Business and Management Books
Cutting Costs Creatively: A Self-Guided Program for Continuous Improvement Teams
This program presents managers, supervisors, work teams and other employees with the essential information they need to set up and manage an in-house continuous cost, quality and productivity improvement program. The book focuses on ten key skill areas that any Continuous Improvement Team (CIT) needs in order to identify, prioritize and solve problems that can negatively impact organizational performance and profitability. Cutting Costs Creatively is a "must read" for members of any organization that is committed to strengthen their business or operation to successfully compete in today's highly competitive and challenging global economic environment. ORDER: B-101 $14.95 including shipping |
25 Quick Start Training Activities: To Kick-Off & Energize Your Training Programs
Every trainer needs a library of easy-to-use exercises to "break the ice" in a new class or to give a training session a "shot in the arm." This collection of short exercises is just what the training doctor ordered! Lots of fun, easy-to-administer, powerful enough to really motivate yet short enough so that they do not interfere with your main training objectives. Each exercise is accompanied by administration information and guidelines for easy facilitation. Group size can vary according to need. An introductory section, Tips for Trainers, provides additional useful information about how to set up your training session and use 25 Quick Start Training Activities for optimum results. ORDER: B-102 $14.95 including shipping |
How to Conduct Successful Employee Opinion Surveys
The purpose of this book is to introduce executives, managers and human resource development professionals to a process by which they can conduct a successful employee opinion survey in their organization. Readers will find that the book contains a wealth of valuable information including a step-by-step survey planning guide, model project schedules, sample survey announcements to employees, examples of survey reports with interpretation guidelines and a recommended process for post-survey follow up response action. All of this information is presented in a way that will be easily understood and that can be easily applied or administered by any management level employee. ORDER: B-103 $14.95 including shipping |
How to Achieve Superior Teamwork
This activity based training program gets to the heart of effective team performance. It gives readers the building blocks that they need to achieve superior team interaction and problem solving by using team activities, structured feedback and practical application exercises as the principal method of instruction. The program begins with the fundamentals of group dynamics and clearly demonstrates the differences between group and team behavior. It then leads readers through a step-by-step process for building and strengthening teamwork in any organizational setting, including strategies to achieve superior teamwork and the problem solving tools that will enable readers to help their organizations achieve and maintain the competitive edge that is essential in today’s global economy. Order: B-104 $14.95 including shipping |
Leadership Skills for Managers, Supervisors and Team Leaders
Leadership Skills: For Managers, Supervisors and Team Leaders is designed as a training program to provide organizational leaders and candidates for these positions with the fundamental knowledge and skill development that they need to succeed as leaders in today’s business environment. The book focuses on the nature of the role that most managers and supervisors are required to fulfill as they strive to accomplish things through others, which is the essence of leadership. The book consists of twelve chapters that focus on essential leadership skills including: Understanding The Role and Responsibility of a Leader, How to Build a Winning Team, How to Manage Diversity, How to Improve Communication Skills, How to Plan, Organize and Manage Time Effectively, How to Solve Problems and much more. At the end of each chapter the reader is presented with a Self-Awareness Test that will provide feedback regarding how well he or she understands the leadership issues and principles presented. Concluding each chapter is a structured format by which the reader can prepare a Personal Developmental Plan that will help him or her gain introspection about developmental needs related to the topic of the chapter and then prepare developmental goals and a set of strategies by which skill development can be accomplished. ORDER: B-105 $14.95 including shipping |
16 Developmental Tests: For Managers & Supervisors
This is a compendium of sixteen developmental instruments designed to help HRD and Training Professionals and other Executives assess the interaction skills of managers, supervisors and candidates for those positions. Their purpose is to help HRD and Training Professionals and other Executives understand the training and development needs of employees. The instruments in this compendium can be used singly or as part of a series. For example, a facilitator might choose to administer only the Supervisory Skills Test to a group of current or prospective supervisors, team leaders or lead persons in order to obtain diagnostic information that will help the facilitator design a supervisory training course. Alternatively, The Supervisory Skills Test can be paired with a leadership instrument such as the Leadership Skills Test in order to obtain a broader diagnostic perspective. Similarly, the five team assessments can be used either singly or in combination in a structured team building training course. Each instrument consists of an Administration Manual or Facilitator’s Guide and a Participant’s Booklet. The former includes a synopsis of the instrument and facilitation guidelines and scoring information. The Participant’s Booklet is essentially a “test booklet.” Purchase of this book includes a limited license for the purchaser to reproduce and use any or all of the material contained herein for educational and developmental purposes. ORDER: B-106 $14.95 including shipping |
Communication Skill Builders: 20 Icebreakers & Training Activities
This series of 20 icebreakers and short training activities (25 to 60 minutes) has all the material you need to improve the communication skills of managers, supervisors and employees at all organizational levels. The activities have been specifically designed to clearly demonstrate key communication principles and to make participants more effective listeners and communicators. The activities set can be used either as a complete communications skills training program or as individual modules to supplement a corporate program. They are an excellent way to kick-off training sessions or to give your training program that "shot in the arm" that it needs to really energize your class. ORDER: B-107 $14.95 including shipping |
Talico Team Builders: For Managers, Supervisors & All Employees
