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0017703970Stunaan8419472114.0 Mark Sisson's 2009 release of The Primal Blueprint was the catalyst for the primal/paleo/ancestral health movement to gain mainstream awareness and acceptance. Both the hardcover and paperback editions enjoyed a seven-year run at the top of the primal/paleo charts and selling hundreds of thousands of copies. Sisson, publisher of the acclaimed MarksDailyApple.com, the acclaimed and most-visited primal/paleo blog, has spent the past six years diligently researching and evaluating recent the most up-to-date science and reflecting on thousands of users' experiences going primal. The second edition of The New Primal Blueprint offers a comprehensively revised, expanded, and updated message from the original runaway bestseller. The New Primal Blueprint serves as the ultimate road map for anyone wishing to make the shift from flawed conventional wisdom about diet and exercise to a healthy, happy empowering lifestyle patterned after the evolutionary-tested behaviors of our hunter-gatherer ancestors. The book details the ten immutable Primal Blueprint lifestyle laws that enable empower you to reprogram your genes to direct in the direction of weight loss, health, and longevity. The Primal Blueprint laws are validated by two million years of human evolution as well as an ever-expanding body of contemporary scientific research. Sisson's philosophy was originally met with skepticism as he aggressively challenged numerous mainstream health tenets. Eight years later, mainstream medical and health science are validating the Primal Blueprint tenets assertions that a high-carb, grain-based diet will make you fat, tired, and sick; that a consistent routine of medium-to-difficult cardiovascular workouts can actually compromise your health and longevity and increase risk of heart disease; and that consuming (whole food sources of) fat and cholesterol does not lead to heart disease as we have been led to believe, but rather offers many health benefits. The New Primal Blueprint comes alive with a vibrant full-color presentation packed with photos, graphics, and cartoons to make for a fun, easy, and memorable read. Join hundreds of thousands of primal enthusiasts and embrace a new way of life where you take responsibility for your health, fitness, and happiness. Reject once and for all the flawed conventional wisdom that has left modern citizens struggling with fatigue, excess body fat, and elevated disease risk factors as a consequence of grain-based eating habits, exhausting exercise routines, sedentary lifestyle patterns, and high-stress existences that misdirect our genes and promote illness instead of wellness and longevity. Here is a quick overview of the ten Primal Blueprint laws that will help you quickly and effortlessly reprogram your genes in the direction of health, happiness, and longevity: Law #1 - Eat Plants and Animals: Enjoy the nutritious, satisfying foods that fueled two million years of human evolution. Law #2 - Avoid Poisonous Things: Avoid toxic modern foods (primarily refined vegetable oils, sugars, and grains) that make us fat, sick, and malnourished. Law #3 - Move Frequently: Enhance fat metabolism, improve cognitive function, and avoid the stress of chronic cardio by keeping active with aerobic workouts at a comfortable heart rate, increased everyday movement, and complementary flexibility/mobility activities throughout your day. Law #4 - Lift Heavy Things: Brief, intense sessions of functional, full-body resistance exercises supports muscle development, increases bone density, and prevents injury. Law #5 - Sprint Once in a While: Occasional all-out sprints turbo-charge fat reduction and deliver a boost of anti-aging hormones. Law #6 - Get Plenty of Sleep: Align your sleep with your circadian rhythm by minimizing artificial light and digital stimulation after dark, and creating a calm, quiet, dark sleeping sanctuary. Optimal sleep promotes healthy immune, brain, and endocrine function. Law #7 - Play: Balance the stress of modern life with some unstructured, physical fun! Both brief breaks and grand outings are essential to nurture a cognitively fluid mind and a free spirit. Law #8 - Get Plenty of Sunlight: Expose large skin surface areas frequently to optimize vitamin D production (increases energy, prevents cancer). Maintain a slight tan, but never burn. Diet alone doesn't cut it. Law #9 - Avoid Stupid Mistakes: Learn to be mindful and vigilant against dangers, both extreme and routine. Cultivate risk management skills to stay safe and sensible and eliminate "avoidable suffering." Law #10 - Use Your Brain: Engage in creative and stimulating activities away from your core daily responsibilities. This will keep you refreshed, energized, creative, and productive in everything you do.

