Books about Consulting from Amazon.com

Cosentino demystifies the consulting case interview He takes you inside a typical interview by exploring the various types of case questions and he shares with you a system that will help you answer today's most sophisticated case questions..
Price: $20.00 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Click here for the complete DVD content that accompanies this title.

Pioneering computer graphics author Deke McClelland updates his bestselling hands-on tutorial for Adobe Photoshop CS3, the latest version of this industry-standard image editing and production program. As with previous editions, Photoshop CS3 One-on-One guides readers step by step through the program's features and functionality. A key appeal of the One-on-One series is the two hours of DVD-video material included. Once you read about a particular technique, you can see how it's done first hand in the video. The combination is uniquely effective. And hugely popular.

Whether you're a first-timer looking to learn Photoshop, or a seasoned user interested in the groundbreaking features of CS3, Deke's conversational style and carefully structured lessons guide you through everything you need to know to get up and running, and then takes you well into mastery. You'll learn to:

• Grasp fundamental and advanced concepts and theory
• Use best practices, and techniques for making the most of Photoshop CS3
• Build relevant, real-world projects
• Use Photoshop's workflow and file handling features
• Use the combined power of Bridge + Camera Raw to process your digital photos
• Choose the right technique for converting your images to black & white
• Create beautiful multilayered documents including posters and flyers
• And much more

A Photoshop expert, sought-after computer graphics and design lecturer and author of over 70 books, Deke creates a classroom environment in Photoshop CS3 One-on-One with written instruction and video training -- except that you get one-on-one attention as you proceed from lesson to lesson at your own pace. It's like having private lessons with the author.

Whether you're an enthusiast, prosumer, creative pro, technical pro, or newcomer, Deke's book will have you speaking fluent Photoshop CS3 in no time.

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Price: $22.98 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Revised and Expanded Edition

It's often reported that the number one fear among American adults is public speaking But in today's competitive business world, effective communication is a crucial skill, and the cost of being less than effective is quite high. From the White House to boardrooms worldwide, Tim Koegel has strengthened presentations, media relations and communications skills of CEOs and world leaders alike with his renowned coaching abilities. His new book, The Exceptional Presenter, lays out his techniques in a format perfectly suited to today's busy world..
Price: $13.60 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Too often, finance courses stop short of making a connection between textbook finance and the problems of real-world business. Financial Modeling bridges this gap between theory and practice by providing a nuts-and-bolts guide to solving common financial models with spreadsheets. Simon Benninga takes the reader step by step through each model, showing how it can be solved using Microsoft Excel.

The long-awaited third edition of this standard text maintains the "cookbook" features and Excel dependence that have made the first and second editions so popular. It also offers significant new material, with new chapters covering such topics as bank valuation, the Black-Litterman approach to portfolio optimization, Monte Carlo methods and their applications to option pricing, and using array functions and formulas. Other chapters, including those on basic financial calculations, portfolio models, calculating the variance-covariance matrix, and generating random numbers, have been revised, with many offering substantially new and improved material. Other areas covered include financial statement modeling, leasing, standard portfolio problems, value at risk (VaR), real options, duration and immunization, and term structure modeling. Technical chapters treat such topics as data tables, matrices, the Gauss-Seidel method, and tips for using Excel. The last section of the text covers the Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) techniques needed for the book. The accompanying CD contains Excel worksheets and solutions to end-of-chapter exercises.

