After years studying remarkable companies and speaking to some of the most influential leaders around, Tim Manners has discovered a solution to the marketing woes of many brands. Stop worrying about demographics, fads, and cutting-edge advertising. Instead, focus on relevance. Manners shares how the best of the best create solutions to their customers’ problems and help them live happier lives. You’ll learn how: Levi’s reasserted relevance when it created wardrobe solutions for men. Dunkin’ Donuts stopped trying to mimic the look and feel of Starbucks and found success by delivering a simple, quick cup of joe. Hasbro reinvented board games for today’s time-pressed consumers. Kleenex’s new germ-fighting tissues helped keep the company relevant by turning a useful product into a necessary one. Staples stopped wasting its shoppers’ time with extraneous products. Nintendo’s simple design for the Wii appealed to consumers of all ages and game designers alike, allowing it to outsell its competitors. The path to sustainable growth for your brand begins with designing meaningful solutions and providing them when and where people need them most. Relevance will teach you how to become—and remain—indispensable.

Production is a complex system of interdependent activities, necessary to the system as a whole, which itself depends on the continuance of each individual activity that composes it. In such a system, resources must be committed to specific technological purposes long in advance to the ultimate sale of goods to the consumer.The success of such an enterprise system rests on the durability of the instruments it uses. These are so complex, sensitive, and powerful that their huge expense can be recovered only if they can be used for many years. Yet when the decision is made to invest in them, those years of use are in the future and the conditioning circumstances are unobservable and unknown.The firm in Western economies is the essential institutional means of confronting this problem of uncertainty, Expectation, Enterprise and Profit: The Theory of the Firm is concerned with the nature and mode of life of the firm as a means of policy formation in the face of uncertainty.This book offers a concise treatment and excellent analysis of the major concepts studied in a first course in the theory of the firm.

This Technical Note on Oversight, Supervision, and Risk Management of Financial Market Infrastructures explains that financial market infrastructures (FMIs) in Switzerland are well-developed and stable. The FMIs operate smoothly for many years without any substantial outage or other technical or financial problem. Payment in Swiss francs, both large value and retail payments, are settled in the Swiss Interbank Clearing, which is a real time gross settlements system. Important progress has been realized regarding the adoption of the new principles for FMIs. FMIs should continue their efforts to achieve full compliance. The new Swiss Financial Market Infrastructure Act should be passed by Parliament to complete the process. Although the risk management framework of SIX Group AG is comprehensive it has certain gaps that need to be addressed to fully observe the new international standards. The Swiss National Bank (SNB) and Financial Market Supervisory Authority (FINMA) are encouraged to hold a firm stance on the full implementation of the new principles in Switzerland. The SNB and FINMA should upgrade their domestic and foreign cooperation arrangements to be able to handle crisis events effectively and in a timely manner. The domestic cooperation arrangements work well in normal circumstances but may prove insufficient during crisis events in the absence of a lead supervisor or overseer of the FMIs.