William C. Johnson

Shira is a fast-paced historical thriller that gives the reader an inside look at the Israeli spy organization, Mossad, during its heyday in the 1970s and 1980s. The story is about a young woman who is recruited to join the agency by an aging spymaster who believes women can serve an important undercover role in the traditionally male-dominated organization. Shira is inserted into some of the Mossad's most infamous operations, including the murder of an Iraqi scientist, the raid that freed 103 hostages at the airport at Entebbe, and the audacious smuggling operations at the Red Sea diving resort in Ethiopia. Along the way she has an on-again, off-again relationship with her college boyfriend who questions the morality of her chosen profession. Their differing points of view about how to deal with volatile Middle East hostilities occurring at the time (and still occurring) form the moral dilemma that drives the plot toward its surprising but satisfying ending.

First Published in 1999, this book stresses the service aspects of an organization - especially customer service, marketing, and organizational responsiveness, and how to create and provide outstanding customer value to the target market(s).

Rico Lopez is a twice-divorced, moderately successful Mexican immigrant who is living the life of a small business owner when unexpectedly, an agent from the local DEA office shows up with a strange request. He would like to hire Rico for one day to go undercover and gather intel for them on a suspected drug cartel leader. Unfortunately, the seemingly easy, one-time assignment goes bad, and Rico is drawn into a life as a drug agent that while dangerous, also energizes him and forces him to draw on strengths he never knew he had. Rico's relationship with Mike Andress, the charismatic agent who hired him, is at the heart of the story. At times, as his operations intensify in danger and complexity, Rico becomes scared or disenchanted. But Mike persuades him to keep going, and over time, Rico realizes he's not only a good undercover agent but he's also never been happier in his life. As his confidence grows, Rico gets romantically entangled with a sexy, saucy woman who sees Rico as her very own James Bond. Their torrid love life adds a complicating wrinkle but fortunately, before things get too out of hand, Rico's first wife re-enters the picture and gets Rico centered again. This fast-moving tale, with its ordinary hero and a rich cast of nuanced, supporting characters, leads the reader through a series of improbable events until, sooner than the reader would like, the story with a twist that caps it off perfectly.

Rico Lopez is a twice-divorced, moderately successful Mexican immigrant who is living the life of a small business owner when unexpectedly, an agent from the local DEA office shows up with a strange request. He would like to hire Rico for one day to go undercover and gather intel for them on a suspected drug cartel leader. Unfortunately, the seemingly easy, one-time assignment goes bad, and Rico is drawn into a life as a drug agent that while dangerous, also energizes him and forces him to draw on strengths he never knew he had. Rico's relationship with Mike Andress, the charismatic agent who hired him, is at the heart of the story. At times, as his operations intensify in danger and complexity, Rico becomes scared or disenchanted. But Mike persuades him to keep going, and over time, Rico realizes he's not only a good undercover agent but he's also never been happier in his life. As his confidence grows, Rico gets romantically entangled with a sexy, saucy woman who sees Rico as her very own James Bond. Their torrid love life adds a complicating wrinkle but fortunately, before things get too out of hand, Rico's first wife re-enters the picture and gets Rico centered again. This fast-moving tale, with its ordinary hero and a rich cast of nuanced, supporting characters, leads the reader through a series of improbable events until, sooner than the reader would like, the story with a twist that caps it off perfectly.

First Published in 1999, this book stresses the service aspects of an organization - especially customer service, marketing, and organizational responsiveness, and how to create and provide outstanding customer value to the target market(s).

With future competitive landscape shifting from competition between companies themselves to trading partner networks, understanding and mastering process design and change is becoming more critical than ever. In order to succeed, companies are starting to weave their key business processes into hard-to-imitate strategic capabilities that distinguish them from their competitors. Supply Chain Networks and Business Process Orientation: Advanced Strategies and Best Practices will help you "connect the dots" by offering insights on how to achieve greater integration within your supply chain networks and realize the performance possible with today's interaction economics. Based on exhaustive research of supply chains and newly successful networked corporations in the US and Europe, the authors demonstrate how your company can be successful in building an effective supply chain network. Prescriptive benchmarking models illustrate proven strategies, tactics, and methods for achieving a superior level of supply chain performance.

Business Process Orientation: Gaining the E-Business Competitive Advantage provides the "why" and the "how" for building the "horizontal" organization - an essential component of the "e" in e-commerce and business. This book shows you how to weave your business processes into hard-to-imitate strategic capabilities that distinguish you from your competition. The book explores the impact that well-defined and carefully integrated processes have on organizational performance. Using the results of extensive research conducted among consumer, business-to-business, and services-based companies, the authors demonstrate that adopting a business process orientation (BPO) has a positive impact on the organizational culture and business performance. The resulting process oriented e-corporation is now positioned as a necessity not only to thrive but also to survive. The old ways of conducting business are out: pushing costs and compromising quality in order to achieve the lowest possible price. The emerging paradigm focuses on the core processes. The hallmarks of a great business still include high customer relevance, internally consistent decisions about scope and value chain activities performed, value capture mechanisms, a source of differentiation and strategic control, a sound operational system, and carefully designed processes. Business Process Orientation: Gaining the E-Business Competitive Advantage shows you how to balance your functional and horizontal orientation to create and maintain a healthy organization.

Total Quality in Marketing integrates the two areas of marketing and quality management and demonstrates how they are mutually compatible and complementary. Its primary focus is to assist managers in applying total quality principles to the overall marketing management process-preparing for a more highly competitive marketplace. Practical guidelines and processes are offered on how quality initiatives impact planning, organization, implementation, and quality control. This unique and valuable book presents a systems approach to quality-how to operationalize in the context of both the management and marketing cycles. It demonstrates how to establish effective team-based practices as well as describes the pitfalls of quality programs that are introduced as stand-alone programs without any linkage to overall strategy. This useful new book serves as a teaching tool and comprehensive reference source for integrating total quality. Case studies, exercises and chapter profiles also provide excellent support materials.