Praise for the previous editions:

"Benninga has a clear writing style and uses numerous illustrations, which make this book one of the best texts on using Excel for finance that I've seen."
--Ed McCarthy, Ticker Magazine

"The author describes this as a 'cookbook' and that is a good analogy.... Its breadth is extensive, covering simple present valuing and cost of capital ... to the likes of real options and early exercise of American-style options.... A worthwhile acquisition."
--Paul Dentskevitch, Risk Magazine

"Financial Modeling is highly-recommended to readers who are interested in an introduction to basic, traditional approaches to financial modeling and analysis, as well as to those who want to learn more about applying spreadsheet software to financial analysis."
--Edward Weiss, Journal of Computational Intelligence in Finance

"Financial Modeling belongs on the desk of every finance professional. Its no-nonsense, hands-on approach makes it an indispensable tool."
--Hal R. Varian, Dean, School of Information Management and Systems, University of California, Berkeley

"This is applied finance theory for the professional at its best. As a student, I and countless others learnt the intricacies of Lotus and financial theory from Professor Benninga's first book—Numerical Techniques in Finance. Now, as a professional, I do not have to 're-invent the wheel' in Excel. An invaluable guide. A must for all financial analysts."
--Vikas Nath, Global Strategist, Emerging Equity Markets, Union Bank of Switzerland, London.
Price: $62.99 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Best known for his Border Trilogy, hailed in the San Francisco Chronicle as "an American classic to stand with the finest literary achievements of the century," Cormac McCarthy has written ten rich and often brutal novels, including the bestselling No Country for Old Men, and The Road. Profoundly dark, told in spare, searing prose, The Road is a post-apocalyptic masterpiece, one of the best books we've read this year, but in case you need a second (and expert) opinion, we asked Dennis Lehane, author of equally rich, occasionally bleak and brutal novels, to read it and give us his take. Read his glowing review below. --Daphne Durham

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Guest Reviewer: Dennis Lehane

Dennis Lehane, master of the hard-boiled thriller, generated a cult following with his series about private investigators Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro, wowed readers with the intense and gut-wrenching Mystic River, blew fans all away with the mind-bending Shutter Island, and switches gears with Coronado, his new collection of gritty short stories (and one play).

Cormac McCarthy sets his new novel, The Road, in a post-apocalyptic blight of gray skies that drizzle ash, a world in which all matter of wildlife is extinct, starvation is not only prevalent but nearly all-encompassing, and marauding bands of cannibals roam the environment with pieces of human flesh stuck between their teeth. If this sounds oppressive and dispiriting, it is. McCarthy may have just set to paper the definitive vision of the world after nuclear war, and in this recent age of relentless saber-rattling by the global powers, it's not much of a leap to feel his vision could be not far off the mark nor, sadly, right around the corner. Stealing across this horrific (and that's the only word for it) landscape are an unnamed man and his emaciated son, a boy probably around the age of ten. It is the love the father feels for his son, a love as deep and acute as his grief, that could surprise readers of McCarthy's previous work. McCarthy's Gnostic impressions of mankind have left very little place for love. In fact that greatest love affair in any of his novels, I would argue, occurs between the Billy Parham and the wolf in The Crossing. But here the love of a desperate father for his sickly son transcends all else. McCarthy has always written about the battle between light and darkness; the darkness usually comprises 99.9% of the world, while any illumination is the weak shaft thrown by a penlight running low on batteries. In The Road, those batteries are almost out--the entire world is, quite literally, dying--so the final affirmation of hope in the novel's closing pages is all the more shocking and maybe all the more enduring as the boy takes all of his father's (and McCarthy's) rage at the hopeless folly of man and lays it down, lifting up, in its place, the oddest of all things: faith. --Dennis Lehane

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Price: $11.99 [Notify me when price goes down.]

David Maister, Charles Green, and Robert Galford--consultants on professional-service management and customer-relation issues--believe nobody can become successful as a business guru until they first gain the confidence of their clients In The Trusted Advisor, the authors effectively build their case through anecdote and illustration, then relay a solid series of relevant suggestions applicable to both would-be consultants and those already active in the field. Among their most potent suggestions is a practical, five-step development process that encourages outsiders to engage clients by focusing attention on the issues and individuals at hand; listening both to what they say and what they leave unsaid; framing the immediate problem from their perspective; envisioning with them how a solution might appear; and committing jointly to the actions and resources that will bring it about. Also particularly useful is the examination of trust-building during four phases of a client-advisor alliance: at the time the relationship is consummated; during the assignment; after the assignment; and when "cross-selling," or establishing affiliations with the customer's associates. Boosting its utility, the book is filled with concise, easily adopted tips like "return phone calls unbelievably fast" and "always tell the truth and not what the client wants to hear." --Howard Rothman.
Price: $8.50 [Notify me when price goes down.]

