Book Description
While the viewer's eyes are trained on the actors, the production design sets the mood for the film. The design also subtly comments on the action and the characters, moves the plot forward and adds to its symbolic content.
The production design of 23 films of the 1980s and 1990s is analyzed here. The films are divided into five areas: realistic films set in the present day, stylized films (including horror) set in the present day, period films, period films that move through several decades, and science fiction and fantasy films. Among the movies analyzed are The Silence of the Lambs, She's Gotta Have It, The Fisher King, Ragtime, Barton Fink, Goodfellas, and Alien. The quality of the designs is assessed by a careful reading of the mise-en-scène. Often the designers' own words are used to describe the effects and the process involved in achieving them.
Book Description
Guild guitars have been around since the early 1950s, and by the beginning of the '60s, the company had established a solid reputation for its electric and acoustic archtops, which are still widely regarded today. Despite this enduring popularity, little was known about the history of Guild. The Guild Guitar Book is the result of years of intensive research and countless photo sessions. It includes a thorough history of the company and its guitars, including serial numbers, specifications, original prices, and all the information needed to date Guild guitars. Features hundreds of photos, with a beautiful 40-page color section. Now Back in Print!
Customer Reviews:
THE GUILD GUITAR BOOK.......2007-01-29
AS A GUITAR COLLECTOR & HISTORIAN I HAVE MANY GUITAR BOOKS IN MY COLLECTION. THIS BOOK HOWEVER DELIVERS THE INFORMATION YOU REQUIRE! GREAT FORMAT AND PRESENTAION, TOGETHER WITH THEIR HISTORY. VERY WELL WRITEN AND ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS IN MY COLLECTION. THE PICTORIAL INFORMATION IS FANTASTIC ENABLING ONE TO SEE DETAIL. THIS BOOK OFFERS GREAT VALUE FOR MONEY ! A MUST FOR GUILD GUITAR LOVERS.
The best resource on Guild.......2007-01-19
Guild experts call this book "The Bible." This volume covers Guild through 1977. (A second volume is forthcoming.) It contains more of the important details about Guild through 1977 than all other sources combined. It's as informative as an encyclopedia. Yet it's also a readable history plus an anthology of great photos.
Good book for guitar addicts.......2001-05-05
I think thia is a good book. It gives an interesting history of the Guild company. It also has a lot of details that can help the collector identify what type of Guild he has and the date it was made. It has some great photos (most black and white, but there are some color ones to). It is a nice coffee table book for a musican. My only comlaint is that for the price it should be a hard cover (but then I'm cheap).
Book Description
15 selections from the Broadway musical featuring songs written by Tim Rice and the two "B"s from Scandinavian supergroup ABBA: Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus. Includes: Anthem * Chess * Heaven Help My Heart * Merano * One Night in Bangkok * Someone Else's Story * more.
Customer Reviews:
A Great Selections Book for A Unique Musical.......2001-08-15
After listening to Chess for over a few years I finally decided to go in search for a Vocal Selections book that would give me some of the great songs featured in the musical. What I found was quite a surprise. It should be noted however that this selections book is based on the 1984 London Concept Album, not the Broadway. The book itself features 13 selections from the aforementioned article.
The songs themselves are piano arrangements with the vocal top line from the songs. The vocal top lines are kept intact from what is heard in the recordings in all the vocal solos. The actual piano accompaniments mimic the full score quite well. The arrangement for 'Pity the Child' in particular stood out. It should be noted that there is one selection called 'Chess' that has been arranged for piano. And the introduction to 'One Night in Bangkok' known as 'Bangkok' has also been arranged for piano. The duets from the musical are also featured. 'You and I' being a personal favorite and for the women 'I Know Him So Well' has also been included. And if you have four singers you can also perform Quartet (A Model of Decorum and Tranquility) with all four parts intact.
The only drawbacks to this book. Well the first could be that unlike most Vocal Selections/Selections book there is not much information on the show. Secondly, for those familiar with the Broadway version of the show the beautiful song 'Someone Else's Story' is not featured. And lastly for anyone who has seen the London version of the show or heard the Chess In Concert CD, the great song 'The Soviet Machine' is not included.
Overall a very comprehensive selections book that should be in any singers collection. The selections taken from the album include: 'Merano', 'Where I Want To Be', 'Quartet (A Model Of Decorum and Tranquility)', 'The American & Florence/Nobody's Side', 'Chess', 'Mountain Duet', 'Embassy Lament', 'Anthem', 'Bangkok/One Night In Bangkok', 'Heaven Help My Heart', 'I Know Him So Well', 'Pity the Child' and 'You and I'.
