"An inspiring and practical guide to really effective people-communication in a modern business climate crying out for it"

Mike Harris - Founding CEO of first direct and Egg Banking plc, founding Executive Chairman at Garlick and ex CEO of Mercury Communications

"This book puts the heart and soul back into business. Miti Ampoma combines her deep experience with fresh insight and inspirational thinking in a communications masterclass that focuses us all on our most valuable asset, at the heart of everything we do - our people."

Mike Symes - Chief Executive, Financial Marketing Limited

"Miti Ampoma, with pincer-sharp clarity, explains brilliantly the relationship between becoming an innovative communicator and having a successful business. She whets our appetite to go do "

Anne Newton - Chief Executive, Richmond Chamber of Commerce

"Articulate and incisively written with compelling stories and practical ways for us to achieve better communication skills so our businesses excel."

Daniel Priestley - Author, Become A Key Person Of Influence

Every business needs an Innovative Communicator

- Are you craving relief from pin numbers, passwords and soulless voice-activated messages?

- Is communication with people in your workplace an uphill struggle in spite of all you have tried?

- Do you fear that the heart and soul of your business is evaporating?

- Is all this impacting staff morale and bottom line profits?

Good human communication is more important than ever in a business world where technology and process have come to dominate at the expense of bringing out the best in people. Work colleagues respect and respond well to clear, honest communication they can trust. At the heart of that communication there needs to be a genuine focus on integrity and humanity.

You may think good communication is best left to the experts, but nothing could be further from the truth.

This book introduces the Innovative Communicator, who puts the soul and heart back into business communication to deliver happy staff, happy customers and more profits. The Innovative Communicator is able to build deep relationships, get their team on board, plan powerful communication strategies, whilst courageously pushing their own boundaries, having the capacity for great empathy and the skills to get tough with heart when necessary.

Start becoming an Innovative Communicator today.

See and feel the difference

Obtaining the ultimate objective of economic growth depends largely on the availability of infrastructure in the economy. New developments in finance also play an important role in enhancing economic prosperity in a country. Strategic Infrastructure Development for Economic Growth and Social Change explores different avenues of research in the areas of corporate governance, socioeconomic conditions, modern business infrastructure, business automation, strategic financial management, and financial aspects of modern businesses. This reference work discusses practical applications, skills, practices, and strategies involved in economic and business growth, and overall economic development. Academicians, practitioners, professionals, and researchers will benefit from the topics discussed in this book.

This is an advanced but very readable introduction to high school algebra for honors students, including as many Cartesian topics as can be presented without use of Euclidean geometry. These will include standard treatments of sets, numbers, equations in one variable, factoring, and functions, as well as more specialized topics such as linear programming that are considered interesting to the student. It is meant to offer an "understandable and accessible" honors course to students in the subject. It assumes a knowledge of multiplication by negatives, simplification of radicals, and other operations with numbers. The style of the text imitates that of most college level Analysis, or Advanced Calculus, texts, both for the sophistication it imparts and to best organize a difficult subject. Very interested students are almost assured to get through this excellent and well written course with only the slightest help from an ordinary tutor or committed instructor.

Sarnikar cites evidence of frequent misconceptions of economics amongst students, graduates, and even some economists, and argues that behavioral economists are uniquely qualified to investigate causes of poor learning in economics. She conducts a review of the economics education literature to identify gaps in current research efforts and suggests a two-pronged approach to fill the gaps: an engineering approach to the adoption of innovative teaching methods and a new research program to enhance economists' understanding of how learning occurs. To facilitate research into learning processes, Sarnikar provides an overview of selected learning theories from psychology, as well as new data on hidden misconceptions amongst beginning students of economics. She argues that if they ask the right questions, economists of all persuasions are likely to find surprising lessons in the answers of beginning students of economics.

In recent years, household indebtedness in the United States reached its highest levels in history. From mortgages to student loans, from credit card bills to US deficit spending, debt is widespread and increasing. Drawing on scholarship from economics, accounting, and critical rhetoric and social theory, Kellie Sharp-Hoskins critiques debt not as an economic indicator or a tool of finance but as a cultural system. Through case studies of the student-loan crisis, medical debt, and the abuses of municipal bonds, Sharp-Hoskins reveals that debt is a rhetorical construct entangled in broader systems of wealth, rule, and race. Perhaps more than any other social marker or symbol, the concept of “debt” indicates differences between wealthy and poor, productive and lazy, secure and risky, worthy and unworthy. Tracking the emergence and work of debt across temporal and spatial scales reveals how it exacerbates vulnerabilities and inequities under the rhetorical cover of individual, moral, and volitional calculation and equivalency. A new perspective on a serious problem facing our society, Rhetoric in Debt not only reveals how debt organizes our social and cultural relations but also provides a new conceptual framework for a more equitable world.

