Integrated Marketing Quotes

Incorporate market research as an integral part of your business, and you’ll not just become competitive, but also profitable.

So long as the Constitution is not amended beyond recognition, so long as elections are held regularly and fairly and the ethos of secularism broadly prevails, so long as citizens can speak and write in the language of their choosing, so long as there is an integrated market and a moderately efficient civil service and army, and — lest I forget — so long as Hindi films are watched and their songs sung, India will survive

A blog is only as interesting as the interest shown in others.

Content Isn't King, It's the Kingdom.

The laboring man has not leisure for a true integrity day by day; he cannot afford to sustain the manliest relations to men; his labor would be depreciated in the market. He has no time to be anything but a machine.

Social media is your opportunity to reach a massive number of people with transparency, honesty, and integrity.

Most books on publishing deal with publishing by itself. Most books on marketing deal with marketing as a stand-alone project. I think this is the wrong approach. Self-publishing and book marketing have to be considered as an integrated project. That is what this book does; it treats publishing and marketing together as a unified project.

By integrating ESG principles into the core business strategy, companies can foster innovation and build resilient supply chains that withstand market volatility.

We have left behind the rosy agrarian rhetoric and slaveholding reality of Jeffersonian democracy and reside in the bustling world of trade, industry, stock markets, and banks that Hamilton envisioned. (Hamilton’s staunch abolitionism formed an integral feature of this economic vision.) He has also emerged as the uncontested visionary in anticipating the shape and powers of the federal government. At a time when Jefferson and Madison celebrated legislative power as the purest expression of the popular will, Hamilton argued for a dynamic executive branch and an independent judiciary, along with a professional military, a central bank, and an advanced financial system. Today, we are indisputably the heirs to Hamilton’s America, and to repudiate his legacy is, in many ways, to repudiate the modern world.

Actually, the laboring man has not leisure for a true integrity day by day; he cannot afford to sustain the manliest relations to men; his labor would be depreciated in the market. He has no time to be anything but a machine.

The skills of building, fixing, cooking, planting, preserving, and composting not only undergird the indepen-dence and integrity of the home but develop practices and skills that are the basic sources of culture and a shared civic life. They teach each generation the demands, gifts, and limits of nature; human participation in and celebration of natural rhythms and patterns; and independence from the culture-destroying ignorance and laziness induced by the ersatz freedom of the modern market.

First, with the establishment of a state and territorially defined state borders, “immigration” takes on an entirely new meaning. In a natural order, immigration is a person’s migration from one neighborhood-community into a different one (micro-migration). In contrast, under statist conditions immigration is immigration by “foreigners” from across state borders, and the decision whom to exclude or include, and under what conditions, rests not with a multitude of independent private property owners or neighborhoods of owners but with a single central (and centralizing) state-government as the ultimate sovereign of all domestic residents and their properties (macro-migration). If a domestic resident-owner invites a person and arranges for his access onto the resident-owner’s property but the government excludes this person from the state territory, it is a case of forced exclusion (a phenomenon that does not exist in a natural order). On the other hand, if the government admits a person while there is no domestic resident-owner who has invited this person onto his property, it is a case of forced integration (also nonexistent in a natural order, where all movement is invited).

Deep and liquid markets in a country’s domestic economy are the essential shock absorbers through which the perilous waters of international financial integration can be navigated.

You need a healthy, thriving self-employed ecosystem. An ecosystem that integrates the three main elements of self-employed success--personal development, business strategies, and daily habit.

Every technology has to pass the system integration test before it can achieve widespread market success. Pre existing systems must be either penetrated, replaced, or changed to allow for the new technology to achieve widespread market success.

Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them. Their fingers, from excessive toil, are too clumsy and tremble too much for that. Actually, the laboring man has not leisure for a true integrity day by day; he cannot afford to sustain the manliest relations to men; his honor would be depreciated in the market. He has no time to be anything but a machine.

Jiminy," says the old woman. The mothballs gleam with excitement and she claps her hands. "A wolf!" "Gram!" Siobhan glares across the room. She turns to me. "You'll have to excuse her. She's real old. Wasn't a lot integrating between the species back in her day." I pad over and put out a paw. "Pleased to meet you, madam." She blushes, the varicose veins in her cheeks swelling with blood. Instead of taking my paw to shake, however, she turns it over as if it's a piece of bruised fruit in a market. "Hmmm..." She pores over my palm, nodding like a fortune-teller. Her spectacles slide comically down the bridge of her nose, and when she looks up at me, her face is full of mock astonishment. "Oh, my! What big teeth you have!" She giggles and kicks her slippered feet. "Gram!! The old elf claps her tiny hands. "I always wanted to say that!

Principles of Liberty 1. The only reliable basis for sound government and just human relations is Natural Law. 2. A free people cannot survive under a republican constitution unless they remain virtuous and morally strong. 3. The most promising method of securing a virtuous and morally strong people is to elect virtuous leaders. 4. Without religion the government of a free people cannot be maintained. 5. All things were created by God, therefore upon him all mankind are equally dependent, and to Him they are equally responsible. 6. All men are created equal. 7. The proper role of government is to protect equal rights, not provide equal things. 8. Men are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. 9. To protect man's rights, God has revealed certain principles of divine law. 10. The God-given right to govern is vested in the sovereign authority of the whole people. 11. The majority of the people may alter or abolish a government which has become tyrannical. 12. The United States of America shall be a republic. 13. A constitution should be structured to permanently protect the people from the human frailties of their rulers. 14. Life and Liberty are secure only so long as the Igor of property is secure. 15. The highest level of securitiy occurs when there is a free market economy and a minimum of government regulations. 16. The government should be separated into three branches: legislative, executive, and judicial. 17. A system of checks and balances should be adopted to prevent the abuse of power. 18. The unalienable rights of the people are most likely to be preserved if the principles of government are set forth in a written constitution. 19. Only limited and carefully defined powers should be delegated to the government, all others being retained by the people. 20. Efficiency and dispatch require government to operate according to the will of the majority, but constitutional provisions must be made to protect the rights of the minority. 21. Strong human government is the keystone to preserving human freedom. 22. A free people should be governed by law and not by the whims of men. 23. A free society cannot survive a republic without a broad program of general education. 24. A free people will not survive unless they stay strong. 25. "Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations; entangling alliances with none." 26. The core unit which determines the strength of any society is the family; therefore, the government should foster and protect its integrity. 27. The burden of debt is as destructive to freedom as subjugation by conquest. 28. The United States has a manifest destiny to be an example and a blessing to the entire human race.

Government as we now know it in the USA and other economically advanced countries is so manifestly horrifying, so corrupt, counterproductive, and outright vicious, that one might well wonder how it continues to enjoy so much popular legitimacy and to be perceived so widely as not only tolerable but indispensable. The answer, in overwhelming part, may be reduced to a two-part formula: bribes and bamboozlement (classically "bread and circuses"). Under the former rubric falls the vast array of government "benefits" and goodies of all sorts, from corporate subsidies and privileges to professional grants and contracts to welfare payments and health care for low-income people and other members of the lumpenproletariat. Under the latter rubric fall such measures as the government schools, the government's lapdog news media, and the government's collaboration with the producers of professional sporting events and Hollywood films. Seen as a semi-integrated whole, these measures give current governments a strong hold on the public's allegiance and instill in the masses and the elites alike a deep fear of anything that seriously threatens the status quo.

Without an integrated formal property system, a modern market economy is inconceivable. Had the advanced nations of the West not integrated all representations into one standardized property system and made it accessible to all, they could not have specialized and divided labor to create the expanded market network and capital that have produced their present wealth. The inefficiencies of non-Western markets have a lot to do with the fragmentation of their property arrangements and the unavailability of standard representations.

The hype cheapens the hyped, as right things are then made wrong by exaggeration.

Your customers are the most integral part of your business, and they come before products or profit. Treat them like they are the center of your world — because they are.

We've been very clear all along on where we draw the line," Jim Ward, Lucasfilm's vice president of marketing, told The New York Times. "We love our fans. We want them to have fun. But if in fact somebody is using our characters to create a story unto itself, that's not in the spirit of what we think fandom is about. Fandom is about celebrating the story the way it is.

Openness and transparency is a great first step, but it is equally as important to take the results of that openness--the feedback and market research--and integrate it into the product itself.

We need to understand how the dynamics of innovation, technological advances, urbanization, financial markets, social networks, and population dynamics are interconnected and how their evolving interrelationships fuel growth and societal change—and, as manifestations of human endeavors, how they are all integrated into a holistic interacting systemic framework . . . and whether such a dynamically evolving system is ultimately sustainable.

Design thinking can be described as a discipline that uses the designer’s sensibility and methods to match people’s needs with what is technologically feasible and what a viable business strategy can convert into customer value and market opportunity.

