Books about Redefining from Amazon.com

The U.S. health care system is in crisis. At stake are the quality of care for millions of Americans and the financial well-being of individuals and employers squeezed by skyrocketing costs--not to mention the stability of state and federal government budgets.

In Redefining Health Care, internationally renowned strategy expert Michael E. Porter and innovation expert Elizabeth Olmsted Teisberg reveal the underlying and largely overlooked causes of the problem and provide a powerful prescription for change. The authors argue that participants in the health care system have competed to shift costs, accumulate bargaining power, and restrict services rather than create value for patients. This zero-sum competition takes place at the wrong level--among health plans, networks, and hospitals--rather than where it matters most: in the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of specific health conditions.

In spite of competition among these systems, the patient care cycle is poorly coordinated. The fractured system undermines both efficiency and quality of outcomes.

Redefining Health Care lays out a breakthrough framework for redefining health care competition based on patient value over the full cycle of care—from prevention and diagnosis through recovery or long-term disease management. With specific recommendations for hospitals, doctors, health plans, employers, and policy makers, this book shows how to move to value-based competition on results that will unleash stunning improvements in quality and efficiency..
Price: $16.00 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Why do so many global strategies fail—despite companies’ powerful brands and other border-crossing advantages? Seduced by market size, the illusion of a borderless, “flat” world, and the allure of similarities, firms launch one-size-fits-all strategies

But cross-border differences are larger than we often assume, explains Pankaj Ghemawat in Redefining Global Strategy. Most economic activity—including direct investment, tourism, and communication—happens locally, not internationally.

In this “semiglobalized” world, one-size-fits-all strategies don’t stand a chance. Companies must instead reckon with cross-border differences. Ghemawat shows you how—by providing tools for:

• Assessing the cultural, administrative, geographic, and economic differences between countries at the industry level and deciding which ones merit attention.
  
• Tracking the implications of particular border-crossing moves for your company’s ability to create value.
  
• Creating superior performance with strategies optimized for adaptation (adjusting to differences), aggregation (overcoming differences), and arbitrage (exploiting differences), and for compound objectives.
  
• In-depth examples reveal how companies such as Cemex, Toyota, Procter & Gamble, Tata Consultancy Services, IBM, and GE Healthcare have adroitly managed cross-border differences—as well as how other well-known companies have failed at this challenge.

Crucial for any business competing across borders, this book will transform the way you approach global strategy..
Price: $16.86 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Postman suggests that the current crisis in our educational system derives from its failure to supply students with a translucent, unifying "narrative" like those that inspired earlier generations. Instead, today's schools promote the false "gods" of economic utility, consumerism, or ethnic separatism and resentment. What alternative strategies can we use to instill our children with a sense of global citizenship, healthy intellectual skepticism, respect of America's traditions, and appreciation of its diversity? In answering this question, The End of Education restores meaning and common sense to the arena in which they are most urgently needed.



"Informal and clear...Postman's ideas about education are appealingly fresh."--New York Times Book Review.
Price: $7.89 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Sex and sexuality are hot topics these days. But many single adults are tired of the "how far is too far?" approach because it doesn't go far enough. Why does the discussion stop at the physical? What about the deeper spiritual and relational aspects of sexuality? Pioneering Christian sex therapists Doug Rosenau and Michael Todd Wilson team up in this helpful and hopeful book about understanding sexuality and intimacy beyond what our "do it if it feels good" culture says it is. Providing a much-needed spiritual perspective to the sexuality debate, the authors tackle difficult topics from a biblical foundation to help single adults establish practical models for maintaining purity and creating a healthy sexuality. With real-life personal stories, Soul Virgins helps singles accept their sexuality as a godly discipline. Rosenau and Wilson provide a 3-D discussion of body, soul, and spirit that proves sexuality is ultimately more about relational intimacy than just the physical act of sex..
Price: $2.31 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Unlike practically every other segment of the modern business world, the corporate-sales department has changed very little from the rigid organizational framework it first attained back in the gray-flannel '60s. But even that bastion of traditional business structure is starting to evolve, as customers at all levels begin to reconsider their expectations, purchasing patterns, and criteria for establishing and maintaining relationships with sales professionals. Rethinking the Sales Force, by Neil Rackham and John De Vincentis, is an innovative attempt to give today's salespeople a push in the right direction before the inevitable sea change now developing totally overtakes them and undermines their potential for future success. Rackham, author of Spin Selling, and De Vincentis, an independent sales and marketing consultant, use leading real-world examples such as Microsoft, IBM, and Charles Schwab to show how the commercial viability of assorted products and services can be dramatically improved by determining the real needs of three different types of buyers--whom they call "intrinsic value customers," "extrinsic value customers," and "strategic value customers"--and then developing the appropriate sales strategies to meet them. --Howard Rothman.
Price: $5.00 [Notify me when price goes down.]