The second edition of Peter Block's Flawless Consulting gracefully updates what many consider the best resource of its kind. New chapters on implementation, "whole-system" strategies, and ethics are included, but in general it simply fine-tunes Block's proven advice to match the transformations that business and society have undergone since initial publication two decades ago. "The days of long studies and expert-driven answers are passing," the author proclaims in his new preface. "The task of the consultant is increasingly to build the capacity of clients to make their own assessments and answer their own questions." He then subtly modifies his established recommendations accordingly for every step, from the initial client meeting and problem diagnosis through data collection and the execution of solutions. In the section on "Conducting a Group Feedback Meeting," for example, he advises: "Treat the group as a collection of individuals.... Ask each person what he or she wants from the meeting. This will surface differences and force the group to take responsibility for some of the difficulties that may arise." --Howard Rothman.
Price: $27.98 [Notify me when price goes down.]

For the first time in paperback, international expert and consultant David Maister offers a brilliant and accessible guide to every management issue at play in professional firms.

Professional firms differ from other business enterprises in two distinct ways: first, they provide highly customized services and thus cannot apply many of the management principles developed for product-based industries. Second, professional services are highly personalized, involving the skills of individuals. Such firms must therefore compete not only for clients but also for talented professionals.

Drawing on more than ten years of research and consulting to these unique and creative companies, David Maister explores issues ranging from marketing and business development to multinational strategies, human resources policies to profit improvement, strategic planning to effective leadership. While these issues can be complex. Maister simplifies them by recognizing that "every professional service firm in the world, regardless of size, specific profession, or country of operation, has the same mission statement: outstanding service to clients, satisfying careers for its people, and financial success for its owners.".
Price: $13.00 [Notify me when price goes down.]

This revised edition of the classic Core Javaâ„¢, Volume I–Fundamentals, is the definitive guide to Java for serious programmers who want to put Java to work on real projects.

Fully updated for the new Java SE 6 platform, this no-nonsense tutorial and reliable reference illuminates the most important language and library features with thoroughly tested real-world examples. The example programs have been carefully crafted to be easy to understand as well as useful in practice, so you can rely on them as an outstanding starting point for your own code.

Volume I is designed to quickly bring you up to speed on what’s new in Java SE 6 and to help you make the transition as efficiently as possible, whether you’re upgrading from an earlier version of Java or migrating from another language. The authors concentrate on the fundamental concepts of the Java language, along with the basics of user-interface programming. You’ll find detailed, insightful coverage of

• Java fundamentals
• Object-oriented programming
• Interfaces and inner classes
• Reflection and proxies
• The event listener model
• GUI programming with Swing
• Packaging applications
• Exception handling
• Logging and debugging
• Generic programming
• The collections framework
• Concurrency

For detailed coverage of XML processing, networking, databases, internationalization, security, advanced AWT/Swing, and other advanced features, look for the forthcoming eighth edition of Core Java™, Volume II—Advanced Features (ISBN: 978-0-13-235479-0).

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Price: $32.29 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Simplifies the intricacies of the case interview process by approaching them from the perspective of the consulting firms. Emphasis is placed on developing the tools that will make the candidate effective in both the interviews and on the first day of the job.

This book presents a method for building a framework for any possible case issue on the fly. It also provides one pre-built framework that should cover 80% or more of the cases a candidate will encounter. Also included are resume tips, networking advice, and general and behavioral interview preparation techniques..
Price: $29.95 [Notify me when price goes down.]