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The Celebrity Experience by Donna Cutting - Book review

The Celebrity Experience

Insider Secrets to Delivering Red Carpet Customer Service

By: Donna Cutting

Published: Jan 9, 2008
ISBN: 9780470174012
Format: Hardcover, 256pp
Publisher: Wiley

When it all comes together, your company will stand out as being one of only a few rare companies that truly give their customers honest to goodness red carpet customer service, writes red carpet fan Donna Cutting, in her essential guide to extraordinary customer service, The Celebrity Experience: Insider Secrets to Delivering Red Carpet Customer Service. Drawing on the worlds of Hollywood and business, the author fuses the concept of outstanding customer service, with the red carpet treatment given to celebrities, and transforms real world customers into stars.

Donna Cutting understands that many businesses don't provide good customer service, and she describes many examples of this business destroying phenomenon. At the same time, the author recognizes that Hollywood, music, media, and sports celebrities are given the royal treatment. Instead of treating customers differently, based on often incorrect perceptions, Donna Cutting recommends rolling out the red carpet for every customer. Everyone wants to be treated as special, and deserves to be accorded respect. People given respect will return the favour, and share their superior customer experience with others. Good customer service is simply good business practice.

Donna Cutting (photo left) shares stories of business people who have gone above and beyond the expected level of service, and provided the extraordinary. The employees offering the personalized treatment, and who demonstrated genuine interest in their clientele, were also happier employees. Staff turnover is lower, according to Donna Cutting, and repeat business and referrals were much higher at the companies using customer services best practices. The profiled elite providers were more fun workplaces for staff members, and were memorable occasions for customers.

For me, the power of the book was not only the practical ideas that any business can put into practice to enhance its customer service experience, but the recognition of the power of personal respect. Movie stars are accustomed to getting the very finest of service, everywhere they go in the world. By offering similar respect and courtesy to everyone who contacts a business, the employees and customers are engaged in the experience. Sharing very personal, and highly focused attention to each and every person, as if they were the Hollywood elite, creates joy as it develops an environment of mutual respect.

I highly recommend the destined to be classic The Celebrity Experience: Insider Secrets to Delivering Red Carpet Customer Service by Donna Cutting, to anyone who is serious about offering top notch customer service to their clients. Companies providing a unique and buss worthy customer experience will attract more customers, and retain their clientele for life.

Read The Celebrity Experience: Insider Secrets to Delivering Red Carpet Customer Service by Donna Cutting, and roll out the red carpet for every person you meet. Your business will be more profitable, your customers happier, your employee morale will rise, and everyone will enjoy and fuller and richer life.

Tags: The Celebrity Experience, Donna Cutting, customer service, business book reviews.

Jim Kukral: A Leader's Guide To Motivation - Blog Business Success Radio

Entrepreneur, business coach, keynote speaker, and social media expert Jim Kukral shares secrets for motivating yourself & the people around you to achieve success. He provides practical ideas, and leadership techniques, for reaching and exceeding your business and personal goals.

Jim Kukral is my internet radio show guest on Blog Business Success; hosted live on Blog Talk Radio.

The show airs live on Tuesday, December 30, at 8:00 pm Eastern Time; 5:00 pm Pacific Time.

Entrepreneur, business coach, keynote speaker, and social media expert Jim Kukral shares secrets for motivating yourself and the people around you to achieve success. He provides practical ideas, and leadership techniques, for reaching and exceeding your business and personal goals. You will learn:

* What leadership really means in the modern world

* Why motivation is important for leaders to understand

* Tips for better leadership and motivation

* How to achieve business success in a down economy

Jim Kukral (photo left) is a web marketer & coach, speaker, long-time award-winning blogger, customer evangelist, writer, online monetization expert, and well, a bunch of other things.

For years Jim has been working on the bleeding edge of web marketing and business. From owning his own web firms to consulting for some of the world's largest companies, Jim Kukral has experienced just about everything web related you can think of. That's why Jim has become one of the Industry's most sought after consultants and public speakers.

