...the more they stay the same. Despite the fact that this book was written and published more than five years ago, it's still the best book written on strategy execution and implementation. Alright,... I'll admit it: the book's title and cover design need a little work (author take note!!). However, if you're willing to look past these superficial flaws, you'll discover the definative book on strategy implementation -- even better than Larry Bossidy's fine "Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done." In addition to this book and Bossidy's "Execution," I'd also recommend that you consider Kotter's "Leading Change" and Smallwood, Ulrich, and Zenger's "Results-Based Leadership" (both five-star books!!). Bottom line? "Implementing Your Strategic Plan" is a must addition to your management library. Overall grade: B+/A.

This book could have been titled "making change happen." The core of this book consists of a chapter by chapter discussion of the 18 keys to implementing the strategic plan. The 18 keys are grouped into five categories: setting accountability; enabling and aligning action; fixing the organization; providing an environment in which people can excel; and judging and rewarding. This is a superb, penetrating and detailed book which begins with a fascinating summary of findings from the author's survey of CEOs and key executives who were successful in implementing change. One insight stands out from these findings-teams don't develop paradigm shift strategies; CEOs do. Indeed Fogg states that the single most important factor in the change equation is leadership. With that truth set forth up front, we were confident that this book would be a rewarding experience; it was...and we highly recommend it!

I just finished this set of three novels in less than a day (fortunately, I had the day off!) and they were wonderful! They're set in the time right after World War II and really incorporate some very interesting history in a painless way. The main character's growing relationship with God and then his opportunities to help others make their own spiritual connections are very inspirational without being saccharin, and the non-stop adventure is really gripping. Highly recommended!

These three books are only the first out of five. They are so exciting you can't put them down. They've got romance, adventure, history, and excitment. They take place in post-WWII times, focusing on the life of Captain (soon to be Colonel) Jake Burnes. It tells about his assignments in Europe, his best friend Pierre, and his fiance Sally. If you like adventure, read these!

The authors have done a superlative job condensing years of research into a comprehensive encyclopedia of insect pests of palms. With a holistic approach that emphasizes the biological interaction of insects with their palm hosts, and a mix of basic and applied information, this volume is an invaluable reference for anyone who works with the "royalty of plants," from the enthusiastic hobbyist to an agronomist managing extensive palm plantations. Accessible and edifying for both scientists and non-scientists, "Insects on Palms" will remain the acknowledged authority on its subject for years to come.

Los amantes de las palmeras y los que trabajamos en este campo echábamos de menos un buen libro sobre las plagas de las palmeras. Desde que Lepesme publicara en 1947, en francés, "Les Insectes des Palmiers", nadie se había atrevido a poner al día, de forma tan profunda, los conocimientos sobre los insectos de las palmeras y las modernas técnicas de control. Por fin, los autores de este libro, que poseen una amplia experiencia en estos insectos, nos ofrecen una herramienta de trabajo indispensable, moderna y llena de conocimientos.

It is rare that you find a comprehensive Administration text written specifically to long term care. After reading this text from cover to cover I passed that NAB examination with EASE!

The text is well organized and provides the reader with relevant terms and concepts essential to the practice of Nursing Home Administration. Winborn Davis--- WELL DONE!

Ten years ago, I used Davis' 1991 Edition to pass the NAB on the first try. Today, it is still the most complete guide to the essential subject components of the Administrator's exam. It is concise and well organized and is best utilized when outlined. Updated, the 1999 edition addressed the latest changes in Medicare PPS and some of the most important life safety code regulations. Davis addresses the needs of both the corporately owned and the privately held facility. This text was also most helpful in preparing uccessfully for the American College of Health Care Administrator's Nursing Home Administration Certification exam. In sum, the volume's only possible shortcoming is in the clinical areas; both nursing and dietary.

I came across this book wandering through a bookstore in 1989. It had a section on Hegel's famous chapter on "Lordship and Bondage," and I thought Davis might have something interesting to add to my already considerable library on the subject. The academic sounding book title suggested a Ph.d thesis turned book or something from the mills of postmodernism, in those years grinding out mind-numbing book-length footnotes to Derrida et al.

Wrong, wrong, wrong! The pages showed an intellect and heart breathtakingly alive and engaged. Despite forbidding sounding chapter titles the prose was beautifully crafted and spoke to my life, my fears, my evasions. I found the book more akin to a sort of wisdom literature, maybe something Ralph Waldo Emerson could have written towards the end of the 20th Century. I read it 2-3 times. Gave it to friends along with advice to ignore the forbidding title and titles to sections.

Later I searched academic journals for reviews and, as I had expected, found none. There is something discomfiting about Davis' book. Maybe Davis meant to scratch your conscience, grapple with intellectual and emotional honesty and courage, put a tack in life's chair -- do those things, that is, that tend to not get one the big symposia at the academic conference. I'm not sure what Davis meant to do, but I have never read such engaged presentations of the likes of Hegel, et al, that so gently yet so relentlessly made me look at the question of how I live.