What's better- supply side economics a la John Keynes, or libertarian free markets a la Milton Friedman? Safety nets or bootstraps to build a just society? Big sticks or carrots to preserve international order? Federal or states' rights to guide the governed? Investing in education or employment to empower a citizenry? Seperation or integration of church and state? Multicultural melting pot or national identity? Revolution or evolution? The only honest answer is "it depends." and we're not entirely sure.

The Indian countryside has transformed into this wasteland of near-terminal despair and increasingly impossible survival, by new technologies, forced integration with globalized markets, and an uncaring state. For a sector which employs half the population, contributes a sixth of the GDP, the state allocates as little as a twentieth of total public investment. It is no wonder, then, that tens of thousands of farmers each year poison or hang themselves; and millions of the young flee, when they can, to wherever they can, while they still can. Unequal

Industrial innovations are costly, and managers must justify their high cost by producing measurable proof of their superiority... [P]eriodic innovations in goods or tools foster the belief that anything new will be proven better. This belief has become an integral part of the modern world view. It is forgotten that whenever a society lives by this delusion, each marketed unit generates more wants than it satisfies. If new things are made because they are better, then the things most people use are not quite good. New models constantly renovate poverty. The consumer feels the lag between what he has and what he ought to get. He believes that products can be made measurably more valuable and allows himself to be constantly re-educated for their consumption. The "better" replaces the "good" as the fundamental normative concept.

In order to lead a successful marketing and communications campaign, you must support key customer relations initiatives, integrate creative methods of branding, oversee execution of effective publicity, and focus on media pitching that will support PR and Social Media strategies.

We have left behind the rosy agrarian rhetoric and slaveholding reality of Jeffersonian democracy and reside in the bustling world of trade, industry, stock markets, and banks that Hamilton envisioned. (Hamilton’s staunch abolitionism formed an integral feature of this economic vision.)

Americans and Europeans were guided through the new century by a tale about “the end of history,” by what I will call the politics of inevitability, a sense that the future is just more of the present, that the laws of progress are known, that there are no alternatives, and therefore nothing really to be done. In the American capitalist version of this story, nature brought the market, which brought democracy, which brought happiness. In the European version, history brought the nation, which learned from war that peace was good, and hence chose integration and prosperity.

Let’s be honest, a traditional marketer would not even be close to imagining the integration above—there’s too many technical details needed for it to happen. As a result, it could only have come out of the mind of an engineer tasked with the problem of acquiring more users from Craigslist.13

There’s only one way America’s neighborhoods will begin to integrate: people have to want it more than vested public and corporate interests are opposed to it. And more people should want it. Mixed-race, mixed-income housing is a product we need to market. It’s the only real solution to segregated schools, for one.

Research by Graham Bodie, a professor of integrated marketing communication at the University of Mississippi, shows that people are more likely to feel understood if a listener responds not by nodding, parroting, or paraphrasing but by giving descriptive and evaluative information. Contrary to the idea that effective listening is some sort of passive exercise, Bodie's work reveals it requires interpretation and interplay. Your dog can "listen" to you. Siri or Alexa can "listen" to you. But ultimately, talking to your dog, Siri, or Alexa will prove unsatisfying because they won't respond in a thoughtful, feeling way, which is the measure of a good listener.

You dreamed like all mothers do. Until he began to speak aloud, Your boy, calling for justice in the market place, Demanding integrity and fair play in the courts and halls of business. Declaring the Realm of God Imminent, Manifest . . . Jesus leapt into the swelling crowds like an axe into wood, Uncompromising and unrelenting in his passionate call for peace and justice. Jesus, your boy, causing havoc in public, critiquing and condemning the status quo, breaking rule after rule . . . And with every speech, with every act of defiance, with every call to liberation, with every amazing deed, Your dreams of peace and liberation, Your dreams of a secure old age, Your dreams of grandchildren— Evaporated.

Still allergic to PowerPoints and formal presentations, he insisted that the people around the table hash out issues from various vantages and the perspectives of different departments. Because he believed that Apple's great advantage was its integration of the whole widget- from design to hardware to software to content-he wanted all departments at the company to work together in parallel. The phrases he used were "deep collaboration" and "concurrent engineering." Instead of a development process in which a product would be passed sequentially from engineering to design to manufacturing to marketing and distribution, these various departments collaborated simultaneously. " Our method was to develop integrated products, and that meant our process had to be integrated and collaborative," Jobs said. This approach also applied to key hires. He would have candidates meet the top leaders-Cook, Tevanian, Schiller, Rubinstein, Ive- rather than just the managers of the department where they wanted to work. " Then we all get together without the person and talk about whether they'll fit in," Jobs said.

This is free-market fanaticism, the fanaticism of indifference to its own values and, for that very reason, total intolerance towards those who differ by any passion whatsoever. The New World Order implies the extermination of everything different to integrate it into an indifferent world order. Is there still room between these two fanaticisms for a non-believer to exercise his liberty?

hear companies talk about consumers being bombarded with thousands and thousands of advertising messages every day, because there’s usually a lot of discussion among companies and ad agencies talking about how to get their message to stand out. There’s a lot of buzz these days about “social media” and “integration marketing.” As unsexy and low-tech as it may sound, our belief is that the telephone is one of the best branding devices out there. You have the customer’s undivided attention for five to ten minutes, and if you get the interaction right, what we’ve found is that the customer remembers the experience for a very long time and tells his or her friends about it. Too many companies think of their call centers as an expense to minimize. We believe that it’s a huge untapped opportunity for most companies, not only because it can result in word-of-mouth marketing, but because of its

the fact is, our relationships to these corporations are not unambiguous. some memebers of negativland genuinely liked pepsi products. mca grew up loving star wars and didn't mind having his work sent all over the united states to all the "cool, underground magazines" they were marketing to--why would he? sam gould had a spiritual moment in the shower listening to a cd created, according to sophie wong, so that he would talk about tylenol with his independent artist friends--and he did. many of my friends' daughters will be getting american girl dolls and books as gifts well into the foreseeable future. some skateboarders in washington, dc, were asked to create an ad campaign for the east coast summer tour, and they all love minor threat--why not use its famous album cover? how about shilling for converse? i would have been happy to ten years ago. so what's really changed? the answer is that two important things have changed: who is ultimately accountable for veiled corporate campaigns that occasionally strive to obsfucate their sponsorship and who is requesting our participation in such campaigns. behind converse and nike sb is nike, a company that uses shit-poor labor policies and predatory marketing that effectively glosses over their shit-poor labor policies, even to an audience that used to know better. behind team ouch! was an underground-savvy brainreservist on the payroll of big pharma; behind the recent wave of street art in hip urban areas near you was omd worldwide on behalf of sony; behind your cool hand-stenciled vader shirt was lucasfilm; and behind a recent cool crafting event was toyota. no matter how you participated in these events, whether as a contributor, cultural producer, viewer, or even critic, these are the companies that profited from your attention.

NLP subliminals have long since been used in advertising and marketing, and yet people are still ignorant about it because the government keeps the information suppressed since it is an integral part of their arsenal for marketing their own agenda to a socially engineered population. Attorneys who are aware of it use it to manipulate the minds of the jury, and even the mind of the judge if he doesn’t have the knowledge to defend himself against it.

By contrast, the early majority want to buy a productivity improvement for existing operations. They are looking to minimize the discontinuity with the old ways. They want evolution, not revolution. They want technology to enhance, not overthrow, the established ways of doing business. And above all, they do not want to debug somebody else’s product. By the time they adopt it, they want it to work properly and to integrate appropriately with their existing technology base.

Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them. Their fingers, from excessive toil, are too clumsy and tremble too much for that. Actually, the laboring man has not leisure for a true integrity day by day; he cannot afford to sustain the manliest relations to men; his labor would be depreciated in the market.

It has become increasingly clear that the way we farm affects the local community, and that the economy of the local community affects the way we farm; that the way we farm affects the health and integrity of the local ecosystem, and that the farm is intricately dependent, even economically, upon the health of the local ecosystem. We can no longer pretend that agriculture is a sort of economic machine with interchangeable parts, the same everywhere, determined by “market forces” and independent of everything else.

Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them. Their fingers, from excessive toil, are too clumsy and tremble too much for that. Actually, the laboring man has not leisure for a true integrity day by day; he cannot afford to sustain the manliest relations to men; his labor would be depreciated in the market. He has no time to be anything but a machine.

Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them. Their fingers, from excessive toil, are too clumsy and tremble too much for that. Actually, the laboring man has not leisure for a true integrity day by day; he cannot afford to sustain the manliest relations to men; his labor would be depreciated in the market. He has no time to be any thing but a machine.

Love in an act of proximity. The lover refuses to remain at a safe distance and bombards the subject with its mode of satisfaction, a mode of satisfaction around which the subject must try to orient itself. This satisfaction is what we almost always recoil from, but in the act of love we embrace it. This is why lovers can accompany each other in the most private moments: they can tell each other their most revelatory dreams or allow the other into the bathroom with them. What would alienate or even repulse everyone else becomes integral to the love relation.

