The New Gold Standard

Discover the secrets of world-class leadership! When it comes to refined service and exquisite hospitality, one name stands high above the rest: The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company. With ceaseless attention to every luxurious detail, the company has set the bar for creating memorable customer experiences in world-class settings. Now, for the first time, the leadership secrets behind the company's extraordinary success are revealed. The New Gold Standard takes you on an exclusive tour behind the scenes of The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company. Granted unprecedented access to the company's executives, staff, and its award-winning Leadership Center training facilities, bestselling author Joseph Michelli explored every level of leadership within the organization. He emerged with the key principles leaders at any company can use to provide a customer experience unlike any other, such as: Understanding the ever-evolving needs of customers Empowering employees by treating them with the utmost respect Anticipating customers' unexpressed needs and concerns Developing and conducting an unsurpassed training regimen Sharing engaging stories from the company's employees--from the corporate office and hotels around the globe--Michelli describes the innovative methods the company uses to create peerless guest experiences and explains how it constantly hones and improves them. The New Gold Standard weaves practical how-to advice, proven leadership tools, and the wisdom of experts to help you create and embed superior customer-service principles, processes, and practices in your own organization.

Learn how to cultivate the most incredible customer experiences on earth through this essential guide by Colin Cowie, distinguished purveyor of unforgettable “wow” events for the world’s most demanding clients. If you’re searching for ways to ensure your customers walk away from your company with a smile on their face and a plan to return, you found it. And any business organization can adapt the tools and techniques in this book. Colin Cowie, one of the world’s most sought-after event planners, shares the hard-won and hard-nosed advice he has learned through entertaining and engaging stories and examples. He gives readers the indisputable blueprint for creating a customer-service culture that anyone can tailor to their own needs, whether you’re a shopkeeper, corporate marketing director, or budding event planner. Upon coming to the United States from South Africa with $400 in his pocket, Colin built his highly successful catering and event-planning business from the ground up to become event planner to the most respected tastemakers and personalities in the world—including Oprah Winfrey, Jennifer Lopez, Ryan Seacrest, and Kim Kardashian, to name a few. In this book, you will: Learn how to formulate your own vision, mission statements, and guiding principles, and effectively communicate them to your team. Learn how you can align your vision with your essential mission statement. Discover the core values, including service and accountability, that fuel Colin’s customer-care ethos, and how you can apply those values to your own business. Have a renewed understanding of how vitally important it is that you take good care of the people who work for you so they, in turn, can care for your customers. Become armed to inspire and empower your team. Be guided to create your own “bible” of scripts, protocols, and procedures that will streamline customer-care situations while making every customer feel like their individual desires are being taken care of. Learn how to use every complaint as an opportunity, as well as why you should be more afraid of a client who doesn’t complain when something goes wrong versus one who does.

The guide to returning to a gold standard All that glitters is gold and gold has never glittered so much as it has in the last decade, reaching staggering new prices in recent years. The definitive modern argument to returning to a gold standard, The New Gold Standard succinctly and clearly explains the nature of sound money, the causes and cures of inflation and deflation, the importance of fiscal responsibility within a sound monetary system, and the reasons for recessions and depressions. Little has been written beyond academic histories of the gold standard, but gold standard expert Paul Nathan fills that void for the first time Written for beginning and professional investors, the book provides guidance on how a gold standard will strengthen the dollar, reduce debt, and help stabilize the economy, offering easily applied strategies for investing in gold now and in the future The degree of depressions and recessions and the boom bust cycle can be avoided with a sustainable, stable monetary policy The international return to gold is not a fad but a sign of a world in monetary transition As long as governments continue to print money and deficits continue to rise, gold will be a hot commodity. As inflation creeps up, more and more talk will turn to returning to some version of the gold standard, and The New Gold Standard is the first major work to explicitly address the challenges and benefits of such a move.

Ari Gold is known for his ruthless approach to deal-making and client relationships that made him one of, if not the, most powerful and sought-after agents in Hollywood until he retired in 2011. In his new book THE GOLD STANDARD, Gold will illuminate, for the first time, his unique, effective and, some would say, outrageous philosophies on running a successful business, client management, employee motivation, keeping a happy home life, and other keys to his many successes. Brash, emphatic, instructive and always wise, Gold's book will rival business and leadership bestsellers the world over. In his own words and with his trademark enthusiasm, Gold's tome will be the only book anyone wanting to make something of him or herself will ever need. Ari Gold says: "In my humble opinion, if you want to run a successful business this is the only book you'll ever have to read. And my humble opinion is never wrong."

By the end of the nineteenth century, the world was ready to adopt the gold standard out of concerns of national power, prestige, and anti-English competition. Yet although the gold standard allowed countries to enact a virtual single world currency, the years before World War I were not a time of unfettered liberal economics and one-world, one-market harmony. Outside of Europe, the gold standard became a tool for nationalists and protectionists primarily interested in growing domestic industry and imperial expansion. This overlooked trend, provocatively reassessed in Steven Bryan's well-documented history, contradicts our conception of the gold standard as a British-based system infused with English ideas, interests, and institutions. In countries like Japan and Argentina, where nationalist concerns focused on infant-industry protection and the growth of military power, the gold standard enabled the expansion of trade and the goals of the age: industry and empire. Bryan argues that these countries looked less to Britain and more to North America and the rest of Europe for ideological models. Not only does this history challenge our idealistic notions of the prewar period, but it also reorients our understanding of the history that followed. Policymakers of the 1920s latched onto the idea that global prosperity before World War I was the result of a system dominated by English liberalism. Their attempt to reproduce this triumph helped bring about the global downturn, the Great Depression, and the collapse of the interwar world.

Of the monetary reform plan -- Introduction -- The purpose of The True Gold Standard -- The properties of gold -- Restoration of the gold dollar -- How we get from here to there -- Conclusion. Appendix I: Excerpts from the United States Constitution -- Appendix II: Coinage Act of 1792 -- Appendix III: American monetary history in brief, price stability -- Selected bibliography -- Index.

Since the first edition, published in 1985, much new research has been completed. This updated version includes five new essays, including a new introduction by Eichengreen and a discussion of the gold standard and the EU monetary debate.

This highly practical and concise book shows you how to undertake a reporting process and produce a sustainability report in line with the new standards and frameworks presented by the International Integrated Reporting Council (IIRC) and the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI). Fully updated to ensure compliance with the new standards, this second edition shows how to actually produce a sustainability report as well as the key processes in the planning: how to produce a business case; the development of actions plans; process and team leadership; and generating cross-functional buy in. Templates are provided for certain steps in order to simplify the tasks involved at each point in the process. Anyone involved in delivering or developing a process to embed sustainability reporting for an organization will find this book invaluable, for example Chief Sustainability Officers, Chief Financial Officers and Company Secretaries. It will also be of interest to students in the field of sustainability.