The world's economy has been transformed from a twentieth-century materials-based economy to the Age of the Knowledge-Based Economy - and the currency of this realm is ideas, imagination, creativity, and knowledge. According The World Bank, 80% of the developed world's wealth now resides in human capital. Perhaps President Ronald Reagan said it best in his address to Moscow State University on May 31, 1988: "Like a chrysalis, we're emerging from the economy of the Industrial Revolution - an economy confined and limited by the Earth's physical resources - into, as one economist titled his book, "the economy in mind," in which there are no bounds on human imagination and the freedom to create is the most precious natural resource." Written by Ronald Baker and Ed Kless, hosts of The Soul of Enterprise: Business in the Knowledge Economy, the popular radio show on Voice America's Business Channel, The Soul of Enterprise: Dialogues on Business in the Knowledge Economy sounds the clarion call that organizations can no longer ignore this seismic shift that has occurred in the economy since 1959. The Soul of Enterprise introduces the three components of Intellectual Capital - human capital, social capital, and structural capital - and how to leverage them to create wealth in today's economy, by revealing: The physical fallacy - why wealth no longer consists of tangible things, but of ideas, imagination and knowledge from human minds The best learning tool ever invented: After Action Reviews Why Frederick Taylor and the Scientific Management movement was a fraud and the wrong focus for knowledge workers The fact that effectiveness always and everywhere trumps efficiency The First Law of Pricing: All value is subjective The Second Law of Pricing: All prices are contextual The Morality of Markets: Doing well and doing good Why your organization - and you - need to be driven by a higher purpose than profit The Soul of Enterprise will inspire and challenge readers to unlock the enormous financial and competitive power hidden in the intellectual capital of their organizations and knowledge workers."

From old-fashioned bricks-and-mortars to cutting-edge startups, businesses are moving into uncharted territory as they determine how to move from an analog past to a digital future effectively. How can you make sure not to leave human instinct behind? Businesses are leaving behind traditional meetings in favor of virtual ones, transitioning from surveys and studies to analytics and algorithms. The startling and often unacknowledged truth is that?the promise of digital transformation can only be realized when we find a way to balance it with the promise of people.?In the end, it’s the people that matter, and companies must never forget the soul that drives them. In Restoring the Soul of Business, business leader Rishad Tobaccowala?teaches you to: Understand how to unleash the significant benefit that can be realized by combining emotion and data, human and machine, analog and digital. Spot the warning signs of data-blinded companies: cold cultures with little human interaction, poor innovation stemming from discouraged employees who don’t contribute ideas, and poor customer service due to automated, robotic processes. Explore how organizations of various sizes and from different industries have successfully reoriented their thinking on how to fuse technology and humanity. Gain skills to become an expert in connections critical to growth and success, including the connection between being creative and using technology. Everyone working in an organization will find penetrating observations and guidance about how and why establishing the proper balance between human intuition and creativity and data-driven insights can lead to increased revenue, profitability, retention—and even joy—in their careers and business. Restoring the Soul of Business provides practical tools and techniques that every organization can and should implement, and challenges you to move forward with the kind of balance that capitalizes transformation and produces one great success after another.

A social, economic, and political study of Philadelphia merchants, this study presents both the spirit and statistics of merchant life. Doerflinger studies the Philadelphia merchant community from three perspectives: their commercial world, their confront

An award-winning business writer dismantles the myths of entrepreneurship, replacing them with an essential story about the experience of real business owners in the modern economy. We're often told that we're living amidst a startup boom. Typically, we think of apps built by college kids and funded by venture capital firms, which remake fortunes and economies overnight. But in reality, most new businesses are things like restaurants or hair salons. Entrepreneurs aren't all millennials -- more often, it's their parents. And those small companies are the fabric of our economy. The Soul of an Entrepreneur is a business book of a different kind, exploring our work but also our passions and hopes. David Sax reports on the deeply personal questions of entrepreneurship: why an immigrant family risks everything to build a bakery; how a small farmer fights to manage his debt; and what it feels like to rise and fall with a business you built for yourself. This book is the real story of entrepreneurship. It confronts both success and failure, and shows how they can change a human life. It captures the inherent freedom that entrepreneurship brings, and why it matters.