"This book is a potent reminder of what it means when teachers teach whole human beings—their minds, hearts, and souls. Erickson helps us recall what all great teachers know: quality teaching is about building young lives."
—Carol Ann Tomlinson, Professor, University of Virginia
Author, The Parallel Curriculum

"Erickson sets the standard for concept-based curriculum. Her work offers a theoretically rich and eminently practical approach for constructing curriculum around rich, transferable concepts. The third edition extends this seminal work for the benefit of educators and their students."
—Jay McTighe, Educational Consultant, McTighe and Associates
Author, Understanding by Design

Help students analyze and synthesize information for a deeper understanding of big ideas!

This updated edition of the classic bestseller on curriculum design for quality instruction provides practical structures, planning tools, and specific classroom examples of effective teaching strategies. The author focuses on the need for curriculum and instruction that allows students to move beyond factual learning to a level of understanding where knowledge transfers readily to new situations and thinking becomes integrated. The book's wide-ranging topics include:

• Aligning local curriculum with state and national content standards
• Using brain-based teaching methods
• Developing higher-order thinking skills
• Assessing and reporting student progress
• Creating a lifelong love of learning in students

This invaluable resource encourages teachers to create an educational environment that challenges students' personal intellect, engages their spirits, and fosters a greater understanding of the world around them.

(20070719).
Price: $31.55 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Put together your own version of an ideal relationship, embrace the full capacity of your heart to express love, redefine the potential of a friendship, imagine a thousand ways to make love to yourself and to anyone else you care about. Radicalize your relationship by imagining your wildest ideal partnership together. Avoid stagnancy by challenging your old familiar routine and re-inventing new levels of commitment. Face your true desires in life by asking yourself what you really want from all of your connections..
Price: $8.63 [Notify me when price goes down.]

The author of this book examines The Purpose Driven Church, The Purpose Driven Life, and the business system that Rick Warren has developed to promote it around the world. He looks carefully at his claims, his use of scripture, his integration of human wisdom with scripture, and his ability to get thousands of pastors to convert from expository Bible preaching to being Purpose Driven. In the end he compares Rick Warren’s version of “church health” with that of Jesus Christ. The reader will see how Rick Warren has indeed redefined Christianity..
Price: $12.99 [Notify me when price goes down.]

The entry of more and more women into science, writes Dianne Hales, has started a quiet revolution, a reassessment of accepted notions of what it is to be a woman. "Women are not the second sex but a separate sex, female to the bone and to the very cells that make up those bones.... In affirming our femaleness, we are not diminishing or discrediting our mental ability or essential equality. Rather, we are recognizing a fundamental source of strength and sustenance."

This "equal but different" stance is crucial to modern gender studies--heretofore, Hales says, most if not all medical and psychological research was done on men, and the conclusions recklessly applied to women. Now, science is finding out that females have their own unique strengths that equip them both for the biological roles they may choose to embrace as well as the societal roles they have often been denied. Hales explodes stereotypical notions of physiology and psychology in this well-researched and liberating book. --Therese Littleton.
Price: $13.72 [Notify me when price goes down.]