Book Description
In the worldwide bestseller The Innovator's Dilemma, Clayton M. Christensen exposed a crushing paradox behind the failure of many industry leaders. By doing what good companies were supposed to do-focus on pleasing their most profitable customers-leaders were paving the way for their own demise. How? By ignoring "disruptive technologies"-new, cheaper innovations that initially target small customer segments but evolve to displace the reigning product.
Now, Christensen and coauthor Michael E. Raynor cut the Gordian knot of the "innovator's dilemma" with The Innovator's Solution. This groundbreaking book reveals that innovation is not as unpredictable as most managers have come to believe. While the outcomes of past innovations seem random, the process by which innovations are packaged and shaped within companies is very predictable. By understanding and managing the forces that influence this process, companies can shape high-octane business plans that create truly disruptive growth.
Drawing on years of in-depth research and using new theories tested in hundreds of companies across many industries, the authors identify the processes that create successful innovations, and show managers how to tailor their strategies to the changing circumstances of a dynamic world.
Comprehensive yet practical, The Innovator's Solution is an actionable prescription for innovation-driven, profitable growth.
"A good business book makes managers stop and think. A great business book teaches managers how to stop and think. This is a great book. It is hard to imagine an executive team that would not benefit from devoting an entire day to discussing it."
-Geoffrey Moore, Chairman and Founder, TCG Advisors, and author, Crossing the Chasm and Living on the Fault Line
"In The Innovator's Solution, Christensen and Raynor address the holy grail of all organizations: how to generate growth and sustain it over long periods. Avoiding the temptation to provide simplistic formulas, they guide the reader through carefully constructed frameworks that teach how to think about the issues that limit-and provide-growth to organizations."
-Dr. Andrew S. Grove, Chairman of the Board, Intel
"Christensen and Raynor have done a superb job of creating a framework for helping to understand the industry dynamics and for planning your own growth alternatives."
-Pekka Ala-Pietilä, President, Nokia Corporation
"Singapore, as a small nation, needs to be innovative and sensitive to disruptive changes more than other countries. Christensen and Raynor have provided an excellent framework to reduce the randomness of the innovation process. This framework will help in our effort to nurture an environment conducive for enterprises to create and capitalize on disruptive innovations."
-Teo Ming Kian, Chairman, Singapore Economic Development Board
"The Innovator's Solution goes directly to the heart of why large companies have failed to sustain innovation. Christensen and Raynor have a deep insight into the challenges that innovative companies face, and they propose practical, realistic solutions to the dilemmas of innovation. This book will be extremely useful to all managers who are committed to using innovation to sustain their growth."
-Bill George, former Chairman and CEO, Medtronic, Inc.
Customer Reviews:
Disruptive Innovations Key to Spicing Up Competition.......2007-10-01
Clayton Christensen and Michael Raynor set the tone immediately by showing that most companies cannot sustain growth and by explaining to readers how stock markets factor in growth in the price of any publicly-traded stock. Growing faster than what stock markets see now and expect in the future is essential to move up a stock price.
The resource allocation process is the key culprit in humbling many market leaders when dealing with disruptive innovations. That process typically invites up-market flight rather than head-to-head fight with new market entrants. That flight mechanism is applicable not only to product/service makers, but also to their distributors and retailers. Unlike a sustaining innovation, a disruptive innovation is not compatible with the business model of market leaders. Christensen and Raynor call this behavioral pattern asymmetric motivation.
The way out of asymmetric motivation is for the leadership of an established player 1) to frame the disruptive innovation as a threat during the resource allocation process and 2) to shift responsibility for the project to an autonomous organization that has the relevant experience to frame it as an opportunity. The leadership needs to have a clear understanding of the respective impact of resources, processes, and values on what an organization can or cannot accomplish. Resources and processes are often enablers while values often represent constraints. Unlike deliberate processes, emergent processes should dominate when the future is hard to predict and the right strategy is not yet clear. That is especially true at the beginning of a company's existence. Once the winning strategy becomes clear, deliberate processes become a must to maximize the changes of success.
Christensen and Raynor continue their analysis by sub-dividing disruptive innovations into two categories: new-market disruptions competing with "non-consumption" and low-end disruptions that go after the proverbial "low-hanging fruit." Charting the upward path for a new-market disruption is more daunting because nobody has ever walked the walk. In practice, the distinction between the two types of disruptive innovations is not always clear-cut due to the existence of hybrid disruptions that combine new-market and low-end approaches. Christensen and Raynor also point out that an innovation that passes the new-market or low-end test must be disruptive to all of the significant established players to deserve the label of disruptive innovation.
Christensen and Raynor clearly show that new entrants in turn do not escape from the up-market urge. After driving out the last established market player competing in a certain market segment, cut-throat competition forces new entrants to also move up market for greener pastures.
