The Metail Economy: 6 Strategies for Transforming Your Business to Thrive in the Me-Centric Consumer Revolution


Book Description

Rethink, rebuild, and re-energize your relationship with every customer for ultimate success in today’s Metail economy Armed with computers, tablets, smartphones, and social media, today’s consumers have revolted against the marketplace status quo. Demanding a voice, and sometimes a hand, in the products they buy, these digitally empowered consumers―"Me's"―have inverted the traditional power dynamics of retail into Metail. To put it simply, your customers are now in charge, and you must recognize and embrace this fact in order to survive in new Metail economy. From Joel Bines, one of today’s top retail brand thought leaders, The Metail Economy provides innovative methods for connecting with the Me-centric consumer and shows how to thrive in this consumer revolution. Bines provides examples of companies that have failed to address the Metail paradigm, along with those that are on the right path, clearly illustrating how the traditional power dynamic has inverted and why it matters for business survival. Bines offers six proven models you can use to cultivate and serve highly informed and empowered customers in the Metail marketplace: Curation Customization Category Expertise Cost Convenience Community Bines explains why you shouldn’t pigeonhole your business into one model, but rather develop a deep self-awareness about how your organization is viewed and valued by your customers―and focus your efforts accordingly. Whether you’re the CEO of a global organization or starting your own clothing boutique, you must become a Metailer―and this groundbreaking book will show you how.




Leading at a Distance


Book Description

A timely and hands-on resource informed by lessons learned from Fortune 500 CEOs and executives Leading at a Distance provides executives with the necessary skills to successfully lead in the new virtual workplace, backed by the research and expertise of global leadership firm Spencer Stuart. Although working remotely is not new, the global pandemic has placed virtual work at the center of everyday life. And it has thrust workforce strategies to the core of business operations globally. As the shift towards large-scale virtual work continues to grow and become a permanent fixture—by some estimates, 30% of the workforce will be working virtually – leaders must understand how to build virtual work environments that foster connected, engaged, and high-performing teams. Although some forward-thinking companies and not-for-profit organizations have made significant investments in technology and virtual collaboration, many others have simply joined the “Zoom culture” without fully appreciating what it takes to operate effectively at a distance on a sustained basis. Leading at a Distance is a timely, research-based, and highly practical guide for developing and implementing strategies for conducting high-impact virtual work, building trust, and enhancing team unity. Designed to help leaders shape organizational culture remotely, this must-have resource demonstrates how to conduct virtual onboarding for senior leaders, build top teams from a distance, manage accountability in the new virtual environment, and much more. A hands-on toolkit filled with compelling examples, expert insights, and invaluable advice, this book: Provides clear guidance on establishing effective leadership in the virtual workplace Offers practical approaches for establishing strong relationships, increasing employee engagement, and coaching from a distance Addresses ways to keep geographically dispersed team members aligned and accountable Illustrates creative ideas for boosting team morale Features an overview of the unique challenges facing leaders in the virtual workplace Discusses often-overlooked topics such as virtual hiring and onboarding Leveraging the authors' in-depth research and consulting experience, Leading at a Distance is required reading for anyone needing to adapt to a virtual way of working and develop their virtual leadership skills to maximize organizational effectiveness and performance.




Strategic International Management


Book Description

“Strategic International Management” takes a global perspective and covers the major aspects of international business strategies, the coordination of international companies and the particularities of international value chain activities and management functions. The book provides a thorough understanding of how Production & Sourcing, Research & Development, Marketing, Human Resource Management and Controlling have to be designed in an international company and what models are available to understand those activities in an international context. The book offers 20 lessons that provide a comprehensive overview of all key issues. Each lesson is accompanied by a case study from an international company to facilitate the understanding of all important factors involved in strategic international management.




Adaptive Marketing


Book Description

Adapt or die is really the 21st century mantra for business. Authors Norm Johnston provides guidance on how to adopt an Adaptive Marketing model to ensure you are not only prepared for this new data world, but also winning against both traditional competitors and new disrupters.




The Relationship Economy


Book Description

Creating Authentic Customer Connections in a High-Tech World In The Relationship Economy, author John DiJulius teaches business leaders about the importance of relationship building in the digital age. He argues that in spite of (and because of) the advances in tech, we've become a less connected society. We have dramatically evolved away from face-to-face communication, and the skill of building rapport is evaporating. This means that customer personalization and relationships are more important now than ever—and they will be the key to success for businesses moving forward. As he aptly states, “Being able to build true sustainable relationships is the biggest competitive advantage in a world where automation, artificial intelligence, and machine learning are eliminating the human experience, which is what creates the emotional connections that build true customer loyalty.” This book reminds readers of the importance of personal connections and shows them how to attain meaningful, lasting relationships with their customers.




