McDonald, founders of, respectively, Holiday Inn and McDonald's). In this often "mean time" of redbaiting, change still managed to burst out, with the invention of the Pill, the moves by Japan and Germany to undercut GM's preeminence in the auto industry, and the assault on legalized segregation. Halberstam finds at the heart of this decade of social, political, and economic innovation a deep split between an acceptance of change and a yearning for earlier and simpler times, and he examines thoroughly how TV altered various aspects of Americanlife—its recreation habits, its advertising, and, inevitably, its politics, through the medium's coverage of the Little Rock crisis and the JFK-Nixon debates. Compulsively readable, with familiar events and people grown fresh in the telling. (Thirty-two pages of photographs—not seen) (First Serial to American Heritage)

Economics or Positioning

Economics

Author: Walter J Wessels

Covers many subjects including plotting and understanding graphs, market equilibrium and the nature of the price system, macroeconomics, microeconomics, and international trade.

Table of Contents:

	Preface
	Essentials of Economics
1	What is Economics All About?	1
2	How to Use Graphs in Economics	18
3	Supply and Demand: Part One	28
4	Supply and Demand: Part Two	45
	Macroeconomics: Aggregate Supply and Demand
5	Measuring National Output	59
6	Inflation and Unemployment	72
7	Aggregate Demand and Supply: The Key to Macroeconomics	87
8	Aggregate Demand in the Private Sector: The Keynesian Model	101
9	Aggregate Supply and Getting to Full Employment	123
	Macroeconomics: Fiscal and Monetary Policy
10	Fiscal Policy: Government Spending and Taxation	138
11	The Supply of Money	152
12	Money and Aggregate Demand: Keynesian Model	165
13	Money and Aggregate Demand: Monetarist Model	181
14	Inflation and Unemployment	195
15	Rational Expectations and Other Models of the Business Cycle	214
	Microeconomics: Consumer and Cost
16	Elasticity	234
17	The Theory of Demand	250
18	Cost and Output	265
	Microeconomics: Competition and Monopoly
19	Competitive Supply	282
20	Markets, Competition, and Growth	304
21	Monopolies	319
22	Between Monopoly and Competition	335
23	Efficiency and Regulation	354
	Microeconomics: What People Earn
24	Factor Demand and Productivity	368
25	Wages, Labor Markets, and Unions	386
26	Rent, Interest, and Profits	404
	Microeconomics: Government and the Economy
27	Public Choice and Externalities	418
28	Government Spending and Taxation	436
	International Trade
29	International Trade	451
30	Exchange Rates and the International Monetary System	470
	Appendix
	Index	514

Read also Ghost Train to the Eastern Star or Streetwise Ireland Map Laminated Country Road Map of Ireland Folding Pocket Size Travel Map

Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind

Author: Al Ries

A handsome edition of the original 1981 text, this 20th Anniversary Edition makes available to business and marketing professionals-including tens of thousands of Ries and Trout groupies, worldwide-the work that forever changed the way marketing strategy is done. This new edition features commentary from the authors that offers fresh insight into why "positioning" a product in a prospective customer's mind is still the most important strategy in business, and includes numerous examples of campaigns that followed, or didn't follow, Ries and Trout's thinking.

What People Are Saying

David Bohnett
Ries and Trout taught me everything I know about branding, marketing, and product management. When I had the idea of creating a very large thematic community on the Web, I first thought of Positioning....
—(David Bohnett, Chairman and Founder of GeoCities)

The End of Food or Who

The End of Food

Author: Paul Roberts

The best-selling author of The End of Oil turns his attention to food and finds that the system we've entrusted with meeting one of our most basic needs is dramatically failing us.

With his trademark comprehensive global approach, Paul Roberts investigates the startling truth about the modern food system: the way we make food, market and consume it, and even think about it is no longer compatible or safe for the billions of consumers the system was built to serve.

