For more than a century, oil has been the engine of growth for a society that delivers an unprecedented standard of living to many. We now take for granted that economic growth is good, necessary, and even inevitable, but also feel a sense of unease about the simultaneous growth of complexity in the processes and institutions that generate and manage that growth. As societies grow more complex through the bounty of cheap energy, they also confront problems that seem to increase in number and severity. In this era of fossil fuels, cheap energy and increasing complexity have been in a mutually-reinforcing spiral. The more energy we have and the more problems our societies confront, the more we grow complex and require still more energy. How did our demand for energy, our technological prowess, the resulting need for complex problem solving, and the end of easy oil conspire to make the Deepwater Horizon oil spill increasingly likely, if not inevitable? This book explains the real causal factors leading up to the worst environmental catastrophe in U.S. history, a disaster from which it will take decades to recover.

I spend a lot of time in marketing-oriented discussion lists. If you do, you probably also sense the incredible frustration of people who keep asking about using their customer data to retain customers and increase profits. Everybody knows they should be doing it, but can't find out how to do it. Consultants and agencies make this process sound like some kind of "black magic", something you can't possibly do yourself. I disagree. I think the average business owner can do a perfectly decent job creating profiles and using them to retain customers and drive profits. Thus the book. The examples provided are Internet specific, but the methods can be used in any business where customer data is available. This book is about the down-and-dirty, nitty-gritty art of taking chunks of data generated by your customers and making sense of it, getting it to speak to you, creating insight into what types of marketing or general business actions you can take to make your business more profitable. We'll be talking about "action-oriented" ideas you can generate on your own to drive sales and profits, ideas that will reveal themselves by analyzing your own customer data, using only a spreadsheet. We have all heard how important it is to collect customer data, to "know" your customer. What I don't hear much about is what exactly you DO with all that data once you have collected it. How is it used? What exactly is Drilling Down into the data supposed to tell me, and what am I looking for when I get there? For that matter, what data should I be collecting and how will I use it when I have it? And how much is this process going to cost me? The following list outlines what you will learn and be able to do after reading the Drilling Down book: --What data is important to collect about a customer and what data is not --How to create action-oriented customer profiles with an Excel spreadsheet --How to use these profiles to plan marketing promotions --How to use these profiles to define the future value of your customers --How to use these profiles to measure the general health of your business --How to use these profiles to encourage customers to do what you want them to --How to predict when a customer is about to defect and leave you --How to increase your profits while decreasing your marketing costs --How to design high ROI (Return on Investment) marketing promotions How to blow away investors with predictions of the future profitability of your business Table of Contents Chapter 1: What's a Customer Profile? Chapter 2: Data-Driven Marketing - Customer Retention Basics Chapter 3: The Language of Data, The Science of Profit Chapter 4: Interactivity Changes the Rules of the Game Chapter 5: How to Build a Customer Profiling Spreadsheet Chapter 6: How to Profile (Score) Your Customers Chapter 7: Marketing Using Customer Scores - Basic Approach Chapter 8: Using Customer Characteristics and Multiple Scores Chapter 9: Watching Scores over Time - Customer LifeCycles Chapter 10: Customer Scoring Grids - Profiling on Steroids Chapter 11: Calculating and Using LifeTime Value in Promotions Chapter 12: Turning Profiles into Profits - the Staging Area Chapter 13: Turning Profiles into Profits - the Financial Model Chapter 14: Turning Profiles into Profits - Financial Tweaks Chapter 15: Measuring Success in Best Customer Promotions Chapter 16: Some Final Thoughts Seasonal Adjustments to Marketing Promotions Don't Fight Customer Behavior CRM Software and Customer Scoring Data-Driven Marketing Program Descriptions There's more! Automate the basic customer scoring process on large groups of customers. Use the software included free with this edition! Windows OS and MS Access and Excel required to run the software.

This book shows you how to attain consistency, profitability, and scalability in your construction or trade business. As the cofounder of the industry-leading coaching practice Small Business Growth Partners, Chris has helped develop a proven system for unlocking organizational growth. Whether you've been struggling with personnel issues, marketing, sales, processes, or anything in between, this book will help you transform your pain points into strengths.

A self-paced visual guide to learning Crystal Reports, this workbook for beginners has easy-to-understand, step-by-step instructions and screen shots to show users how to complete the design technique.

