Make Your Contacts Count is a practical, step-by-step guide for creating, cultivating, and capitalizing on networking relationships and opportunities. Packed with valuable tools, the book offers a field-tested "Hello to Goodbye" system that takes readers from entering a room, to making conversations flow, to following up. Updated from its first edition, the book now includes expanded advice on building social capital at work and in job hunting, as well as new case studies, examples, checklists, and questionnaires. Readers will discover how to:

* draft a networking plan
* cultivate current contacts
* make the most of memberships
* effectively exchange business cards
* avoid the top ten networking turn-offs
* share anecdotes that convey character and competence
* transform their careers with a networking makeover

Job-seekers, career-changers, entrepreneurs, and others will find all the networking help they need to supercharge their careers and boost their bottom lines.

The next five years will be [...] a period of opportunity for China to speed up the growth of software and information services outsourcing. China will continue to generate strong market demand for the global software industry.

Distributed business component computing–the assembling of business components into electronic business processes, which interact via the Internet–caters to a new breed of enterprise systems that are flexible, relatively easy to maintain and upgrade to accommodate new business processes, and relatively simple to integrate with other enterprise systems. Companies with unwieldy, large, and heterogeneous inherited information systems–known as legacy systems–find it extremely difficult to align their old systems with novel business processes. Legacy systems are not only tightly intertwined with existing business processes and procedures but also have a brittle architecture after years of ad-hoc fixes and offer limited openness to other systems. In this book, Willem-Jan van den Heuvel provides a methodological framework that offers pragmatic techniques for aligning component-based business processes and legacy systems.

Van den Heuvel's methodology is based on three building blocks: reverse engineering, which allows legacy systems to be componentized; forward engineering, which derives a set of business components from requirements of the new business processes; and alignment of new business processes and componentized legacy systems. Van den Heuvel provides a theoretical foundation for these, with chapters that discuss component-based development, introduce a case study that is used throughout the book to illustrate the methodology, and assess methods and technologies for legacy integration, component adaptation, and process alignment. He describes the methodological framework itself and its techniques to align new business processes with legacy systems by adopting a meet-in-the-middle strategy. Drawing on topics from a wide range of disciplines, including component-based development, distributed computing, business process modeling, and others, Aligning Modern Business Processes and Legacy Systems offers theoretically grounded practical methodology that has been explored and tested in a variety of experiments as well as some real-world projects.

For years, companies have accepted the underlying principles that define the customer-driven paradigm–that is, using customer "requirements" to guide growth and innovation. But twenty years into this movement, breakthrough innovations are still rare, and most companies find that 50 to 90 percent of their innovation initiatives flop. The cost of these failures to U.S. companies alone is estimated to be well over $100 billion annually. In a book that challenges everything you have learned about being customer driven, internationally acclaimed innovation leader Anthony Ulwick reveals the secret weapon behind some of the most successful companies of recent years. Known as "outcome-driven" innovation, this revolutionary approach to new product and service creation transforms innovation from a nebulous art into a rigorous science from which randomness and uncertainty are eliminated.

Based on more than 200 studies spanning more than seventy companies and twenty-five industries, Ulwick contends that, when it comes to innovation, the traditional methods companies use to communicate with customers are the root cause of chronic waste and missed opportunity. In What Customers Want, Ulwick demonstrates that all popular qualitative research methods yield well-intentioned but unfitting and dreadfully misleading information that serves to derail the innovation process. Rather than accepting customer inputs such as "needs," "benefits," "specifications," and "solutions," Ulwick argues that researchers should silence the literal "voice of the customer" and focus on the "metrics that customers use to measure success when executing the jobs, tasks or activities they are trying to get done." Using these customer desired outcomes as inputs into the innovation process eliminates much of the chaos and variability that typically derails innovation initiatives.

Most people have been conditioned to believe that business communication must be clear, rational, and objective, with no place for emotion or subjective thinking. Yet the most powerful, persuasive communication has a human element…often delivered simply and personally through the telling of stories.

This book shows readers how to use personal stories to get their ideas across and create meaningful connections between themselves and their audience. Moving beyond the usual speech-openers or ice-breakers, the book gives readers a process for finding, developing, and using their own stories, including how to:

* gain people's trust
* use six different kinds of stories
* shift from everyday thinking into story thinking
* help shape group decisions and actions.

Filled with enlightening anecdotes, this practical guide gives readers the tools they need to persuade, inspire, and influence others through the power of story.

Filled with case studies and anecdotes, this book demystifies the most critical aspect of customer service: conversations employees have every day with customers. It outlines a proven system based on the authors' MAGIC customer service training program - MAGIC, stands for Make A Great Impression on the Customer.

Author Description:

Diane Berenbaum, a senior vice president and owner of Communico Ltd., has helped foster and build strong, long-lasting client relationships for the company. Diane has authored numerous articles and has delivered training and coaching services to both senior leadership teams and front-line associates for over twenty-five years.
Tom Larkin, a senior vice president and owner of Communico Ltd., is an authority on customer service initiatives and customer relations training and development. His work in the training and education field spans more than thirty years. He continues to work with senior leadership teams in a variety of industries.