If your company hasn’t adopted a digital mindset, it’s time. Digital Marketing: Integrating Strategy and Tactics with Values will show you how.
Designed by co-authors Ira Kaufman and Chris Horton as a guide to gaining a competitive advantage through lasting growth in the digital era, the book proposes five stages to full digital integration: mindset, model, strategy, implementation and sustainability. Each stage is critical in any strategy to make a company’s core values visible to customers at all touch points during their experience.
Digital Marketing models the kind of integration it touts. Specifically, readers can use the Zappar and Vusay mobile apps to access augmented content via their smartphones and tablets.
“This connectivity to updated resources transforms the reader experience from static to conversational and interactive,” Kaufman said. “This site will be a leading resource for digital marketing.”
With a foreword by Kellogg’s S.C. Johnson & Son Professor of International Marketing Philip Kotler, and bearing the endorsements of numerous other thought leaders, Digital Marketing is poised to become an essential hybrid text in its field.

Heart disease and cancer kill about 2.5 million people every year in the United States. Globally, heart disease remains the leading cause of death, killing 7.4 million, while cancer is seventh, killing 1.6 million. Together, they annually cause more than one third of total deaths worldwide.
Those statistics are the starting point for Kenneth Johnson’s first book, Understanding Microinflammation: The Common Link Between Aging, Cancer and Coronary Disease, co-authored with colleague and fellow physician Rajiv Dahiya.
As understanding of human physiology deepens, commonalities among diseases begin to emerge. One frequent warning sign is microinflammation, “a chronic, low-grade state of cellular inflammation” that can precede any number of lethal maladies.
“By recognizing the interactions between … physiology and traditional risk factors,” Johnson and Dahiya write, “we can approach risks in a multidimensional fashion, attenuate or eliminate them, and reduce our chances of capitulating to the two primary modes of death in this country.”
Of course, no one can control family history or sex, and aging is an inescapable part of life. But in focusing on microinflammation, itself still a subject of medical research, Johnson and Dahiya align themselves with the other alternative to treating symptoms: preventing the disease.

In 2009, a Pew Research survey found that “more help flows from child to parent than the other way around” once parents reach the age of 65, whether in the form of financial or everyday assistance.
“Unfortunately,” writes Tim Prosch, “if you’re anything like the hundreds of families and medical personnel and end-of-life practitioners whom I’ve interviewed in preparation for this book, you will most likely put off indefinitely any substantive discussion with your kids about what they might expect in your last years.”
Enter The Other Talk: A Guide to Talking with Your Adult Children About the Rest of Your Life, recipient of an APEX award for publishing excellence and the April 2014 Book of the Month in The Washington Post. The book also has garnered accolades from the likes of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and the Journal of Financial Planning.
Any dialogue surrounding end-of-life care touches on deep apprehensions about aging and responsibility. The same Pew survey reported that 76 percent of older parents have talked with their kids about their will, while only 55 percent have broached what to do when they can no longer live independently.
The Other Talk helps readers begin and sustain the conversations that form a lasting partnership between aging parents and their grown-up children. Prosch urges readers to talk about their fears with their families instead of waiting for life to make decisions for them.
“It will create a new dimension to the family relationship that comes from participating in, rather than suffering through, your last years,” he writes.

“Target confusion” is a state in which an abundance of possible actions causes the mind to balk at choosing any of them. One way of breaking out of the ensuing immobility is to choose something — anything — followed by another arbitrary choice, and another after that.
“Typical management efforts currently lack any comprehensive, practical science,” observes Factory Physics for Managers: How Leaders Improve Performance in a Post-Lean Six Sigma World. These efforts also lack “practical understanding of the underlying natural behavior of the operations they are trying to manage.”
Co-written by Edward Pound, Jeffery Bell and Mark Spearman, Factory Physics for Managers is a practical guide to preventing both managerial decision-making shutdown and exclusively near-term initiatives.
In looking closely at the industry practices of corporations like Toyota and Boeing, the book offers both reassurance and a challenge: Everyone, at some point, gets it wrong. But corporate leaders put their mistakes to work in developing and executing operations strategy, and don’t wait for technological innovations to solve their organizational problems. Put another way, “Factory Physics science objectively describes what will work … and what will not.”

Lew Sauder and co-author Jeff Porter introduce their novel, The Reluctant Mentor, into a contentious demographical environment: Currently, four generations spanning the better part of a century are active in the marketplace at the same time.
Friction among the age groups, all of whom have different value systems and work styles, is unsurprising, says Robert DelCampo, associate dean and a Bill Daniels Business Ethics Fellow at the University of New Mexico’s Anderson School of Management, in his foreword. “As sage older workers, we believe that mentoring relationships go only one way.”
But mentoring goes both ways, argue Sauder and Porter, using fictional company Stewart Bicycle Manufacturing to demonstrate how all generations have things to learn from those who precede and follow them.
“Call it mentoring, or mutual respect for anyone you have the opportunity to work with,” they say in the preface, “but every interaction is an opportunity to both impart and gain knowledge, regardless of the apparent gaps in experience.”

In his third book, Steve Yastrow has some sales advice that calls for such essential changes to traditional technique, he boiled it down to three words: Ditch the pitch.
Comprised of Yastrow’s observations on connecting with an audience, and with numerous musicians and improv comedians weighing in throughout, Ditch the Pitch advances the notion that the less a sales prospect feels “pitched to,” the more likely it is that a business relationship will develop.
The author of Brand Harmony and We: The Ideal Customer Relationship, Yastrow places customer experience at the core of any sales dialogue. “It is a privilege to enter this stream of consciousness and be noticed by your customer,” he says in We.
The takeaway of Ditch the Pitch is that building a business proposal in real time around the customer’s needs — and how you can meet them — is not merely a good way to turn a prospect into a buyer. It also respects the time and intelligence of customers, and involves all parties in a dialogue through which they can reach the best possible outcome together.