Learn how to build advanced reports and dashboards in Salesforce Lightning experience About This Book Visualize and create advanced reports and dashboards using Lightning Experience Improve overall business efficiency with advanced and effective reports and dashboards Understand and create custom reports and dashboards Who This Book Is For This book is targeted at Salesforce.com administrators, business analysts, and managers who use Salesforce.com for their daily job and want to learn in depth about Salesforce Reporting and Dashboard in Lightning Experience. Readers should have a basic knowledge of Salesforce, such as: Accounts, Contacts, Leads, Opportunities and custom objects. What You Will Learn Navigate in Salesforce.com within the Lightning Experience user interface Secure and share your reports and dashboards with other users Create, manage, and maintain reports using Report Builder Learn how the report type can affect the report generated Explore the report and dashboard folder and the sharing model Create reports with multiple formats and custom report types Explore various dashboard features in Lightning Experience Use Salesforce1, including accessing reports and dashboards In Detail Built on the Salesforce App Cloud, the new Lightning Experience combines the new Lightning Design System, Lightning App Builder, and Lightning Components to enable anyone to quickly and easily create modern enterprise apps. The book will start with a gentle introduction to the basics of Salesforce reports and dashboards. It will also explain how to access reports in depth. Then you will learn how to create and manage reports, to use Schedule Report, and create advanced report configurations. The next section talks about dashboards and will enable you to understand and compare various types of dashboard component and how you can benefit the most from each of them. Then we move on to advanced topics and explain tips and tricks related to reports and dashboards, including reporting snapshots, report parameters, and collaboration. Finally, we will discuss how to access dashboards and reports from the Salesforce1 mobile app. Style and approach This comprehensive guide covers the advanced features of the all new Salesforce Lightning concepts and communicates them through a practical approach to explore the underlying concepts of how, when, and why to use them.

This book is specifically for the version of Crystal Reports that comes with Visual Studio 2005. If you have been looking for a beginners book that has a lot of easy to understand, step-by-step instructions and screen shots that show you how to learn and use the version of Crystal Reports that comes bundled with Visual Studio 2005, this is the book for you. The No Stress Tech Guide To Crystal Reports for Visual Studio 2005 For Beginners book, is a self-paced visual guide to learning Crystal Reports and is written from the perspective that the reader has not created a report before or has not used Crystal Reports. This book is for the beginner and intermediate user. To help you become familiar with the options and features, this book contains over 500 illustrations that provide a visual tour of the software. Crystal Reports Basic for Visual Studio 2008, ISBN 978-0-9773912-8-8 is also available. If you are looking for a beginners book for Crystal Reports XI, see ISBN 978-0-9773912-3-3.

The final edition of the incomparable data warehousing and business intelligence reference, updated and expanded The Kimball Group Reader, Remastered Collection is the essential reference for data warehouse and business intelligence design, packed with best practices, design tips, and valuable insight from industry pioneer Ralph Kimball and the Kimball Group. This Remastered Collection represents decades of expert advice and mentoring in data warehousing and business intelligence, and is the final work to be published by the Kimball Group. Organized for quick navigation and easy reference, this book contains nearly 20 years of experience on more than 300 topics, all fully up-to-date and expanded with 65 new articles. The discussion covers the complete data warehouse/business intelligence lifecycle, including project planning, requirements gathering, system architecture, dimensional modeling, ETL, and business intelligence analytics, with each group of articles prefaced by original commentaries explaining their role in the overall Kimball Group methodology. Data warehousing/business intelligence industry's current multi-billion dollar value is due in no small part to the contributions of Ralph Kimball and the Kimball Group. Their publications are the standards on which the industry is built, and nearly all data warehouse hardware and software vendors have adopted their methods in one form or another. This book is a compendium of Kimball Group expertise, and an essential reference for anyone in the field. Learn data warehousing and business intelligence from the field's pioneers Get up to date on best practices and essential design tips Gain valuable knowledge on every stage of the project lifecycle Dig into the Kimball Group methodology with hands-on guidance Ralph Kimball and the Kimball Group have continued to refine their methods and techniques based on thousands of hours of consulting and training. This Remastered Collection of The Kimball Group Reader represents their final body of knowledge, and is nothing less than a vital reference for anyone involved in the field.