After World War II, the United States, triumphant abroad and undamaged at home, saw a door wide open for world supremacy. Only the thing called ‘communism’ stood in the way, politically, militarily, economically, and ideologically. Thus it was that the entire US foreign policy establishment was mobilized to confront this ‘enemy’, and the Marshall Plan was an integral part of this campaign. How could it be otherwise? Anti-communism had been the principal pillar of US foreign policy from the Russian Revolution up to World War II, pausing for the war until the closing months of the Pacific campaign when Washington put challenging communism ahead of fighting the Japanese. Even the dropping of the atom bomb on Japan – when the Japanese had already been defeated – can be seen as more a warning to the Soviets than a military action against the Japanese.19 After the war, anti-communism continued as the leitmotif of American foreign policy as naturally as if World War II and the alliance with the Soviet Union had not happened. Along with the CIA, the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, the Council on Foreign Relations, certain corporations, and a few other private institutions, the Marshall Plan was one more arrow in the quiver of those striving to remake Europe to suit Washington’s desires: 1.    Spreading the capitalist gospel – to counter strong postwar tendencies toward socialism. 2.    Opening markets to provide new customers for US corporations – a major reason for helping to rebuild the European economies; e.g. a billion dollars (at twenty-first-century prices) of tobacco, spurred by US tobacco interests. 3.    Pushing for the creation of the Common Market (the future European Union) and NATO as integral parts of the West European bulwark against the alleged Soviet threat. 4.    Suppressing the left all over Western Europe, most notably sabotaging the Communist parties in France and Italy in their bids for legal, non-violent, electoral victory. Marshall Plan funds were secretly siphoned off to finance this endeavor, and the promise of aid to a country, or the threat of its cutoff, was used as a bullying club; indeed, France and Italy would certainly have been exempted from receiving aid if they had not gone along with the plots to exclude the Communists from any kind of influential role.

Looking at the works of art that are considered worthy of preservation in our Museums, and that were once the common objects of the market place, I could not but realise that a society can only be considered truly civilised when it is possible for every man to earn his living by the very work he would rather be doing than anything else in the world, a condition that has only been attained in social orders integrated on the basis of vocation, "svadharma". At the same time I should like to emphasis that I have never built up a philosophy of my own or wished to establish a new school of thought. Perhaps the greatest thing I have learnt is never to think for myself; I fully agree with Andre Gide that "Toutes choses sont dites deja", and what I have sought is to understand what has been said, while taking no account of the "inferior philosophers". Holding with Heraclitus that the Word is common to all, and that Wisdom is to know the Will whereby all things are steered, I am convinced with Jeremias that the human cultures in all their apparent diversity are but the dialects of one and the same language of the spirit, that there is a "common universe of discourse" transcending the differences of tongues".

The flat tire that threw Julio into a temporary panic and the divorce that almost killed Jim don’t act directly as physical causes producing a physical effect—as, for instance, one billiard ball hitting another and making it carom in a predictable direction. The outside event appears in consciousness purely as information, without necessarily having a positive or negative value attached to it. It is the self that interprets that raw information in the context of its own interests, and determines whether it is harmful or not. For instance, if Julio had had more money or some credit, his problem would have been perfectly innocuous. If in the past he had invested more psychic energy in making friends on the job, the flat tire would not have created panic, because he could have always asked one of his co-workers to give him a ride for a few days. And if he had had a stronger sense of self-confidence, the temporary setback would not have affected him as much because he would have trusted his ability to overcome it eventually. Similarly, if Jim had been more independent, the divorce would not have affected him as deeply. But at his age his goals must have still been bound up too closely with those of his mother and father, so that the split between them also split his sense of self. Had he had closer friends or a longer record of goals successfully achieved, his self would have had the strength to maintain its integrity. He was lucky that after the breakdown his parents realized the predicament and sought help for themselves and their son, reestablishing a stable enough relationship with Jim to allow him to go on with the task of building a sturdy self. Every piece of information we process gets evaluated for its bearing on the self. Does it threaten our goals, does it support them, or is it neutral? News of the fall of the stock market will upset the banker, but it might reinforce the sense of self of the political activist. A new piece of information will either create disorder in consciousness, by getting us all worked up to face the threat, or it will reinforce our goals, thereby freeing up psychic energy.

The retreat of the state from the function on which its claims to legitimation were founded for the better part of the past century throws the issue of legitimation wide open again. A new citizenship consensus (‘constitutional patriotism’, to deploy Jürgen Habermas’s term) cannot be presently built in the way it used to be built not so long ago: through the assurance of constitutional protection against the vagaries of the market, notorious for playing havoc with social standings and for sapping rights to social esteem and personal dignity. The integrity of the political body in its currently most common form of a nation-state is in trouble, and so an alternative legitimation is urgently needed and sought. In

Wild animals enjoying one another and taking pleasure in their world is so immediate and so real, yet this reality is utterly absent from textbooks and academic papers about animals and ecology. There is a truth revealed here, absurd in its simplicity. This insight is not that science is wrong or bad. On the contrary: science, done well, deepens our intimacy with the world. But there is a danger in an exclusively scientific way of thinking. The forest is turned into a diagram; animals become mere mechanisms; nature's workings become clever graphs. Today's conviviality of squirrels seems a refutation of such narrowness. Nature is not a machine. These animals feel. They are alive; they are our cousins, with the shared experience kinship implies. And they appear to enjoy the sun, a phenomenon that occurs nowhere in the curriculum of modern biology. Sadly, modern science is too often unable or unwilling to visualize or feel what others experience. Certainly science's "objective" gambit can be helpful in understanding parts of nature and in freeing us from some cultural preconceptions. Our modern scientific taste for dispassion when analyzing animal behaviour formed in reaction to the Victorian naturalists and their predecessors who saw all nature as an allegory confirming their cultural values. But a gambit is just an opening move, not a coherent vision of the whole game. Science's objectivity sheds some assumptions but takes on others that, dressed up in academic rigor, can produce hubris and callousness about the world. The danger comes when we confuse the limited scope of our scientific methods with the true scope of the world. It may be useful or expedient to describe nature as a flow diagram or an animal as a machine, but such utility should not be confused with a confirmation that our limited assumptions reflect the shape of the world. Not coincidentally, the hubris of narrowly applied science serves the needs of the industrial economy. Machines are bought, sold, and discarded; joyful cousins are not. Two days ago, on Christmas Eve, the U.S. Forest Service opened to commercial logging three hundred thousand acres of old growth in the Tongass National Forest, more than a billion square-meter mandalas. Arrows moved on a flowchart, graphs of quantified timber shifted. Modern forest science integrated seamlessly with global commodity markets—language and values needed no translation. Scientific models and metaphors of machines are helpful but limited. They cannot tell us all that we need to know. What lies beyond the theories we impose on nature? This year I have tried to put down scientific tools and to listen: to come to nature without a hypothesis, without a scheme for data extraction, without a lesson plan to convey answers to students, without machines or probes. I have glimpsed how rich science is but simultaneously how limited in scope and in spirit. It is unfortunate that the practice of listening generally has no place in the formal training of scientists. In this absence science needlessly fails. We are poorer for this, and possibly more hurtful. What Christmas Eve gifts might a listening culture give its forests? What was the insight that brushed past me as the squirrels basked? It was not to turn away from science. My experience of animals is richer for knowing their stories, and science is a powerful way to deepen this understanding. Rather, I realized that all stories are partly wrapped in fiction—the fiction of simplifying assumptions, of cultural myopia and of storytellers' pride. I learned to revel in the stories but not to mistake them for the bright, ineffable nature of the world.

I remain fundamentally optimistic about Wall Street as a marketplace and as a vehicle for wealth creation. Its future will rightly depend on several variables, chief among them being human choices; whether they be rationally, emotionally, subjectively or objectively made. Financial engineering taught us that if it could be quantified, it could be qualified. We learned about how to use leverage and have abused that knowledge for a myriad of reasons. We became practitioners of the transaction-based model, but forgot that long before the abacus there was trust and integrity, anchors of relationship-based models common with Middle East and Asian markets. It goes back to a handshake, the first and enduring example of mutual consensus.

