Charles Mingus is among jazz’s greatest composers and perhaps its most talented bass player. He was blunt and outspoken about the place of jazz in music history and American culture, about which performers were the real thing (or not), and much more. These in-depth interviews, conducted several years before Mingus died, capture the composer’s spirit and voice, revealing how he saw himself as composer and performer, how he viewed his peers and predecessors, how he created his extraordinary ...

Any organization can win more customers and increase sales if they learn to be more strategic with their customer service.When customers complain, employees respond. The typical service model is riddled with holes. What about people and businesses who never speak up, but never come back? Learn to actively reach out, prevent problems, and resolve issues in ways that boost loyalty.Strategic Customer Service is a data-packed roadmap that shows you how...

Any organization can win more customers and increase sales if they learn to be more strategic with their customer service.When customers complain, employees respond. The typical service model is riddled with holes. What about people and businesses who never speak up, but never come back? Learn to actively reach out, prevent problems, and resolve issues in ways that boost loyalty.Strategic Customer Service is a data-packed roadmap that shows you how...

This book examines the lives of the Malay and Cham Muslims in Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam and examines how they co-exist and live in societies that are dominated by an alternative consensus and are illiberal and non-democratic in nature.Focusing on two major Muslim communities in Southeast Asia, both of whom live as minorities in societies that are not democratic and have a history of hostility and repression towards non-conforming ideas, the book explains their circumstances, t...

Customer Experience 3.0 provides firsthand guidance on what works, what doesn't--and the revenue and word-of-mouth payoff of getting it right.Between smartphones, social media, mobile connectivity, and a plethora of other technological innovations changing the way we do almost everything these days, your customers are expecting you to be taking advantage of it all to enhance their customer service experience far beyond the meeting-the-minimum experiences o...

If you are driving off a cliff, someone telling you to slow down isn't much of a help. (Well, slowing down while you turn in a new direction is likely to be a good idea.) By burning fossil fuels, humanity is now driving itself off a climate cliff toward extinction. We need to completely stop burning "stuff" (fossil fuels, or anything else) for energy. Yet to thrive we really do need lots of energy-in fact, even more than we now are using. This book shows how we can meet both these needs by...

The COVID-19 pandemic. Obamacare. The Great Recession. The dot-com bust. The early ’90s recession. Every decade or so a disaster hits the United States and reminds us that many American families live one calamity away from financial ruin. But what if there were a better way to help families protect themselves from life’s risks? And what if that way did not require bloated government bureaucracies, increased taxes, and runaway spending and debt?Fortunately, author, ...

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act—a.k.a. Obamacare—remains highly controversial and faces ongoing legal and political challenges. Polls show that by a large margin Americans remain opposed to the healthcare law and seek to “repeal and replace” it. However, the question is: Replace it with what?In A Better Choice, John C. Goodman clearly and concisely provides the compelling answer—no small feat, considering the complexity and ...

In this long-awaited updated edition of his groundbreaking work Priceless: Curing the Healthcare Crisis, renowned healthcare economist John Goodman ("father" of Health Savings Accounts) analyzes America’s ongoing healthcare fiasco—including, for this edition, the failed promises of Obamacare.Goodman then provides what many critics of our healthcare system neglect: solutions.And not a moment too soon. Americans are entangled in a system with perverse incenti...

Tennessee Williams’s iconic work is an evocative memory-play about an eccentric Southern family revolving around the domineering Amanda Wingfield and her grown children: the cynical Tom and the fragile Laura. This L.A. Theatre Works production reunites the cast of the Roundabout Theatre’s celebrated revival, which earned Drama Desk Awards for Kevin Kilner as Jim, and, in her Broadway debut, Calista Flockhart as Laura.Recorded at KCRW, Santa Monica in January 1996.Directed b...

A sidesplitting musical about one of the most powerful men of the 20th Century. Learn about his secret love life, his need for personal privacy, and his obsession with knowing the private affairs of others. If you weren’t so busy laughing and humming the tunes, the show might upset you!An L.A. Theatre Works full-cast performance featuring Dan Castellaneta, Ethan Glazer, John Goodman, Kelsey Grammer, Christopher Guest, Rudy Hornish, John Kapelos, David L. Lander, Tom Leopold, Michae...

The Philosophy of Modern Song is Bob Dylan’s first book of new writing since 2004’s Chronicles: Volume One—and since winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016.Dylan, who began working on the book in 2010, offers his extraordinary insight into the nature of popular music. He writes over sixty essays focusing on songs by other artists, spanning from Stephen Foster to Elvis Costello, and in between ranging from Hank Williams to ...