Jim focuses on helping businesses and brands find success online. Whether that's through providing expert advice for the firm that can't figure out how to get their web strategy right, or helping a business achieve more publicity, sales or leads, Jim has the experience and knowledge to get it done right the first time.

When Jim isn't speaking or consulting to top Fortune 500 clients, Jim spends his business hours as the owner of Scratchback.com, a widget-based tipping system that thousands of bloggers and webmasters use daily. Jim also produces a daily web show about web marketing and being an entrepreneur called the Daily Flip, where he broadcasts shows in audio or video. The Daily Flip reaches hundreds of thousands of viewers and listeners.

Jim has written professionally for both clickZ.com and Builder.com, as well as other top Industry magazines like Revenue Today. He is currently writing a new book (details to come in the future).

Jim is also a highly rated speaker at Industry events, and has experience working as a show emcee and special introductions for keynote speakers. Read more about Jim's speaking or book him for your event.

Jim is also regarded as a web video expert, having produced hundreds of videos for himself and his clients, that have been viewed by hundreds of thousands of people. His free guide called the Online Video Toolkit has been featured in Entrepreneur blogs and on Marketing Sherpa.

But what Jim is most proud of is his ability to have fun in his work. "If it's not fun, why do it?," says Jim. Because of his love of "fun", Jim has created fun projects like the Awesome Million, and Big Brown Box. Clients who work with Jim enjoy his attitude and willingness to think beyond the limits of innovation and creativity.

Listen live on Tuesday at 8:00 pm Eastern, 5:00 pm Pacific time.

If you miss this very informative show, it will be available for free download as a podcast for iPod, iTunes, and MP3 players; or play it right on your computer. To download this, or any other of my guest interviews, go to the Blog Business Success host page and click on Archived Segments. Once there, click on the podcast icon at the end of the episode description, to download the show free of charge for your listening enjoyment. You can also subscribe to the show feed.

To call in questions for my guest, the number is: (347) 996-5832

Let's talk with entrepreneur, business coach, keynote speaker, and social media expert Jim Kukral as he shares secrets for motivating yourself and the people around you to achieve success. He provides practical ideas, and leadership techniques, for reaching and exceeding your business and personal goals on Blog Business Success Radio.

Tags: Jim Kukral , leadership, motivation, Blog Business Success, Blog Talk Radio.

Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell - Book review

Outliers

Why Some People Succeed and Some Don't

By: Malcolm Gladwell

Published: Nov 1, 2008
ISBN: 9780316017923
Format: Hardcover, 304pp
Publisher: Little Brown & Co

Our notion that it is the best and the brightest who effortlessly rise to the top is much too simplistic, writes visionary author Malcolm Gladwell in his watershed book Outliers: Why Some People Succeed and Some Don't. The author provides a devastating rebuttal to the idea of why people succeed or fail, and why we need to rethink conventional wisdom on everything from what constitutes genius, to the causes of unusual events.

Malcolm Gladwell begins his book with the seemingly innocent observation that elite level hockey players share similar birth dates, clustered in the first three months of the year. With this data in hand, the author discovers a pattern that has gone unnoticed by others. While coaches, selecting eight and ten year old hockey players believed they were selecting talent objectively, their selection bias favored older and bigger players. As a result of their being chosen, the players received better coaching and more playing time. By they time they reached adulthood, as a result of this self fulfilling prophecy, the players were better than their slightly younger cohorts.

Malcolm Gladwell (photo left) continues his assault on what people believe causes success as he delves more deeply into his research. By extending the analysis of the hockey players' additional playing time to other fields, including the careers of The Beatles and Microsoft Founder Bill Gates, the commonality is that essential and exceptional preparation time. For Gladwell, the threshold preparation time for exceptional performance is ten thousand hours. Through additional empirical data gleaned from observation, that ten thousand hour development period holds true for every walk of life. Carrying the discussion further, a person's entire social, economic, and demographic profile also play huge roles in the success or failure of an individual.

