Each vol. a compilation of ERIC digests.

Customer Service, Aiming for Excellence is a fast-paced, humourous and fresh approach to Customer Service that will benefit both first time employees and seasoned professionals as well. This easy-to-read, 'one sitting', book tells you how to handle different customers instead of just why you need to. The fun and insights are inescapable and 'it provides the tools to deal with difficult situations with confidence and a greater understanding of the underlying motives behind behavior'. Customer Service, Aiming for Excellence introduces the concept of "Linked Pairs", the relationships between the situations/conditions that cause a problem and the generally appropriate techniques that aid in solving it. Aiming for Excellence also teaches you to identify the 5 customer types and how best to handle them based on their personality. The book also discusses Opportunities for Excellence, Everyday Extraordinary Service and Professionalism. If you have already read a book on customer service, have some fun and add this one to your list. If you read only one book on customer service make this one it!

By the early twenty-first century, a startling consensus had emerged about the overall aim of American school reform. In an era of political discord, and in a field historically known for contentiousness, the notion of promoting educational excellence for all students was a distinct point of bipartisan agreement. Shaped by a corps of entrepreneurial reformers intent on finding "what works" and taking it to scale, this hybrid vision won over the nation's most ambitious and well-resourced policy leaders at foundations and nonprofits, in state and federal government, and in urban school districts from coast to coast. "Excellence for all" might, at first glance, appear to be nothing more than a rhetorical flourish. Who, after all, would oppose the idea of a great education for every student? Yet it is hardly a throwaway phrase. Rather, it represents a surprising fusion of educational policy approaches that had been in tense opposition throughout the twentieth century--those on the right favoring social efficiency, and those on the left supporting social justice. This book seeks to understand why the "excellence for all" vision took hold at the time it did, unpacks the particular beliefs and assumptions embedded in it, and details the often informal coalition building that produced this period of consensus. Examining the nation's largest urban school districts (Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York), the author details three major reform efforts in chapters titled "The Right Space: The Small Schools Movement"; "The Right Teachers: Teach for America"; and "The Right Curriculum: Expanding Advanced Placement."

This book is an exploration of Alasdair MacIntyre’s writings on virtue ethics and John Pearce’s reformist and radical forms of social enterprise. Although Pearce’s work has had academic impact, by his own admission, his ideas lack the necessary philosophical underpinnings. In Virtue and Social Enterprise: Ethical Alternatives to Capitalism, Geraldine Hall draws on MacIntyre to provide such underpinnings. Through a novel synthesis of the works of these two authors, a philosophical grounding is given to Pearce’s radical form of social enterprise. In turn, MacIntyre’s views on virtue are given greater scope to address global issues created by the capitalist paradigm. With a foreword by Kelvin Knight, this book will be of great interest to scholars and students of Alasdair MacIntyre, virtue ethics, business ethics and social responsibility.

Dysfunction abounds in America in so many ways, from continuous turbulent change in the business environment, to a US federal government polarized by an inability to compromise and fulfill its historic missions, to personal levels where even deeper and darker levels of dysfunction reside within our colleagues, families, friends, and ourselves. Can any of us survive and thrive against such a backdrop of unsettledness and anxiety? Deborah Lee James wants to help us try. As the 23rd Secretary and the “CEO” of the male-dominated US Air Force (only the second woman to lead a US military service), Secretary Deborah Lee James led a force of 660,000 people and managed a $139 billion budget—larger than the GDP of more than 120 countries. In the midst of unprecedented political dysfunction in Washington, she faced down enormous challenges, including preparing military women and men to fight terror in the Middle East, combatting sexual assault in the military, and responding to a crisis in the nuclear enterprise. In Aim High: Chart Your Course and Find Success, Deborah James shares her personal and professional challenges, outcomes, strategies for success, and the problem-solving principles she used to overcome the daunting pressures, threats, and challenges that come with rising to the top of the US Armed Forces. As a supplement to her storytelling, Bain and Company, a top-tier management consulting firm, offers research and statistics that prove James’ insights have widespread impact. The book offers an insider’s view on how things really work in Washington—and how the author’s five-step, repeatable problem-solving approach can work in any walk of life. As a mother and wife, Deborah James carried her insights and problem-solving skills home. For women in similar circumstances, her story will provide a powerful guidebook for excelling in both public and private life, and ensuring that their battles can be won and their challenges overcome.