Changing Views of Business Marketing This book aims to provide an in-depth understanding of long-term busi in industrial markets. During the late 1980s our view ness relationships on business marketing changed remarkably. From a single-transaction oriented, market mechanism-based description of marketing and purchas ing, we are moving into domestic and international buyer-seller relation ships. In academic terms, we are experiencing a broadening of the para digms that describe how companies interact. This change in focus has its roots in the recognition that business marketing is frequently characterized by long-term interaction, coopera tion, and coalitions between participant firms. The forces of quality, total cost management, and the need to decrease response times in new prod uct/service development all are combining to accelerate the trend to wards strategic relationships. In increasingly global markets, different forms of strategic alliances provide ways of joining forces in attempts to reach goals beyond any single firm's resources. Also, our way of seeing the corporate environment is changing. In stead of the traditional view of markets or industries as constituted by independent companies operating mainly through market competition, we are starting to realize that markets can be more realistically defined and described as networks of interlinked organizations. The network view offers a highly promising tool for describing and analyzing the rapidly integrating global marketplace. For instance, strategic alliances can be seen as moves of establishing positions in a network or as ways of changing the whole network."

Changing Views of Business Marketing This book aims to provide an in-depth understanding of long-term busi in industrial markets. During the late 1980s our view ness relationships on business marketing changed remarkably. From a single-transaction oriented, market mechanism-based description of marketing and purchas ing, we are moving into domestic and international buyer-seller relation ships. In academic terms, we are experiencing a broadening of the para digms that describe how companies interact. This change in focus has its roots in the recognition that business marketing is frequently characterized by long-term interaction, coopera tion, and coalitions between participant firms. The forces of quality, total cost management, and the need to decrease response times in new prod uct/service development all are combining to accelerate the trend to wards strategic relationships. In increasingly global markets, different forms of strategic alliances provide ways of joining forces in attempts to reach goals beyond any single firm's resources. Also, our way of seeing the corporate environment is changing. In stead of the traditional view of markets or industries as constituted by independent companies operating mainly through market competition, we are starting to realize that markets can be more realistically defined and described as networks of interlinked organizations. The network view offers a highly promising tool for describing and analyzing the rapidly integrating global marketplace. For instance, strategic alliances can be seen as moves of establishing positions in a network or as ways of changing the whole network."

This book describes the Author's repair of a vehicle he owns and the discovery of what appears to be a nearly universal deficiency in the braking systems of nearly all cars on the road today. The brakes are rendered unnecessarily spongy by this deficiency.

The world in which we live is frenzied and furious, chaotic and confusing, daunting and discouraging. David Thatcher Wilson looks at all that is happening around us, and brings a collection of calming and consoling messages, based not in esoterica, but in common day-to-day life experiences.