Author: Biz India

Author: Lawrence S. Levin Publisher: iUniverse, 177 pages Book Review by Nano Khilnani These days, to stay competitive in business, top management must be not only anticipate what the next challenge could be, and be prepared to not only meet that challenge, but also be proactive to become No.1 in overcoming it and forging ahead to become the leader in an industry or a particular segment of an industry. Lawrence S. Levin PhD, a psychologist and management consultant, has helped CEOs of many Fortune 500 companies for 25 years develop not just top-performing teams but “top teams,” or those that know and understand what he describes as “the Now, the New, and the Next.” “Top teams” are those “that drive a company’s alignment, focus and strategy where they need to be and provide the best results,” he points out. Levin explains that such teams are capable of taking on “today’s challenges of greater complexity, volatility, speed of change and demand for growth.” The book contains case studies, challenging questions and practical advice to help top management develop such teams. He uses a pragmatic and results-driven approach I achieving goals for his clients. The book is very useful because Dr. Levin has great insight into human behavior – having had professional training in psychology – and he uses his knowledge and experience in business strategy and execution to achieve the...

Author: Debbie Jordan Publisher: Outskirts Press. 163 pages Book Review by Paiso Jamakar This book is a compassionate compilation of essays written over the years by Debbie Jordan in a column for the Arizona City Independent Edition. Her fervent belief – which is the thesis of this book – is that poverty and peace cannot co-exist. For there to be peace in the world, poverty must be eradicated? Can permanent peace and total elimination of war be achieved in your lifetime? Unfortunately leaders of many countries are not naturally magnanimous, so they have not done much to alleviate poverty in their lands. Also, she contends that wars have occurred over the millennia and continue to persist till today because they are profitable for the winners. We believe that countries rich with certain resources have been exploited enviously by rulers of other nations who covet those resources, often under the guise of instilling or installing freedom. In other words, war is profitable; peace is not. She writes in her “Ode to Peace”: “Wars may be expensive but peace certainly isn’t profitable except for those privileged few who rake in all the profits of war.” Debbie Jordan has a plan to banish poverty that will lead to permanent peace around the world. But she writes that “peace takes a lot of hard work, day in and day out.” More about her...

Author: Bill Carter Publisher: Plume (Penguin) – 417 pages Book Review by:  Paiso Jamakar This book published in September 2011 is by Bill Carter, a writer on media for The New York Times. It is about the intense competition and drama in television for supremacy among comedy shows and their hosts. Bill Carter has extensive knowledge about, experience with, and contacts in, the television business. In 1995, he had written The Late Shift: Letterman, Leno and the Network Battle for the Late Night, a bestseller, and in 2005, he also authored Desperate Networks. Specifically, the present book is about the controversy that followed after the major American television network NBC, widely-recognized by its colorful, iconic peacock, decided to change the time slots of two of its top shows – The Jay Leno Show and The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien. The media and public relations spectacle that followed this decision affected many lives. It hurt some people financially but it also hugely benefited others. Comedy and talk shows typically aired late at night at 10 pm and later, draw in a lot of viewers and consequently, much revenue from advertisers. They are considered hot properties in the TV business, probably ranking as high if not higher in the number of viewers than for news programs and news-and-discussion shows. The online newspaper The Week reports in a January, 21, 2010...

By the editors of Better Homes and Garden Publisher: Wiley – 480 pages Book Review by Laxmi Chaandi Cooking can be done in two basic ways: placing food in a pan over fire or placing food in a ceramic container that is put in a heated oven. In both instances it is the heat that softens the food and makes it eatable. Which is the better method of cooking? Well, each one has its advantages and disadvantages. Placing food in a metal pan, skillet, wok or container made of another material over fire affords you the chance to add ingredients and seasonings little by little and taste the food as it is cooking, so you can make adjustments as you go along. But the disadvantage is that you have to keep watch over the food and cannot relax while the food is being cooked. On the other hand, placing food with all the ingredients and seasonings all at the same time in a ceramic or heat-resistance dish does not give you the opportunity to taste the food as it is being heated and becoming edible, to eat. But the advantage over cooking in the oven over atop a fire is that once you have mixed the food and added all the ingredients and seasonings, you can simply leave the food in the heated oven, put the timer on and...

Author: John Schlimm Publisher: Da Capo – Lifelong Books – 164 pages Book Review by: Laxmi Chaandi This delightfully interesting book has 75 recipes of different types of food that contain liquor, nonalcoholic drinks and other liquids, including ice cream. The highly creative John Schlimm treats you with all kinds of delicacies spiced up or made tastier with alcoholic drinks ranging from brandy to rum to whiskey and nonalcoholic drinks ranging from apple juice to sorbet to vanilla cream. The types of foods he presents with his imaginative twists are also wide ranging. Be it appetizers or other starters, breakfasts or brunches, dinners or desserts, light main dishes or lunches, snacks, soups or sweet treats, there isn’t a dull recipe. Almost everything is a surprise in this one-of-a-kind book. Beautiful full-color photos – many being full-page ones – are well placed and neatly organized in this compact book which has a two-page list of booze he suggests you should stock your liquor cabinet with. This slim book has inset tabs that make it easy for you to find the type of recipe you are looking for. Again, Schlimm’s creative imagination is at work even in naming the tabs. Here are some of them in the pages in the contents section: Where else would you find “boozy soups” or “drunken desserts” or “plastered party starters” or “sloshed suppers”? Nowhere else...