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REACH

CREATE THE BIGGEST POSSIBLE AUDIENCE FOR YOUR MESSAGE, BOOK, OR CAUSE

A straightforward guide to building and keeping an audience through authenticity, perseverance, and generosity.

A debut guide that offers tips and tricks for expanding the reach of one’s brand.

In an age of ever increasing connectivity, getting one’s message to your target audience can be a big challenge. As the founder and CEO of digital marketing agency Weaving Influence, Robinson wants to help everyone with a book, message, cause, or another endeavor expand and strengthen their audience. She defines reachas “expanding your audience plus having a lasting impact” and promotes the “commitments” that one needs to gain a larger audience. In a nutshell: Expanding one’s reach, she says, depends on regularly delivering valuable content over an extended period of time and in a manner that focuses on others’ needs instead of one’s own. The body of the book offers detailed suggestions and provides answers to issues commonly faced by those wanting to build, expand, or hold onto online readership. Robinson discusses options for content creation and addresses questions about when, why, and how to write a book. There’s also advice about how to manage a permission-based email list. She aims to help people find clarity about their goals in order to improve their messaging, which should reflect one’s “authentic self.” The tone of this book is highly encouraging and advises readers not to give up “because creating reach may take a long time.” Robinson effectively offers case studies to support her suggestions and also draws on her own personal experiences. The book’s structure is consistently clear and enables readers to consider the author’s strategies in a logical manner. For those looking for an explicit how-to manual for building an online presence, this is a good beginning; however, some readers may have to look elsewhere for more specifics. In essence, this is more of a why-to manual on the need for strong marketing and valuable content.

A straightforward guide to building and keeping an audience through authenticity, perseverance, and generosity.

Pub Date: April 19, 2022

ISBN: 978-1-5230-0087-6

Page Count: 224

Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers

Review Posted Online: April 27, 2022

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THE CULTURE MAP

BREAKING THROUGH THE INVISIBLE BOUNDARIES OF GLOBAL BUSINESS

These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.

A helpful guide to working effectively with people from other cultures.

“The sad truth is that the vast majority of managers who conduct business internationally have little understanding about how culture is impacting their work,” writes Meyer, a professor at INSEAD, an international business school. Yet they face a wider array of work styles than ever before in dealing with clients, suppliers and colleagues from around the world. When is it best to speak or stay quiet? What is the role of the leader in the room? When working with foreign business people, failing to take cultural differences into account can lead to frustration, misunderstanding or worse. Based on research and her experiences teaching cross-cultural behaviors to executive students, the author examines a handful of key areas. Among others, they include communicating (Anglo-Saxons are explicit; Asians communicate implicitly, requiring listeners to read between the lines), developing a sense of trust (Brazilians do it over long lunches), and decision-making (Germans rely on consensus, Americans on one decider). In each area, the author provides a “culture map scale” that positions behaviors in more than 20 countries along a continuum, allowing readers to anticipate the preferences of individuals from a particular country: Do they like direct or indirect negative feedback? Are they rigid or flexible regarding deadlines? Do they favor verbal or written commitments? And so on. Meyer discusses managers who have faced perplexing situations, such as knowledgeable team members who fail to speak up in meetings or Indians who offer a puzzling half-shake, half-nod of the head. Cultural differences—not personality quirks—are the motivating factors behind many behavioral styles. Depending on our cultures, we understand the world in a particular way, find certain arguments persuasive or lacking merit, and consider some ways of making decisions or measuring time natural and others quite strange.

These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.

Pub Date: May 27, 2014

ISBN: 978-1-61039-250-1

Page Count: 288

Publisher: PublicAffairs

Review Posted Online: April 15, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014

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GOOD ECONOMICS FOR HARD TIMES

Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.

“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.

It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.

Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.

Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0

Page Count: 432

Publisher: PublicAffairs

Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019

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