Lean manufacturing is the single most effective way to increase sales, cut costs, improve margins, and secure the future of a business. The problem is that the principles and philosophies of lean manufacturing are geared strictly to mass production operations and can be ineffective, even detrimental, for smaller job shops and make-to-order businesses. Now, Speed to Market delivers a proven approach for smaller suppliers who want to successfully cut their lead time and trigger profitable growth. Completely updated and expanded, the book explains how to: * Apply the principles of pull, flow, and the elimination of waste to every area of the company, at every stage from quotes to cash* Implement a continuous improvement process while sidestepping the typical implementation pitfalls* Ease scheduling problems* Improve performance and profitability using the book's practical concepts, process analysis tools, and perspective-enhancing techniques and much more

This book shows you how to get up to speed with online marketing and go where your market is so you can effectively promote your business on a limited budget. The book explains in a straightforward style all there is to know about promoting small businesses online, and covers all the major online tools available, including websites, search engine marketing, email marketing, blogging, podcasts, online video, social networks, virtual worlds, and social bookmarking. Get Up to Speed with Online Marketing shows readers how to use each medium to their best effect on a limited marketing budget, if not for free! This straightforward, step-by-step guide to online marketing shows you affordable and effective ways to: Create a website Get found on Google Get your email marketing right Create content your market will value with blogs, podcasts, video and images Promote your business with social networking sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter Develop a coherent online marketing plan Manage your online marketing workload Measure your results

A new, evolutionary explanation of markets and investor behavior Half of all Americans have money in the stock market, yet economists can’t agree on whether investors and markets are rational and efficient, as modern financial theory assumes, or irrational and inefficient, as behavioral economists believe. The debate is one of the biggest in economics, and the value or futility of investment management and financial regulation hangs on the answer. In this groundbreaking book, Andrew Lo transforms the debate with a powerful new framework in which rationality and irrationality coexist—the Adaptive Markets Hypothesis. Drawing on psychology, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and other fields, Adaptive Markets shows that the theory of market efficiency is incomplete. When markets are unstable, investors react instinctively, creating inefficiencies for others to exploit. Lo’s new paradigm explains how financial evolution shapes behavior and markets at the speed of thought—a fact revealed by swings between stability and crisis, profit and loss, and innovation and regulation. An ambitious new answer to fundamental questions about economics and investing, Adaptive Markets is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how markets really work.

Advertising expert Agnieszka M. Winkler offers an insider's perspective on how technology has changed marketing and advertising. Writing with clarity and confidence, she outlines the steps advertisers and marketers must take to keep pace. She cites high-profile companies like Dell Computers and Amazon as examples of brands that were built in months, not years. These examples illustrate her sometimes complex concepts, and make them more accessible. Unfortunately, she also devotes a large amount of space to what amounts to a commercial for an adverting software application that she's trying to sell. But for readers who can stomach the pitch, getAbstract recommends this book to those who work in marketing, advertising, or related industries, and to those who are making the transition to technology-driven brand building. (Editor's note: TeamToolz, one of the major resources covered in this book, is a pay-for-use service sold by the author.).

A remarkable look at how the growth, technology, and politics of high-frequency trading have altered global financial markets In today’s financial markets, trading floors on which brokers buy and sell shares face-to-face have increasingly been replaced by lightning-fast electronic systems that use algorithms to execute astounding volumes of transactions. Trading at the Speed of Light tells the story of this epic transformation. Donald MacKenzie shows how in the 1990s, in what were then the disreputable margins of the US financial system, a new approach to trading—automated high-frequency trading or HFT—began and then spread throughout the world. HFT has brought new efficiency to global trading, but has also created an unrelenting race for speed, leading to a systematic, subterranean battle among HFT algorithms. In HFT, time is measured in nanoseconds (billionths of a second), and in a nanosecond the fastest possible signal—light in a vacuum—can travel only thirty centimeters, or roughly a foot. That makes HFT exquisitely sensitive to the length and transmission capacity of the cables connecting computer servers to the exchanges’ systems and to the location of the microwave towers that carry signals between computer datacenters. Drawing from more than 300 interviews with high-frequency traders, the people who supply them with technological and communication capabilities, exchange staff, regulators, and many others, MacKenzie reveals the extraordinary efforts expended to speed up every aspect of trading. He looks at how in some markets big banks have fought off the challenge from HFT firms, and how exchanges sometimes engineer technical systems to favor certain types of algorithms over others. Focusing on the material, political, and economic characteristics of high-frequency trading, Trading at the Speed of Light offers a unique glimpse into its influence on global finance and where it could lead us in the future.

A straightforward guide to trading today's dynamic Forex market Written by Wayne McDonell, the Chief Currency Coach at FX Bootcamp, this book shows readers how to successfully trade the Forex market on their own. FX Bootcamp's Guide to Strategic and Tactical Forex Trading skillfully explains how to combine popular technical indicators to formulate a comprehensive market strategy. Readers will then learn how to focus on using this information to create a tactical trading plan--one that will help them pull the trigger to get in and out of a trade. Along the way, McDonell takes the time to discuss the various challenges a Forex trader faces, such as greed, fear, loss, and isolation. As a Forex trader and educator of traders, Wayne McDonell knows what it takes to make it in the competitive world of Forex. And with FX Bootcamp's Guide to Strategic and Tactical Forex Trading he shows readers how.