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During the last months of the war, Josef Pieper saw the realization of a long-cherished plan to escape from the “lethal chaos” that was the Germany of that time, “plucked,” he writes, “as was Habakkuk, by the hair of his head . . . to be planted into a realm of the most peaceful seclusion, whose borders and exists were, of course, controlled by armed sentries.” There he made contact with a friend close-by, who possessed an amazing library, and Pieper hit upon the idea of reading the letters of Goethe from that library. Soon, however, he decided to read the entire Weimar edition of fifty volumes, which were brought to him in sequence, two or three at a time.The richness of this life revealing itself over a period of more than sixty years appeared before my gaze in its truly overpowering magnificence, which almost shattered my powers of comprehension – confined, as they had been, to the most immediate and pressing concerns. What a passionate focus on reality in all its forms, what an undying quest to chase down all that is in the world, what strength to affirm life, what ability to take part in it, what vehemence in the way he showed his dedication to it! Of course, too, what ability to limit himself to what was appropriate; what firm control in inhibiting what was purely aimless; what religious respect for the truth of being! I could not overcome my astonishment; and the prisoner entered a world without borders, a world in which the fact of being in prison was of absolutely no significance. But no matter how many astonishing things I saw in these unforgettable weeks of undisturbed inner focus, nothing was more surprising or unexpected than this: to realize how much of what was peculiar to this life occurred in carefully preserved seclusion; how much the seemingly communicative man who carried on a world-wide correspondence still never wanted to expose in words the core of his existence. It was precisely in the seclusion, the limitation, the silence of Goethe that made the strongest impact on Pieper. Here was modern Germany’s quintessential conversationalist intellectual, but the strength of his words came from the restraint behind them, even to the point of purposeful forgetting:The culmination is when the eighty-year-old sees forgetting not as a convulsive refusal to think of things, but as what could almost be termed a physiological process of simple forgetting as a function of life. He praises as “a great gift of the gods” . . . “the ethereal stream of forgetfulness” which he “was always able to value, to use, and to heighten.” However manifold the forms of this silence and of their unconscious roots and conscious motives may have been, is it not always the possibility of hearing, the possibility of a purer perception of reality that is aimed at? And so, is not Goethe’s type of silence above all the silence of one who listens? . . . This listening silence is much deeper than the mere refraining from words and speech in human intercourse. It means a stillness, which, like a breath, has penetrated into the inmost chamber of one’s own soul. It is meant, in the Goethean “maxim,” to “deny myself as much as possible and to take up the object into myself as purely as it is possible to do.” . . . The meaning of being silent is hearing – a hearing in which the simplicity of the receptive gaze at things is like the naturalness, simplicity, and purity of one receiving a confidence, the reality of which is creatura, God’s creation. And insofar as Goethe’s silence is in this sense a hearing silence, to that extent it has the status of the model and paradigm – however much, in individual instances, reservations and criticism are justified. One could remain circumspectly silent about this exemplariness after the heroic nihilism of our age has proclaimed the attitude of the knower to be by no means that of a silent listener but rather as that of self-affirmation over against being: insight and knowledge are naked defiance, the severest endangering of existence in the midst of the superior strength of concrete being. The resistance of knowledge opposes the oppressive superior power. However, that the knower is not a defiant rebel against concrete being, but above all else a listener who stays silent and, on the basis of his silence, a hearer – it is here that Goethe represents what, since Pythagoras, may be considered the silence tradition of the West.Pieper concludes his remarkable find with this summation:When such talk, which one encounters absolutely everywhere in workshops and in the marketplace – and as a constant temptation – , when such deafening talk, literally out to thwart listening, is linked to hopelessness, we have to ask is there not in silence – listening silence – necessarily a shred of hope? For who could listen in silence to the language of things if he did not expect something to come of such awareness of the truth? And, in a newly founded discipline of silence, is there not a chance not merely to overcome the sterility of everyday talk but also to overcome its brother, hopelessness – possibly if only to the extent that we know the true face of this relationship? I know that here quite different forces come into play which are beyond human control, and perhaps the circulus has to be broken through in a different place. However, one may ask: could not the “quick, strict resolution” to remain silent at the same time serve as a kind of training in hope?

