In this sequel to Goldratt's great business novel "The Goal," Alex and his team have all been promoted into the key positions in the faltering Diversified Businesses group in their conglomerate. The whole company is faltering, and great pressure is put on Alex and the team to turn their businesses around. The story emphasizes the Thinking Processes from "The Goal," and he devotes much of his attention to demonstrating the relevance of the theory of constraints to marketing, sales, inventory control, distribution channels, strategic alliances, and conflict resolution.

Gene Simmons' autobiography, KISS and Make-Up, was a New York Times bestseller. Here is the long-anticipated follow-up in which Simmons explains the bad deals he made along the way, the reasoning behind everything he did, and the value of hard work, long hours, and dedication to the cause. He is brutally candid, smart, shocking, shameless, insightful, in-your-face, bizarre, crude, pragmatic, human, sympathetic, and wholesome, all at the same time! Kiss, Money and Girls is the perfect business book for our times.

All individuals who operate in the business sphere, whether as consumers, employers, employees, entrepreneurs, or financial traders to name a few constituents, share a common biological heritage and are defined by a universal human nature. As such, it is surprising that so few business scholars have incorporated biological and evolutionary-informed theories within their conceptual toolboxes. This edited book addresses this lacuna by culling chapters at the intersection of the evolutionary behavioral sciences and specific business contexts including in marketing, consumer behavior, advertising, innovation and creativity, intertemporal choice, negotiations, competition and cooperation in organizational settings, sex differences in workplace patterns, executive leadership, business ethics, store design, behavioral decision making, and electronic communication. To reword the famous aphorism of T. G. Dobzhansky, nothing in business makes sense except in the light of evolution.

How does your company define creativity? Or does creativity define your company? In this book, Jerry Hirshberg - founder and president of Nissan Design International (NDI) - distills his experience as leader of the world's hotbed of automotive innovation and reveals his strategy for designing an organization around creativity. Rather than championing the traditional treatment of creativity as a vital component in business, Hirshberg shows how creativity can become the fundamental organizing principle of business. In The Creative Priority, Hirshberg describes how NDI produced a culture that fostered innovation, enabling his team to produce such cutting-edge designs as Nissan's Altima, Pathfinder, Quest, and Maxima; Ford's Villager; and Infiniti's J30.

This outstanding contribution to market research focuses on the upfront activities and ideas for new product and service development. A central theme of this book is that there is, or should be, a constant struggle going on in every organization, business, and system between delivering feature-rich versions of products and services using extravagant engineering and delivering low-cost versions of products and services using frugal engineering. A number of powerful concepts and tools are presented in the book to facilitate new product development. For example, three templates are featured that facilitate new product and service development. The FAD (features, attributes, and design) template is used to identify the features and attributes that can be used for product and service differentiation. The Ten-Ten planning process contains two templates: an Organizational and Industry Analysis template and the Business Plan Overview template. These two templates coupled with the FAD template can be used to develop a full-blown business plan. Entrepreneurship, technology and product life cycles, product and service versioning, product line optimization, creativity, lock-in real options, business valuation, and project management topics are also covered.