For me, the power of the book is the observation of the crucial patterns at work at both the individual and societal level. By uncovering similarities, through commonalities shared by successful people and those of less successful individuals, the entire paradigm of what constitutes genius an failure is turned upside down. Malcolm Gladwell opens himself to the charge of presenting common sense as theory. That charge is weak, as his common pattern analysis is based on objective data, historical study, cultural differences, and sociological studies.

The all important pattern of success theory invites widespread application as it creates opportunities for achievement and success. The previous theory, that genius and success were random and inexplicable, is no longer valid. Students who lack the glaring advantage of Bill Gates receiving a computer and terminal time as a teenager no longer need be condemned to failure. Through understanding the power of the requisite preparation time, a head start can be multiplied to students across all of society. In that sense, this is a very optimistic book, as it offers a series of blueprints for developing and multiplying success.

I highly recommend the landmark Outliers: Why Some People Succeed and Some Don't by Malcolm Gladwell, to anyone serious about discovering the conditions that predispose a person to success, and how to duplicate those circumstances for individuals who lack those same benefits. As a mandate for rebuilding Western society through raising and expanding levels of achievement, this destined to be classic book is an indispensable power tool.

Read Outliers: Why Some People Succeed and Some Don't by Malcolm Gladwell, and you will never look at genius or successful people in the same way again. Instead, you will want to examine the special circumstances that led to their exceptional lives more closely. Outliers are not all they may appear to be at first glance.

Tags: Outliers: Why Some People Succeed and Some Don', Malcolm Gladwell, personal success, genius, business book reviews.

Jeffrey Krames: Inside Drucker's Brain - Blog Business Success Radio

Best selling business book author Jeffrey Krames, talks about his latest book Inside Drucker's Brain, and shares the ideas and strategies gleaned from an indepth interview with legendary management thinker Peter F. Drucker. Jeffrey Krames discusses Drucker's wisdom on management, how his watershed ideas are still influential today, and how to apply the concepts to your own business.

Jeffery Krames is my internet radio show guest on Blog Business Success; hosted live on Blog Talk Radio.

The show airs live on Tuesday, December 23, at 8:00 pm Eastern Time; 5:00 pm Pacific Time.

Best selling business book author Jeffrey A. Krames , talks about his latest book Inside Drucker's Brain, and shares the ideas and strategies gleaned from an indepth interview with legendary management thinker Peter F. Drucker. You will learn:

* Why Peter Drucker is the source of modern management ideas

* Many of the foundation management ideas that originated with Peter Drucker

* How many of the most influential business authors owe a debt to Peter Drucker

* How to apply Peter Drucker's management principles to your own business

Jeffrey Krames (photo left) “The Dean of Leadership”

As former Vice President and Publisher of McGraw-Hill’s trade business books division, Jeffrey Krames has personally edited and published more than 300 business books, including many award-winning, best-selling titles on business luminaries that include Jack Welch, Michael Ovitz, Ross Perot, William Paley, Michael Dell, Bill Gates, Herb Kelleher and Lou Gerstner among others. Recently, Jeffrey Krames published seven of the top 35 best business books of the year as determined by Library Journal. In 2006, Jeffrey Krames become the Editorial Director of Portfolio/Penguin.

Mr. Krames has had his work published in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, Financial Times, Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times. Jeffrey Krames has been interviewed by national and international media such as the Fox News Channel, CNBC, MSNBC, CNN, A&E’s Biography, CSPAN, CNN Europe, CNBC Europe, the BBC, The New York Times, Newsweek, Time, Business Week, the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune and Publishers Weekly.

Jeffrey Krames is also a best-selling author and his last book was Jack Welch and the 4E’s of Leadership which was published in December 2004. His other titles include What The Best CEO’s Know, The Jack Welch Lexicon of Leadership and The Rumsfeld Way: The Leadership Wisdom of a Battle-Hardened Maverick.Inside Drucker's Brain is Jeffrey’s first book in four years.

