Excel Phenomenon: The Astonishing Success Story of the Fastest-Growing Communications Company -- and What It Means to You

Book Description

How It Happened, Where It's Going,
and Why It Matters to You
This is the story of a remarkable business opportunity, one that is open to all and is as simple to grasp as a telephone handset. It's about good old American ingenuity. It's about offering consumers a better deal. It's about people helping people. It's about accomodating and strengthening a family while working for financial achievement. It's about false starts and missteps, too, but in the end the brief history of Excel Communications, Inc., is the ultimate American success story.
If you believe in challenging conventional wisdom, or if you're looking for reassurance that ideas still count in our society, this story is for you. Old assumptions crumble. New ideas emerge. Opportunity abbounds. Think about it: For nearly a century, there was only one phone company, and almost everyone—scholars, economists, politicians, business executives, and consumers—just assumed that was the way it had to be. Then in the early 1980's the breakup of the AT&T monopoly opened an opportunity for a young entrepreneur to realize his dream.
That dream is Excel. In less than ten years, Kenny Troutt and his partners have grown their dream into a $2 billion corporation. They've created an opportunity for a million people to start their own home-based businesses, ones that allow them to spend more time with their families. Many have acchieved satisfying degrees of financial independence and security. Some have become wealthy.
Virtually all credit Excel with bringing their families closer together and giving them the financial security they never thought possible.
The dream is open to you. Find out more about it inside The Excel Phenomenon.

Customer Reviews:

Definitely a title to keep on your "personal success" library shelves..........2007-02-18

The Excel Phenomenon certainly has had its detractors. Doubtless, there are handfuls of people out there in Bookland who have been through the rigours of "Excel U" but not fared nearly as well with the product and the "system" as some of the prominent personalities featured in this book, proud of them as we are. Lookit, I'm slightly skeptical about this read, ok? The author makes a clearcut attempt to distance himself from CEO Kenny Troutt and the people at the top of the Excel Communications foodchain, yet (and for this, folks, you'll have to give it a solid concerted read) he waxes majorly poetic on the merits of the company, how it functions, the nitties-gritties 'n all, and this book appeared to me to basically be a primer on all things Excel-like. A posterior-smoocher.

I'm not saying that I minded it. I'm also not saying that it's unacceptable. It's just that if an author's going to state his bona fides, and then masquerade his copy as shilling for the principals of the company he writes about, I'd have to say that mightily stretches the bounds of belief just a wee too much for this reviewer's taste. Just be forthcoming. If you're going to boink me, then boink me properly is where I'm going with this.

Okay, so enough about the demerits of this book. On the positive side of the ledger, I enjoyed the "slice of life" portraits of the people whose lives were changed by Excel. It's heartwarming to read about real people going through real economic day-to-day crow. This isn't a rags to riches sort of thing. Some of the people described within these pages toiled at Excel for a long time and didn't necessarily see a profit return for, like, well...ages! It took them YEARS to build up a steady business and clientele, and in the meantime, like the rest of the working-stiff population, they had to take on menial jobs to make ends meet. Many of these profiles described were two-child families, with spouses who **both** worked. To read about how they ultimately managed to triumph and make it boldly back to the black is quite a remarkable achievement.

Will this encourage other people to emulate their successes? Hard to say. I recommend--at the very least--reading this book in order to, at first, glean some of the feel-good cream which will get you thinking differently about your lifestyle. I'd reckon to say that many of the people who get through Robinson's book will be jazzed up enough to want to go out and make a mega-change in their lives, and what's more, the bulk of the people who are reading this are typically in a "I wanna change my life mode." (Sure, there are people just reading it for reading its own sake...though not too many of those, I doubt). I hazard to recommend any one given book at the "silver bullet" solution as a source of motivation for readers. THE EXCEL PHENOMENON is precisely the same. Don't look to it as a "Bible" of sorts to glean all possible inspirations for the direction you think your life should be going. DO, however, look to it as that, perhaps, **final** book you're going to read that will propel you once and for all on that path through life which will ensure that you've got a steady stream of income which will prevent the need to have to alternately scrounge around for it constantly in dead-end jobs, working for "da Man," or possibly even getting stuck in an earn-spend lifer trap that nets you little in the way of positive net worth.

Robinson, through the device of Kenny Troutt and his cronies' Excel, shows you at the very least that a way certainly **does** exist in order to remove yourself from this dead-end matrix of taking out of your pocket what you toil and labour hours to earn.

