Flats For Sale Quotes

He held out the written pass. "This is what they want us to be," he said. "They want us to be nothing but a bill of sale and a letter explaining where we is and instructions for where we go and what we do. They want us empty. They want us flat as paper. They want to be able to carry our souls in their hands, and read them out loud in court. All the time, they're on the exploration of themselves, going on the inner journey into their own breast. But us, they want there to be nothing inside of. They want us to be writ on. They want us to be a surface. Look at me, I'm mahogany." I protested, "A man is known by his deeds." "Oh, that's sure," said Bono. "Just like a house is known by its deeds. The deeds say who owns it, who sold it, and who'll be buying a new one when it gets knocked down.

The news about Shiraha spread through the store like wildfire. Every time I saw the manager he started pestering me with: “How’s Shiraha? When are you going to bring him out drinking with us?” I’d always had a lot of respect for manager #8. He was a hard worker and I’d thought of him as the perfect colleague, but now I was sick to death of him only ever talking about Shiraha whenever we met. Until now, we’d always had meaningful worker-manager discussions: “It’s been hot lately, so the sales of chocolate desserts are down,” or “There’s a new block of flats down the road, so we’ve been getting more customers in the evening,” or “They’re really pushing the ad campaign for that new product coming out the week after next, so we should do well with it.” Now, however, it felt like he’d downgraded me from store worker to female of the human species.

Columbus was born around 1492. I say around because before that the world was flat. My stomach also used to be flat, but now it looks like a globe is about to be born.

What about his style?" asked Dalgliesh who was beginning to think that his reading had been unnecessarily restricted. "Turgid but grammatical. And, in these days, when every illiterate debutante thinks she is a novelist, who am I to quarrel with that? Written with Fowler on his left hand and Roget on his right. Stale, flat and, alas, rapidly becoming unprofitable..." "What was he like as a person?" asked Dalgliesh. "Oh, difficult. Very difficult, poor fellow! I thought you knew him? A precise, self-opinionated, nervous little man perpetually fretting about his sales, his publicity or his book jackets. He overvalued his own talent and undervalued everyone else's, which didn't exactly make for popularity." "A typical writer, in fact?" suggested Dalgliesh mischievously.

Funnel The family story tells, and it was told true, of my great-grandfather who begat eight genius children and bought twelve almost-new grand pianos. He left a considerable estate when he died. The children honored their separate arts; two became moderately famous, three married and fattened their delicate share of wealth and brilliance. The sixth one was a concert pianist. She had a notable career and wore cropped hair and walked like a man, or so I heard when prying a childhood car into the hushed talk of the straight Maine clan. One died a pinafore child, she stays her five years forever. And here is one that wrote- I sort his odd books and wonder his once alive words and scratch out my short marginal notes and finger my accounts. back from that great-grandfather I have come to tidy a country graveyard for his sake, to chat with the custodian under a yearly sun and touch a ghost sound where it lies awake. I like best to think of that Bunyan man slapping his thighs and trading the yankee sale for one dozen grand pianos. it fit his plan of culture to do it big. On this same scale he built seven arking houses and they still stand. One, five stories up, straight up like a square box, still dominates its coastal edge of land. It is rented cheap in the summer musted air to sneaker-footed families who pad through its rooms and sometimes finger the yellow keys of an old piano that wheezes bells of mildew. Like a shoe factory amid the spruce trees it squats; flat roof and rows of windows spying through the mist. Where those eight children danced their starfished summers, the thirty-six pines sighing, that bearded man walked giant steps and chanced his gifts in numbers. Back from that great-grandfather I have come to puzzle a bending gravestone for his sake, to question this diminishing and feed a minimum of children their careful slice of suburban cake.

Obesity research is almost solely funded by the weight-loss industry. Conducting studies is expensive, and government funds don’t even begin to cover them all. Luckily, our good friend the diet industry is there to give millions to studies aiming to prove that fat is killing us, meaning that in turn their sales go through the roof as we all run, terrified, to our nearest weight-loss group.