Christensen and Raynor also reflect on why an overwhelming majority of new products fail miserably in the market-place. Attribute-based segmentation for which data are often available is the lead explanation for these failures. That type of market segmentation too often ignores the jobs that people and companies need to get done and how a product or service can be "hired" for that purpose. Targeting a product or service at the circumstances in which the target audience finds itself, rather than at the target itself is the key to success. Christensen and Raynor drive that point home very well with their story about the milkshake doing a different job for a bored commuter and his/her child at different times of the day. Christensen and Raynor blame the counterproductive attribute-based segmentation to 1) fear of focus, 2) senior executives' demand for quantification of opportunities, 3) the structure of channels, and 4) advertising economics and brand strategies.
Christensen and Raynor pursue their analysis by looking at the traditional distinction between core and non-core competences. Unlike competitiveness that is focused on what a customer values, core competence, as it is usually practiced by managers, is ominously inward looking. The rigidity of that categorization results in downplaying the evolving product architectures and integration over time. Christensen and Raynor highlight the respective impact of interdependent architectures that optimize performance in terms of functionality and reliability and modular architectures that optimize flexibility on industry structures.
Dis-integration that modularity makes possible does not preclude re-integration down the road if market circumstances change or vice versa. Savvy managers anticipate where the money will be instead of solely focusing their companies on the profitable businesses of the past. Developing this intuition is essential to avoid the process of commoditization. If commoditization already happens, de-commoditization can be achieved as well. Christensen and Raynor describe both processes in much detail. For example, the integrated American automakers are evolving toward modular architectures for their mainstream models in order to compete on speed and flexibility. This has in turn led to a significant consolidation of their suppliers.
Christensen and Raynor also clearly demonstrate that none of the attribute-based categorizations of funding such as venture capital vs. corporate capital and public versus private capital are a reliable predictor of a new venture success. Christensen and Raynor correctly point out that the best money is patient for growth but impatient for profit in the first years of a new business. The deal spiral from inadequate growth as Christensen and Raynor call it, results from impatience for growth and patience for profit.
Finally, Christensen and Raynor highlight the three roles that senior executives have to play in leading new growth:
1) Short-Term: To be at the juncture between disruptive growth businesses and the mainstream businesses to decide on the allocation of the company's resources and processes
2) Longer-Term: To lead what Christensen and Raynor call a "disruptive growth engine" to repeatedly launch successful growth businesses
3) Perpetual: To anticipate when the circumstances are changing, and to pass on their know-how to others to identify these signals.
To summarize, Christensen and Raynor made with The Innovator's Solution an important contribution to the better understanding and harnessing of disruptive innovations that are an essential ingredient of what Joseph Schumpeter called "creative destruction."
Motivation assymetries.......2007-06-11
Already a business classic, this book does not disappoint. Picking up from where the 'Innovator's Dilemma' left off, Christensen and Raynor examine in detail the barriers towards innovation and growth. Perhaps surprisingly, the concepts discussed are as applicable to large enterprises as they are to one man startups. The problem is one and the same - enterprise readers will learn about the pitfalls of institutionalized processes and sustaining innovation; startup teams will learn how to position their products for future success. Whether you are an aspiring entrepreneur, or a high-ranked executive, 'Innovator's Solution' should be at the top of your reading list.
The Purpose of Your Product.......2007-04-05
Exceptional. Who wants their customers to rave about their products and services? Who wants to know "exactly" what your customers need? Who wants to experience revenue growth for their company? If you answered yes to these then the "Innovator's Solution" is a MUST READ. Clayton Christensen and Michael Raynor have taken us back to the fundamental issue facing a company... that being "what job does my product or service satisfy?" Moving away from features, advantages and benefits and back to the basics of so-what-can-you-do-for-me will bring value to anyone tasked with the duty of using innovation to drive revenue growth. CEO's... read on!
Interesting theory for big company innovations.......2007-02-23
This is a well researched and informative book that I read after reading "The Innovator's Dilemma" by Christensen. This book answers the questions raised in the first book. I therefore strongly recommend reading the "The Innovator's Dilemma". The books are complementary and outstanding. Christensen and Raynor explains so eloquently and compellingly, the problem of managing and sustaining growth as large companies suffer from the problem of "stalling" since innovations that address small markets get eliminated in the resource allocation process. Conventional market research methodologies are often unable to reveal the potential for markets that do not exist. Disruptive innovations are targeted at exploiting the markets of products that are "good enough" or are competing against "non consumption".
The book provides solution frameworks for design, manufacturing, distribution, organizing and financing of successful strategies of disruption. This book identifies the processes that create winning innovations and the strategies that can be applied in your own project. References at the end of each chapter provide you with useful and insightful sources for further reading should you wish to pursue this subject further. The researcher made good use of these references in piecing together their theories. The authors reinforce their arguments, claims and solutions with real-life examples from many different companies including IBM, Sony, AT&T, Microsoft, and others.
