Sears And Zemanski

Whether you're selling, persuading, advising or explaining, you spend most of your day-to-day life in verbal communication with others. The skills you bring to those exchanges will determine whether they go in your favor – or leave you behind as others succeed. If you can't communicate your ideas or intentions, you can't expect others to understand them; on the other hand, the better you can make yourself understood, the higher your chances for climbing to the top.

Former corporate speechwriter Hare presents an unvarnished look at the J.C. Penney Company, a truly American saga that parallels U.S. business history itself. Hare looks at the company from its beginning in 1902 as a dry goods store, through its rise into a successful chain of full-service department stores rivaled only by Sears, Roebuck, to its fall into bankruptcy in the 1990s due to corporate bungling.

A no account outlaw establishes his own particular brand of law and order and builds a town on the edges of civilization in this farcical western. With the aid of an old law text and unpredictable notions Roy Bean distinguishes between lawbreakers and lawgivers by way of his pistols.

In a company so large, there are bound to be controversies, with wages, with attempts to make employees (called “associates” – and early in the history the company offered them stock) pay for some health care (the company has improved prescription drugs recently). There have been disturbing (to say the least) reports of abuses, such as associates being locked in a store, being illegally forced to work off the clock, and allegations that cleaning contractors have hired illegal aliens. There was a segment showing Wal-Mart in China.