The Future of Competition: Co-Creating Unique Value With Customers


C.K. Prahalad - 2004
    K. Prahalad and Venkat Ramaswamy explore why, despite unbounded opportunities for innovation, companies still can't satisfy customers and sustain profitable growth. The explanation for this apparent paradox lies in recognizing the structural changes brought about by the convergence of industries and technologies; ubiquitous connectivity and globalization; and, as a consequence, the evolving role of the consumer from passive recipient to active co-creator of value. Managers need a new framework for value creation. Increasingly, individual customers interact with a network of firms and consumer communities to co-create value. No longer can firms autonomously create value. Neither is value embedded in products and services per se. Products are but an artifact around which compelling individual experiences are created. As a result, the focus of innovation will shift from products and services to experience environments that individuals can interact with to co-construct their own experiences. These personalized co-creation experiences are the source of unique value for consumers and companies alike.In this emerging opportunity space, companies must build new strategic capital—a new theory on how to compete. This book presents a detailed view of the new functional, organizational, infrastructure, and governance capabilities that will be required for competing on experiences and co-creating unique value.

Condemned to Repeat?: The Paradox of Humanitarian Action


Fiona Terry - 2002
    In Condemned to Repeat?, Terry examines the side-effects of intervention by aid organizations and points out the need to acknowledge the political consequences of the choice to give aid. The author makes the controversial claim that aid agencies act as though the initial decision to supply aid satisfies any need for ethical discussion and are often blind to the moral quandaries of aid. Terry focuses on four historically relevant cases: Rwandan camps in Zaire, Afghan camps in Pakistan, Salvadoran and Nicaraguan camps in Honduras, and Cambodian camps in Thailand. Terry was the head of the French section of Medecins sans frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) when it withdrew from the Rwandan refugee camps in Zaire because aid intended for refugees actually strengthened those responsible for perpetrating genocide. This book contains documents from the former Rwandan army and government that were found in the refugee camps after they were attacked in late 1996. This material illustrates how combatants manipulate humanitarian action to their benefit.Condemned to Repeat? makes clear that the paradox of aid demands immediate attention by organizations and governments around the world. The author stresses that, if international agencies are to meet the needs of populations in crisis, their organizational behavior must adjust to the wider political and socioeconomic contexts in which aid occurs.

First Execution


Domenico Starnone - 2007
    But she proudly declares her guilt. What's more, she entrusts him with a task that initially seems a child's game but soon becomes much more serious...

History of Europe


Henri Pirenne - 1936
    We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

Exit Wounds


Rutu Modan - 2006
    Learning that his estranged father may have been a victim of a suicide bombing in Hadera, Koby reluctantly joins the soldier in searching for clues. His death would certainly explain his empty apartment and disconnected phone line. As Koby tries to unravel the mystery of his father's death, he finds himself piecing together not only the last few months of his father's life but his entire identity. With thin, precise lines and luscious watercolors, Rutu Modan creates a portrait of modern Israel, a place where sudden death mingles with the slow dissolution of family ties. Exit Wounds is the North American graphic-novel debut from one of Israel's best-known cartoonists. Modan has received several awards in Israel and abroad, including the Best Illustrated Children's Book Award from the Israel Museum in Jerusalem four times and Young Artist of the Year by the Israel Ministry of Culture. She is a chosen artist of the Israel Cultural Excellence Foundation.

Archaeology: An Introduction


Kevin Greene - 1983
    In a lucid and accessible style Kevin Greene explains the discovery and excavation of sites, outlines major dating methods, gives clear explanations of scientific techniques and examines current theories and controversies.

The Nimrod Flipout


Etgar Keret - 2002
    Weekly, these short stories include a man who finds equal pleasure in his beautiful girlfriend and the fat, soccer-loving lout she turns into after dark; shrinking parents; a case of impotence cured by a pet terrier; and a pessimistic Middle Eastern talking fish. A bestseller in Israel, The Nimrod Flipout is an extraordinary collection from the preeminent Israeli writer of his generation.

Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir


Lauren Slater - 2000
    Mixing memoir with mendacity, Slater examines memories of her youth, when after being diagnosed with a strange illness she developed seizures and neurological disturbances—and the compulsion to lie. Openly questioning the reliability of memoir itself, Slater presents the mesmerizing story of a young woman who discovers not only what plagues her but also what cures her—the birth of her sensuality, her creativity as an artist, and storytelling as an act of healing.

