Author: Biz India

Author: Mikal E. Bellicove and Joe Kraynak Publisher: Alpha Publishing – 285 Book Review by Sonu Chandiram Facebook is an amazing social media platform that has taken the world by storm. It has over 800 million users and growing. People new to it just cannot believe how easy it is to find long lost relatives and friends and reconnect with them. It is wonderful to see and keep in touch with them. With Facebook, you can add friends to your “collection” in rapid-fire fashion. You can also either become pleasantly surprised or bewildered by the number and variety of “add friend” requests you get. If you have plenty of time, you can go on adding more and more people, knowing that as your number of Facebook friends grows, there will be even more friend requests, more postings on your site, more Facebook emails, more requests to add your birth date to their calendar, which will generate even more “happy birthday” greetings via email and postings. I believe in T. Harv Eker’s saying: “whatever you focus on, expands.” What do you wan to focus on? It can all be overwhelming. It is up to you to decide how much or how little time you are going to spend on Facebook. For the undisciplined, Facebook is like a candy store and you are the kid who gets all excited about all...

Authors: Sherry Beck Paprocki and Ray Paprocki Publisher: Alpha – 251 pages Book Review by:  Sonu Chandiram In today’s world of social media, it is a lot quicker than ever before for you to reach out to people and get to know a little – or a lot – about them. And for others to know you. The authors of this book point out, in a letter at the outset of the book, that it is also a lot easier for you to reach out to thousands of people and spread information about you to them. The big question is, what is it about you that you want people to know? The bigger questions are: what is your purpose? and: what do you want to accomplish? Once you have thought out well enough about these questions and come up with honest answers, you can start developing a personal brand based on your purpose and your intended accomplishments. This book is your guide to branding yourself. Taking stock of your assets and liabilities is a starting point to building your unique brand. I believe this should not only come from within you but also from your family and friends. What is the one big or unique characteristic that makes you or can make you stand out from others? Ask yourself, but also ask others who know you well. “Reach out...

Authors: Gina Abudi and Brandon Toropov Publisher: Alpha (www.idiotsguides.com), 336 pages Book Review by Paiso Jamakar Small businesses (with fewer than 500 employees) comprise 99.9 percent of all (27.4 million of the 27.5 million) businesses in the United States, according to the Small Business Administration. These businesses have created 65 percent of net new jobs in the past 17 years. They employ half of all US employees and create nearly half of the non-farm Gross Domestic Product (GDP). They constitute 44 percent of total US private payroll and hire 43 percent of all high-tech workers, such as scientists, engineers, computer programmers and other such skilled people in this country. Small businesses also made up more than 97 percent of all US exporters and in Fiscal Year 2008 of the US government and contributed 31 percent to the overall export volume. It is also interesting to note that more than half of all small businesses (52 percent) are home-based. So with small businesses in the US being nearly all of US businesses, creating two-thirds of new jobs, and being responsible for about half of the country’s total economic output as measured by the GDP, we cannot overemphasize the importance of this business sector in the overall business map of the United States. So it is in the interest not only of the US economy but for individual business owners themselves...

Author: John Torinus Jr. Publisher:Ben Bella Books – 210 pages Book Review by: Sonu Chandiram With health care expense in the United States totaling around $2.4 trillion, it constitutes   nearly 16 percent or almost a whopping sixth of the country’s current gross domestic product (GDP) of $15.1 trillion. This is by far the single largest component of the U.S. economy and its annual rates of growth over the last two decades have been no less than alarming. The Obamacare law, while it got health insurance coverage for some of the uninsured, did nothing to slow down the rising premiums of health insurance firms. On the contrary, its provisions will do the exact opposite for employers: raise further the already fast-rising premiums for health insurance coverage for their employees. In 2010, the rate of increase of health insurance premiums for most companies ranged from at least 10 percent to more than 20 percent, according to the author of this book. Out-of-control prices for health care have affected all levels of government in the United States, all States, all companies and all individuals. The Federal government continues to pay more and more every year to provide health care to each person over 65 covered under Medicare and each lower-income person covered by Medicaid. State governments’ budgets have gone out of balance due to insuring their employees for health care. Perhaps the...

Author: Jim Clifton, Chairman of Gallup Publisher: Gallup Press, 225 pages Book Review by Paiso Jamakar This is truly an eye-opening book with high impact on what Gallup polls have found to be the No.1 issue for seven billion people in the world today: jobs. It is written in a bold, no-holds-barred style by Jim Clifton, chairman of the now-global Gallup organization, with 40 offices worldwide in 30 countries. Jobs are what the seven billion people on earth all want, more than anything else, Jim Clifton says, for themselves, for their families, and through their leaders, for their nations.  The imperative that jobs are the primary want and need in the world today is based on six years of global data collection and tabulation by the Gallup organization, he reveals. It makes but perfect sense that jobs are desired more than love, more than freedom, more than anything else. After all, the main cause of most wars has been then need for economic well-being, which is achieved through the plentiful availability of good jobs, Clifton points out. The need for jobs has also been the subject of constant, recurrent talk by President Obama. Whereas there has been so much talk by him about job creation, the fact is, based on current data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, some two-and-a-half million jobs have been lost since February 2009,...