The chain booksellers, like Barnes and Noble, began to dominate the market, and they instituted a “gay and lesbian” section in many of their branch stores. This section was never positioned at the front of the store with the bestsellers. It was usually on the fourth floor hidden behind the potted plants. What this meant in practical terms was that those of us who had the integrity to be out in our work found our books literarily yanked off of the “Fiction” shelves and hidden on the gay shelves, where only “gay” people wanting “gay” books would dare to tread. It was an instant undoing of all the progress we had made to be treated as full citizens and a natural, organic part of American intellectual life. …I felt very strongly, and still do, that authentic lesbian literature should be represented at all levels of publishing, including taking its rightful place as a natural organic part of mainstream American intellectual life. The corporate lockdown went into overdrive just at the moment that this integration was beginning to take place. This positioning is essential for so many reasons, least of which is the right of writers of merit to not be excluded from financial, emotional, and intellectual development simply because they have the integrity to be out in their work. Second is the right of gay people to be in dialogic relationships with straights - where they read and identify with our work as we are asked to with theirs. And finally, that even at the height of the strength of the lesbian subculture, most gay people find out about gay things through the mainstream media.

people in hunter-gatherer communities shared about 25 percent, while people in societies who regularly engage in trade gave away about 45 percent. Although religion was a modest factor in making people more generous, the strongest predictor was “market integration,” defined as “the percentage of a household’s total calories that were purchased from the market, as opposed to homegrown, hunted, or fished.” Why? Because, the authors conclude, trust and cooperation with strangers lowers transaction costs and generates greater prosperity for all involved, and thus market fairness norms “evolved as part of an overall process of societal evolution to sustain mutually beneficial exchanges in contexts where established social relationships (for example, kin, reciprocity, and status) were insufficient.”57

If government had declined to build racially separate public housing in cities where segregation hadn’t previously taken root, and instead had scattered integrated developments throughout the community, those cities might have developed in a less racially toxic fashion, with fewer desperate ghettos and more diverse suburbs. If the federal government had not urged suburbs to adopt exclusionary zoning laws, white flight would have been minimized because there would have been fewer racially exclusive suburbs to which frightened homeowners could flee. If the government had told developers that they could have FHA guarantees only if the homes they built were open to all, integrated working-class suburbs would likely have matured with both African Americans and whites sharing the benefits. If state courts had not blessed private discrimination by ordering the eviction of African American homeowners in neighborhoods where association rules and restrictive covenants barred their residence, middle-class African Americans would have been able gradually to integrate previously white communities as they developed the financial means to do so. If churches, universities, and hospitals had faced loss of tax-exempt status for their promotion of restrictive covenants, they most likely would have refrained from such activity. If police had arrested, rather than encouraged, leaders of mob violence when African Americans moved into previously white neighborhoods, racial transitions would have been smoother. If state real estate commissions had denied licenses to brokers who claimed an “ethical” obligation to impose segregation, those brokers might have guided the evolution of interracial neighborhoods. If school boards had not placed schools and drawn attendance boundaries to ensure the separation of black and white pupils, families might not have had to relocate to have access to education for their children. If federal and state highway planners had not used urban interstates to demolish African American neighborhoods and force their residents deeper into urban ghettos, black impoverishment would have lessened, and some displaced families might have accumulated the resources to improve their housing and its location. If government had given African Americans the same labor-market rights that other citizens enjoyed, African American working-class families would not have been trapped in lower-income minority communities, from lack of funds to live elsewhere. If the federal government had not exploited the racial boundaries it had created in metropolitan areas, by spending billions on tax breaks for single-family suburban homeowners, while failing to spend adequate funds on transportation networks that could bring African Americans to job opportunities, the inequality on which segregation feeds would have diminished. If federal programs were not, even to this day, reinforcing racial isolation by disproportionately directing low-income African Americans who receive housing assistance into the segregated neighborhoods that government had previously established, we might see many more inclusive communities. Undoing the effects of de jure segregation will be incomparably difficult. To make a start, we will first have to contemplate what we have collectively done and, on behalf of our government, accept responsibility.

Most observers had overlooked the radical change in the relationship between the USSR and the world that took place in the 1960s and 1970s. At that time, the Soviet economy, formally still closed, had in fact become deeply integrated into the system of international trade and dependent on world markets (see table 4-19). This change, as a rule, was noticed only by researchers concerned with grain and oil markets. The majority of analysts studying the socialist system considered its foundation to be solid.99 Some publications spoke of risk factors that could undermine the stability of the Soviet regime. But they were exceptions, and their influence on the future image of the USSR was limited.100 In 1985 almost no one imagined that six years later there would be no Soviet Union, no ruling Communist Party, no Soviet economic system.

Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them. Their fingers, from excessive toil, are too clumsy and tremble too much for that. Actually, the laboring man has not leisure for a true integrity day by day; he cannot afford to sustain the manliest relations to men; his labor would be depreciated in the market. He has no time to be anything but a machine. How can he remember well his ignorance — which his growth requires — who has so often to use his knowledge? We should feed and clothe him gratuitously sometimes, and recruit him with our cordials, before we judge of him. The finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be preserved only by the most delicate handling. Yet we do not treat ourselves nor one another thus tenderly.

The EEC was grounded in weakness, not strength. As Spaak’s 1956 report emphasized, ‘Europe, which once had the monopoly of manufacturing industries and obtained important resources from its overseas possessions, today sees its external position weakened, its influence declining and its capacity to progress lost in its divisions.’ It was precisely because the British did not—yet—understand their situation in this light that they declined to join the EEC. The idea that the European Common Market was part of some calculated strategy to challenge the growing power of the United States—a notion that would acquire a certain currency in Washington policy circles in later decades—is thus quite absurd: the new-formed EEC depended utterly upon the American security guarantee, without which its members would never have been able to afford to indulge in economic integration to the exclusion of all concern with common defense.

Too many land users and too many conservationists seem to have accepted the doctrine that the availability of goods is determined by the availability of cash, or credit, and by the market. In other words, they have accepted the idea always implicit in the arguments of the land-exploiting corporations: that there can be, and that there is, a safe disconnection between economy and ecology, between human domesticity and the wild world. Industrializing farmers have too readily assumed that the nature of their land could safely be subordinated to the capability of their technology, and that conservation could safely be left to conservationists. Conservationists have too readily assumed that the integrity of the natural world could be preserved mainly by preserving tracts of wilderness, and that the nature and nurture of the economic landscapes could safely be left to agribusiness, the timber industry, debt-ridden farmers and ranchers, and migrant laborers. To

It is challenging to honor the descent in a culture that primary values the ascent. We like things rising—stock markets, the GDP, profit margins. We get anxious when things go down. Even within psychology, there is a premise that is biased toward improvement, always getting better, rising above our troubles. We hold dear concepts like progress and integration. These are fine in and of themselves, but it is not the way psyche works. Psyche, we must remember, was shaped by and is rooted in the foundations of nature. As such, psyche also experiences times of decay and death, of stopping, regression, and being still. Much happens in these times that deepen the soul. When all we are shown is the imagery of ascent, we are left to interpret the times of descent as pathological; we feel that we are somehow failing. As poet and author Robert Bly wryly noted, “How can we get a look at the cinders side of things when the society is determined to create a world of shopping malls and entertainment complexes in which we are made to believe that there is no death, disfigurement, illness, insanity, lethargy, or misery? Disneyland means ‘no ashes.’ 

QUESTLOVE: How do you get that back? Does being downtrodden make us spiritual again? WEST: I don't think it's just a matter of the material conditions; it's a matter of the choices that we make. Our ancestors could have chosen forms of spiritual suicide and spiritual blackout, but they decided not to, even in the midst of slavery, even in the midst of Jim Crow. Great-great grandma could have chosen to commit suicide. But she said no, her kids said no. The love said no. "I choose to be on the love train, even under slave-like conditions." That's a choice we make. All we have had as a people, historically—amid the levels of hatred, the social death of slavery, the civic death of Jim Crow, the psychological death of hating one's self, the spiritual death of giving up and selling out and caving in—all we have is a subversive memory, personal integrity, and courageous witness in the fight for justice. That's all we've got. You do away with the memory, and people can't hear the voice of a Glenn Jones or, my favorite, Gerald Levert. With no memory, you get very little artistic integrity, just a matter of stimulating people for the market, and then no creative witness.

What was the Sherlock Holmes principle? ‘Once you have discounted the impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.’” “I reject that entirely,” said Dirk, sharply. “The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it which the merely improbable lacks. How often have you been presented with an apparently rational explanation of something which works in all respects other than one, which is just that it is hopelessly improbable? Your instinct is to say, ‘Yes, but he or she simply wouldn’t do that.’” “Well, it happened to me today, in fact,” replied Kate. “Ah yes,” said Dirk, slapping the table and making the glasses jump, “your girl in the wheelchair – a perfect example. The idea that she is somehow receiving yesterday’s stock market prices apparently out of thin air is merely impossible, and therefore must be the case, because the idea that she is maintaining an immensely complex and laborious hoax of no benefit to herself is hopelessly improbable. The first idea merely supposes that there is something we don’t know about, and God knows there are enough of those. The second, however, runs contrary to something fundamental and human which we do know about. We should therefore be very suspicious of it and all its specious rationality.

International economic integration generally expands economic opportunities and is good for society. The great alternatives to economic integration failed. Attempts to seal countries off from the rest of the world economy in the 1930s were ultimately disastrous. Germany, Italy, and Japan closed their economies and also turned toward dictatorship, war, and conquest. The poor countries and former colonies that created closed economies in the 1930s and 1940s collapsed into economic stagnation, social unrest, crisis, and military dictatorships in the 1970s and 1980s. Few countries have achieved economic progress without access to the international economy. But an insistence on globalization at all cost is equally misguided. During the golden age of global capitalism before 1914, governments committed themselves to international economic integration and little else. Supporters of free trade, the gold standard, and international finance wanted governments to limit themselves to safeguarding these policies and their properties. But these governments ignored the concerns of many harmed by globalization. As the working and middle classes grew, so did their demands for social reforms to improve the lot of the unemployed, the poor, children, and the elderly. The clash between classical orthodoxy and these new social movements turned into bitter, often violent, conflicts, especially once the Depression hit. Attempts to maintain global capitalism without addressing those ill treated by world markets drove societies toward polarization and conflict.