The book's written in a no-nonsense style, easy to read, and I found myself liberally jumping between sections as a way to spice up the read. That's my indicator of a good piece of non-fiction, I'll have you know.

What the author is basically positing here, I believe, is that business phenomena like the "Excel phenomenon" are going to become increasingly more important in the early 21st-century. With the explosion of telecommunications products, and as more and more data gets pumped down that line, like TV and other wireless services, there will be many more people getting rich off of these products.

I didn't award this book the top ranking, only because I think that the author wasn't entirely forthcoming about his connection to the relevant Excel brass. It's hard to believe with something this seemingly rah-rah that there wasn't some kind of clever artifice and assorted payola in the mix here. Sorry, but just my $0.02.

Otherwise, it was a rather spirited read.

--ADM in Prague

A political communicator as the author.......2005-01-17

Many of the reviews seemed to consider more the network marketing aka MLM in general than the book itself. I think that the Excel Communications was a very well timed and well implemented business idea that worked.

Unfortunately, I cannot say the same about this book. Especially the first half of the book is painful rhetoric about the glory of Excel Communications. Somehow I had a feeling that the author was a professional writer, maybe a journalist. I could not believe that any journalist would write as one-sighted text as this book, and I checked the background of the author: a veteran speech-writer and political communicator. Well, that explained a lot.

The book repeats over and over the same positive claims of working for Excel: Be your own boss, be with your family, and with the hypocrisy of a Miss World candidate the story that although I make a lot of money, the most important for me is that I can help the others to succeed as well.

When you open the book on an arbitrary page, you get the feeling that the book includes facts as there are so many numbers and dollar signs. By reading the text, the reader notices that 95% of the facts are irrelevant like how much the person earned before joining Excel or how much one can gain by saving 20 years with 8% interest rate. The latter fact got 3 pages in 225-page book. The other facts were mainly related to the environment or society, not to Excel. The book had also some relevant facts like how many percentage of the Excel representatives succeed or fail, but those facts have to be dug out from a lot of noise around them, and in those cases the facts are not statistical from the Excel book-keeping but individual opinions.

What I was missing are the facts:
How much of the Excel income come from the telecom services and how much of it comes from training and other MLM supporting services.
How many customers Excel has compared to the representatives.
How Excel is sharing the customer revenue between the person who sold the service, the person who recruited that sales person and Excel.
How a typical representative income stream is composed, how much comes from getting customers, how much customer calls, how much recruiting others, how much from recruited persons recruiting new ones, and how much of training and managerial tasks.

21 years old and almost financially free with Excel.......2004-01-19

This was a recap of the history of Excel. If growing to 1 Billion in sales faster than any company in history doesn't impress you maybe this will. I think that most people who bad mouth this book or MLM in general have failed themselves. Maybe only a small percentage of people find financial independence in MLM, but that's the same deal with any new venture. Those that fail have quit, because the only way to fail in Excel is to quit. If your new Micky D's franchise fails, does that mean that Micky D's doesn't work. I think the problem is, YOU DON'T WORK. People by nature hate blaming themselves. I am 21, a university student and well on my way to never working again for the rest of my life. If you want to learn how, i'll tell you my big secret, I WORK!

An Excel Rep, Biased but Financially Free.......2004-01-19

This book was obviously written to not only to give a historical view of the company but to promote it to others. Excel and network marketing are amazing in the way they give motivated people the opportunity to have money and time freedom. I am a 21 year old college student and i am well on my way to never working a real job again. Those who are nay sayers or bad mouth this company or MLM as a whole are the ones who have failed. They'll be the same ones after they open a million dollar franchise who fail and tell you franchising doesn't work. I've got news for you, YOU DIDN'T WORK! MAYBE THE FACT THAT YOU CAN'T BLAME YOURSELF IS THE REASON FOR YOUR FAILURE!
Whether its Excel or another MLM company, get in now and never quit.

Good read for those interested in NM........2002-12-20

This is a good book for anyone interested in learning more
about NM and how Excel has grown into a global communications
company. For those that say the company "keeps your investment",
you get your "investment" back if you actually work. The problem
is most folks that join a NM company, they expect to get paid
for doing nothing. This is a business! And it's yours...you
reap the rewards for what you put into it. And for those that
say Excel products are over priced,etc, not true. They are
competitively priced with the larger carriers. Check it out
yourself. Yes, you can find bargains, but that's true with
anything you buy/use. The one review that mentioned market
saturation? Excel is a 2Billion company on what? A 2% share
of the 100B long distance industry. And now there's local! Anyone that bashes this book obviously
has failed at NM (maybe with Excel), but I bet they never put
forth any effort to really build a business.

