Cool Book Of The Day

Pitch reporters with our up-to-date media databases:

Question: Who is the intended audience?
Answer: Anyone who wants to understand more about risk in their life or business, including business owners, managers, executives, and employees who want to know more about the risks to their jobs if their company is endangering jobs by not balancing risk taken and reasonably projectable rewards obtainable.

Q: What is the book about?
A: In Stick Out Your Balance Sheet and Cough, Gary Patterson details for the first time the proven methods he’s used to successfully treat ailing companies of all sizes across a range of industries–from a startup purchased by IBM to a public technology company sold to eBay to an Inc. 500 consumer goods manufacturer to an international Fortune 500 firm.

Offering tips to stanch the internal financial bleeding and providing a daily regimen for ensuring your company’s financial health, the FiscalDoctor’s prescription is clear:
• Give your company an overall checkup to gauge its condition
• Diagnose problems by reviewing your financials and operations
• Implement a treatment plan using Best Practices from world-class successful companies
• Create a wellness program to prevent future fiscal crises

Using the FiscalDoctor’s Best Practices, the high-growth company you own, manage or
direct can avoid unnecessary increased expenses, revenue shortfalls, employee layoffs, missed bonuses or broken dreams.

So open this book and say “Profit.”

Q: Why are you the best person to write this book?
A: Gary W. Patterson, The FiscalDoctor®, actually uses these methods developed over more than 30 years of top management experience with companies in manufacturing, technology, wireless, service and distribution in companies from start-ups to Inc 500 to Fortune 500. Several reached 10x compounded annual growth in revenue. He was the European coordinator for a global enterprise-wide leading-edge supply chain re-engineering pilot software application for Robertson CECO, a Fortune 500 company. The project was selected as a premiere site by J D Edwards and he was one of three worldwide pilots for a dimensional MRP software module. Gary also successfully negotiated more than 25 M&A transactions with a market value exceeding $390 million. Gary holds an MBA in Finance and Operations from the Stanford Graduate School of Business, a BA in Accounting from the University of Mississippi, and is a KPMG Big 4 CPA.

Q: How is this book different than other books on this topic?
A: Patterson offers a commonsense approach to risk management that unlocks added value for existing or new ERM programs, both identifying formerly invisible opportunities and revealing key risk areas executives unwittingly take.

In these turbulent economic times when risk is a guaranteed certainty, Gary Patterson unlocks the “hidden risks” that could topple even the best of companies. Even before Bernie Madoff, he saw companies struggle, even die from self inflicted risks they unknowingly took. To this end, Patterson helps companies develop and implement an ERM strategy to ensure a company’s long-term financial growth.

Patterson offers readers seven takeaway tips:
• Management needs to “bite the bullet” and just get started. Often companies want to start at too high a level of sophistication and quit because of the “perceived” challenges. Patterson offers a basic starting point.
• Patterson zeroes in on five operational areas where an ERM strategy will result in immediate improvements.
• Even viable business models need continuous fine tuning to help re-define and manage risk.
• The greening of America will necessitate that every company have an ERM strategy.
• Even cash-strapped companies can find innumerable ways to improve their cashflow. Patterson’s Resource Sections offer additional tips to improve a company’s balance sheet.
• Executive teams must come to terms with their risk tolerance in order to implement an ERM strategy that works for their companies’ cultures.
• Corporate board packages that are delivered less than six days before a board meeting is a sign that there may be systemic operational problems (read risk) lurking inside the company.

Q: Is there anything else we should know about this book?
A: This enterprise risk management (ERM) book includes stories on how a Fiscal Checkup can save your business life. “What You Don’t Know About Your Business Can Cost You Your Business.” That is why sticking out your balance sheet and coughing gets you what you need to know in time for any needed procedures which can mean the difference between life and death. Sticking out your balance sheet is no more comfortable than a visit to your doctor, but it’s every bit as important. Even if it’s bad news (maybe especially) you need to know.

This commonsense approach to risk management unlocks added value for existing or new ERM programs, both identifying formerly invisible opportunities and revealing key risk areas business unwittingly takes.

Too many CEOs, C-suite officers, and boards are taking far greater risks than they may be aware of. Posing the million-dollar-question, “What is the cost of what you don’t know,” this session alerts managers to hidden risks that may be lurking inside their projects and even companies.

For example, in this rapidly accelerating world where layers of management and large numbers of employees have been fired or their work outsourced, decision makers are under siege. After adding factors like silo-thinking departments, inadequate reporting systems, and a challenging global economy, companies are taking far greater risks than CEOs and C-suite officers and their boards are aware of. Examples of risks can range from inventory mismanagement, outdated and/or incomplete financial reports, and false accounting assumptions to external forces like misreading the market, losing competitive advantage, and missing opportunities.

And as another point of WIIFM, you will find you can implement a basic version of this which can make you more money, including saving your bonus in some future year, or maybe this current year.

A video of Gary discussing his book is available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXhsY8hP70A

Pitch reporters with our up-to-date media databases:

Question: Who is the intended audience?
Answer: Promoting Your Non-Profit is a workbook targeted to professionals and volunteers in non-profit organizations and associations who’d like to understand how to better promote and market their organizations. The book is valuable for both local groups and those operating as part of a large national or international network.

Q: What is the book about?
A: The book provides a series of fun, easy-to-use tools to help organizations identify and articulate their target audience, the unique value they provide, and outline the steps to create a simple marketing or promotional plan. Topics covered include how to understand the market and your position, developing a brand, competition, integrating social media, and developing a marketing campaign. The workbook also includes ways to measure the progress of your campaign and a list of useful resources.