If we consider this official or elite multiculturalism as an ideological state apparatus we can see it as a device for constructing and ascribing political subjectivities and agencies for those who are seen as legitimate and full citizens and others who are peripheral to this in many senses. There is in this process an element of racialized ethnicization, which whitens North Americans of European origins and blackens or darkens their 'others' by the same stroke. This is integral to Canadian class and cultural formation and distribution of political entitlement. The old and established colonial/racist discourses of tradition and modernity, civilization and savagery, are the conceptual devices of the construction and ascription of these racialized ethnicities. It is through these 'conceptual practices of power' (Smith, 1990) that South Asians living in Canada, for example, can be reified as hindu or muslim, in short as religious identities.....We need to repeat that there is nothing natural or primordial about cultural identities - religious or otherwise - and their projection as political agencies. In this multiculturalism serves as a collection of cultural categories for ruling or administering, claiming their representational status as direct emanations of social ontologies. This allows multiculturalism to serve as an ideology, both in the sense of a body of content, claiming that 'we' or 'they' are this or that kind of cultural identities, as well as an epistemological device for occluding the organization of the social....an interpellating device which segments the nation's cultural and political space as well as its labour market into ethnic communities....Defined thus, third world or non-white peoples living in Canada become organized into competitive entities with respect to each other. They are perceived to have no commonality, except that they are seen as, or self-appellate as, being essentially religious, traditional or pre-modern, and thus civilizationally backward. This type of conceptualization of political and social subjectivity or agency allows for no cross-border affiliation or formation, as for example does the concept of class.

the politics of inevitability, a sense that the future is just more of the present, that the laws of progress are known, that there are no alternatives, and therefore nothing really to be done. In the American capitalist version of this story, nature brought the market, which brought democracy, which brought happiness. In the European version, history brought the nation, which learned from war that peace was good, and hence chose integration and prosperity. Before the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, communism had its own politics of inevitability: nature permits technology; technology brings social change; social change causes revolution; revolution enacts utopia. When this turned out not to be true, the European and American politicians of inevitability were triumphant. Europeans busied themselves completing the creation of the European Union in 1992. Americans reasoned that the failure of the communist story confirmed the truth of the capitalist one. Americans and Europeans kept telling themselves their tales of inevitability for a quarter century after the end of communism, and so raised a millennial generation without history. The American politics of inevitability, like all such stories, resisted facts. The fates of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus after 1991 showed well enough that the fall of one system did not create a blank slate on which nature generated markets and markets generated rights. Iraq in 2003 might have confirmed this lesson, had the initiators of America’s illegal war reflected upon its disastrous consequences. The financial crisis of 2008 and the deregulation of campaign contributions in the United States in 2010 magnified the influence of the wealthy and reduced that of voters. As economic inequality grew, time horizons shrank, and fewer Americans believed that the future held a better version of the present. Lacking a functional state that assured basic social goods taken for granted elsewhere—education, pensions, health care, transport, parental leave, vacations—Americans could be overwhelmed by each day, and lose a sense of the future. The collapse of the politics of inevitability ushers in another experience of time: the politics of eternity. Whereas inevitability promises a better future for everyone, eternity places one nation at the center of a cyclical story of victimhood. Time is no longer a line into the future, but a circle that endlessly returns the same threats from the past. Within inevitability, no one is responsible because we all know that the details will sort themselves out for the better; within eternity, no one is responsible because we all know that the enemy is coming no matter what we do. Eternity politicians spread the conviction that government cannot aid society as a whole, but can only guard against threats. Progress gives way to doom.

Our political system today does not engage the best minds in our country to help us get the answers and deploy the resources we need to move into the future. Bringing these people in—with their networks of influence, their knowledge, and their resources—is the key to creating the capacity for shared intelligence that we need to solve the problems we face, before it’s too late. Our goal must be to find a new way of unleashing our collective intelligence in the same way that markets have unleashed our collective productivity. “We the people” must reclaim and revitalize the ability we once had to play an integral role in saving our Constitution. The traditional progressive solution to problems that involve a lack of participation by citizens in civic and democratic processes is to redouble their emphasis on education. And education is, in fact, an extremely valuable strategy for solving many of society’s ills. In an age where information has more economic value than ever before, it is obvious that education should have a higher national priority. It is also clear that democracies are more likely to succeed when there is widespread access to high-quality education. Education alone, however, is necessary but insufficient. A well-educated citizenry is more likely to be a well-informed citizenry, but the two concepts are entirely different, one from the other. It is possible to be extremely well educated and, at the same time, ill informed or misinformed. In the 1930s and 1940s, many members of the Nazi Party in Germany were extremely well educated—but their knowledge of literature, music, mathematics, and philosophy simply empowered them to be more effective Nazis. No matter how educated they were, no matter how well they had cultivated their intellect, they were still trapped in a web of totalitarian propaganda that mobilized them for evil purposes. The Enlightenment, for all of its liberating qualities—especially its empowerment of individuals with the ability to use reason as a source of influence and power—has also had a dark side that thoughtful people worried about from its beginning. Abstract thought, when organized into clever, self-contained, logical formulations, can sometimes have its own quasi-hypnotic effect and so completely capture the human mind as to shut out the leavening influences of everyday experience. Time and again, passionate believers in tightly organized philosophies and ideologies have closed their minds to the cries of human suffering that they inflict on others who have not yet pledged their allegiance and surrendered their minds to the same ideology. The freedoms embodied in our First Amendment represented the hard-won wisdom of the eighteenth century: that individuals must be able to fully participate in challenging, questioning, and thereby breathing human values constantly into the prevailing ideologies of their time and sharing with others the wisdom of their own experience.

me to be honest about his failings as well as his strengths. She is one of the smartest and most grounded people I have ever met. “There are parts of his life and personality that are extremely messy, and that’s the truth,” she told me early on. “You shouldn’t whitewash it. He’s good at spin, but he also has a remarkable story, and I’d like to see that it’s all told truthfully.” I leave it to the reader to assess whether I have succeeded in this mission. I’m sure there are players in this drama who will remember some of the events differently or think that I sometimes got trapped in Jobs’s distortion field. As happened when I wrote a book about Henry Kissinger, which in some ways was good preparation for this project, I found that people had such strong positive and negative emotions about Jobs that the Rashomon effect was often evident. But I’ve done the best I can to balance conflicting accounts fairly and be transparent about the sources I used. This is a book about the roller-coaster life and searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing. You might even add a seventh, retail stores, which Jobs did not quite revolutionize but did reimagine. In addition, he opened the way for a new market for digital content based on apps rather than just websites. Along the way he produced not only transforming products but also, on his second try, a lasting company, endowed with his DNA, that is filled with creative designers and daredevil engineers who could carry forward his vision. In August 2011, right before he stepped down as CEO, the enterprise he started in his parents’ garage became the world’s most valuable company. This is also, I hope, a book about innovation. At a time when the United States is seeking ways to sustain its innovative edge, and when societies around the world are trying to build creative digital-age economies, Jobs stands as the ultimate icon of inventiveness, imagination, and sustained innovation. He knew that the best way to create value in the twenty-first century was to connect creativity with technology, so he built a company where leaps of the imagination were combined with remarkable feats of engineering. He and his colleagues at Apple were able to think differently: They developed not merely modest product advances based on focus groups, but whole new devices and services that consumers did not yet know they needed. He was not a model boss or human being, tidily packaged for emulation. Driven by demons, he could drive those around him to fury and despair. But his personality and passions and products were all interrelated, just as Apple’s hardware and software tended to be, as if part of an integrated system. His tale is thus both instructive and cautionary, filled with lessons about innovation, character, leadership, and values.

MRU Consulting helps digital marketing enthusiasts increase conversion rates and improve website design with smart analytics analysis, user-friendly design.

Be sure to integrate PR and marketing methods with your media outreach and social media strategies.

The transformation of competitive capitalism into monopoly capitalism altered the character of the economic links between capitalist countries and their colonies. Monopolies require a well-ordered market with stable sources of raw materials and stable outlets. The colonies therefore became integrated into this general tendency toward market "rationalization," which monopolies try to achieve for their outlets and for the sources of their raw materials. The colonies became above all a field for the investment of overabundant capital from the home countries, which is now exported on an increasing scale from these metropolitan countries to their colonies and to backward countries in general. In these areas the high rate of profit, tied to the very cheap labor costs that prevail there, allows capital to exploit labor to a much greater extent.