The Excel Phenomenon: The Astonishing Success Story of the Fastest-Growing Communications Company-And What It Means to You

Average customer rating:

The Excel Phenomenon: The Astonishing Success Story of the Fastest-Growing Communications Company-And What It Means to You
James W. Robinson
Manufacturer: Prima Pub
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000NXYLHW

ACCA Paper 1.1 Preparing Financial Statements (Acca Study Text)
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ACCA Paper 1.1 Preparing Financial Statements (Acca Study Text)
BPP Professional Education
Manufacturer: BPP Professional Education
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0751723134

ACCA Paper 1.1 Preparing Financial Statements (Acca Study Text)
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ACCA Paper 1.1 Preparing Financial Statements (Acca Study Text)
BPP Professional Education
Manufacturer: BPP Professional Education
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 075171660X

ACCA Paper 1.1 Preparing Financial Statements (International) (Acca Study Text)
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ACCA Paper 1.1 Preparing Financial Statements (International) (Acca Study Text)
BPP Professional Education
Manufacturer: BPP Professional Education
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 075171674X

Book Description

The assessment of risks posed by natural hazards such as floods, droughts, earthquakes, tsunamis or cyclones, may not reflect the full range or magnitude of events possible. As human populations grow, especially in hazard-prone areas, methods for accurately assessing natural hazard risks are becoming increasingly important. Jonathan Nott describes the many methods used to reconstruct such hazards from natural long-term records. He demonstrates how long-term records are essential in gaining a realistic understanding of the variability of natural hazards, and how short-term historical records can often misrepresent likely risks.

Book Description

"Real black magic calculus" is how Albert Einstein described quantum mechanics in a letter in 1925. Quantum mechanics is now rather more widely understood by physicists, but still many "outsiders" are unaware of what quantum mechanics is, how it has changed the course of development of physics and how it affects their everyday lives. This book gives a fascinating account of the evolution of the ideas and concepts of quantum theory and modern physics, written by an "insider" but aimed specifically at the general science reader. Many anecdotes from famous past physicists give an insight into their work and personalities. The many illustrations are an important and attractive feature of the book. Leonid Ponomarev is a leading theoretical physicist. His deep understanding of the subject is allied with his wide knowledge of history, literature and philosophy to produce this history of the development of modern physics and its impact on our lives.

Customer Reviews:

Excellent Primer.......2001-05-31

This is an excellent primer on the history and make-up of quantum physics. I don't know why it's [so expensive] but it may be due to the unique format and high quality of the CONTENT, which is so often difficult to find in books of this area.... ;)

Lively supplement to any course on atomic or nuclear physics.......2000-05-26

Dr. Ponomarev has here presented an original history and discussion of Modern Physics. The subject is the development of Quantum Mechanics from atomic through nuclear physics. The book is obviously the fruit of years of reading in many areas of science, literature, and philosophy. It is enlivened with many entertaining quotes from famous pundits of all kinds, and by attractive, unusual pen-and-ink drawings by Olga Levenok.(Okay, her drawings of famous physicists are not always good likenesses--but her other designs, some of them whimsical and surrealistic, more than make up for it.)

The author is a himself a nuclear physicist, and chapters 12-18 reflect this expertise: he succeeds in making nuclear physics interesting--yes, nuclear physics, that notorious, grundgey step-child of QM --by retelling the history of its development. And because he is a research physicist, his account has a level of detail, accuracy, and authenticity that is usually missing in popularizations of Physics. (Whenever I could check his numbers, I found they were accurate--a most refreshing contrast to many science popularizations, where the numbers are few and far between, being either regarded as trivia, an unwelcome distraction, or else side-stepped altogether to avoid alienating a non-numerate public. It was only in Ch. 18, his review of astrophysics, that I detected several factual errors.)

The book does contain a few equations--even Schrodinger's eq'n makes a brief appearance. But there is nothing that should overwhelm the person with a few physics courses under his belt.

