Between capitalism and socialism

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Alan Ebenstein, William Ebenstein, Edwin Fogelman

Discusses the historical background, psychological roots, strengths, weaknesses, practices, evolution, and future of these political systems.

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Ali Soofastaei

An intelligent virtual assistant (IVA) or intelligent personal assistant (IPA) is a software agent that can perform tasks or services for an individual based on commands or questions. Improving the quality of artificial intelligence (AI) learning algorithms increases the application of IVAs in different areas. The capabilities and usage of IVAs are expanding rapidly. IVAs, such as Siri, Alexa, and chatbots, help individuals and companies to make better decisions. They learn from collected historical data, and the quality of their recommendations depends on the size of the database they are using. Modern technology has provided a huge capacity for data collection and storage. This means that the new generation of IVAs can help people much better than the previous one. This book examines the applications of IVAs in different areas and presents a clear vision of how this new technology can be used in current and future activities. Chapters cover such topics as the scientific development of VA technology, generating voices for IVAs, the ethics of using IVAs, and using IVAs in banking and finance.

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Josh Leibner, Gershon Mader, Alan Weiss

Even the most well thought out initiatives will fail without true employee ownership, accountability, and engagement. Yet most managers and executives don’t have a clear system for ensuring the support they need from those around them. The Power of Strategic Commitment helps readers improve their strategic processes by enlisting the support of managers, employees, boards, suppliers, investors, and others. The book outlines the key factors that determine commitment, providing powerful ways to build buy-in that cost nothing. Readers will discover how to:continuously measure buy-ininvolve everyone in creating their own piece of a larger organizational futuretailor commitment strategies for individual employeeskeep everyone on the road to achieving stated goalscreate a commitment-inspiring rewards systemhire fully-engaged talentThis book provides practical methods for getting everyone behind the kind of important organizational actions that drive results.

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Dan Dimancescu

"How would you like to have a consultant interrogate you in detail about your company's product, quality standards, and shipping methods, force you to admit exactly how you and your staff had dropped the ball, and ask you point-blank what you were going to do about it--while every single one of your employees watched and listened? According to Dan Dimancescu, this kind of meeting is not only a good idea--it's just one ripple of a huge wave of change in management that is absolutely vital to the future of American business." "Dimancescu, who has been a consultant to such companies as AT&T, Boeing, Digital, HP, NASA, and Xerox, has witnessed scenes like the one above over and over in Japan. Those employees and the boss who was being put on the hot seat were involved in a concept still very foreign to American business: cross functional management.^ Holistic in nature, cross functional management aims that everyone from the CEO on down to the delivery truck driver understands the company's goals, failings, and triumphs, and the part he or she contributes. Instead of workers blindly following the new systems or procedures instituted by management, everyone learns to improve their performance as a group, and to internalize knowledge across the whole team. It's a system in which process--not just results, but how to get things done--is the top priority. The results are, quite simply, astonishing." "Dimancescu believes that cross functional management can and must be our future. He looks at the recent achievements of companies including Ford, AT&T, and Hewlett Packard, and the growing popularity of holistic initiatives like time-to-market and concurrent engineering.^ He details what senior executives must do to lay the groundwork, and describes six steps to follow: access the opportunity, appoint a process core team, target a pilot project, use the cross function "tool kit," review the pilot, and plan and implement a rollout. The Seamless Enterprise provides the vision, systematic model, tools, and techniques every company needs to achieve the new dynamic edge--and unleash the long-stifled collective genius in American enterprise."--BOOK JACKET.