The lobby of the Fanny Briggs Memorial Building was almost finished when she arrived. As if to distract from the minuscule and cramped philosophy of what would transpire on the floors above, the city offered visitors the spacial bounty of the lobby. The ersatz marble was firm underfoot like real marble, sheer, and produced trembling echoes effortlessly. The circle of Doric columns braced the weight above without complaint. The mural, however, was not complete. It started out jauntily enough to Lila Mae’s left. Cheerless Indians holding up a deerskin in front of a fire. The original tenants, sure. A galleon negotiating the tricky channels around the island. Two beaming Indians trading beads to a gang of white men—the infamous sale of the Island. Big moment, have to include that, the first of many dubious transactions in the city’s history. (They didn’t have elevators yet. That’s why the scenes look so flat to Lila Mae: the city is dimensionless.) The mural jumped to the Revolution then, she noticed, skipped over a lot of stuff. The painter seemed to be making it up as he went along, like the men who shaped the city. The Revolution scene was a nice setpiece—the colonists pulling down the statue of King George III. They melted it down for ammunition, if she remembers correctly. It’s always nice when a good mob comes together. The painting ended there. (Someone knocks at the door of her room in 117 Second Avenue, but she doesn’t open her eyes.) Judging from the amount of wall space that remained to Lila Mae’s right, the mural would have to get even more brief in its chronicle of the city’s greatest hits. Either the painter had misjudged how much space he had or the intervening years weren’t that compelling to him. Just the broad strokes, please.

Though my mother and I hadn't parted on good terms, once a month, huge boxes would arrive, reminders I was never far from her mind. Sweet honey-puffed rice, twenty-four packs of individually wrapped seasoned seaweed, microwavable rice, shrimp crackers, boxes of Pepero, and cups of Shin ramen I would subsist on for weeks on end in an effort to avoid the dining hall. She sent clothing steamers, lint rollers, BB creams, packages of socks. A new "this is nice brand" skirt she'd found on sale at T.J. Maxx. The cowboy boots arrived in one of these packages after my parents had vacationed in Mexico. When I slipped them on I discovered they'd already been broken in. My mother had worn them around the house for a week, smoothing the hard edges in two pairs of socks for an hour every day, molding the flat sole with the bottom of her feet, wearing in the stiffness, breaking the tough leather to spare me all discomfort.

In the 1950s, the standard bike had been the cruiser design, a gargantuan fender-covered machine built exclusively for adults. There was only one speed (slow) and you stopped the bike by reversing the pedals and pressing down hard. In 1962, however, Schwinn designer Al Fritz had an idea. He’d heard about a new youth trend centered in California: retrofitting bicycles with drag-racing motorcycle accoutrements. “Choppers” — custom motorcycles with long handlebars — were all the rage. Fritz introduced chopper elements into his new design. The Schwinn Stingray was born. It had smaller, 20-inch tires — with flat racing treads — and high handlebars and a banana seat. Sales were initially disappointing — parents didn’t want their children riding such an odd looking bike — but as the Stingray began making its way into America’s neighborhoods, every kid had to have one. And every bike manufacturer began manufacturing bikes just like it — a style we referred to as the “spider” bike.

But here they are, leaving the stress and shit food and endless misunderstandings. Leaving. The jobcentre, the classroom, the pub, the gym, the car park, the flat, the filth, the TV, the constant swiping of newsfeeds, the hoover, the toothbrush, the laptop bag, the expensive hair product that makes you feel better inside, the queue for the cash machine, the cinema, the bowling alley, the phone shop, the guilt, the absolute nothingness that never stops chasing, the pain of seeing a person grow into a shadow. The people’s faces twisting into grimaces again, losing all their insides in the gutters, clutching lovers till the breath is faint and love is dead, wet cement and spray paint, the kids are watching porn and drinking Monster. Watch the city fall and rise again through mist and bleeding hands. Keep holding on to power-ballad karaoke hits. Chase your talent. Corner it, lock it in a cage, give the key to someone rich and tell yourself you’re staying brave. Tip your chair back, stare into the eyes of someone hateful that you’ll take home anyway. Tell the world you’re staying faithful. Nothing’s for you but it’s all for sale, give until your strength is frail and when it’s at its weakest, burden it with hurt and secrets. It’s all around you screaming paradise until there’s nothing left to feel. Suck it up, gob it, double-drop it. Pin it deep into your vein and try for ever to get off it. Now close your eyes and stop it. But it never stops. They

The key is to store things standing up rather than laid flat. Some people mimic store displays, folding each piece of clothing into a large square and then arranging them one on top of the other in layers. This is great for temporary sales displays in stores, but not what we should be aiming for at home, where our relationship with these clothes is long term.