A company’s revenue engine is a critical success factor. I had seen from my own direct experience how easy it was to get caught in silos: marketing people would just think of marketing, salespeople would just think of sales, and accounting wouldn’t think of itself as part of the revenue engine at all. Furthermore, product and the revenue engine were too often thought of completely independent of each other. The need for a more integrated approach was on my mind from the beginning. The revenue engine is a whole system. It encompasses a diverse set of integrated components, each doing its part to advance the system’s purpose. The engine is not just comprised of marketing and sales— it includes product, accounting, and the underlying technology and data infrastructure required to keep everything flowing. It involves people, tools, workflow, and metrics. Its purpose is to optimize reach, conversion, and expansion of customer spend. I call my revenue engine model “the bowtie schema.” It was the product of continuous iteration. As I interacted with marketing and sales practitioners and waded through the research, the model slowly emerged. The final model conveys not just the product and customer journey across the bowtie, but also the foundational layers that support that journey-- the interaction between people tools, workflow, and metrics that make it all happen. The most basic question a CEO must answer is whether the product has achieved a value breakthrough. Without that, the revenue engine is irrelevant. Once product-market fit is confirmed, the next step is to clearly identify your ideal customer profile (ICP) and your business model. This includes the lifetime value (LTV) profile of your company. Assuming a strong product, a clear ICP, and a solid understanding of the constraints composed by your unit economics, the path forward is clear. Then, the focus will turn to uplifting the maturity of your revenue engine and scaling it efficiently.

A company’s revenue engine is a critical success factor. I had seen from my own direct experience how easy it was to get caught in silos: marketing people would just think of marketing, salespeople would just think of sales, and accounting wouldn’t think of itself as part of the revenue engine at all. Furthermore, product and the revenue engine were too often thought of completely independent of each other. The need for a more integrated approach was on my mind from the beginning.

TripAdvisor has always been a top-funnel platform, not a bottom-funnel one. Now, thanks to a new feed-oriented design, fresh content from over a thousand influencers and Facebook integration, it (finally) takes a step back in the customer journey: no longer a OTA / metasearch engine /review site hybrid, therefore, but an inspirational site for curious travelers

Back in the days, PMS were pretty much just that: fancy versions of excel spreadsheets: you used them to assign rooms, print attendants’ sheets or, best case scenario, manage guest invoicing. Today, on the other hand, PMS are required to manage a multitude of tasks, and they have to flawlessly integrate with a multitude of third-party apps and software: channel managers, booking engines, CRM, Yield Management tools, MICE planning software, self-check-in apps, reputation management systems… Well, you get the idea.

Because of the need for external connections, PMS strength is proportional to the number of tools it can integrate to. In a perfect world, in fact, PMS should be able to communicate with every single software/hardware in the hotel, but connections between PMS and third-party systems can be (and often are) challenging.

Moving away from traditional hotel loyalty programs' model and offering a good mix of instant gratifications and long-term rewards based on the guest type is crucial to creating sustainable and scalable programs. And if it is unlikely that the industry will ever entirely move away from the points-for-stay model, most hotel brands are already integrating guest experience, recognition and service personalization as part of their loyalty programs, realizing that the in-house financial value of their guests is as important as their stay frequency.

The revenue engine is a whole system. It encompasses a diverse set of integrated components, each doing its part to advance the system’s purpose. The engine is not just comprised of marketing and sales— it includes product, accounting, and the underlying technology and data infrastructure required to keep everything flowing. It involves people, tools, workflow, and metrics. Its purpose is to optimize reach, conversion, and expansion of customer spend.

We all agree that the main concept of ​​a metasearch engine is to compare and find the best rates, right? Well, we may be wrong. Up until only 10 years ago, there were dozens of OTAs, each one specialized in a niche market. But, over the years, these OTAs have been acquired, integrated or simply merged under Booking and Expedia's brands. Today, digital distribution is, de facto, a duopoly. And with only two OTAs sharing almost 100% of online transactions, what exactly a metasearch engine should do?

Without standard, shared languages, open APIs and predefined protocols for cross-software integration, no effective automation will ever be possible in hospitality, especially with legacy software, where integrations remain expensive, slow and complex processes

hope more white people don’t move here.” My husband isn’t prone to sentimentality of any kind, or to worrying about white people, so I asked him why, and he said, “Because, kids were playing basketball by the school and they had cheerleaders cheering them on, and black men say hello to me on the street, and I love our little fruit market, and I don’t want this place to change.” But this place will probably change, if only because this is not a city where integrated neighborhoods last very long. And we are the people for whom the new coffee shop has opened. And the pet-grooming store. “You know your neighborhood is gentrifying,” my sister observes, “when the pet-grooming store arrives.

There are many potential explanations for the less-than-robust performance, but IBM’s current strategy suggests that one component at least is a challenge to the traditional shrink-wrapped software business. As much as any software provider in the industry, IBM’s software business was optimized and built for a traditional enterprise procurement model. This typically involves lengthy evaluations of software, commonly referred to as “bake-offs,” followed by the delivery of a software asset, which is then installed and integrated by some combination of buyer employees, IBM services staff, or third-party consultants. This model, as discussed previously, has increasingly come under assault from open source software, software offered as a pure service or hosted and managed on public cloud infrastructure, or some combination of the two. Following the multi-billion dollar purchase of Softlayer, acquired to beef up IBM’s cloud portfolio, IBM continued to invest heavily in two major cloud-related software projects: OpenStack and Cloud Foundry. The latter, which is what is commonly referred to as a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering, may give us both an idea of how IBM’s software group is responding to disruption within the traditional software sales cycle and their level of commitment to it. Specifically, IBM’s implementation of Cloud Foundry, a product called Bluemix, makes a growing portion of IBM’s software portfolio available as a consumable service. Rather than negotiate and purchase software on a standalone basis, then, IBM customers are increasingly able to consume the products in a hosted fashion.

Choosing thе Right SEO Cоmраnу The role оf an SEO соmраnу іѕ vеrу important whеn it соmеѕ to рrоmоtіng уоur online buѕіnеѕѕ. Aссоrdіng to сurrеnt dау trends in internet marketing, it іѕ еѕѕеntіаl tо сhооѕе thе rіght SEO service рrоvіdеr fоr gооd rеѕultѕ. Some common rеѕроnѕіbіlіtіеѕ оf an SEO соmраnу іnсludе website dеѕіgn, сrеаtіоn оf bасk lіnkѕ, соntеnt wrіtіng, wеbѕіtе орtіmіzаtіоn, dіrесtоrу submissions, vіdео сrеаtіоn, press rеlеаѕеѕ, blog posts, selection оf ѕuіtаblе keywords, and much mоrе. Hоw tо Idеntіfу a Prоfеѕѕіоnаl SEO Fіrm? A рrоfеѕѕіоnаl SEO company іѕ сараblе of dеlіvеrіng the bеѕt rеѕultѕ tо ѕаtіѕfу the rеԛuіrеmеntѕ оf clients. Bу аvаіlіng оf thе ѕеrvісеѕ оf рrоfеѕѕіоnаlѕ in the SEO fіеld, you can еnhаnсе your wеbѕіtе rаnkіngѕ and online рrеѕеnсе. SEO еxреrtѕ are wеll-vеrѕеd іn thе lаtеѕt techniques that wіll help іn асhіеvіng hіgh ranks fоr your wеbѕіtе іn ѕеаrсh еngіnе result раgеѕ. Cеrtаіn things are to be соnfіrmеd bеfоrе signing a соntrасt with аn SEO company. Credibility - Chесk the аuthеntісіtу of thе SEO fіrm. Enѕurе that іt саn dеlіvеr ԛuаlіtу SEO ѕеrvісеѕ іn ассоrdаnсе wіth уоur demands. Experience - Experience іn the field always mаttеrѕ wіth rеgаrd tо dеlіvеrіng ԛuаlіtу output wіthоut еrrоrѕ. Dо background research аbоut the fіrm to ensure іtѕ соnѕіѕtеnсу, rеlіаbіlіtу аnd соnfіdеntіаlіtу. Affordable solutions - Compare thе рrісе tags of dіffеrеnt SEO companies tо select an аffоrdаblе, рrоfеѕѕіоnаl SEO соmраnу. SEO tесhnіԛuеѕ - A рrоfеѕѕіоnаl SEO firm implements thе latest SEO ѕtrаtеgіеѕ tо brіng аbоut optimum rеѕultѕ for client websites. Exреrt wоrkfоrсе - Emіnеnt and еxреrіеnсеd team оf employees аrе the backbone thе company. They аrе dеdісаtеd to реrfоrmіng vаrіоuѕ tasks ассurаtеlу аnd соnѕіѕtеntlу tо satisfy thе wеbѕіtе requirements аnd goals. Thеу often fосuѕ оn creating brand awareness and enhance уоur оnlіnе rеvеnuе by рlасіng your wеbѕіtе in tор роѕіtіоnѕ іn search engines. Customer rеlаtіоnѕhір - A professional SEO ѕеrvісе provider always give рrеfеrеnсе to сuѕtоmеr саrе аnd rоund thе сlосk сuѕtоmеr support. Thеу аlѕо kеер іn соntасt wіth уоu tо іnfоrm аbоut SEO dеvеlорmеntѕ аnd сurrеnt mаrkеt trends. Client testimonials/feedback - Pоrtfоlіоѕ of сlіеntѕ hеlр tо identify the bеѕt ѕеrvісе provider оut оf many. Alѕо, сhесk the authenticity of fееdbасkѕ аnd testimonials роѕtеd оn the website. High profile сlіеnt lіѕt - Evaluate thе ѕuссеѕѕ stories оf рrеvіоuѕ рrоjесtѕ fоr wеll-knоwn сlіеntѕ. Anаlуzе thе рrосеdurеѕ іnvоlvеd in соmрlеtіng a раrtісulаr рrоjесt. Seek thе advice of buѕіnеѕѕ раrtnеrѕ оr rеlаtіvеѕ- Tаlk wіth реорlе who have аlrеаdу used ѕеаrсh еngіnе optimization ѕеrvісеѕ to make an іnfоrmеd decision. Rеlеvаnсе of аn SEO соmраnу Yоu must clearly ѕеt уоur gоаlѕ about ѕеаrсh еngіnе орtіmіzаtіоn services to іmрrоvе wеbѕіtе trаffіс аnd ѕеаrсh еngіnе rаnkіngѕ. SEO ѕеrvісеѕ help to integrate уоur wеbѕіtе with social nеtwоrkіng sites fоr іntеrnаtіоnаl brаnd rесоgnіtіоn tо gеnеrаtе lеаdѕ and increase оnlіnе ѕаlеѕ. Hеnсе take еnоugh tіmе and choose the rіght SEO Cоmраnу for gооd SEO rеѕultѕ that wіll fuel the business grоwth in thе lоng-run аnd help avoid wаѕtаgе of mоnеу аnd tіmе.