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Praise for MANAGING THE NEW CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP “Gordon delivers an impressive synthesis of the newest methods for engaging customers in relationships that last. No organization today can succeed without the mastery of customer relationship management strategy fundamentals. But to win in the decades ahead, you must also understand and capitalize on the rapidly evolving social computing, mobility and customer analytics technologies described in this book. Checklists, self-assessments and graphical frameworks deliver pragmatic value for the practicing manager.” — William Band, Vice-President, Principal Analyst, Forrester Research Inc., Cambridge, MA “A very comprehensive and practical book on managing relationships with existing customers in the age of social media! I particularly enjoyed reading chapters on teaching customers new behaviors, which were illustrated by excellent case studies.” — Jagdish N. Sheth, Ph.D. , Charles H. Kellstadt Professor of Marketing, Emory University, Atlanta, GA “The strategic breadth and depth of this book is impressive as Gordon explores the new customer and how to plan and manage the new customer relationship. I found his review of strategies, techniques and technologies for social, mobile, mass customization and customer analytics to be particularly insightful. Gordon urges marketers to live and breathe one-through-one marketing and to master social engagement techniques. The checklists, cases and examples make the content grounded and actionable. This is an important, current and detailed book to which every organization should pay close attention to improve customer relationships and create shareholder value.” — Marcus Ruebsam, Vice-President, Line-of-Business Marketing Solutions, SAP AG, Walldorf, Germany “There are many books on CRM, but I recommend this one because Gordon’s book does what others do not. He considers CRM strategy and evolves it to recognize a new customer, one who is always connected, socially available and influential. The book doesn’t just discuss many point solutions for specific marketing challenges; it integrates technology with strategy, people, process and customer analytics to develop relationships continuously. This book is a broad and deep exploration of CRM, providing practical, fact-based perspectives that every company can use to validate and rethink their customer and stakeholder relationships.” — Helmuth Cepeda, Small, Medium and Distribution Director, Microsoft Mexico, Mexico City, Mexico Marketing has changed fundamentally in the last few years and has become an entirely new discipline, one that focuses on a new customer and a new relationship, framed by new principles, strategies, processes, roles and tactics. Individual customers are economically targeted and served, and treated as segments of one rather than members of a target market. Word of mouth and recommendations are vital as customers influence one another more than a company can do within its own advertising or customer dialogs. Today’s customer is always online, accessible and connected. Now marketing is not only direct and customer-specific but a continuous process by which companies seek to engage customers and be progressively more relevant, attractive and valuable. This is the era of a new customer relationship—an individual relationship that is social, mobile and local, influenced by peers and shaped by cognitive, behavioural and social psychological principles. New techniques, processes and technologies transform what it means to implement marketing strategy and achieve improved business results. The new customer relationship requires that even those companies that have embraced customer relationship management ought to reassess their customer management. Now every marketing decision, whether online or in the physical world, whether of a technological nature, whether it affects customer experience, communications, dialogs, teaching or organizational memory, every decision should be seen through a single lens focused on the individual customers who matter most. Managing the New Customer Relationship provides a strategic and practical guide to help companies attract, develop, sustain and build more valuable relationships by: Expanding upon existing customer relationship management theories, concepts and methods to make these considerations more useful, strategic and contemporary Recognizing the profound importance of social media and how to plan customer engagement in the social context of each customer Exploring new technologies that offer new opportunities for engaging customers, including mobile, local, the cloud and customer analytics Demonstrating how to develop customer-specific understanding, predict what customers will want next, and how to manage each individual customer, and Offering perspectives to help the organization endure by focusing a chain of relationships on the end customer and creating meaning for stakeholders that can make relationships more intense and robust. Managing the New Customer Relationship is for organizations of all sizes in all industries, for private- and public-sector organizations and not-for-profits. In short, every organization can apply the new principles, strategies, techniques and technologies discussed here to recognize important marketplace changes, plan to improve relationship and financial results and capture new shareholder value from new customer relationships.