The more a stock has gone up, the more it seems likely to keep going up. But that instinctive belief is flatly contradicted by a fundamental law of financial physics: The bigger they get, the slower they grow. A $1-billion company can double its sales fairly easily; but where can a $50-billion company turn to find another $50 billion in business?

The current fast food fuss obscures the reality that such foods are ancient. Fried kibbeh, sausages, olives, nuts, small pizzas, and flat breads have been sold on the streets of Middle Eastern and North African cities for a cycle of centuries; Marco Polo reported barbequed meats, deep-fried delicacies, and even roast lamb for sale in Chinese markets.

There is also a clear, demonstrated relationship between the cost of alcohol and the number of drunk-driving deaths. Research has shown that raising social awareness around drunk driving—as groups like Mothers Against Drunk Driving have done—is not enough. In most Western European countries, the sales tax on alcohol ranges between sixteen and twenty-five per cent. In the United States, it is somewhere between one-half and a third of the European rate—and because the federal excise is a flat amount (not a percentage of the sales price) it falls every year with inflation.

Kids started having their own cameras, en masse, in the 1960s. Kodak Instamatics, which came out in 1963, were inexpensive ($16) and easy to use, durable and small, the perfect size to fit in a child’s pocket or the upper tray of a footlocker on its way to summer camp. The Instagram logo, in a conscious nod, echoes the look of the early Instamatics—a dark stripe on top, metallic on the bottom, with a round flat lens and viewfinder in the middle. The

I went to a gun range and shot a man made out of paper. That paper man must have had a brother, and I fear one day that paper man’s brother is going to shoot me while I am laying flat on my back.

She had two leaves for feat. Maple, I think. She was flat-footed and always ready to leave. That’s why I tried to pour my love on thick, like syrup.

Buy 3 bhk flats in korba Flat with amazing amenities in Korba

We moved back to London a year ago, after selling the cottage in Somerset. I used the money from the sale and a bank loan to buy a top-floor flat in a mansion block called Wellington Court in Belsize Park, not far from Primrose Hill. Airy and bright, with high ceilings and a large bay window in the sitting room, it has three bedrooms and a small roof terrace, accessible from the kitchen window, where Emma and I sometimes watch the sun setting over London while sitting on deckchairs like passengers on an ocean liner

Mixing culture war and capitalism is not just a personal quirk shared by these three individuals; it is writ in the very manifesto of the Kansas conservative movement, the platform of the state Republican Party for 1998. Moaning that “the signs of a degenerating society are all around us,” railing against abortion and homosexuality and gun control and evolution (“a theory, not a fact”), the document went on to propound a list of demands as friendly to plutocracy as anything ever dreamed up by Monsanto or Microsoft. The platform called for: • A flat tax or national sales tax to replace the graduated income tax (in which the rich pay more than the poor). • The abolition of taxes on capital gains (that is, on money you make when you sell stock). • The abolition of the estate tax. • No “governmental intervention in health care.” • The eventual privatization of Social Security. • Privatization in general. • Deregulation in general and “the operation of the free market system without government interference.” • The turning over of all federal lands to the states. • A prohibition on “the use of taxpayer dollars to fund any election campaign.” Along

Mixing culture war and capitalism is not just a personal quirk shared by these three individuals; it is writ in the very manifesto of the Kansas conservative movement, the platform of the state Republican Party for 1998. Moaning that “the signs of a degenerating society are all around us,” railing against abortion and homosexuality and gun control and evolution (“a theory, not a fact”), the document went on to propound a list of demands as friendly to plutocracy as anything ever dreamed up by Monsanto or Microsoft. The platform called for: • A flat tax or national sales tax to replace the graduated income tax (in which the rich pay more than the poor). • The abolition of taxes on capital gains (that is, on money you make when you sell stock). • The abolition of the estate tax. • No “governmental intervention in health care.” • The eventual privatization of Social Security. • Privatization in general. • Deregulation in general and “the operation of the free market system without government interference.” • The turning over of all federal lands to the states. • A prohibition on “the use of taxpayer dollars to fund any election campaign.” Along the way the document specifically endorsed the disastrous Freedom to Farm Act, condemned agricultural price supports, and came out in favor of making soil conservation programs “voluntary,” perhaps out of nostalgia for the Dust Bowl days, when Kansans learned a healthy fear of the Almighty.17