The emergence of large-scale and efficient food production changed forever our relationship with food and ultimately left a vulnerable and paradoxical system in place. Over 1.1 billion people worldwide are "over-nourished," according to the World Health Organization, and are at risk of obesity-related illness, while roughly as many people are starving. Meanwhile the natural systems all food is dependent upon have been irreparably damaged by chemicals and destructive farming techniques; the pressures of low-cost food production court contamination and disease; and big food consumers, such as China and India, are already planning for tightened global food supplies, making it clear that the era of superabundance is behind us.

Vivid descriptions, lucid explanations, and fresh thinking make The End of Food uniquely able to offer a new, accessible way to understand the vulnerable miracle of the modern food economy. Roberts presents clear, stark visions of the future and helps us prepare to make the decisions -- personal and global -- we must make to survive the demise of food production as we know it.

Publishers Weekly

This potentially interesting investigation into the challenges of global food production and distribution is marred by the burial of its argument at the end of the book. Beneath a history of food (old news to any reader of Michael Pollan), factoid avalanches and future-tense fretting, Roberts (The End of Oil) makes a familiar plea for rethinking food systems. When the author illustrates his points with actual players, the narrative becomes affecting and memorable: a French meat packer shows how retail powerhouses dictate prices; a Kenyan farmer demonstrates how "hunger-ending" technologies are often poorly suited to the climates, soils and infrastructures in malnourished regions. Unfortunately, these anecdotes are overshadowed by colorless recitations of Internet research and data culled from interviews. Roberts worries about our "vast and overworked [food] system" and proffers the usual solutions: eat less (land-based) meat, farm more fish, support regional (not just local) agriculture and pressure food policy makers to fund research into more sustainable farming methods (including genetic modification). Despite the undeniable urgency of the issue, Roberts's arguments are as commonplace as his prescriptions. (June 4)

Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Kirkus Reviews

From Harper's contributor Roberts (The End of Oil, 2004), another dire warning of hard times ahead. This time the author scrutinizes the modern food system, examining its history from prehistoric big-game hunting through the rise of industrialized food production to the retail revolution in which large grocery companies control the supply chain. The result, he asserts, is a low-cost, high-volume model that has reduced the nutritional value of processed food and increased such health problems as obesity and diabetes; it offers superabundance to a few while millions of others go hungry. Roberts argues that the present system is critically vulnerable not only to escalating energy costs and declining supplies of land and water but to the threats of climate change, soil contamination and food-borne diseases. He paints a horrific picture of how all these factors could come together in what he calls " a perfect storm of sequential or even simultaneous food-related calamities" that begins with wheat rust in Uganda and cascades into a global crisis involving droughts, floods, unemployment, mass migrations and a deadly epidemic. To understand how the system operates, the author visited food giant Nestle in Switzerland, a meat-packing plant in France, an agricultural fair in China's Shandong Province and an Albertsons market in Washington state, among other sites, and he consulted with politicians and scientists involved in protecting and expanding the food supply. In his search for solutions, Roberts examines genetically modified foods, organic and integrated polyculture farming, aquaculture and the growing locavore movement ("eat food grown locally"), all of which hold promise but none of whichhas all the answers. The key to change, he declares, lies with an informed and activist public, which is precisely what his book aims to create and energize. A revealing, deeply dismaying overview of how the world's food is produced and marketed. Agent: Heather Schroder/ICM

Book review: Fat Proof Your Family or Herbs and Nutrients for the Mind

Who: The A Method for Hiring

Author: Geoff Smart

In Who, Geoff Smart and Randy Street provide a simple and straightforward solution to every manager's number-one problem: unsuccessful hiring.

Table of Contents:

Introduction: Who, Not What

1 Your #1 Problem 3

2 Scorecard: A Blueprint for Success 19

3 Source: Generating a Flow of A Players 47

4 Select: The Four Interviews for Spotting A Players 67

5 Sell: The Top Five Ways to Seal the Deal 123

6 Your Greatest Opportunity 147

For More Information 173

Biographies of Captains of Industry 175