Q: Why are you the best person to write this book?
A: Linda Popky is an award winning marketer, as well as a successful consultant, speaker, author and educator. Her company, L2M Associates, helps organizations dramatically improve their bottom line by more effectively leveraging their investment in marketing programs, processes, and people.

She is the president of Women in Consulting (WIC), a collaborative organization of seasoned business professionals in more than 30 consulting specialties, and a member of the Society for the Advancement of Consulting (SAC). She is the program advisor for the  Integrated Marketing Program at San Francisco State University’s College of Extended Learning, on the Advisory Board for the University of California Santa Cruz Extension in Silicon Valley and an adjunct instructor for the online Master’s in Integrated Marketing Communication program at West Virginia University.

Linda believes that especially in these challenging economic times many worthy non-profit organizations are not doing all they can to promote and market themselves to each of their key audiences. This book combines her extensive knowledge of applied marketing concepts with her long experience in leadership and volunteer roles with various associations and non-profit organizations, and draws on her consulting experience in organizations from start-ups to Fortune 100 companies as well.

Q: How is this book different than other books on this topic?
A: This workbook, based on Linda’s Leverage2MarketTM concepts, brings a solid audience-focused approach to non-profit organizations. Where for-profit businesses focus on reaching paying customers, non-profits must reach multiple groups of individuals, including volunteers, donors, sponsors, constituents, members and policymakers. Whether you are promoting toothpaste, coffee or non-profit services, what’s important are the benefits that meet the audience’s wants and needs—-not the features the organization may want to promote.

Q: Is there anything else we should know about this book?
A: You don’t need to be a marketing professional to benefit from this book. The marketing concepts are straightforward and easy to grasp, and the workbook is concise and easy to complete.

This is the second in a series of workbooks in the Leverage2Market Mastery Series. The Leverage2Market Model focuses on five key elements: Products: the goods or services being marketed; Programs: the marketing initiatives being created and delivered; Processes: the way initiatives are delivered; People: those who deliver the initiatives; and Positioning, the key messages to be delivered in a campaign.

Promoting Your Non-Profit: Using Marketing to Help Your Organization Success in a Turbulent Time is available immediately from Amazon.com and from the publisher, Woodside Business Press, a specialty business press dedicated to publishing books on stimulating and thought-provoking business and marketing-related topics, at www.woodsidebusinesspress.com.

Pitch reporters with our up-to-date media databases:

Question: Who is the intended audience?
Answers: Sales Professionals and Small Business Owners

Q: What is the book about?
A: Companies are infamous for “promoting” their top sales person into the role of sales manager with no training, no development, no mentoring. Since sales management is not a skill you learn in the womb, these new sales managers have not been provided with a tool kit to help their sales team…but they still expect them to perform.

The book is intended for the sales people working for a manager that is not equipped to help them so that they can develop their own sales architecture® which is their success framework. Soar teaches sales people how to develop a sound-byte, organize their sales territory in a meaningful way, create a needs analysis program, analyze buying players, and much, much more.

Q: Why are you the best person to write this book?
A: Having built sales organizations for twenty years in multiple companies and industries, I’ve learned what sales people need to thrive. The sales architecture® methodology presented in Soar is not theoretical. It has been used and refined by the sales organizations that I managed over the years.

Q: How is this book different from other books on this topic?
A: There is nothing theoretical in this book. It was not developed based on studies of countless companies and how they were successful. It a grass roots, hands-on book with strategies and tactics that have been used by the teams that I managed.

Q: Is there anything else we should know about this book?
A: The Sales Book Awards ranked this book as one of the top 12 books of 2008 and awarded it a silver medal for sales motivation.

Pitch reporters with our up-to-date media databases:

Question: Who is the intended audience?
Answer: Executives, managers, directors, family firms, HR specialists, coaches, MBA Candidates.

Q: What book is about?
A: This book explores what happens when patterns originally created to cope with family conflicts are unleashed in the workplace. When stress and anxiety hit the hot button at work we all revert to behaviors we used as children for survival and security.

The common patterns of pleaser, rebel, avoider, martyr, and the like are familiar in every business setting and get in the way of real work being done. This book shows how to transform these out-dated behavior patterns to ones that make working together successful and profitable.

Q: Why are you the best person to write this book?
A: I am the owner of a retreat center and a consulting company. I am also a “drama queen” who had to learn where that academy award winning, albeit bothersome, behavior came from before my employees were ready for a mutiny.  I have a PhD in psychology with a focus on family therapy.

When I realized that we do bring the behavior patterns from our original organization, the family into our present organization, the workplace I knew I had stumbled onto something important. I have dedicated myself to helping leaders and their direct reports become aware of the tired, old behaviors that worked at three or ten years of age yet get in the way of present day grown-up interactions. I have developed the OUT Technique (Observe, Understand Transform) as an effective and efficient process to make the work environment productive and collaborative.

Q: How is this book different than other books on this topic?
A: This is the first book to identify the 13 most common patterns that correspond to characters familiar to anyone who has ever worked in an office. You know the type – maybe he’s the office clown, or the woman who always looks busy yet is the avoider, or the guy who has a rain cloud above his victim head. These behaviors are painfully annoying and stir up conflict in any office. The book is filled with a wealth of real-life anecdotes and practical workbook-style exercises that, when followed, empower people to make profound differences both at work and in their personal lives.

Q: Is there anything else we should know about this book?
A: It is being used as the text for a leadership program in Ghana as well as several other graduate courses in the states. There are several groups that have begun to use this book as a home study course and it is the basis of the successful Total Leadership Connections Program.