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A review of current (education) policy and practice endorses the view of an apparent paradox in policy implementation. Although tremendous investments (in terms of energy, time and financial resources) are made in enacting policies, there is ample evidence to suggest that policy actors are impervious to policy information. Change agents and implementers of policy are often seen as pursuing different agendas when it comes to the task policy implementation. As aptly asserted by Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith (1993, cited by Shulock, 1999, p. 228), âpolicymakers and implementers' core beliefs are unaffected by policy information, major policy change results rather from external factors such as inflation and elections'. This book re-conceptualizes this policy phenomenon for rumination. The book essentially unravels perspectives on the policy implementation paradox, and through that exemplifies the âbest' suited approach for demystifying the policy/practice gap to bring understanding to the messiness and contested nature of (education) policy processes. To help draw conceptual leverage on the phenomenon described as the âpolicy implementation paradox', this eight chapter book performs two major functions. First, Chapters 1 to 4 set the context for the book. Chapter 1 defines (education) policy, and in the process, the traditional problem-solving definition of policy is juxtaposed with the process model, and through that a third conception (i.e. the theoretical eclecticism approach) is gauged to help provide both practical and theoretical bases for understanding how policy and practice exist in dynamic and iterative relationships. Chapters 2 and 3 give insights into how education policy-making is made and implemented respectively to unravel some of the influences on policy processes. Chapter 4 explicates (from within relevant literature) the policy paradox to assist readers to understand perspectives that are advanced in latter chapters to unravel and/or explain the existence or occurrence of this policy phenomenon. Second, Chapters 5 to 7 draw on literature from disparate sources to unravel perspectives on the policy implementation paradox, whilst Chapter 8 presents the key messages that are tangential to achieving the objectives of the book. Overall, the Chapter 8 performs three functions, namely it: summarizes perspectives presented in the scholarly literature to demystify and unravel the policy implementation paradox illustrates the reasons for the choice of the post-modernist perspective as the most appropriate and/or best suited perspective for unravelling this policy phenomenon; and outlines the relevance (and/or justifications) of the post-modernist conception of policy as both âtext' and âdiscourse' as a framework for understanding the policy implementation paradox and the dynamism of policy processes at large. The contribution of this book is seen particularly in its ability to leverage the post-modernist conception of policy as both âtext' and âdiscourse' to stress the importance of recognizing the role of implementation in actually changing policy. Brought directly into the context of the policy implementation paradox, the book (drawing on the post-modernist conception of policy) clearly propels the dynamism of policy processes, and uses this to explain the reasons why policy implementation outcomes most often differ from policy-makers' intentions. First, the book makes the point aptly and forcefully that because policy processes are dynamic, there is usually conflicts among those who make policy as well as those who put policy provisions into practice, about what the important issues or problems for policy are and what the desired policy goals ought to be. Second, it puts down the issue of disconnect between policy intentions in theory and policy implementation outcomes in practice invariably to the active processes involved in interpreting policy. Policy statements, in the view of the book and in the post-modernist tradition, are almost always subject to multiple interpretations and re-interpretations depending upon the standpoint of the people doing the interpretive 'work'. Third, the policy/practice gap is explained as existing and/or occurring because the practice of policy on the ground is extremely complex, both that which is being 'described' by policy and those that are 'intended' to put policy into effect or practice. The point, according to the post-modernist thinking on which this book draws, is that simple policy descriptions of practice do not capture the multiplicity and complexity of the practice of policy on the ground, as such, the implementation of policy in practice almost always means outcomes differ from policy-makers' intentions. Against the backdrop of these three reasons alluded to, the book attributes the underlying causes of the policy implementation paradox to two interrelated factors. One, it is argued that the paradox in policy implementation occurs mainly because of what post-modernist thinkers call policy refraction. That is to say, because policies in practice tend to evolve through the interactions of a multiplicity of actors, they become distorted and less coherent as they are interpreted and put into practice by the 'ground-level' actors and implementers. Two, it is contended that the emergence of post-modern theory (with its contemporary understanding of the nature of reality and how to 'go on' in life) has undermined the 'modernist' philosophy to such an extent that older ideas of fixed structures conditioning behaviour and imposing regularity and predictability on social life have become considerably weakened, if not demolished completely. Essentially, the book argues that the post-modern theoretical movement has had tremendous effect of stressing the unpredictability of human behaviour in policy implementation processes, and by extension, the unpredictability of policy outcomes as against policy intentions.

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