So, wandering through the Amazon.com jungle, I was greatly encouraged to see that, 12 years later, Davis' book is still available. Give it a try.

In my not-so-humble opinion, Walter Davis's Inwardness and Existence is the most important work of philosophy since Sartre's Being and Nothingness. In this book Davis attempts an astonishing synthesis of 4 seemingly irreconcilable schools of thought: Hegel's self-consciousness, Heidegger's Existentialism, Marxist concepts of ideology and subjectivity, and Freudian psychoanalysis. His goal is a comprehensive and intellectually rigorous theory of "subjectivity," of what we are and how we got that way. Along the way he finds time to write a prose Ode to Death, explore the psychological mysteries of sexuality, provide the best explanation ever written of the Marxist concept of ideology, and intellectually skewer the phony "radical" Professors of academic deconstruction. This is a profound, challenging, wide-ranging book that deserves to be read, re-read, argued with, and discussed. "Put down thy Derrida; open thy Davis!"

Glenn Davis' lifetime encompassed the defining events of the century: Depression, WW II, Vietnam, and Watergate. His biography is like a Greek tragedy. He rises from a poor rural background through brains, work, and personality. He succeeds in Depression, faces terror in the naval war in the Pacific, enters the Congress after the war, rises near the summit with Nixon and Ford, and falls with the disgust of Vietnam and Watergate. For those with an interest in history, politics, and humanity, this biography is an enjoyable thought provoker.

I could not put this book down. It went from his birth all the way to his death. A very detailed account of his time on congress and in world war two.

It's Alive has an unusual perspective. The authors argue that the valuable innovations of the next ten years are being developed in the research laboratories and advanced developments of organizations and companies today. The template is looking backward at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center in 1971 as a way to have gotten a preview of today's computer-connected society.

The book will primarily appeal to those with an interest in applying complexity science and biological analogies through information technology to large organizations. Most of the applications here require tens of millions of dollars to do. So for those in small organizations, the examples will seem out-of-reach.

The main advantage of this book over similar books is that it has more and more contemporary examples and a further development of its concepts than the predecessors that I have read.

From looking at technological developments that are available now and those that are in process, Christopher Meyer and Stan Davis see the maturing of the information technology revolution occurring at the same time as the commercialization of various "molecular" technologies (such as nanotechnology, biotechnology and materials science). Because the two fields operate conceptually in similar ways, the authors point to a convergence that has begun between the two fields that will probably grow in the future. They also draw key lessons from the way that evolutionary biology operates to prescribe for business organizations in the future.

Here's the book's structure:

Introduction

Part I The Next Ten Years
Chapter 1 Economic Evolution: Learning from Life Cycles

Part II Code Is Code
Chapter 2 General Evolution: Learning from Nature
Chapter 3 Biology and the World of the Molecule
Chapter 4 Information and the World of Bits

Part III The Adaptive Enterprise
Chapter 5 Adaptive Management
Chapter 6 Seed, Select, and Amplify at Capital One
Chapter 7 Breeding Early and Often at the U.S. Marine Corps
Chapter 8 Creating the Capacity to Respond at BP
Chapter 9 Born Adaptive at Maxygen
Chapter 10 Becoming an Adaptive Enterprise

Part IV Convergence
Chapter 11 The Adjacent Possible

To me, the most interesting parts of the book involved advanced experiments and applications of technology to solve problems. Most of these I had not read about before. For the most part, these are written in ways that a lay person can easily follow.

The organizational examples were helpful to applying the concepts of an adaptive enterprise. Apply the six memes (gene-like qualities of ideas) for managing:

Self-organize; recombine; sense and respond; learn and adapt; seed, select, and amplify; destabilize.

Of the organizational examples, I found the Capital One and Maxygen examples the easiest to understand. The BP and U.S. Marine Corps examples seemed a little sketchy.

My favorite example in the entire book was of artist Eduardo Kac turning Genesis 1:28 into Morse code and translating the results into a DNA sequence. He then had the sequence inserted into live bacteria, and displayed the bacteria publicly where viewers could zap the bacteria with UV to create potential mutations. Now, that's technological convergence!

The book ends with some speculation about new applications of convergent technologies such as matter compilers, personal hospitals, universal individual lifelong mentors, experience machines and social-science stimulators.

Don't let the book's conceptual structure scare you off. Underneath the new definitions and concepts, there's a lot of common sense that most will agree with: Get experience fast; learn from your experience; keep it simple; be agile; get to the most valuable places first with the most; and communicate in all directions.

After you've finished reading the book, I suggest you think about how the book's principles could be accomplished on a shoe-string by an organization that you know well. In that way, you will play a valuable role in being a commercializer of advanced laboratory results.