Leaders rooted in the logic of multiplication believe: 1. Most people in organizations are underutilized. 2. All capability can be leveraged with the right kind of leadership. 3. Therefore, intelligence and capability can be multiplied without requiring a bigger investment. For example, when Apple Inc. needed to achieve rapid growth with flat resources in one division, they didn’t expand their sales force.

1. Opportunity. What is the best opportunity for a new entrepreneur to build a successful business? Why is now the time to do it? How does the new landscape of e-commerce and social media create an environment of opportunity? And how do you fit into it all? You will discover why now is the perfect time to create your pie, and why there are others who are ready and willing to buy a slice. 2. Mindset. There’s a reason not every wantrepreneur becomes a successful entrepreneur, and psychology is a big piece of the puzzle. I’ll take you through the development of the right mindset to take a business from zero to one million in a year. 3. Getting customers. A million-dollar business doesn’t start with a product; it starts with a person. Your first step in building your business must be identifying your customer, and then answering his or her need. This builds a real brand, not just a revenue stream. If you get this piece right, you will have droves of repeat buyers who will eagerly “overpay” for your products, thank you for it, and tell all of their friends about you. 4. Product. Choosing your first product will be the biggest hurdle you face. It will take research, patience, and determination. Most importantly, it will require listening to what your customer is saying. I’ll take you through the whole process, from ideation to prototyping and refinement, helping you clear this hurdle in no time flat. 5. Funding. Sure, you’ve got a great product, and you know to whom you’re selling—but how do you fund your inventory? Here’s how to bootstrap, borrow, and build your way to a self-sustaining revenue machine, without stressing about money. 6. Stacking the deck. How do you nearly guarantee that your first product is successful, right out of the gate? Once you’ve decided what business you’re in, we will work to ensure that you don’t get stuck holding a product no one wants; this is where you stack the deck so your launch day is set up to blast off. 7. Launch. Your first product is ready to launch. What do you do now? Do you just let it ride? No. Here’s where building relationships and a few strategic marketing tips will take your business from a single product to a world-class brand, as we cover what you need to do to reach the key growth point of twenty-five sales per day.

Phase 1: Discovery 1. Define the problem statement What is the challenge that will be solved? The problem statement is defined at this step and becomes the foundation of the project. Here is a sample problem statement: The company has more than one hundred thousand email addresses and has sent more than one million emails in the last twelve months, but open rates remain low at 8 percent, and sales attributed to email have remained flat since 2018. Based on current averages, a 2 percentage-point lift in email open rates could produce a $50,000 increase in sales over the next twelve months. It’s important to note that a strong and valid problem statement should include the value of solving the problem. This helps ensure that the project is worth the investment of resources and keeps everyone focused on the goal. 2. Build and prioritize the issues list What are the primary issues causing the problem? The issues are categorized into three to five primary groups and built into an issues tree. Sample issues could be: •​Low open rates •​Low click rates •​Low sales conversion rates 3. Identify and prioritize the key drivers. What factors are driving the issues and problem? Sample key drivers could include: •​List fatigue •​Email creatives •​Highly manual, human-driven processes •​Underutilized or missing marketing technology solutions •​Lack of list segmentation •​Lack of reporting and performance management •​Lack of personalization 4. Develop an initial hypothesis What is the preliminary road map to solving the problem? Here is a sample initial hypothesis: AI-powered technologies can be integrated to intelligently automate priority use cases that will drive email efficiency and performance. 5. Conduct discovery research What information can we gain about the problem, and potential solutions, from primary and secondary research? •​How are talent, technology, and strategy gaps impacting performance? •​What can be learned from interviews with stakeholders and secondary research related to the problem? Ask questions such as the following: •​What is the current understanding of AI within the organization? •​Does the executive team understand and support the goal of AI pilot projects?

