Offers an organizational design model for service organizations, covering such topics as funding mechanisms, employee management systems, and customer management systems.

Entrepreneurial phenomenon Ari Weinzweig, co-founder of the much-loved Zingerman's Deli, shares the secrets to providing world-class customer service. Zingerman's in Ann Arbor, Michigan, is a beloved deli with some of the most loyal clientele around. It has been praised for its products and service in media outlets far and wide, including the New York Times, Men's Journal, Inc. Magazine, Esquire, Atlantic Monthly, USA Today, and Fast Company. And what started out as a small deli has grown to a flourishing restaurant, catering service, bakery, mail-order operation, creamery, and training business. Booming business and loyal customers are proof enough that the Zingerman's team knows a thing or two about customer service. Now in Zingerman's Guide to Giving Great Service, co-founder Ari Weinzweig shares the unique Zingerman method of treating customers, giving the reader step-by-step instructions on what to teach staff, how to train them, how to implement the training, how to measure their success, and finally, how to reward performance. Some of Zingerman's time-tested principles: Customers who get a great product but poor service won't be as loyal as those who are disappointed with a product but get great service. You'll get more complaints if people believe you care enough to listen to them. And that's a good thing. Employees who are rewarded, respected, and well cared for treat customers the same way.

Now a Major Motion Picture Directed by American Sniper Writer Jason Hall and Starring Miles Teller No journalist has reckoned with the psychology of war as intimately as David Finkel. In The Good Soldiers, his bestselling account from the front lines of Baghdad, Finkel embedded with the men of the 2-16 Infantry Battalion as they carried out the infamous “surge”. Now, in Thank You for Your Service, Finkel tells the true story of those men as they return home from the front-lines of Baghdad and struggle to reintegrate--both into their family lives and into American society at large. Finkel is with these veterans in their most intimate, painful, and hopeful moments as they try to recover, and in doing so, he creates an indelible, essential portrait of what life after war is like--not just for these soldiers, but for their wives, widows, children, and friends, and for the professionals who are truly trying, and to a great degree failing, to undo the damage that has been done. Thank You for Your Service is an act of understanding, and it offers a more complete picture than we have ever had of two essential questions: When we ask young men and women to go to war, what are we asking of them? And when they return, what are we thanking them for? “Finkel sketches a panoramic view of postwar life....A book that every American should read.” —Jake Tapper, Los Angeles Times Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the New York Public Library Helen Bernstein Award for Excellence in Journalism. One of Ten Favorite Books of 2013 by Michiko Kakutani (The New York Times), a Washington Post Top Ten Book of the Year, and a New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The unapologetic, laugh-your-ass-off military memoir both vets and civilians have been waiting for, from a five-tour Army Ranger turned YouTube phenomenon and zealous advocate for veterans Members of the military’s special operations branches share a closely guarded secret: They love their jobs. They relish the opportunity to fight. They are thankful for it, even, and hopeful that maybe, possibly, they’ll also get to kill a bunch of bad guys while they’re at it. You don’t necessarily need to thank them for their service—the pleasure is all theirs. In this hilarious and personal memoir, readers ride shotgun alongside former Army Ranger and private military contractor and current social media phenomenon Mat Best, into the action and its aftermath, both abroad and at home. From surviving a skin infection in the swampy armpit of America (aka Columbus, Georgia) to kicking down doors on the outskirts of Ramadi, from blowing up a truck full of enemy combatants to witnessing the effects of a suicide bombing right in front of your face, Thank You for My Service gives readers who love America and love the good guys fresh insight into what it’s really like inside the minds of the men and women on the front lines. It’s also a sobering yet steadying glimpse at life for veterans after the fighting stops, when the enemy becomes self-doubt or despair and you begin to wonder why anyone should be thanking you for anything, least of all your service. How do you keep going when something you love turns you into somebody you hate? For veterans and their friends and families, Thank You for My Service will offer comfort, in the form of a million laughs, and counsel, as a blueprint for what to do after the war ends and the real fight begins. And for civilians, this is the insider account of military life you won’t find anywhere else, told with equal amounts of heart and balls. It’s Deadpool meets Captain America, except one went to business school and one went to therapy, and it’s anyone’s guess which is which.