This is a collection of 15 team building training activities developed by well known author and consultant Louis E. Tagliaferri, retired founder and former CEO of Talico Developmental Systems LLC. These easy-to-administer team builders capture the attention and interest of managers, supervisors and employees at all organizational levels as they demonstrate key team interaction principles and motivate activity participants. Purchase of the book includes a limited license to reproduce and use any of the activities without royalty payments. This is a "must have" for any training professional or manager who wants to improve the team skills of employees in his or her organization. ORDER: B-108 $14.95 including shipping |
Novels
Bellaria di Rivergaro
Emilio and Evangelina meet in a small hamlet in northwest Italy’s beautiful Trebbia Valley. They soon fall in love and marry. Emilio, his son and brothers, build a country inn in the nearby town of Rivergaro that Emilio names Bellaria di Rivergaro. Together Emilio and Evangelina raise a family of eight children as they struggle to make the inn a successful business. As time passes, their two oldest children, Elisa and Luigi, leave Bellaria and immigrate to America to make a better life for themselves. While Elisa and Luigi confront the problems of assimilating into a foreign culture, life at Bellaria continues through the turbulent years of World War I, dealing with one challenge after another until tragedy strikes Elisa and her family in the immigrant section of New York City. Later, during the fascist period of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, the family at Bellaria finds it must deal with economic hardship, terror and danger. They confront even greater danger during World War II when family members face possible execution because occupying German forces suspect they are engaged in partisan activities. In America, Luigi achieves success in the construction industry, but carries a burden of remorse because despite many promises he never returns to see his family at Bellaria. The years pass with the economic fortunes of Bellaria rising and falling. Emilio and Evangelina pass on leaving their children the task of trying to make Bellaria a viable business. Eventually, business conditions force the family to sell Bellaria to an outside party, ending eighty years of family ownership. However, in America, the grandson of Luigi and his wife determine to fulfill Luigi’s promise, but in a unexpected and emotional way. ORDER: BDR $14.95 including shipping |
The Web Shop
The Web Shop is a dramatic story about the lives, loves and struggles of early twentieth century immigrant employees of a New England textile mill, as they seek a better life in America. Leaving their families in Italy and everything familiar to them, Felicia, Armando and Santina immigrate to Centerville, Connecticut where they join other immigrants who have successfully found employment at a place called the Web Shop. Working at the Web Shop is not easy for the immigrants. They are continuously confronted with long hours, low pay, unhealthy work conditions and sometimes-abusive supervisors. However, a strong camaraderie develops between the Italian immigrants and their fellow employees from other countries, as together they face further erosion of the quality of their work life from an autocratic management. World War I and the 1917-1919 Spanish Flu pandemic bring new fears and losses to Web Shop employees. Then, a hated supervisor disappears and a body is found in a cave, casting suspicion on an immigrant employee who has a mysterious past. Conditions become almost intolerable when Web Shop president Bernard Waite learns that the mill might become unionized and in retaliation severely restricts employees’ rights and privileges. Deteriorating relationships between the employees and management are further strained when an act of sabotage almost destroys the mill and is seen by the company president as a personal attack against him and his values. This sets the stage for a confrontation that has unexpected and unintended consequences for everyone at the Web Shop. ORDER: WS $14.95 including shipping |
Prince Frederick Ludwig, prospective heir to the Habsburg throne, is ambushed and almost assassinated while on a special mission given him by his uncle Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Frederick and cavalry korporal Michael Petras are the sole survivors of the ambush. With Petras as his aide, Frederick begins an odyssey that includes a Benedictine Abbey on the Danube River, a perilous transatlantic crossing to New York and a meeting with wealthy gold and silvers mine owners in Silverton, Colorado.
Unaware that they are still being pursued by a cabal that wants to kill the prince and stop the crucial mission, the two Habsburg Cowboys, as they are called by the ranch hands of multi-millionaire miner and rancher Tom Walsh, decide to remain in Colorado after their mission is completed. Petras sends for Rosalia Luscak, a woman he met while on leave in Austria, to become his bride, while Frederick mulls his own future. However, before Petras’s bride-to-be arrives in Silverton, both men are gravely wounded by a hired gunman and at least one of them may not survive his wounds. The assassination of Frederick’s uncle, Archduke Ferdinand, triggers World War I and buries the purpose and nature of the prince’s mission; until its secret is finally unlocked over one hundred years later by Yale University Professor Kurt Linder and his research assistant Melissa Hoffman. Their shocking discovery, though, might require rewriting the history of the final years of the Habsburg Monarchy. Order: THC $14.95 including shipping |
When Scott Morris, professor of history at the University of North Florida, met Nita Ramirez, he was attracted to her not only because she was stunningly beautiful, but also because she shared his passion for finding the ruins of the seventeenth century Timucuan village of Becca. Their search for Becca on the shore of the Tolomato River in St. Johns County, Florida, and the history that might be buried there, was stopped dead in its tracks by Aaron Paxton, a greedy and unethical real estate developer. Paxton, who faced a series of lawsuits for previous shoddy and unethical building practices, purchased the tract of land on which Becca was believed to be located and was determined to cover the historical site with residential construction.
It seemed that there was no way to stop Paxton from destroying the Becca site until a copy of a mysterious letter from a Franciscan Friar who lived in the Spanish Colonial Period to his superior in Havana, Cuba was discovered. The letter disclosed that a priceless object might have been buried under the soil of Becca to preserve it from the invading forces of Carolina Governor James Moore during the Queen Anne’s War in 1702. An urgent flight to San Juan, Puerto Rico, a recluse determined to seek revenge for the destruction of his beloved hunting grounds, the death of an undocumented worker in a foreboding swamp and the deepening love between Scott and Nita lead to an exciting conclusion of this fascinating story. Order: ISB $14.95 including shipping |
Language Training DVD
Imagine visiting Italy and being able to speak with Italians in their own language! Italian for Travelers is a fun and exciting “hands on” language training course that will:
Order: ITFT $19.95 including shipping
- Teach you how to correctly pronounce Italian words and phrases
- Give you the essential vocabulary you need as a traveler to Italy
- Provide you with over 100 useful Italian phrases and dialogues
- Offer you helpful tips for getting the most out of your travel to Italy
Order: ITFT $19.95 including shipping