A minor problem is that sometimes the translation and/or the author's mode of expression turns clumsy or wooden. A bigger annoyance--and the reason I cannot give 5 stars--is the complete absence of an index.

Book Description

In spite of the impressive predictive power and strong mathematical structure of quantum mechanics, the theory has always suffered from important conceptual problems. Some of these have never been solved. Motivated by this state of affairs, a number of physicists have worked together for over thirty years to develop stochastic electrodynamics, a physical theory aimed at finding a conceptually satisfactory, realistic explanation of quantum phenomena.
This is the first book to present a comprehensive review of stochastic electrodynamics, from its origins to present-day developments. After a general introduction for the non-specialist, a critical discussion is presented of the main results of the theory as well as of the major problems encountered. A chapter on stochastic optics and some interesting consequences for local realism and the Bell inequalities is included. In the final chapters the authors propose and develop a new version of the theory that brings it in closer correspondence with quantum mechanics and sheds some light on the wave aspects of matter and the linkage with quantum electrodynamics.
Audience: The volume will be of interest to scholars and postgraduate students of theoretical and mathematical physics, foundations and philosophy of physics, and teachers of theoretical physics and quantum mechanics, electromagnetic theory, and statistical physics (stochastic processes).

Decoherence and Entropy in Complex Systems: Selected Lectures from DICE 2002 (Lecture Notes in Physics)

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Decoherence and Entropy in Complex Systems: Selected Lectures from DICE 2002 (Lecture Notes in Physics)

Manufacturer: Springer
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 3540206396

Book Description

The contributions to this volume are based on selected lectures from the first international workshop on decoherence, information, complexity and entropy (DICE). The aim of this volume is to reflect the growing importance ot common concepts behind seemingly different fields such as quantum mechanics, general relativity and statistical physics in a form accessible to nonspecialist researchers. Many presentations include original results which are published here for the first time.

Proving Quantum Mechanics Wrong: God does not throw dice

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Proving Quantum Mechanics Wrong: God does not throw dice
Randall B. Floit
Manufacturer: AuthorHouse
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Science | Subjects | Books

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ASIN: 1420888269

Book Description

Direct Challenge To Modern Science From An Outsider :
Not by some new theory from an outsider without credentials, that current scientists are not willing to read. Instead, never before preformed experiments are presented with falsifiable predictions to challenge science. Falsifiable by putting predictions at risk with physical tests that could show this book wrong. However, they also put Quantum Mechanics and the idea of "Non-Local" reality at risk as well. These tests will show Einstein was correct to say, "GOD does not throw dice".

Commonsense Explanations For Commonsense Readers:
Written for non-scientific lay readers interested in gaining a realistic and logical understanding of current physics. Explanations that build a commonsense discovery of Einstein's Hidden Variable, which modern science has failed to find. A dramatic find that will amaze both general readers and scientific community. Understandable views of physics where the public will see the flaws in current science revealed by an outsider, and ultimately require science to rewrite their textbooks. The general reader will gain a real understanding of issues like :

- History of realistic & mystic ideas becoming The Scientific Method
- Special Relativity presented in Classical and understandable terms
- Conflict between General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics
- How Relativistic Mass still used by some popular Scientists is wrong
- "Einstein Local" vs. "Non-Local" Theories made clear
- Bell Theorem and error made by modern science.
- Photon Hidden Variable that solves Bell Theorem

Marking the beginning of the end for all "Non-Local" Theories, this First Edition could become a collectable piece of science history. Second Edition will be issued with Epilog detailing results of the experiments proposed in this book, once the scientific community accepts the challenge of putting Modern Theories at risk by actually running the experiments proposed in this book.

Quantum Dice 2ND Edition
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Quantum Dice 2ND Edition
L I Ponomarev
Manufacturer: IOP INST OF PHYSICS@
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000Q19WSE

Quantum Dice.
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Quantum Dice.
L.I. Ponomarev
Manufacturer: Publisher Unknown
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000UYIC3S

Book Description

This book examines reactions to the Russian Revolution by four little magazines of the teens and twenties (The Liberator, The Messenger, The Little Review, and The Dial) in order to analyze some of the ways modernist writers negotiate the competing demands of aesthetics, political commitment and race. Re-examining interconnections among such superficially disparate phenomena as the Harlem Renaissance, Greenwich Village bohemianism, modernism and Leftist politics, this book rightly emphasizes the vitality of little magazines and argues for their necessary place in the study of modernism.

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