A “bold and unflinchingly sexy” (Vogue) debut novel about a young woman who follows her desires into a world of pleasure, decadence, and privilege, unraveling everything she thought she knew about sex . . . and herself. “One of the most entertaining books about sex I’ve ever read . . . The perfect read for fans of Raven Leilani and Ottessa Moshfegh, this is a book that will have people talking.”—BuzzFeed “A sex masterpiece.”—The Guardian ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker, The Hollywood Reporter “Anytime I want, I can forsake this dinner party and jump into real life.”—Eve Babitz Eve has an adoring girlfriend, an impulsive streak, and a secret fear that she’s wasting her brief youth with just one person. So one evening she posts some nudes online. This is how Eve meets Olivia, and through Olivia the charismatic Nathan. Despite her better instincts, the three soon begin a relationship—one that disturbs Eve as much as it enthralls her. As each act of their complicated, three-way affair unfolds across a cold and glittering New York, Eve is forced to confront the questions that most consume her: What do we bring to sex? What does it reveal of ourselves, and one another? And how do we reconcile what we want with what we think we should want? In the way only great fiction can, Acts of Service takes between its teeth the contradictions written all over our ideas of sex and sexuality. At once juicy and intellectually challenging, sacred and profane, Lillian Fishman’s riveting debut is bold, unabashed, and required reading of the most pleasurable sort.

AI as a Service is a practical handbook to building and implementing serverless AI applications, without bogging you down with a lot of theory. Instead, you’ll find easy-to-digest instruction and two complete hands-on serverless AI builds in this must-have guide! Summary Companies everywhere are moving everyday business processes over to the cloud, and AI is increasingly being given the reins in these tasks. As this massive digital transformation continues, the combination of serverless computing and AI promises to become the de facto standard for business-to-consumer platform development—and developers who can design, develop, implement, and maintain these systems will be in high demand! AI as a Service is a practical handbook to building and implementing serverless AI applications, without bogging you down with a lot of theory. Instead, you’ll find easy-to-digest instruction and two complete hands-on serverless AI builds in this must-have guide! Purchase of the print book includes a free eBook in PDF, Kindle, and ePub formats from Manning Publications. About the technology Cloud-based AI services can automate a variety of labor intensive business tasks in areas such as customer service, data analysis, and financial reporting. The secret is taking advantage of pre-built tools like Amazon Rekognition for image analysis or AWS Comprehend for natural language processing. That way, there’s no need to build expensive custom software. Artificial Intelligence (AI), a machine’s ability to learn and make predictions based on patterns it identifies, is already being leveraged by businesses around the world in areas like targeted product recommendations, financial forecasting and resource planning, customer service chatbots, healthcare diagnostics, data security, and more. With the exciting combination of serverless computing and AI, software developers now have enormous power to improve their businesses’ existing systems and rapidly deploy new AI-enabled platforms. And to get on this fast-moving train, you don’t have to invest loads of time and effort in becoming a data scientist or AI expert, thanks to cloud platforms and the readily available off-the-shelf cloud-based AI services! About the book AI as a Service is a fast-paced guide to harnessing the power of cloud-based solutions. You’ll learn to build real-world apps—such as chatbots and text-to-speech services—by stitching together cloud components. Work your way from small projects to large data-intensive applications. What's inside - Apply cloud AI services to existing platforms - Design and build scalable data pipelines - Debug and troubleshoot AI services - Start fast with serverless templates About the reader For software developers familiar with cloud basics. About the author Peter Elger and Eóin Shanaghy are founders and CEO/CTO of fourTheorem, a software solutions company providing expertise on architecture, DevOps, and machine learning. Table of Contents PART 1 - FIRST STEPS 1 A tale of two technologies 2 Building a serverless image recognition system, part 1 3 Building a serverless image recognition system, part 2 PART 2 - TOOLS OF THE TRADE 4 Building and securing a web application the serverless way 5 Adding AI interfaces to a web application 6 How to be effective with AI as a Service 7 Applying AI to existing platforms PART 3 - BRINGING IT ALL TOGETHER 8 Gathering data at scale for real-world AI 9 Extracting value from large data sets with AI

Kaufman takes you on a journey into the new world of service. Learn how the world's leading companies have changed the game, and how you can successfully follow this path to an uplifting service transformation.

Features text for common ceremonies such as marriage services, baptismal services, dedication of children, reception of new members, funeral services, dedication of church buildings, and installation of officers. Gold stamped

This is a new release of the original 1941 edition.