The outcome is a result of the integrity of the process.

Passage Four: From Functional Manager to Business Manager This leadership passage is often the most satisfying as well as the most challenging of a manager’s career, and it’s mission-critical in organizations. Business mangers usually receive significant autonomy, which people with leadership instincts find liberating. They also are able to see a clear link between their efforts and marketplace results. At the same time, this is a sharp turn; it requires a major shift in skills, time applications, and work values. It’s not simply a matter of people becoming more strategic and cross-functional in their thinking (though it’s important to continue developing the abilities rooted in the previous level). Now they are in charge of integrating functions, whereas before they simply had to understand and work with other functions. But the biggest shift is from looking at plans and proposals functionally (Can we do it technically, professionally, or physically?) to a profit perspective (Will we make any money if we do this?) and to a long-term view (Is the profitability result sustainable?). New business managers must change the way they think in order to be successful. There are probably more new and unfamiliar responsibilities here than at other levels. For people who have been in only one function for their entire career, a business manager position represents unexplored territory; they must suddenly become responsible for many unfamiliar functions and outcomes. Not only do they have to learn to manage different functions, but they also need to become skilled at working with a wider variety of people than ever before; they need to become more sensitive to functional diversity issues and communicating clearly and effectively. Even more difficult is the balancing act between future goals and present needs and making trade-offs between the two. Business managers must meet quarterly profit, market share, product, and people targets, and at the same time plan for goals three to five years into the future. The paradox of balancing short-term and long-term thinking is one that bedevils many managers at this turn—and why one of the requirements here is for thinking time. At this level, managers need to stop doing every second of the day and reserve time for reflection and analysis. When business managers don’t make this turn fully, the leadership pipeline quickly becomes clogged. For example, a common failure at this level is not valuing (or not effectively using) staff functions. Directing and energizing finance, human resources, legal, and other support groups are crucial business manager responsibilities. When managers don’t understand or appreciate the contribution of support staff, these staff people don’t deliver full performance. When the leader of the business demeans or diminishes their roles, staff people deliver halfhearted efforts; they can easily become energy-drainers. Business managers must learn to trust, accept advice, and receive feedback from all functional managers, even though they may never have experienced these functions personally.

If charts are of high integrity, i.e. large volumes, large market capitalisations, large number of investors with no large holders of stocks, you have to look for uptrends and downtrends to trade. And, you have to stick to supports and resistances. If the charts are of low integrity, trade them only when there is an accumulation in process. During periods of accumulation, gains will be exponential.

Truth is the greatest marketing campaign.

Enrolling card holders gives a retailer the chance to find out more about its customer base (where they live, family composition, family income). By integrating this information with known purchasing behaviour, retailers are able to target direct marketing activities with a precision and success rate well above that of manufacturers. This gives retailers an information advantage that they have not had since the dawn of modern retailing.

if Western universal values are false, is it enough to oppose them with a particular way of life like China’s Confucian ‘mainstream ideology’? Don’t we need a different universalism, a different project of universal emancipation? The ultimate irony here is that ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’ effectively means socialism with a market economy (with capitalist characteristics), i.e., a socialism that fully integrates China into the global market. The universality of global capitalism is left intact – it is silently accepted as the only possible frame, and the project of Confucian harmony is mobilized only in order to keep under control the antagonisms that come from global capitalist dynamics.

If we focus on substance over size, sustainability over consumption, we can create a solo business that is efficient and profitable. This may seem entirely conceptual (and it is), but changing your philosophy from “Bigger is Better” to “Business Edited” will allow you more freedom, flexibility, and profit. Living Business Edited You may want to grow your business into a thriving company. And that’s a great goal. But the philosophy can be the same. Create a business based on substance over size. Bigger is not better. Become an expert in efficiency and embrace the less stuff, less overhead philosophy. Here are a few examples of how to live Business Edited: Focus on a niche instead of trying to do everything for everyone (think small target market over large target market) Get rid of paper – no one reads brochures! Embrace technology that helps you integrate and organize (think iPad over PC) Choose sustainable and local whenever you can Create a leaner office space Choose dual purpose items Don’t purchase “stuff”  – purchase only what you truly need Minimalism

When it comes to defending the economic viability of our nation, it is naïve to count on the honesty and integrity of people responsible for our markets when they stand to gain so much by manipulating the system to their advantage.

Some people argue that economics is an exception to this general story. Economics, they say, provides a much more analytically precise and tightly integrated body of theory—a theory that is explicitly linked to a small set of generally accepted assumptions about human beings’ motivations and decision-making procedures, and that has been rigorously tested against quantified empirical evidence. Among all the social sciences, economics alone, these boosters contend, has a defensible claim to true scientific status. Economics certainly deserves to be regarded as the queen of the social sciences; unlike the others, it has unquestionably produced useful knowledge on a wide range of issues that affect our daily lives. Yet we should be suspicious of its bold claims to scientific status. Modern neoclassical economic theory is firmly grounded in the kind of mechanistic worldview (described in “Complexities”) that sees the economy as a machine, and to explain the operation of this machine it imports many of the concepts of nineteenth-century classical physics. So it stresses the natural tendency of the economy to find a stable equilibrium and the possibility of isolating the effect of changes in different economic factors (like changes in interest rates) on economic performance.25 As well, to achieve its simplicity and elegance, the theory focuses on the behavior of independent individuals operating in a market—individuals who are atomized, rational, similar in preferences, and stripped of any social attributes. But this makes the theory largely asocial and ahistorical: there’s generally no place in it for large-scale historical, cultural, and political forces that sometimes have a huge impact on our economies—forces like the emancipation of women, rising environmental consciousness, or democratization in poor countries. Because it’s insensitive to broad social forces, modern economic theory is also surprisingly insensitive to its own tight relationship with capitalism. Nevertheless, it’s clearly a product of capitalism—a specific, historically rooted economic system—and it only makes sense in the context of capitalism.26

Did you know that you can integrate your telecommunications and office network together so you get an email that reads a voicemail message to you? -