The Ash Wednesday Supper


Giordano Bruno
    Like Galileo, who met a similar fate for similar reasons later in the century, Bruno has been accorded martyrdom to the cause of scientific truth and regarded as a visionary whose ideas were out of joint with the superstitions of his time. In fact, as editors Edward Gosselin and Lawrence Lerner point out, Bruno was far more complex, and his thought far more intricate, than simple stereotype would suggest.Possibly mad, certainly brilliant, vain, obstreperous, and often ignorant, Bruno was a Christian deeply immersed in Hermeticism and mysticism; simultaneously he was Copernican in his non-homocentric view of the universe. His La Cena de le ceneri was one of the first works in which Copernican theory was received outside the sphere of the natural sciences. These dialogues have never been generally accessible, and are translated into English as The Ash Wednesday Supper.Using Copernican theory as both a foundation of and a metaphor for his own vast philosophical-theological-political-social program, Bruno united his conflicting beliefs and frustrated his critics. Arguing for the physical reality of the infinite universe with no centre, yet whose centre is everywhere, Bruno sought to prove that each man is every other man. Using this radical cosmology and the imagery of Lenten regeneration, the messianic Bruno sought to heal the secular and religious wounds of sixteenth-century Europe by reconciling Catholic and Protestant, France and England.In this edition Gosselin and Lerner have provided a broad understanding of Bruno and his time, with background and interpretive discussion. They have also preserved the flavour and ferment of the original discourses and maintained Bruno's eclectic if somewhat obscure style.

Nadja


André Breton - 1928
    The first-person narrative is supplemented by forty-four photographs which form an integral part of the work -- pictures of various surreal people, places, and objects which the author visits or is haunted by in naja's presence and which inspire him to mediate on their reality or lack of it. The Nadja of the book is a girl, but, like Bertrand Russell's definition of electricity as not so much a thing as a way things happen, Nadja is not so much a person as the way she makes people behave. She has been described as a state of mind, a feeling about reality, k a kind of vision, and the reader sometimes wonders whether she exists at all. yet it is Nadja who gives form and structure to the novel.

Heavenly Breakfast: An Essay on the Winter of Love


Samuel R. Delany - 1979
    Memoir. HEAVENLY BREAKFAST is Samuel R. Delaney's wise and vivid essay on urban communes and cooperatives in the winter of 'Sixty-seven/'Sixty-eight. It examines their function, structure, permanence, and impermanence as precisely as a sociological study. Because its method is narrative and anecdotal, however, it reads like a passionate memoir--a marvelous document from an extraordinary time. Based on journals he kept at the time, these pages recount his encounters with other communes and experimental living arrangements-some gentle, some brutal; of encounters between those inside and those outside the countercultural life; of idealism and hopes pushing against a resistant reality.

Heresy of Formlessness


Martin Mosebach - 2002
    Woods Jr., historian and N.Y. Times national best-selling author: “…One of the rare ‘must-read’ books about the Latin Mass. It lays bare the obtuseness of those who would treat the immemorial Roman rite as a text in need of editing.” The Heresy of Formlessness The Roman Liturgy and Its Enemy By Martin Mosebach German writer Martin Mosebach is as famous in his country as Tom Wolfe is in ours. So when he wrote a book about the destruction of the old Latin Mass, Church leaders and the secular world took note. His view of the new rite of Mass in force since Vatican II goes deeper than any other yet published. Mosebach sees the normative Mass today, precisely because it is at the core of Catholic life for most souls, as the tragic product of wholesale manipulation and compromise with the world, from its gestures and rubrics (or lack of them) to its bad translations and committee-invented prayers. But he does not stop with his evaluation of the new Mass. He defends the old, and summons fellow Catholics to drop their prejudices against it, embrace it as their forefathers did, and restore it to its proper place in the Church. Excerpts from the Mosebach tour de force: On ‘refurbishing’ old churches: “No one who really believes in the power of…prayer would be so reckless as to scorn and wreck something that has been sanctified by prayer.” On the net result of the changes at Mass: “To put it crudely, the liturgy disappeared, and what did the congregation see in its place? A ‘presider’ in billowing garments, his mouth opened in joyful song.” On his rediscovery of the old Latin Mass after being away: “…I was fulfilling the most important duty of human existence…and I was doing this for all the others who did not

Spain


Jan Morris - 1964
    History, legend, landscape, architecture, religion, character, and anecdote are brilliantly woven together to create a fascinating and complex portrait. 120 color illustrations.

Nineteenth Century Art: A Critical History


Stephen F. Eisenman - 1994
    This classic textbook examines the artistic movements and achievements of that time.

Waking Lions


Ayelet Gundar-Goshen - 2013
    Eitan Green is a good man. He saves lives. Then, speeding along a deserted moonlit road in his SUV, he hits someone. Seeing that the man, an African migrant, is beyond help, he flees the scene. It is a decision that changes everything. Because the dead man’s wife knows what happened. When she knocks at Eitan’s door the next day, tall and beautiful, he discovers that her price is not money. It is something else entirely, something that will shatter Eitan’s safe existence and take him into a world of secrets and lies. Waking Lions is a gripping, suspenseful and morally devastating drama of guilt and survival, shame and desire.