In 1987, Lou Pritchett, the vice president of sales at Procter & Gamble, had a radical idea. He phoned Sam Walton and invited the visionary chairman of Wal-Mart on a two-day canoe trip. There on the South Fork River in Arkansas, Lou made Sam and offer no profit-minded person could refuse: the chance to forge a partnership between the two colossal firms. This now legendary trip marks the culmination of a lifetime devoted to building customer relationships. Sam wrote Lou, "Thank you for what you have personally done to bring our two companies together and develop a relationship that I think will be outstanding and beneficial to both of us for a long time to come. You are a real friend."

In 1987 Lou Pritchett the Vice president of sale at Procter and Gamble, had a radical idea. He phoned Sam Walton and invited the visionary chairman of Wal-Mart on a two day canoe trip. There on the South Fork River in Arkansas, Lou made Sam an offer no profit minded person could refuse: the chance to forge a partnership between the two colossal firms. This now legendary trip marks the culmination of a lifetime devoted to building customer relationships. Sam wrote to Lou, "Thank you for what you have personally done to bring our two companies together and develop a relationship that I think will be outstanding and beneficial to both of us for a long time to come. You are a real friend." Winning companies have the ability to create and sustain genuine love affairs with suppliers customers, and employees. The Object of customer supplier partnering is to form and maintain a mutually productive relationship in which the needs of both parties are met Leading companies make room for dreamers and poets because an idea is a thousand times more powerful than a fact. Only when trust and cooperation replace doubt and confrontation can costs be reduced throughout the total system. Top performing companies choose first to understand, then to meet, and then to exceed customer expectations.

A humorous and practical management and sales strategy guide offers hundreds of personal anecdotes and addresses such topics as partnering, the changing marketing environment, and the dangers of success

Our government has been pissing me off for years and finally it boiled over. Both parties have been creeping towards Socialism for years. Obama and the Democrats have socialism on steroids! The Republicans have been more subtle about it. I thought we had some hope when the Republicans gained the House. Speaker John Boehner is not much better than Pelosi. He caved on the debt ceiling and gives too much ground to Obama. Obama, his Czars and 98% of the Democrats are the most corrupt gang of thieves in history. The reason the government hates the Mafia and drug cartels is because they are competing with our government. With subsidies and the printing of money by the Feds $ billions or $ trillions have disappeared into a "black hole." There are millionaires being made within our government. There is no accountability at all. A Republican House is allowing this to happen. Bernie Madoff will spend the rest of his life for doing the same thing in the private sector.

Now, there is a formula for leadership, the LQ. Like the Intelligence Quotient and the Emotional Quotient that preceded it, The Leadership Quotient contains verifiable dimensions of leadership that are designed to improve every leader's performance. The Leadership Quotient makes the complex simple by fitting the 12 dimensions of leadership into a framework of leader, follower, and environment. The Leadership Quotient makes the three components measurable and practical for the reader. The "nature vs. nurture" argument is over. There is general agreement that effective leaders are prepared by nature and refined by nurture. The need for improved leadership has never been greater, as witnessed by corporate scandals, world tumult, and economic morass. The failure of ethical moralities and the dumbing down of education give clarion calls for the type of improved leadership available through the application of LQ principles. The Leadership Quotient is thoroughly researched by two leadership experts, who combined, have 37 years of practical business leadership, 45 years of formal education, and 25 years of teaching leadership at the university level. Yet, the book is accessibly written for leadership practitioners. The LQ is years of comprehensive research packaged in a simplified formula for immediate application.

The definitive account of how a small Ozarks company upended the world of business and what that change means Wal-Mart, the world's largest company, roared out of the rural South to change the way business is done. Deploying computer-age technology, Reagan-era politics, and Protestant evangelism, Sam Walton's firm became a byword for cheap goods and low-paid workers, famed for the ruthless efficiency of its global network of stores and factories. But the revolution has gone further: Sam's protégés have created a new economic order which puts thousands of manufacturers, indeed whole regions, in thrall to a retail royalty. Like the Pennsylvania Railroad and General Motors in their heyday, Wal-Mart sets the commercial model for a huge swath of the global economy. In this lively, probing investigation, historian Nelson Lichtenstein deepens and expands our knowledge of the merchandising giant. He shows that Wal-Mart's rise was closely linked to the cultural and religious values of Bible Belt America as well as to the imperial politics, deregulatory economics, and laissez-faire globalization of Ronald Reagan and his heirs. He explains how the company's success has transformed American politics, and he anticipates a day of reckoning, when challenges to the Wal-Mart way, at home and abroad, are likely to change the far-flung empire. Insightful, original, and steeped in the culture of retail life, The Retail Revolution draws on first hand reporting from coastal China to rural Arkansas to give a fresh and necessary understanding of the phenomenon that has transformed international commerce.

