A home repair and maintenance guide shares a wealth of household solutions that use everyday items, from ant-proofing a home with lemon juice and using iodine to cover up furniture scratches to using powdered milk for sunburn and reusing bubble wrap as a toilet tank insulator. Reprint.
A guide to home maintenance presents a wide range of helpful tips, such as a ten-minute check that can add years to the life of appliances and how to make worn furniture look new
Answers common questions about the performance of repair and maintenance jobs in areas of the house, including the floors, bathroom, kitchen, basement, and roof
A guide to home maintenance presents a wide range of helpful tips, such as a ten-minute check that can add years to the life of appliances and how to make worn furniture look new
A home repair and maintenance guide shares a wealth of household solutions that use everyday items, from ant-proofing a home with lemon juice and using iodine to cover up furniture scratches to using powdered milk for sunburn and reusing bubble wrap as a toilet tank insulator. Reprint.
In this pathbreaking book, world-renowned Harvard Business School service firm experts James L. Heskett, W. Earl Sasser, Jr. and Leonard A. Schlesinger reveal that leading companies stay on top by managing the service profit chain. Why are a select few service firms better at what they do -- year in and year out -- than their competitors? For most senior managers, the profusion of anecdotal "service excellence" books fails to address this key question. Based on five years of painstaking research, the authors show how managers at American Express, Southwest Airlines, Banc One, Waste Management, USAA, MBNA, Intuit, British Airways, Taco Bell, Fairfield Inns, Ritz-Carlton Hotel, and the Merry Maids subsidiary of ServiceMaster employ a quantifiable set of relationships that directly links profit and growth to not only customer loyalty and satisfaction, but to employee loyalty, satisfaction, and productivity. The strongest relationships the authors discovered are those between (1) profit and customer loyalty; (2) employee loyalty and customer loyalty; and (3) employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction. Moreover, these relationships are mutually reinforcing; that is, satisfied customers contribute to employee satisfaction and vice versa. Here, finally, is the foundation for a powerful strategic service vision, a model on which any manager can build more focused operations and marketing capabilities. For example, the authors demonstrate how, in Banc One's operating divisions, a direct relationship between customer loyalty measured by the "depth" of a relationship, the number of banking services a customer utilizes, and profitability led the bank to encourage existing customers to further extend the bank services they use. Taco Bell has found that their stores in the top quadrant of customer satisfaction ratings outperform their other stores on all measures. At American Express Travel Services, offices that ticket quickly and accurately are more profitable than those which don't. With hundreds of examples like these, the authors show how to manage the customer-employee "satisfaction mirror" and the customer value equation to achieve a "customer's eye view" of goods and services. They describe how companies in any service industry can (1) measure service profit chain relationships across operating units; (2) communicate the resulting self-appraisal; (3) develop a "balanced scorecard" of performance; (4) develop a recognitions and rewards system tied to established measures; (5) communicate results company-wide; (6) develop an internal "best practice" information exchange; and (7) improve overall service profit chain performance. What difference can service profit chain management make? A lot. Between 1986 and 1995, the common stock prices of the companies studied by the authors increased 147%, nearly twice as fast as the price of the stocks of their closest competitors. The proven success and high-yielding results from these high-achieving companies will make The Service Profit Chain required reading for senior, division, and business unit managers in all service companies, as well as for students of service management.
In this book you will see how a farmboy in Kentucky made do with his surroundings. The unusual stories actually happened to the author, which are a lasting part of his life. He just wishes that his children could have had some of these experiences. Through it all, he did survive with that ?spizzerinctum? feeling.
This is the engaging rags-to-riches autobiography of a young boy, Earl Robbins, the youngest of five children, son of a retired opera singer and poor silk weaver from the small working class of the New York City suburban town of Wood-Ridge, New Jersey. In a vivid recreation of life on the streets of the NYC area during most of the 1900's you accompany this young and talented man through The Great Depression, two World Wars, and three wives as he ultimately succeeded in achieving his goal of building an empire, living his dream. Explore his life through 93 exciting years.
Through these they hope to facilitate development of activities that will improve the economic lives of residents and enable their city to maintain or advance its competitiveness and its position in the urban hierarchy. This unique study will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of economics, urban studies, and public policy, as well as to those in city administrative and leadership positions.
In this book the authors cover every aspect of optimal service leadership: the best hiring, training, and workplace organization practices; the creation of operating strategies around areas such as facility design, capacity planning, queue management, and more; the use - and misuse - of technology in delivering top-level service; and practices that can transform loyal customers into "owners." They describe the world of great service leaders in which "both/and" thinking replaces trade-offs. It's a world in which new ideas will be tested against the sine qua non of the "service trifecta"--Wins for employees, customers, and investors. And it's a world in which the best leaders admit that they don't have the answers and create organizations that learn, innovate, "sense and respond, " operate with fluid boundaries, and seek and achieve repeated strategic success. --
An exploration of the thematic interests and narrative strategies of a contemporary American master of fiction Earl Ingersoll introduces the fiction of Steven Millhauser, whose distinguished career of more than four decades includes eight books of short fiction and four novels, the latest being the Pulitzer Prize-winning Martin Dressler (1996). In Understanding Steven Millhauser, Ingersoll explores Millhauser's twelve books chronologically, revealing the development of a major contemporary American writer and a master of fiction who cares as deeply about his craft as the modernists did earlier in the past century. While most examinations of an author's work begin with at least a biographical sketch, Ingersoll has faced distinct challenges because Millhauser has resisted efforts to read his fiction through the lens of his biography. Responding to an interviewer's request for a brief biography, Millhauser provided the succinct "1943-." Part of such resistance, Ingersoll argues, arises from Millhauser's belief that if readers have too many questions about an author's work, the author has failed, and no amount of response can redress that failure. Millhauser's central characters, such as August Eschenburg and J. Franklin Payne, are often themselves artists or technicians who are "overreachers," and Ingersoll shows that Millhauser's early expressions of literary realism have given way to interest in departures from the "real." For Millhauser, "stories, like conjuring tricks, are invented because history is inadequate to our dreams." Millhauser's strength is the ability to sustain obsessions because works of fiction succeed insofar as they are able to supplant reality. As a master fabulist, Ingersoll argues, Millhauser is preoccupied with extravagance both in the subject matter of his fiction and in his style. Whether it involves Martin Dressler doing himself in by designing and constructing increasingly complex hotels or the miniaturists in the short story "Cathay" pushing their impulse to extremes, past the eye's ability to see their art objects, Millhauser's fiction is full of such an impulse, which can produce prolific artists as well as compulsive lunatics. The triumph of Millhauser's craft, Ingersoll shows, is that it merges a fascination with the relationship between imagination and experience with a precise and allusive prose to produce works seamlessly joining the everyday with the radical and fantastic, in forms ranging from travelogues of the imagination to works merging the waking world with the world of dreams.
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