Bryce lifted her chin, though she remained sitting on the ground. “Are Ruhn and Hunt still alive?” Something like distaste flashed in the Autumn King’s eyes. As if such mortal bonds should be the least of her concerns. “You show your hand, Bryce Quinlan.” “I thought my name was Bryce Danaan now,” she seethed. “To the detriment of the line, yes,” the Autumn King said, his eyes sparking. “Where have you been?” “There was a sample sale at the mall,” Bryce said flatly.

Bryce lifted her chin, though she remained sitting on the ground. “Are Ruhn and Hunt still alive?” Something like distaste flashed in the Autumn King’s eyes. As if such mortal bonds should be the least of her concerns. “You show your hand, Bryce Quinlan.” “I thought my name was Bryce Danaan now,” she seethed. “To the detriment of the line, yes,” the Autumn King said, his eyes sparking. “Where have you been?” “There was a sample sale at the mall,” Bryce said flatly. “Are Ruhn and Hunt still alive?” The Autumn King’s head angled, gaze sweeping over her filthy T-shirt, her torn leggings. “I was informed that you were no longer on this planet. Where did you go?” Bryce declined to answer. Her father smiled slightly. “I can connect the dots. You arrive from off-world, bearing a knife that matches the Starsword. The dagger from the prophecy, no?” His eyes gleamed with greed. “Not seen since the First Wars. If I were to guess, you managed to reach a place I have long desired to go.” He glanced up at the orrery. “You might want to reconsider before packing your bags,” Bryce said. “They don’t take kindly to assholes.” “Your journey hasn’t impacted that smart mouth of yours, I see.” She smiled with saccharine sweetness. “You’re still an absolute bastard, I see.

I’m not that afraid of heights. I’ve been 7,000 feet above sea level. Just so long as the land is flat, with no sudden drop-offs, I’m fine.

The more concentrated the competition, the more you have to worry about it. If you don’t realize when a case involves high competitor concentration, you could easily make a strategic recommendation that’s flat-out wrong. The easiest way to assess competitor concentration is to ask the following questions: How many competitors are there? How big are they (in terms of sales or market share)?

Candidate: This is a pretty broad problem, so I’d like to start with an arbitrary hypothesis. Because the client wants both sales and profits to increase, let’s hypothesize that the client has a sales growth problem. To test that hypothesis, I’d like to break down the client’s profits into its component parts: sales and costs. Specifically, I’d like to understand how each has changed in the past three years, because we know that’s the duration in which sales and profits have remained flat.

Candidate: Aha! Interesting. So industry growth is really being driven by a single segment that is offsetting flat and declining sales in other segments. (Note the effective use of a mini-synthesis.)

The Walmart is having a sale on canned tuna this week, three cans for $2.49. The Walmart would like to remind you that the canned tuna is in Aisle 3, not in aisle 8, and it is perfectly safe there. Attention, Anomaly Flats: Do not go into aisle 8 in the Walmart. Do not go into the Walmart. Do not ever go into the Walmart.” The

Polson had always made butter from stale cream. He never collected milk to get fresh cream. The cream merchants would supply him with cans of cream, which went into his butter production. Sometimes these cans of cream would be kept for as long as ten days without refrigeration. Many pollutants – sometimes even maggots – contaminated the cream and turned it malodorous. Polson’s Manager, Foster, found an answer to all such problems. He acquired a vacreator – a machine that heats cream for pasteurisation with injected steam that quickly raises its temperature. The machine also creates a vacuum, which removes the steam molecules so that it does not dilute the cream. For Polson, the vacreator served a dual purpose: along with the steam, the vacuum also almost totally removed the foul odour from the stale cream. Some odour though did remain and, ironically enough, became a problem for us at Amul. Our butter, like butter from New Zealand, was made of fresh cream – milk to cream to butter, all in the same day. When we introduced this butter into the market, people exclaimed in distaste: ‘What kind of butter is this? There’s no flavour in it. It’s flat!’ Of course, the Parsis in Bombay city’s popular Irani restaurants would not touch it (although I suspect this could as well have been because of their loyalty to ‘apro Pestonjee’, Polson). This was a serious problem and we had to find a solution quickly. We did. At the end of the butter-making process we began to add a permitted chemical additive called diacetyl, which also gave the butter an added ‘flavour’. This solution to a rather unusual problem was legal as long as we printed the line ‘permitted flavours added’ on the packets. In its new form, Amul butter became more acceptable – and sales showed dramatic improvement.