Physical Invasion The normative principle I am suggesting for the law is simply this: No action should be considered illicit or illegal unless it invades, or aggresses against, the person or just property of another. Only invasive actions should be declared illegal, and combated with the full power of the law. The invasion must be concrete and physical. There are degrees of seriousness of such invasion, and hence, different proper degrees of restitution or punishment. "Burglary," simple invasion of property for purposes of theft, is less serious than "robbery," where armed force is likely to be used against the victim. Here, however, we are not concerned with the questions of degrees of invasion or punishment, but simply with invasion per se. If no man may invade another person's "just" property, what is our criterion of justice to be? There is no space here to elaborate on a theory of justice in property titles. Suffice it to say that the basic axiom of libertarian political theory holds that every man is a selfowner, having absolute jurisdiction over his own body. In effect, this means that no one else may justly invade, or aggress against, another's person. It follows then that each person justly owns whatever previously unowned resources he appropriates or "mixes his labor with." From these twin axioms — self-ownership and "homesteading" — stem the justification for the entire system of property rights titles in a free-market society. This system establishes the right of every man to his own person, the right of donation, of bequest (and, concomitantly, the right to receive the bequest or inheritance), and the right of contractual exchange of property titles. Legal and political theory have committed much mischief by failing to pinpoint physical invasion as the only human action that should be illegal and that justifies the use of physical violence to combat it. The vague concept of "harm" is substituted for the precise one of physical violence. Consider the following two examples. Jim is courting Susan and is just about to win her hand in marriage, when suddenly Bob appears on the scene and wins her away. Surely Bob has done great "harm" to Jim. Once a nonphysical-invasion sense of harm is adopted, almost any outlaw act might be justified. Should Jim be able to "enjoin" Bob's very existence? Similarly, A is a successful seller of razor blades. But then B comes along and sells a better blade, teflon-coated to prevent shaving cuts. The value of A's property is greatly affected. Should he be able to collect damages from B, or, better yet, to enjoin B's sale of a better blade? The correct answer is not that consumers would be hurt if they were forced to buy the inferior blade, although that is surely the case. Rather, no one has the right to legally prevent or retaliate against "harms" to his property unless it is an act of physical invasion. Everyone has the right to have the physical integrity of his property inviolate; no one has the right to protect the value of his property, for that value is purely the reflection of what people are willing to pay for it. That willingness solely depends on how they decide to use their money. No one can have a right to someone else's money, unless that other person had previously contracted to transfer it to him. "Legal and political theory have committed much mischief by failing to pinpoint physical invasion as the only human action that should be illegal and that justifies the use of physical violence to combat it.

5 WORDS ON A WHITEBOARD HAVE A STRUCTURE FOR 1:1s, AND TAKE THE TIME TO PREPARE FOR THEM, AS THEY ARE THE BEST WAY TO HELP PEOPLE BE MORE EFFECTIVE AND TO GROW. BILL’S FRAMEWORK FOR 1:1s AND REVIEWS PERFORMANCE ON JOB REQUIREMENTS Could be sales figures Could be product delivery or product milestones Could be customer feedback or product quality Could be budget numbers RELATIONSHIP WITH PEER GROUPS (This is critical for company integration and cohesiveness) Product and Engineering Marketing and Product Sales and Engineering MANAGEMENT/LEADERSHIP Are you guiding/coaching your people? Are you weeding out the bad ones? Are you working hard at hiring? Are you able to get your people to do heroic things? INNOVATION (BEST PRACTICES) Are you constantly moving ahead . . . thinking about how to continually get better? Are you constantly evaluating new technologies, new products, new practices? Do you measure yourself against the best in the industry/world?

So what counts as a ‘commercial insight’? Some examples include: BEST PRACTICES: Customers often want to know about best practices from other regions. For instance, being able to explain to an Australian-based buyer that businesses in the US or UK are solving a similar problem with a new solution that is deemed to be the current best practice is often highly valued, as it could provide a newer (or better) solution than the one the buyer had previously considered. EMERGING TRENDS: Being able to share the latest trends concerning your sector can empower buyers to make educated decisions about investments, particularly when it comes to the longevity of different solutions or how developments in adjacent industries could disrupt the business. INVESTMENT RISK: In mature markets, business buyers often become very risk averse as they don’t want to be held responsible for having a negative impact on growth numbers. Many sales people steer clear of talking about risk with their customers, because they worry about turning a buyer off making a purchase decision. However, while highlighting a risk to your customer could mean that you lose a sale, putting the customer’s best interests ahead of your own will ultimately position you as a trusted adviser. Additionally, because many sales people take the opposite approach – they sell the customer on the value while carefully avoiding any mention of the possible downside, only for the risk to raise its ugly head after the purchase – this helps you stand out as a person of integrity in a field where integrity is seen to be lacking. CASE STUDIES: Unique customer case studies and stories not only build your credibility and the credibility of your offering, they help develop a rapport between you and your customer. In the same way that comedians curate a long list of jokes, anecdotes and stories that they can roll out at any given moment, you should also become the curator of unique stories and case studies that your customers value because they can’t easily find these on Google.

By far the largest class of stablecoins are fiat collateralized. These are backed by an off-chain reserve of the target asset. Usually they are custodied by an external entity or group of entities that undergo routine audits to verify the collateral's existence. The largest fiat-collateralized stablecoin is Tether5 (USDT) with a market capitalization of $62 billion, making it the third largest cryptocurrency behind Bitcoin and Ethereum at time of writing. Tether also has the highest trading volume of any cryptocurrency but is not audited.6 The second largest is USDC,7 and its holdings of USD are regularly audited. USDC is redeemable 1:1 for USD and vice versa for no fee on Coinbase's exchange. USDT and USDC are very popular to integrate into DeFi protocols as demand for stablecoin investment opportunities is high.

This book is a compilation of interesting ideas that have strongly influenced my thoughts and I want to share them in a compressed form. That ideas can change your worldview and bring inspiration and the excitement of discovering something new. The emphasis is not on the technology because it is constantly changing. It is much more difficult to change the accompanying circumstances that affect the way technological solutions are realized. The chef did not invent salt, pepper and other spices. He just chooses good ingredients and uses them skilfully, so others can enjoy his art. If I’ve been successful, the book creates a new perspective for which the selection of ingredients is important, as well as the way they are smoothly and efficiently arranged together. In the first part of the book, we follow the natural flow needed to create the stimulating environment necessary for the survival of a modern company. It begins with challenges that corporations are facing, changes they are, more or less successfully, trying to make, and the culture they are trying to establish. After that, we discuss how to be creative, as well as what to look for in the innovation process. The book continues with a chapter that talks about importance of inclusion and purpose. This idea of inclusion – across ages, genders, geographies, cultures, sexual orientation, and all the other areas in which new ways of thinking can manifest – is essential for solving new problems as well as integral in finding new solutions to old problems. Purpose motivates people for reaching their full potential. This is The second and third parts of the book describes the areas that are important to support what is expressed in the first part. A flexible organization is based on IT alignment with business strategy. As a result of acceleration in the rate of innovation and technological changes, markets evolve rapidly, products’ life cycles get shorter and innovation becomes the main source of competitive advantage. Business Process Management (BPM) goes from task-based automation, to process-based automation, so automating a number of tasks in a process, and then to functional automation across multiple processes andeven moves towards automation at the business ecosystem level. Analytics brought us information and insight; AI turns that insight into superhuman knowledge and real-time action, unleashing new business models, new ways to build, dream, and experience the world, and new geniuses to advance humanity faster than ever before. Companies and industries are transforming our everyday experiences and the services we depend upon, from self-driving cars, to healthcare, to personal assistants. It is a central tenet for the disruptive changes of the 4th Industrial Revolution; a revolution that will likely challenge our ideas about what it means to be a human and just might be more transformative than any other industrial revolution we have seen yet. Another important disruptor is the blockchain - a distributed decentralized digital ledger of transactions with the promise of liberating information and making the economy more democratic. You no longer need to trust anyone but an algorithm. It brings reliability, transparency, and security to all manner of data exchanges: financial transactions, contractual and legal agreements, changes of ownership, and certifications. A quantum computer can simulate efficiently any physical process that occurs in Nature. Potential (long-term) applications include pharmaceuticals, solar power collection, efficient power transmission, catalysts for nitrogen fixation, carbon capture, etc. Perhaps we can build quantum algorithms for improving computational tasks within artificial intelligence, including sub-fields like machine learning. Perhaps a quantum deep learning network can be trained more efficiently, e.g. using a smaller training set. This is still in conceptual research domain.

Leverage Integrations as a Service In a start-up, you always need to be on the lookout for shortcuts to save you time and money. Don’t corners that will have a negative effect—just look for ways to triple your productivity. No matter how fast I could build integrations, I could never build them all. But in 2012, a new company called Zapier was building a platform to integrate web services together. This was perfect for WebMerge, as I could essentially build an integration to every one of their connected apps, with one single integration. WebMerge was one of the first 100 apps on Zapier, and it instantly allowed WebMerge customers to integrate their documents with each of those 100 apps. Over the years, Zapier blew up and now has thousands of apps available. Zapier was by far our largest integration partner with over 50 percent of our revenue coming from customers using Zapier. Investing in this early platform was crucial and sped up our integration releases by many years. What’s your Zapier story? Is there a partner out there that can open your business to a whole new market—or just help you get your product in front of new customers years ahead of schedule?

Take advantage of marketing, such as: Listings on the Intuit App Center. Intuit offers two app stores, and I posted about 20 listings. The links from QuickBooks boosted my SEO considerably. Other app store listings that are free. If these became paid channels, you can simply delist. YouTube videos. I paid $200 for Camtasia Studio and recorded a video for each integration that I sold. I made about 15–20 videos and asked the user to start a trial at the end of each. Landing pages. I looked at competing products and used similar language on my landing pages. Content in help centers. I wrote several knowledgebase articles that were indexed on Google. These articles later linked back to my website.