Jeffrey Krames blogs at Jeffrey Krames.

My book review of Inside Drucker's Brain by Jeffrey A. Krames.

Listen live on Tuesday at 8:00 pm Eastern, 5:00 pm Pacific time.

To call in questions for my guest, the number is: (347) 996-5832

Let's talk with best selling business book author Jeffrey Krames, as be talks about his latest book Inside Drucker's Brain, and shares the ideas and strategies gleaned from an indepth interview with legendary management thinker Peter F. Drucker. Jeffrey Krames discusses Drucker's wisdom on management, how his watershed ideas are still influential today, and how to apply the concepts to your own business on Blog Business Success Radio.

Tags: Jeffrey Krames, Inside Drucker's Brain, business management, Blog Business Success, Blog Talk Radio.

Inside Drucker's Brain by Jeffrey Krames - Book review

Inside Drucker's Brain

By: Jeffrey A. Krames

Published: Oct 16, 2008
ISBN: 9781591842224
Format: Hardcover, 224pp
Publisher: Portfolio

"I learned more about Drucker that day - and the real essence of management - than I had during the many years that I him and other seminal figures in the field", writes author Jeffrey A. Krames, in the landmark book Inside Drucker's Brain. The author's thought provoking once in a lifetime interview, with management legend Peter Drucker, succeeds in showcasing the father of management's signature concepts, and how they are still vital today. At the same time, the books demonstrates how Peter Drucker originated many of the most important themes of today's best selling business management books.

When Peter Drucker granted a personal interview to Jeffrey Krames, the result was a tour de force conversation with the seminal thinker on business management. Indeed, before Peter Drucker invented the field of management studies and the role of business management in society, there was no such area of inquiry. The resulting interview distills the crucial elements of Peter Drucker's ideas into easy to read chapters. At the same time, the theories presented provide a foundation for further thought and study in each area of management. As Jeffrey Krames points out several times in the book, Peter Drucker established the watershed ideas in every branch of management.

Jeffrey Krames (photo left) not only shares the foundation principles of Peter Drucker's thoughts on management, but also shows how those ideas are as relevant today as when they were formulated decades ago. The author traces the management theories, that form the basis of today's most widely read and important business books, back to their ultimate source in the fertile mind of Peter Drucker. While often a glaring omission from management school reading lists, Peter Drucker's founding business principles are imprinted on the pages of most other business management textbooks. This interview goes far to establish the legacy left by the father of management study, and to acknowledge the debt owed by every modern manager and business book author to the late Peter Drucker.

For me, the power of the book is the intensely personal way the author presents Peter Drucker's ideas. By letting Peter Drucker's own words set the tone of the book, his personality echoes through the pages. In my own management days, I focused on the management principles espoused throughout the book. It was disconcerting the first time I discovered that what I believed to be an innovative management practice, had been already anticipated by Peter Drucker, many decades earlier. As I became more aware of the depth and power of the man's thought, I began to recognize that I was walking in the footprints of greatness, even if I was only able to comprehend just its mere outlines.

I highly recommend the monumental Inside Drucker's Brain by Jeffrey A. Krames, to anyone serious about understanding the most fundamental management ideas right from their source. To read the transcribed words, of the inventor of management study, is to be taught by the late master himself.

Read Inside Drucker's Brain by Jeffrey A. Krames, and you will never look at a management idea or read a management book in the same way again. In every case, you will remember that the very source material of today's most influential management books, was the legendary Peter Drucker. The legacy of Peter Drucker, the humble and unassuming genius of business management, is well preserved in the pages of this already destined to be classic book.

My internet radio interview with Inside Drucker's Brain author Jeffrey A. Krames.

Tags: Inside Drucker's Brain, Jeffrey A. Krames, business management, business book reviews.