Word: authorities
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...author cites handbag maker Coach as a firm that fell to earth trying to bridge market segments. Since the 1970s, Coach had been known as a luxury brand with a status more like Louis Vuitton's or Hermès'. But from 2004 to early 2008, the company opened 94 new stores and dozens of outlet shops. By the end of 2007, same-store sales were dipping for the first time in years. Says the author: "Convenience acts like antimatter to aura and identity." Likewise, Motorola took its sleek, fashionable $400 Razr cell phone and flooded the market with...
...measure of how contentious work relationships can get that the author, a psychiatrist, draws on hostage-negotiation techniques to instruct readers on how to deal with "defiant executives, angry employees or self-destructing management teams." A frequent reaction to such recalcitrance is arguing. Stop raising your voice, says Goulston. A better course would be to "listen, ask, mirror, and reflect back to people what you've heard." By making people feel understood, you are likely to see a more conciliatory colleague. Mission accomplished...
Save more. It's never easy. But it's not as difficult as you may think, and cheaping out is cool today. "It's time to become an obsessive saver," says Dave Ramsey, author of The Total Money Makeover. Start looking at what you spend on cars, travel, cable and phone services. You may be able to save hundreds of dollars a month right there. Refinance the mortgage while rates are still low. Use any new savings to pay down your highest-rate credit cards first. An alternative approach is to target your smallest debts first in order to experience...
...aspiring potter, is sketching the metalwork and camping out secretly amid the statuary. On the lam from a bleak working-class future in England's industrial north, Philip has the good fortune to be discovered by two sympathetic boys, one of whom is the son of children's-book author Olive Wellwood. Soon our ceramist is apprenticed to Wellwood family friend Benedict Fludd, a master potter...
Olive, who is the picture of hospitable fertility - she describes herself to Philip as a "tree with birds in it" - represents that brand of early-20th century literary imagination that found its best expression in works for children. (Byatt modeled her on E. Nesbit, author of The Railway Children and Five Children and It.) What could be more delightful than a mother who writes personalized fairy tales for each of her kids? Except, of course, that fairy tales can be the darkest kind there are, and in the case of Olive (and Fludd and most of the other creative types...