Does the flat tax work?...The flat tax works in a country that is a former Communist state, with no investment capital, and low wage rates, which needs to build a capitalist economy from a base of approximately zero. The flat tax works if people are willing to pay a 20% sales tax on everything they buy to make up for lower revenue. The flat tax works if employers are willing to pay 34%, or more, in Social Security taxes for every employee they hire. The flat tax works in a country where almost everyone has the same amount of wealth so there's no need for the distributive effect of graduated rates. And if all these conditions are met, the flat-rate tax will probably work as long as the economy is on a path of steady growth.

many in sales fail because they fall flat on their face when attempting to conduct the initial face-to-face meeting.

The Walmart is having a sale on canned tuna this week, three cans for $2.49. The Walmart would like to remind you that the canned tuna is in Aisle 3, not in aisle 8, and it is perfectly safe there. Attention, Anomaly Flats: Do not go into aisle 8 in the Walmart. Do not go into the Walmart. Do not ever go into the Walmart.

great company is not a great investment if you pay too much for the stock. The more a stock has gone up, the more it seems likely to keep going up. But that instinctive belief is flatly contradicted by a fundamental law of financial physics: The bigger they get, the slower they grow. A $1-billion company can double its sales fairly easily; but where can a $50-billion company turn to find another $50 billion in business? Growth stocks are worth buying when their prices are reasonable, but when their price/earnings ratios go much above 25 or 30 the odds get ugly:

Like spacecraft that pick up speed as they rise into the Earth’s stratosphere, growth stocks often seem to defy gravity. Let’s look at the trajectories of three of the hottest growth stocks of the 1990s: General Electric, Home Depot, and Sun Microsystems. (See Figure 7-1.) In every year from 1995 through 1999, each grew bigger and more profitable. Revenues doubled at Sun and more than doubled at Home Depot. According to Value Line, GE’s revenues grew 29%; its earnings rose 65%. At Home Depot and Sun, earnings per share roughly tripled. But something else was happening—and it wouldn’t have surprised Graham one bit. The faster these companies grew, the more expensive their stocks became. And when stocks grow faster than companies, investors always end up sorry. As Figure 7-2 shows: A great company is not a great investment if you pay too much for the stock. The more a stock has gone up, the more it seems likely to keep going up. But that instinctive belief is flatly contradicted by a fundamental law of financial physics: The bigger they get, the slower they grow. A $1-billion company can double its sales fairly easily; but where can a $50-billion company turn to find another $50 billion in business? Growth stocks are worth buying when their prices are reasonable, but when their price/earnings ratios go much above 25 or 30 the odds get ugly: Journalist Carol Loomis found that, from 1960 through 1999, only eight of the largest 150 companies on the Fortune 500 list managed to raise their earnings by an annual average of at least 15% for two decades.

The first step is to visualize what the inside of your drawer will look like when you finish. The goal should be to organize the contents so that you can see where every item is at a glance, just as you can see the spines of the books on your bookshelves. The key is to store things standing up rather than laid flat. Some people mimic store displays, folding each piece of clothing into a large square and then arranging them one on top of the other in layers. This is great for temporary sales displays in stores, but not what we should be aiming for at home, where our relationship with these clothes is long term. To store clothes standing, they must be made compact, which means more folds. Some people believe that more folds means more wrinkles, but this is not the case. It is not the number of folds but rather the amount of pressure applied that causes wrinkling. Even lightly folded clothes will wrinkle if they are stored in a pile because the weight of the clothes acts like a press.

and looked up the phone number for Christie’s. When the number came up on her computer, she saw that their offices were at Rockefeller Center. Although by then it was nearly lunchtime, she called the number and asked for the jewelry department when they answered. The phone rang for a long time, and she was about to hang up, when a female voice finally picked up, and Jane asked to speak to someone about an appraisal to submit jewelry items for an upcoming sale, and they put her on hold, while she listened to an endless piece of music. It appeared that there was no one in the department, when a male voice said simply “Lawton” in a flat tone. Jane explained that she was calling from the surrogate’s court and needed an