Twenty first century, flexible capitalism creates new demands for those who work to acknowledge that all aspects of their lives have come to be seen as performance related, and consequently of interest to those who employ them (or fire them). At the start of the 21st century we can identify, borrowing from Max Weber, new work ethics that provide novel ethically slanted maxims for the conduct of a life, and which suggest that the cultivation of the self as an enterprise is the life-long activity that should give meaning, purpose and direction to a life. The book provides an innovative theoretical and methodological approach that draws on the problematising critique of Michel Foucault, the sociological imagination of Zygmunt Bauman and the work influenced by these authors in social theory and social research in the last three decades. The author takes seriously the ambivalence and irony that marks many people’s experience of their working lives, and the demands of work at the start of the 21st century. The book makes an important contribution to the continuing debate about the nature of work related identities and the consequences of the intensification of the work regimes in which these identities are performed and regulated. In a post global financial crisis (GFC) world of sovereign debt, austerity and recession the author’s analysis focuses academic and professional interest on neo-liberal injunctions to imagine ourselves as an enterprise, and to reap the rewards and carry the costs of the conduct of this enterprise.

The wellspring of capital will not be found on Wall Street or in the stuffy halls of corporate America, but instead in the hopes and dreams of people who want to create new products and new approaches to problem solving. It is this wellspring that will ultimately cleanse the soul of corporate America corrupted by power and age. George Gilder's 1984 classic was substantially revised for the 1990s and remains relevant today. This authoritative book looks at what went right in the 1980s and how we can jump-start the economy of the new millenium, featuring unforgettable portraits of entrepreneurs of today and tomorrow, from Bill Gates to members of the dynamic Cuban immigrant community of Miami.

In this thrilling and eye-opening Star Trek: Enterprise novel, T’Pol finds herself torn between the teachings of Vulcan and the regulations of Starfleet. You are alone in the dark reaches of space, surrounded by aliens who do not understand who you are and what you are, and who will not accept your beliefs. Under such circumstances, an emotional human would feel lost, cut off, adrift, but Sub-Commander T’Pol is a Vulcan, and Vulcans control their emotions. However, no other Vulcan has served for longer than a few weeks on a human ship. Has she, as others imply, lost her way? Pulled, once again, into one of Captain Archer’s dangerously impulsive attempts to make first contact, the sub-commander finds her life threatened. T’Pol reacts, draws her phase pistol and kills. It was a simple act of self-defense. But is killing ever simple? Has she forsaken the teachings of Surak? Determined to be true to her heritage, T’Pol forswears violence. She tells Captain Archer that never again will she kill—even if ordered. Is she, as Archer suggests, endangering the entire ship?

Praise for IMPLEMENTING VALUE PRICING A Radical Business Model for Professional Firms "Ron Baker is the most prolific and best writer when it comes to pricing services. This is a must-read for executives and partners in small to large firms. Ron provides the basics, the advanced ideas, the workbooks, the case studies everything. This is a must-have and a terrific book." Reed K. Holden founder and CEO, Holden Advisors, Corp., Associate Professor, Columbia University www.holdenadvisors.com "We've known through Ron Baker's earlier books that he's not just an extraordinary thinker and truly brilliant writer he's a mover and a shaker on a mission. This is the End of Time! Brilliant." Paul Dunn Chairman, B1G1® www.b1g1.com "Implementing Value Pricing is a powerful blend of theory, strategy, and tactics. Ron Baker's most recent offering is ambitious in scope, exploring topics that include economic theory, customer orientation, value identification, service positioning, and pricing strategy. He weaves all of them together seamlessly, and includes numerous examples to illustrate his primary points. I have applied the knowledge I've gained from his body of work, and the benefits to me and to my customers have been immediate, significant, and ongoing." Brent Uren Principal, Valuation & Business Modeling Ernst & Young® www.ey.com "Ron Baker is a revolutionary. He is on a radical crusade to align the interests of service providers with those of their customers by having lawyers, accountants, and consultants charge based on the value they provide, rather than the effort it takes. Implementing Value Pricing is a manifesto that establishes a clear case for the revolution. It provides detailed guidance that includes not only strategies and tactics, but key predictive indicators for success. It is richly illustrated by the successes of firms that have embraced value-based pricing to make their services not only more cost-effective for their customers, but more profitable as well. The hallmark of a manifesto is an unyielding sense of purpose and a call to action. Let the revolution begin." Robert G. Cross, Chairman and CEO, Revenue Analytics, Inc. Author, Revenue Management: Hard-Core Tactics for Market Domination