This book focuses on new product ideas at big enterprises and how they should be effectively pursued. When there is no current market for these innovative products and hence no customer base, these technologies are called disruptive. The authors explain how innovation can be a predictable process that can result in sustainable and lucrative growth. They identify the factors that result in poor judgment by managers and present their ideas and a new framework to help product developers to timely create viable and profitable disrupting-technology that meets the needs of the market.
I recommend this book to managers who are interested in cutting edge innovative solutions. This book should be helpful to define a strategy to form the idea into a commercially viable product or service. This book is excellent reading if you wish to understand the forces that can drive or hinder a firm's growth with numerous real-life examples throughout the book.
Excellent Insights and Ideas.......2007-02-20
A key point in "The Innovator's Solution" is that financial markets relentlessly pressure companies to grow, and to keep growing faster and faster. Yet, considerable evidence exists that once a company's core business has matured, the pursuit of new platforms for growth entails daunting risk - roughly only 10% succeed over more than a few years - thus providing an above average increase in shareholder returns, and often the effort causes the entire corporation to crash. (Twenty-eight percent of those that stall lose 78% of their market capitalization; most of the rest also incur significant, though lesser, losses.)
AT&T is used as an example of what can go wrong. After the '84 mandated divestiture of local phone services, its first attempt at growth was based on the widely shared view that computer systems and phone networks were going to converge. AT&T first tried building its own computer division, achieving at best, losses of at least $200 million/year. It then acquired NCR, but sold it in '96 for a loss of over $6 billion alone, and $10 billion for the total computer venture. AT&T then tried wireless (lost another $5 billion), and broadband (lost another $40 billion).
Incremental innovations are likely to be used by established, leading firms to reinforce their dominance. In computers, G.E., Honeywell, RCA, and AT&T could not muscle in on IBM - that required the disruptive innovation of PCs brought by others. Likewise, IBM and Kodak couldn't beat Xerox at copying - Canon did that via its disruptive table-top.
In disruptive circumstances, the entrants are likely to defeat the incumbents because industry leaders are always motivated to go up-market and almost never motivated to defend small new/low-end markets that new entrants find attractive.
"The Innovator's Solution" uses minimills to illustrate the point. Minimills worked their way up from rebar in several cycles (angle iron, structural steel, sheet steel) that each ended with price/profit collapse after the last integrated producer left the market. The integrated mills were motivated to flee, and the minimills were forced to go up-market to escape their own fierce competition. Toyota et al vs. G.M., Ford, and Chrysler provides another example.
Finally, Christensen and Raynor offer organizational suggestions for nurturing successful disruptive technology development within large firms.
An excellent and insightful book.
Book Description
This digital document is an article from NZ Business, published by Profile Publishing Ltd. on February 1, 2004. The length of the article is 1972 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.
Citation Details
Title: Finding business nirvana; how to disrupt the market and create that killer product.(Lead Feature)(Cover Story)
Author: Denise McNabb
Publication:
NZ Business (Magazine/Journal)
Date: February 1, 2004
Publisher: Profile Publishing Ltd.
Volume: 18
Issue: 1
Page: 14(4)
Article Type: Cover Story
Distributed by Thomson Gale
Product Description
Recorded on eight cd's (9 1/2 hours). Comes in clamshell case with insert.
Books:
- Projecting a Camera: Language-Games in Film Theory
- Real Cheesy Facts About: TV & Movies: Everything Weird, Dumb, and Unbelievable You Never Learned in School (Real Cheesy Facts series)
- Recreational Terror: Women and the Pleasures of Horror Film Viewing (Suny Series, Interruptions - Border Testimony(Ies) and Critical Discourse/S)
- Robert Bresson: A Spiritual Style in Film
- Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle: A Biography Of The Silent Film Comedian, 1887-1933
- Scene by Scene
- Server-Side Flash: Scripts, Databases and Dynamic Development
- Silent Film Sound (Film and Culture Series)
- Some of Me
- Somewhere in the Night
Books Index
Books Home
Recommended Books
- Webster's New World English-Spanish/Spanish-English Business Dictionary
- Nicomachean Ethics
- Get Published! Get Produced!: Tips on How to Sell Your Writing from America's No 1 Literary Agent
- How Can I Help
- Principles of Microeconomics
- The Bad Place
- Seagrasses: Biology, Ecology and Conservation
- Managerial Accounting, Excel Working Papers: Tools for Business Decision Making
- Leading Change: Overcoming the Ideology of Comfort and the Tyranny of Custom
- Mrs. Craddock
Cinematography
| Movies
| Entertainment
| Subjects
| Books
The Filmmaker's Guide to Production Design
The Art Direction Handbook for Film
What an Art Director Does: An Introduction to Motion Picture Production Design
Ken Adam: The Art of Production Design
Pretty Pictures: Production Design and the History Film