‘My hope is that people can grow to appreciate this sector – its challenges and opportunities, but most importantly, the role agriculture can play in improving South Africa’s rural economy, creating jobs and bringing about much-needed transformation (or inclusive growth).’
Wandile Sihlobo is perfectly positioned to provide a well-rounded, accessible view of agriculture in South Africa. He spent his school holidays in the rural Eastern Cape, studied agricultural economics at university, has worked in private-sector agriculture, consulting with farmers across the country, and has been an adviser to government as part of South African policymaking bodies.

Finding Common Ground is a selection of key articles from Sihlobo’s regular Business Day column, framed with insightful commentary and context. The book covers the broad themes that have marked current discussions and outlines the challenges and opportunities faced by South Africa’s agricultural sector, including:

• The contentious and complex issue of land reform;
• The potential for new leadership to revive the sector;
• How agriculture can drive development and job creation;
• Cannabis as an exportable commodity;
• The urgent need for agricultural policy to address gender equity and youth involvement;
• Technological developments and megatrends that are underpinning agricultural development;
• The importance of trade in growing South Africa’s agriculture; and Key lessons that South Africa and other African countries can learn from one another.

The globalized economy, dominated by the diffusion of innovation and social, political, and economic changes, allows people and knowledge to flow without knowing what lies ahead. As new economies emerge and technologies impose significant changes, the internationalization of markets and industries has made defining its delimitation more difficult. Competitive Drivers for Improving Future Business Performance is a conceptualized reference source that discusses the use of digital skills to manage change in volatile contexts and provides fundamental understanding of competitive advantage to guarantee superior performances. To assure this level of performance, a set of choices (drivers) must be created ensuring operational efficiency, innovative products, customer knowledge-base, and focused branding. Featuring research on topics such as consumer experience, strategic leadership, and flexible technologies, this book is ideally designed for managers, executives, entrepreneurs, academicians, consulting professionals, researchers, industry professionals, and students seeking coverage on how to improve competitive performance in an era of uncertainty.

All over the world, private and public institutions have been attracted to "nudges," understood as interventions that preserve freedom of choice, but that steer people in particular directions. The most effective nudges are often "defaults," which establish what happens if people do nothing. For example, automatic enrollment in savings plans is a default nudge, as is automatic enrollment in green energy. Default rules are in widespread use, but we have very little information about how people experience them, whether they see themselves as manipulated by them, and whether they approve of them in practice. In this book, Patrik Michaelsen and Cass R. Sunstein offer a wealth of new evidence about people's experiences and perceptions with respect to default rules. They argue that this evidence can help us to answer important questions about the effectiveness and ethics of nudging. The evidence offers a generally positive picture of how default nudges are perceived and experienced. The central conclusion is simple: empirical findings strongly support the conclusion that, taken as such, default nudges are both ethical and effective. These findings, and the accompanying discussion, have significant implications for policymakers in many nations, and also for the private sector.

In this concise and detailed work, Salim Lamrani addresses questions of media concentration and corporate bias by examining a perennially controversial topic: Cuba. Lamrani argues that the tiny island nation is forced to contend not only with economic isolation and a U.S. blockade, but with misleading or downright hostile media coverage. He takes as his case study El Pais, the most widely distributed Spanish daily. El Pais (a property of Grupo Prisa, the largest Spanish media conglomerate), has editions aimed at Europe, Latin America, and the U.S., making it is a global opinion leader. Lamrani wades through a swamp of reporting and uses the paper as an example of how media conglomerates distort and misrepresent life in Cuba and the activities of its government. By focusing on eight key areas, including human development, internal opposition, and migration, Lamrani shows how the media systematically shapes our understanding of Cuban reality. This book, with a preface by Eduardo Galeano, provides an alternative view, combining a scholar's eye for complexity with a journalist's hunger for the facts.

A business management primer based on field experience of Seamus Phan and contributions from Ter Hui Peng. This book is an extension to the original Dot Zen book published in 2003. This book carries more insights and experience on leadership, human capital, branding, customer service, sales, marketing, public relations, social media, mobile apps, and interactive multimedia, with a focus on field-tested experience and tactics. This is targeted at small business owners, business executives, and marketers who want to build their brands in the marketplace.

Selling on eBay isn't a game. You need to have a plan. eBay 2014 walks you through what it takes to sell on eBay. It answers all of your questions, and gives you ideas about how to get started and grow your eBay business. Do you ever wonder how some sellers can grow a strong thriving business, while others barely scrape by? Many times, I've watched two sellers as they are first starting out on eBay. Both sellers offer the exact same products and prices, yet one business skyrockets to the top of the charts selling thousands of items per month. The other business struggles to sell ten or fifteen items per month. They might even have the same basic look to their listings. On the face of it, it doesn't make sense. Why does one eBay seller prosper, while another falls behind? Is it a matter of luck? Does one eBay seller catch all of the breaks, while another is stuck holding doo doo? Believe it or not, many struggling sellers believe this. They think it's all a matter of luck.