Amazon Blogs

Presenting 101

I once read that something like 30,000,000 PowerPoint presentations are done every day in the U.S. alone. Gee, that's a lot of hot air!

And, as the audience of many presentations, you know that many of them are not very good. The principle reason for bad presentations, says author Jerry Weissman, is because most presentations are data dumps of everything the presenter has in his/her mind, generally focused on the attributes of his/her product or idea--NOT on the concerns, needs, focus, and issues that the audience is interested in.

Jerry, one of America's best presentation coaches, says that every presentation must have a WIIFY, a What's In It for You, focus--a concern for the needs of the audience first. Meet the needs of the audience, make it easy for the audience to understand how the product or idea is going to help them, and you are on your way to a fine presentation.

Presenting is really, really important to get right in your career. You present every day. You try to convince someone of something every day. Check out a couple of Jerry's Elements, and you will begin to see how to be better at something important to you. You may discover some WIIFY's in them that will help you. How about these two: Presenting to Win and Don't Make Them Think

Enjoy.

Tim Moore
VP, Publisher
FT Press Delivers

Tips for New Kindle Users, Part 2

Did you know that in "Your Account" you can manage your Kindle?

Some of the options you have on your Manage Your Kindle page include:
- See a complete list of your Kindles
- Enter an approved email address so you can send personal documents to your Kindle
- Change your payment method and country
- View and cancel your subscriptions
- View and manage your orders

For more information on these topics, please visit www.amazon.com/kindlesupport

Tips for New Kindle Users, Part 1

Congratulations on joining the growing family of Kindle users.

Now that you have registered your Kindle and set up your payment method, the ease of purchase on your Kindle will have you reading in no time.

To shop in the Kindle store from your device, first make sure your wireless is on. You can turn your wireless off and on from the settings menu. After confirming your wireless is on, select "Shop in the Kindle Store" from the settings menu.

Once you get to the Kindle store, you can browse books or search for your favorite author. To search for a book or author, simply begin typing and you will see your search terms in the bottom search box. Select the book you want, and then simply select buy. Your book will be delivered wirelessly, and you can continue to search or browse books while your purchase is downloading.

If you do not see your purchase, first make sure that you are displaying "All" on the home screen. To change your sort options, simply use the five way controller to navigate to the top of the home screen, push the five way controller to the left, and select "All".

For more information on purchasing, please visit www.amazon.com/kindlesupport

Kindle for Christmas

Enjoying your Kindle? Well, there's still time to get the number one most wished for gift on Amazon for your family member or friend before Christmas. Order a Kindle now and get it on December 24th with FREE one-day shipping.

To take advantage of this offer add eligible Kindle(s) to your Shopping Cart and select One-Day Shipping. Your one-day shipping cost will then be deducted from your order total on the final checkout page. Hurry, because you only have just over 9 hours from the time of this posting before the offer expires.

Happy Holidays from the Kindle Team.

A Guide to All Things Kindle

Check out the third edition of Jim Chesire's Using Kindle, a thorough guide covering all aspects of the Kindle, including how it works with devices such as the iPhone, iPod touch, and PC as well as the new PDF and international features. Using Kindle is designed to teach you everything you need to know to get the most out of your Kindle experience.

At what point when opening a package do you call it "Frustrating?"

We're making a wild guess here and thinking some of you are giving and receiving gifts this time of year.

We are interested in hearing from those of you who have frustrating experiences to share and, particularly, at what *time* in the opening process you became exasperated with the whole experience.

5 minutes, 35 minutes? 5 seconds? What is/was your tipping point? Add your experiences here.

Thanks, as Always for shopping (and contributing) on Amazon.com.

Cheers,
The Frustration-Free Folks at Amazon.com

The Best of 2009 from Harvard Business Press

This year, Harvard Business Press published a stellar lineup of books designed to help managers survive and thrive in a fast-changing and challenging business world. From new ideas on how to weather the current economic crisis to the time-tested advice needed to lead organizations into the future, our books tackle the issues managers face daily and provide valuable insight from the world's leading business thinkers.