Wonder


Book Description

How we can all be lifelong wonderers: restoring the sense of joy in discovery we felt as children. From an early age, children pepper adults with questions that ask why and how: Why do balloons float? How do plants grow from seeds? Why do birds have feathers? Young children have a powerful drive to learn about their world, wanting to know not just what something is but also how it got to be that way and how it works. Most adults, on the other hand, have little curiosity about whys and hows; we might unlock a door, for example, or boil an egg, with no idea of what happens to make such a thing possible. How can grown-ups recapture a child’s sense of wonder at the world? In this book, Frank Keil describes the cognitive dispositions that set children on their paths of discovery and explains how we can all become lifelong wonderers. Keil describes recent research on children’s minds that reveals an extraordinary set of emerging abilities that underpin their joy of discovery—their need to learn not just the facts but the underlying causal patterns at the very heart of science. This glorious sense of wonder, however, is stifled, beginning in elementary school. Later, with little interest in causal mechanisms, and motivated by intellectual blind spots, as adults we become vulnerable to misinformation and manipulation—ready to believe things that aren’t true. Of course, the polymaths among us have retained their sense of wonder, and Keil explains the habits of mind and ways of wondering that allow them—and can enable us—to experience the joy of asking why and how.




The Ultimate Marketing Engine


Book Description

A step-by-step system for creating customers and clients for life. In a world that’s difficult for business professionals to cut through noise to create relationships with their customers, organizations that focus on converting their customers to members and helping them achieve lasting transformation rather than simply offering the transaction of the moment are winning. The Ultimate Marketing Engine teaches you how to develop a system to take every customer from where they are to where they want to be by building on the innovative principles first brought to the marketing world in Duct Tape Marketing and honed over three decades of working with thousands of businesses. In this book, you will learn: Why strategy must come before tactics. How to narrow your focus and choose only ideal customers. Why no one wants what you sell – and what they actually want. How to use story and narrative as the voice of strategy. How to construct the perfect customer journey. How to grow your business with your customers. This bookintroduces the Customer Success Track, an innovative new approach to marketing strategy that will transform how you view your business, your marketing and how you view every customer. The Ultimate Marketing Engine will help you take control of your marketing while creating ridiculously consistent business growth.




Toward a New Poetics


Book Description

"Timely and provocative. . . . A pioneer work both in its format and in the range of authors it presents. I came away with an enlarged sense of the French cultural scene and the vitality of the players."—Richard Macksey, author of The Structuralist Controversy "Constitutes a definitive poetics for the recent generation of French poets. The interviews one finds here (and Gavronsky's excellent introduction) will be as important a document of postwar French writing as Symonds' The Symbolist Movement in Literature was for the age of Eliot."—Michael Davidson, author of The San Francisco Renaissance "This is the best and only introduction to the latest and most interesting literary experimentation in France. Through thoughtful interviews with the authors and a short selection of their work we come to know them intimately and we get a good overall sense of the direction present day French Literature is taking."—Sydney Lévy, editor of SubStance: A Review of Theory and Literary Criticism




The Antinomies Of Realism


Book Description

The Antinomies of Realism is a history ofthe nineteenth-century realist novel and its legacy told without a glimmer of nostalgia for artistic achievements that the movement of history makes it impossible to recreate. The works of Zola, Tolstoy, Pérez Galdós, and George Eliot are in the most profound sense inimitable, yet continue to dominate the novel form to this day. Novels to emerge since struggle to reconcile the social conditions of their own creation with the history of this mode of writing: the so-called modernist novel is one attempted solution to this conflict, as is the ever-more impoverished variety of commercial narratives – what today’s book reviewers dub “serious novels,” which are an attempt at the impossible endeavor to roll back the past. Fredric Jameson examines the most influential theories of artistic and literary realism, approaching the subject himself in terms of the social and historical preconditions for realism’s emergence. The realist novel combined an attention to the body and its states of feeling with a focus on the quest for individual realization within the confines of history. In contemporary writing, other forms of representation – for which the term “postmodern” is too glib – have become visible: for example, in the historical fiction of Hilary Mantel or the stylistic plurality of David Mitchell’s novels. Contemporary fiction is shown to be conducting startling experiments in the representation of new realities of a global social totality, modern technological warfare, and historical developments that, although they saturate every corner of our lives, only become apparent on rare occasions and by way of the strangest formal and artistic devices. In a coda, Jameson explains how “realistic” narratives survived the end of classical realism. In effect, he provides an argument for the serious study of popular fiction and mass culture that transcends lazy journalism and the easy platitudes of recent cultural studies.




The Cylinder


Book Description

The Cylinder investigates the surprising proliferation of cylindrical objects in the nineteenth century, such as steam engines, phonographs, panoramas, rotary printing presses, silos, safety locks, and many more. Examining this phenomenon through the lens of kinematics, the science of forcing motion, Helmut Müller-Sievers provides a new view of the history of mechanics and of the culture of the industrial revolution, including its literature, that focuses on the metaphysics and aesthetics of motion. Müller-Sievers explores how nineteenth-century prose falls in with the specific rhythm of cylindrical machinery, re-imagines the curvature of cylindrical spaces, and conjoins narrative progress and reflection in a single stylistic motion. Illuminating the intersection of engineering, culture, and literature, he argues for a concept of culture that includes an epoch’s relation to the motion of its machines.