This is an original work that provides rich detail about why and how companies must adapt. As a college professor, working on an article about contingency marketing, I found "It's Alive" to have numerous insights and examples that will greatly help my work, if not my teaching. While many of the concepts are abstract, the authors almost always manage to make their points effectively and realistically. I enjoyed reading this book.

"What would you do....?"

Debora Davis has taken on a very challenging topic and presentation with this book. Five people are offered a day without consequences. Each of these people represent a literary archtype and make choices that many of the readers would make under the same circumstances...but as always there is a catch. And when the devil comes to collect his due, she does not shy from the results. There is no "hollywood" style ending here where everyone ends up happily every after. And kudos to here for having the guts to follow it through to the logical conclusion, even when she could have made herself a loophole. Anything else and I would have left feeling cheated.

Debora has taken on quite a challenge. A multiple-viewpoint, intertwined story that many established writers would shy away from. She has met the challenge quite admirably.

January 3 ½ is clever and well written tale of wish fulfillment. Debora Davis tells us that there really is no such thing as "no consequences." Recommended. -- Rich Bellush, SF author.

Poet, essayist, and Southern Agrarian, Allen Tate brings (brought) to his life of Jefferson Davis not only a tremendous narrative talent, but also a deep understanding of, and sympathy for, the Southern culture that produced Jefferson Davis. But unlike other Southern writers who made Davis a larger-than-life hero of the Lost Cause, Tate pulls no punches in his assessment of the President's weaknesses as well as his strengths, and how they may have crippled the Confederacy from the very beginning.

Tate considers Davis a man of high ideals and great personal honor. At the same time, though, he had a "peculiarly inflexible mind" ("he had not learned anything since about 1843") (p. 197) and a "feeble grasp of human nature" (p. 255). He treated his office as a sort of super-minister of defense, and was never "the leader of the Southern people as a whole" (p. 180). The South could have won the war if she had had the right kind of political leader, Tate argues. But Davis, whose rise to leadership was generally unearned (p. 79), wasn't it.

Beyond Davis the man, Tate also has a deep grasp of the Southern culture and the larger historical and cultural issues that were clashing in the War Between the States. In keeping with his Southern Agrarianism, Tate paints the South as the last outpost of European culture in the Americas, standing against -- and ultimately overwhelmed by -- the surging might of restless, expansionist, wealth-seeking "Americanism," embodied in the Yankee Northeast. Tate's grasp of Southern regionalism lets him place an emphasis on the tensions between Upper and Lower South that, for me, shone a light on the instability of the Confederate government that I haven't seen as emphasized elsewhere.

Tate's perspective and narrative form may not be in keeping with more modern styles of biography. But this book is nevertheless an excellent and insightful read, and I recommend it to any student of the men caught up in, as well as the issues behind, America's bloodiest conflict.

This book is no act of idolatry, despite the author's reputation as a Southern conservative and Agrarian. Tate believes Davis was a great man, but he points out his flaws as well, his diffidence in acting sooner that might have won the South the War, his pride, his sometime aloofness, his tendency to remain loyal to generals (Braxton Bragg foremost among them) whose incompetence was all too apparent to others, and his refusal to appoint the right men for the right job.

This is an absorbing read that puts one in mind of Shelby Foote's celebrated War trilogy, although Tate's was written first. It has the same novelistic quality and drive and the same quickly drawn but utterly convincing characterizations. The book alternates between presentations of certain monumental battles and portraits of life on the "homefront." The latter is actually more fascinating than the former. We learn in vivid detail of the strength and loyalty and perseverance of the Southern people.

"Jump Back, Honey: The Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar" combines several poems from this beloved African-American poet with illustrations from several different artists: Ashley Bryan, Faith Ringgold, and more. Dunbar (1872-1906) was an expert at writing poems in both a formal "literary" English and in a style that evoked African-American vernacular speech (this second type of poem was known as a "dialect" poem). This book includes excellent examples of both modes. A sample from a "dialect" poem: "Fiddlin' man jes' stop his fiddlin', / Lay his fiddle on de she'f."

I liked how several different visual artists contributed to this book; this gives the book a nice sense of variety. My favorite illustrations include Jerry Pinkney's pictures, which are vibrant with color and energy, and Carole Byard's delicate picture that accompanies "The Sparrow."

These are poems about nature, African-American culture, and the joys of love and family life. This book is an excellent choice for a multicultural children's book collection.

A versatile group of illustrators add flair to Paul Laurence Dunbar's poetry. Faith Ringgold's portrait of Frederick Douglass gives additional power to "Douglass". Jerry Pinkney's illustrations capture the playfulness and sass of "A Negro Love Song"; and "The Colored Band". Both Carole Byard's and Jan Spivey Gilchrist's illustrations add contemporary color and meaning to this anthology. The notes list brief biographical information on Dunbar and some background data on the title of this book. Some facts about the illustrators are also included in this collection of poems. This book can be used for school and church performances and plays.