Here are some highlights:

In Andrew Winston's Green Recovery and Adam Werbach's Strategy for Sustainability, two established voices on sustainability outlined a green path to cutting costs and ensuring business growth that's as good for the environment as it is for the bottom line.

Marshall Goldsmith's Succession: Are You Ready?, Robert Keegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey's Immunity to Change, and Scott Anthony's The Silver Lining focused on the key efforts that must continue despite tough times: developing the leadership you need to guide your company into the future, a culture that can withstand and benefit from change, and new ideas and business models that will yield profits when the economy recovers.

Roger Martin's recently published The Design of Business explains how embracing "design thinking" can open up creative new paths to innovation, giving you and your company a distinct competitive advantage.

Whether you're starting a new venture or leading an existing one, having a clear plan for success is a must.  Randy Komisar and John Mullins provide a practical guide to testing and executing your new business idea in Getting to Plan B, while Ron Heifetz and Marty Linsky's The Practice of Adaptive Leadership provides a clear, "how-to" guide for leading through change.

Social media tools and Web 2.0 philosophies have changed the way we do business forever, and in his new book Enterprise 2.0, social media expert Andrew McAfee explains how this new concept can work for your business.

These new titles for Kindle are complemented by our stable of best-selling books by some of the most established experts in business. Be sure to check out perennial favorites like Groundswell, Blue Ocean Strategy, Primal Leadership, A Sense of Urgency, and Leading Change.

We hope you'll explore these titles from our "Best of 2009" Kindle Booklist and continue to turn to Harvard Business Press for smart books that inform and inspire in 2010.

Rethinking The Green Packaging Paradigm

Green packaging is here to say or so they say this time. This is the third attempt to make the packaging industry more environmentally aware and to offer sensible solutions to solving the problem. There are several reasons behind the previous failures but mostly it was because the consumer wasn't ready, it cost too much and it wasn't all that popular with the majority of the public.

Now the consumer is ready to support more eco friendly packaging alternatives.
But at this point they are totally confused by the reality of it all. What constitutes environmentally or sustainable packaging?

There are many eco terms used by the packaging industry and other organizations that are misunderstood and in many cases (according to the FTC misrepresented.) The term coined to cover this phraseology is called 'Greenwashing'. By definition Greenwashing is the practice of making an unsubstantiated or misleading claim about the environmental benefits of a product, service, technology or company practice.

In the case of packaging you will hear terms such as, bioplastics, bioresins, compostable, biodegradable, sustainable, recyclable, all used to reinforce an environmentally friendly packaging message. The problem is much of this is misleading nomenclature, or at the very least misunderstood. Yet companies are clamoring to come up with the latest buzz phrase to capture that elusive consumer who wants less packaging, packaging reduction or packaging that can be repurposed in a different way.

But less packaging or a different packaging material is not the answer. We need to look at packaging holistically that is from the raw materials used through the manufacturing process to the ultimate disposal. Think about how packaging can be integrated into the entire big picture.

What most consumers don't understand is that we can't have products without packaging and what manufactures and CPG's don't understand is that consumers want to see lees of it. There in lies the problem, miscommunication!

There are numerous fabulous examples such as Terracycle repurposing packaging into other products or companies like Method that has done an incredible job of designing packaging that used over and over again by using refills (using much less packaging) or the old standby example of source reduction the Ultra detergents. These are a start towards feasible less packaging and packaging reduction solutions.

But the bottom line is how can we design and incorporate packaging so that products arrive undamaged, sanitary and uncontaminated while educating and informing the consumer, selling the product, yet contribute a minimum amount of packaging material to the waste stream' That's the answer the packaging companies should be seeking.

As a start, consider these 6 R's in your package design process.

Reduce: That is use less packaging where possible. Example the Ultra detergents.
Refill: Have a container that can be easily refilled with products using a lot less packaging material.

Example: Method

Repurpose: Design the packaging with another purpose in mind after it has been consumed.

Examples: Packaging that turns into other products.

Recycle: Partner with a company that will turn use packaging into something else.

Example: Teracycle

Reuse: By products in packaging that can be used over and over again.