Let me get it,” he says, standing much too close for my comfort. It’s downright suffocating. “Not a chance, darlin’,” I drawl, giving him a dose of his own medicine. I hand the youngish sales lady my tags and bury my gaze inside my purse in search of my wallet. When I look up, I find a loopy smile on her face and it’s directed at him. The happy bastard smiles right back. “Are you two done? Can I pay for these, or would you like to go on a date before you ring me up?” They both turn to stare. She’s cherry red and pushing all the wrong buttons on the register while Dane’s busy scowling at me. I hand her my credit card without taking my eyes off of him. “Did I do something to you, Stella?” The thing is, I’m not mad at him. I’m mad at myself. I cannot believe that I allowed myself to fall under his spell. I don’t blame the sales girl either. She never stood a chance under the magnetic force that is Dane Wylder. I fell for it and I’ve been vaccinated against this particular virulent disease. I have Paul Donovan to thank for that. Turning back to the sales person, I take the receipt she hands me. “I’m sorry,” I murmur. “Hormones––they’re wreaking havoc.” “Oh, I get the same way when I get my period,” she replies in the sweetest drawl. “Thanks for your help,” I tell her in an apologetic tone. With that I walk away from the counter, and the two of them. A second later a big hand grabs a hold of my upper arm. I stop and turn, my expression not a happy one. “You didn’t answer me?” “No, Dane. You did nothing. Like I said, it’s the hormones.” He looks pensive, his sexy lips pursed as he’s mulling this over. “We should get you some ice cream.” I don’t know whether to laugh, or cry. He genuinely thinks ice cream is the solution to our problem? Then again he doesn’t have a problem. I’m the one with the urge. I’m the one with the craving. Unless ice cream comes in a flavor called Sweaty Sex With Dane, I don’t want it…and about as smart as jumping out of a plane with no parachute. The ride will be fast and thrilling and most certainly prove painful when I hit bottom. “What does ice cream have to do with it?” “Maybe it’ll make you nicer. You know, take the edge off.” My eyes automatically narrow. “Maybe we need to give each other space.” “No,” he huffs, arms crossed in front of his broad chest, his shirt straining against the swell of his pecs, expression locked in the determined position. “No?” “No. No space. I see what you’re doing here. This is some kinda female mental jujitsu. You say you want space, but you don’t really want it.” I’m seconds from punching him in the nut sac, which is almost directly in my line of sight. There is something to be said about being short. Or for him being grotesquely tall. “I…I’m going to…I can’t.” I flee to the cosmetics department in search of the Holy Grail, a flat iron, before I do or say something I’ll regret. And find one. Thank the Lord. This goes a small way to propping up my mood. I’m almost tempted to purchase two.

Cisco isn’t just managing a dependable if relatively flat hardware business while it hunts for growth in software and services. It’s embracing subscriptions in a broad, systemic way in order to shift from selling boxes to selling outcomes. Its new cloud-based management services help mitigate the boom-and-bust effects of new product cycles. It doesn’t have to act like a retailer chasing after make-or-break holiday sales in order to make its annual number. Today almost a third of its revenue is recurring, which is resulting (as CFO Kelly Kramer is quite happy to point out) in a short-term hit to its GAAP revenue numbers. Again, standard revenue loss is a good thing. That’s a sign that you are carrying your book of business out into the future.

Here is the logic behind multiplication: 1.  Most people in organizations are underutilized. 2.  All capability can be leveraged with the right kind of leadership. 3.  Therefore, intelligence and capability can be multiplied without requiring a bigger investment. For example, when Apple Inc. needed to achieve rapid growth with flat resources in one division, they didn’t expand their sales force. Instead, they gathered the key players across the various job functions, took a week to study the problem, and collaboratively developed a solution. They changed the sales model to utilize competency centers and better leverage their best salespeople and deep industry experts in the sales cycle. They achieved year-over-year growth in the double digits with virtually flat resources.