Fighting the Banana Wars and Other Fairtrade Battles

Coca-Cola. Harley-Davidson. Nike. Budweiser. Valued by customers more for what they symbolize than for what they do, products like these are more than brands–they are cultural icons. How do managers create brands that resonate so powerfully with consumers? Based on extensive historical analyses of some of America’s most successful iconic brands, including ESPN, Mountain Dew, Volkswagen, Budweiser, and Harley-Davidson, this book presents the first systematic model to explain how brands become icons. Douglas B. Holt shows how iconic brands create “identity myths” that, through powerful symbolism, soothe collective anxieties resulting from acute social change. Holt warns that icons can’t be built through conventional branding strategies, which focus on benefits, brand personalities, and emotional relationships. Instead, he calls for a deeper cultural perspective on traditional marketing themes like targeting, positioning, brand equity, and brand loyalty–and outlines a distinctive set of “cultural branding” principles that will radically alter how companies approach everything from marketing strategy to market research to hiring and training managers. Until now, Holt shows, even the most successful iconic brands have emerged more by intuition and serendipity than by design. With How Brands Become Icons, managers can leverage the principles behind some of the most successful brands of the last half-century to build their own iconic brands. Douglas B. Holt is associate professor of Marketing at Harvard Business School.

This revised and updated edition of How to Make the Most of Your Workday will help you learn how to work smarter, not harder. It is packed with tools, techniques, advice, and activities to help you permanently change the way you work and live.
This book will also show you:
-Why you aren’t getting things done and how you can change this.
-How to reduce daily stress and anxiety.
-How to create more leisure time.
-How to mange your time, prioritize you list, meet your goals, and make all your efforts more successful and rewarding.
-How to conquer one of today’s major productivity killers-procrastination-once and for all.

A One-on-One Financial Planning Session with Suze Orman

With her New York Times bestseller The 9 Steps to Financial Freedom, America’s leading financial expert Suze Orman transformed the concept of money forever by teaching us to recognize the emotional aspects of our relationship with it. Now, this fully revised edition of Suze Orman’s Financial Guidebook translates Suze’s own brand of motivation and inspiration into a user-friendly, hands-on workbook that will empower you to work through the nuts and bolts of personal finance, with Suze as your trusted adviser.

Updated to keep you abreast of our quickly shifting economy, you’ll find:

• Insightful exercises, quizzes, and worksheets to help you understand how your parents’ relationship with money affects yours, and what money means to you

• Up-to-the-minute information on tax codes, IRA rules and regulations, and long-term-care insurance

• Useful strategies for coping with the ever-changing landscape of educational costs, social security, and the stock market

• An outline of key questions that every financial adviser should ask you upon your initial meeting

• An in-depth analysis of all your monthly expenses, providing a realistic picture of just how much money you have to work with and how you may not be respecting your money as much as you should

Regardless of your age and income, it is never too early or too late to take control of your money. Suze Orman’s Financial Guidebook is the perfect companion to The 9 Steps to Financial Freedom, the personal finance classic that changed the way millions of Americans viewed money. Full of self-tests, thought-provoking questions, and Suze’s easy-to-understand personal finance advice, here is your empowering approach to achieving financial freedom forever, with the best guide possible.

In this perennial best seller, embraced by organizations and industries worldwide, globally preeminent management thinkers W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne challenge everything you thought you knew about the requirements for strategic success. Recognized as one of the most iconic and impactful strategy books ever written, Blue Ocean Strategy, now updated with fresh content from the authors, argues that cutthroat competition results in nothing but a bloody red ocean of rivals fighting over a shrinking profit pool. Based on a study of 150 strategic moves (spanning more than 100 years across 30 industries), the authors argue that lasting success comes not from battling competitors but from creating “blue oceans” – untapped new market spaces ripe for growth.

Blue Ocean Strategy presents a systematic approach to making the competition irrelevant and outlines principles and tools any organization can use to create and capture their own blue oceans. This expanded edition includes: a new preface by the authors: “Help! My Ocean Is Turning Red”; updates on all cases and examples in the book; and two new chapters and an expanded third one – “Alignment, Renewal, and Red Ocean Traps” – that address some of the most pressing questions listeners and readers have asked over the years.

Operational Risk is one of the important arms of the risk management triangle, the other two being Credit Risk and Market (Treasury) Risk. Any organisation, particularly in the banking sector, is squarely exposed to operational risks emanating within or outside the organisation.There was no precise definition of operational risk until Basel Accord II came into being in June 2004. For the first time in the history of global banking, operational risk capital charge has been made a mandatory requirement in banking. This certainly puts in a lot of stress and strain on a bank’s management. The entire gamut of operational risk has been visited and covered in the appropriate chapters of this book.