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR WHAT THE INTERNET CANT TEACH YOU In a new digital world where instant communication has left us feeling more disconnected than ever, it is the tried and tested values and principles that really make the difference to todays managers. Theres a reason why guys like Sam Walton and Lou Pritchett have been so successful. We should all be so lucky as to listen and find out why. DAN MANGRU, Host of The Mangru Report on Fox Business What the Internet Cant Teach You has, in one place, the lessons one learns in a military career. I know many military people who failed because they didnt learn these principles of leadership and management! COL. WILL MERRILL, West Point, Class of 1958, Airborne Ranger, US Army (ret) I wish I had had Lous book back in 1986 when we introduced Stainmaster carpeting to the world. His succinct maxims are a timeless road map to business success, cutting through the fog of circumstance and technology. I recommend it to all young aspiring leaders. TOM MCANDREWS, the Father of Stainmaster, Former DuPont Worldwide Director, Flooring Systems Each morning, millions of managersfrom supervisors at McDonalds to Fortune 500 presidentscommute to their respective jobs, where their subordinates rely on their leadership, advice, and coaching in order to be successful themselves. Desperate to achieve greatness in a highly competitive world driven by technology, these leaders are often frustrated with the loss of one-on-one mentorship from a boss who has been there. Lou Pritchett, a former executive who was instrumental in the creation of the partnership between Procter & Gamble and Wal-Mart, shares decades of hands-on experience in company leadership, training, and organizational development in order to mentor others with snippets of wisdom and universal truth not found in cyberspace. Future leaders that include entrepreneurs, educators, executives, administrative assistants, and sales representatives will find inspiration in both Pritchetts wisdom and the seasoned advice of other famous leaders, such as Napoleon Bonaparte, John F. Kennedy, Stonewall Jackson, and Ross Perot. Management is of dollars and things. Leadership is of hearts, souls, and spirits. In What the Internet Cant Teach You, Pritchett allows others to take a step back in time and learn the same way successful leaders have learned for centuriesthrough the wisdom of those who know.

Big Box USA presents a new look at how the big box retail store has dramatically reshaped the US economy and its ecosystems in the last half century. From the rural South to the frigid North, from inside stores to ecologies far beyond, this book examines the relationships that make up one of the most visible features of late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century American life. The rise of big box retail since the 1960s has transformed environments on both local and global scales. Almost everyone has explored the aisles of big box stores. The allure of “everyday low prices” and brightly colored products of every kind connect shoppers with a global marketplace. Contributors join a growing conversation between business and environmental history, addressing the ways American retail institutions have affected physical and cultural ecologies around the world. Essays on Walmart, Target, Cabela’s, REI, and Bass Pro Shops assess the “bigness” of these superstores from “smokestacks to coat racks” and contend that their ecological impacts are not limited to the footprints of parking lots and manufacturing but also play a didactic role in educating consumers about their relationships with the environment. A model for historians seeking to bring business and environmental histories together in their analyses of merchant capital’s role in the landscapes of everyday life and how it has remade human relationships with nature, Big Box USA is a must-read for students and scholars of the environment, business, sustainability, retail professionals, and a general audience.

The rural roads that led to our planet-changing global economy ran through the American South. That region's impact on the interconnected histories of business and ecological change is narrated here by acclaimed scholar Bart Elmore, who uses the histories of five southern firms—Coca-Cola, Delta Airlines, Walmart, FedEx, and Bank of America—to investigate the environmental impact of our have-it-now, fly-by-night, buy-on-credit economy. Drawing on exclusive interviews with company executives, corporate archives, and other records, Elmore explores the historical, economic, and ecological conditions that gave rise to these five trailblazing corporations. He then considers what each has become: an essential presence in the daily workings of the global economy and an unmistakable contributor to the reshaping of the world's ecosystems. Even as businesses invest in sustainability initiatives and respond to new calls for corporate responsibility, Elmore shows the limits of their efforts to "green" their operations and offers insights on how governments and activists can push corporations to do better. At the root, Elmore reveals a fundamental challenge: Our lives are built around businesses that connect far-flung rural places to urban centers and global destinations. This "country capitalism" that proved successful in the US South has made it possible to satisfy our demands at the click of a button, but each click comes with hidden environmental costs. This book is a must-read for anyone who hopes to create an ecologically sustainable future economy.

Is my enterprise really prepared for future business? What can I do to become more competitive? Ulf Pillkahn's book is directed at all of those seeking answers to these questions: executives in strategic positions, business analysts, consultants, trend scouts, marketing and product managers and research engineers. The book presents the two most powerful tools for future planning: environmental analysis, based on the use of trends, as well as the development of visions of the future through the use of scenarios. While scenarios are generally regarded as a classical management tool, it is expected that the importance of trends will gain tremendously in the coming years. Pillkahn demonstrates how to build robust strategies by aligning the results of environmental and enterprise scenarios, thereby offering entirely new insights. "Using Trends and Scenarios as Tools for Strategy Development" convincingly illustrates why efficient observation of the environment of an enterprise is an absolutely essential factor for strategy development, and why strategy development only works if it is institutionalized as a permanent enterprise process. It also addresses the issue of what information is needed to keep both processes running. The book further describes how trends can be categorized, and offers advice on how to glean the essential information from the vast variety of trends. Information is provided on how scenarios are used as a holistic instrument for creating visions and pictures of the future, and how the results of trend research and scenario techniques find their way into entrepreneurial strategy development. An optimized strategy development process is also outlined. Practical examples and real-life pictures of the future round off Pillkahn's insightful discussion of future business planning.