This wise and inspiring book by Leonard Berry, moves far beyond his pioneering work in services marketing and service quality to explain how great service companies meet their toughest challenge: sustaining long-term success. In a world where customers regard flawless products as a given, service is the key differentiator between competitors in any field. From Berry's exacting study of fourteen mature, highly successful, labor-intensive companies comes an astonishing revelation: the single most important factor in building a lasting service business is not a matter of savvy business practice, but of humane values. In all fourteen award-winning companies -- Bergstrom Hotels, The Charles Schwab Corporation, Chick-fil-A, The Container Store, Custom Research Inc., Dana Commercial Credit, Dial-A-Mattress, Enterprise Rent-A-Car, Midwest Express Airlines, Miller SQA, Special Expeditions, St. Paul Saints, USAA, and Ukrop's Super Markets -- values-driven leadership connects with strategic focus, executional excellence, control of destiny, trust-based relationships, generosity, investment in employee success, acting small, and brand cultivation to drive customer satisfaction, innovation, and growth. Dedicating a chapter to each of these nine drivers, this book is the most far-reaching and insightful vision ever presented of the principles and step-by-step actions that continuously bring success to life in a company. Berry's comprehensive model reveals the soul that underlies the strategies and day-to-day operations of great service companies, guiding the thousands of daily decisions of individual employees. Clear, compelling, pathbreaking, Discovering the Soul of Service is essential reading for managers everywhere.

Thinkers50 Top 10 Best New Management Books for 2022 A distinguished Harvard Business School professor offers a compelling reassessment and defense of purpose as a management ethos, documenting the vast performance gains and social benefits that become possible when firms manage to get purpose right. Few business topics have aroused more skepticism in recent years than the notion of corporate purpose, and for good reason. Too many companies deploy purpose, or a reason for being, as a promotional vehicle to make themselves feel virtuous and to look good to the outside world. Some have only foggy ideas about what purpose is and conflate it with strategy and other concepts like “mission,” “vision,” and “values.” Even well-intentioned leaders don’t understand purpose’s full potential and engage half-heartedly and superficially with it. Outsiders spot this and become cynical about companies and the broader capitalist endeavor. Having conducted extensive field research, Ranjay Gulati reveals the fatal mistakes leaders unwittingly make when attempting to implement a reason for being. Moreover, he shows how companies can embed purpose much more deeply than they currently do, delivering impressive performance benefits that reward customers, suppliers, employees, shareholders, and communities alike. To get purpose right, leaders must fundamentally change not only how they execute it but also how they conceive of and relate to it. They must practice what Gulati calls deep purpose, furthering each organization’s reason for being more intensely, thoughtfully, and comprehensively than ever before. In this authoritative, accessible, and inspiring guide, Gulati takes readers inside some of the world’s most purposeful companies to understand the secrets to their successes. He explores how leaders can pursue purpose more deeply by navigating the inevitable tradeoffs more deliberately and effectively to balance between short- and long-term value; building purpose more systematically into every key organizational function to mobilize stakeholders and enhance performance; updating organizations to foster more autonomy and collaboration, which in turn allow individual employees to work more purposefully; using powerful storytelling to communicate a reason for being, arousing emotions and building a community of inspired and committed stakeholders; and building cultures that don’t merely support purpose, but also allow employees to link the corporate purpose to their own personal reasons for being. As Gulati argues, a deeper engagement with purpose holds the key not merely to the well-being of individual companies but also to humanity’s future. With capitalism under siege and relatively low levels of trust in business, purpose can serve as a radically new operating system for the enterprise, enhancing performance while also delivering meaningful benefits to society. It’s the kind of inspired thinking that businesses—and the rest of us—urgently need.