Example: Refillable water bottles.

Renew: Consider using packaging from the renewal natural resources.

Example Cargo Plant Love (plantable container)

So rethink the entire packaging equation from conception to disposal. Don't continue to packaging things the same old way just because it's been done that way for years. Less packaging is not the answer it's just one of many environmentally-friendly packaging solutions.

JoAnn Hines
@packagingdiva
http://packagingdiva.com

~Many thanks to JoAnn Hines for the post. Amazon Green Scene

Don't Worry, It's Not Nonfiction

A Field Guide to Burying Your Parents is my third novel, and it's a title about which my mother has obvious concerns.  And perhaps with good reason: I was recently asked at a book event.  "Is it...is it non-fiction?"  I just had to laugh.  Yes, I've penned a little DIY manual on how I, or you, can inter your parents.  Are you coming to the book signing--there?s going to be a demonstration!  A Field Guide to Burying Your Parents is comic fiction.  Make that darkly comic.  It's a book about the Hawkes family--a family that has to do the unthinkable:  decide what to do when their father takes ill.  The kind of ill that makes us either break apart or cling to one another, the kind of ill that makes us want to stop time altogether.

I once heard Chris Rock say that the funniest stuff (well, he didn?t say 'stuff', but I'm sure you can imagine the word he actually used)--that the funniest stuff was the stuff that wasn't funny.  The world can be hard sometimes, but that doesn?t mean we lose our sense of humor.  The Hawkes family is like you or me: they laugh and cry and try to handle tragedy as best they can.   Because, as my book points out, there is no actual field guide to burying your parents.  There is no How-To Manual on how to endure your parents taking ill.  There is no map for how to keep going when you fear all is lost.

But maybe my book can help you feel not so alone in the undertaking. And if you can laugh a little along the way, I will have succeeded.

--Liza Palmer

December Chills and Thrills

Check out the latest thrillers that are now available in the Kindle Store:

The Darkness by Jason Pinter: A young man is found murdered, his bones crushed nearly to dust before his body was dumped into New York's East River. In New York there are hundreds of murders a year, but this one is different. Somebody is sending a message. And shockingly, the victim has ties to one of the investigator's brothers, Stephen Gaines, recently murdered by an elusive drug lord known only as the Fury.

U is for Undertow by Sue Grafton: It's April, 1988, a month before Kinsey Millhone's thirty-eighth birthday, and she's alone in her office doing paperwork when a young man arrives unannounced. He has a preppy air about him and looks as if he'd be carded if he tried to buy booze, but Michael Sutton is twenty-seven, an unemployed college dropout. Twenty-one years earlier, a four-year-old girl disappeared. A recent reference to her kidnapping has triggered a flood of memories. Sutton now believes he stumbled on her lonely burial when he was six years old. He wants Kinsey's help in locating the child's remains and finding the men who killed her.

Trial by Fire by J.A. Jance: Ali Reynolds takes over a media-relations job at the county police department in her hometown of Sedona, Ariz., after the previous flack is sent on administrative leave for misconduct. Soon after being fitted for the mandatory Kevlar vest, Ali goes to the site of a subdivision fire that has left an unidentified woman in critical condition. All signs point to arson, but the fire's amnesia-ridden survivor is the only one who knows the truth. With the help of a hospital nurse who's also a nun, Ali slowly pieces together the victim's identity and her relationship to the fire.

The Paris Vendetta by Steve Berry: When Napoleon Bonaparte died in exile in 1821, he took to the grave a powerful secret. As general and emperor, he had stolen immeasurable riches from palaces, national treasuries, and even the Knights of Malta and the Vatican. In his final days, his British captors hoped to learn where the loot lay hidden. But he told them nothing, and in his will he made no mention of the treasure. Or did he?

A wily Danish tycoon has uncovered the insidious plans of the Paris Club, a cabal of multimillionaires bent on manipulating the global economy. Only by matching wits with a terrorist-for-hire, foiling a catastrophic attack, and plunging into a desperate hunt for Napoleon's legendary lost treasure can former Justice Department operative Cotton Malone hope to avert international financial anarchy.