George Day

Millennium Cowgirls George Day

Publisher Marketing: Mid-winter: After a series of recent air accidents, the faltering Democratic administration grounds the entire U. S. air fleet in the name of public safety. In the confusion at Los Angeles International Airport, a cosmic coincidence casts together the brilliant young French-born Malibu Beach beauty, Sharon DeLaNovaSelle, and stranded middle-aged Minnesota businessman Desmond Presto, the old college boyfriend of Belinda ("Blueberry Billie"), Sharon's beguiling business partner. Sharon and Billie need to move fast to take advantage of an opportunity to convert their home-brew investor's advisory service into a full-featured brokerage, and to use the subsequent profits to launch the first album for Sharon's all-girl alternative rock band. Ex-Wall Street gunslinger Desmond is down on his luck with women, and hiding safely from any new stresses in a comically dull insurance office in his widowed mother's small, snowbound midwestern town. But vastly experienced in the world of finance as he is, he's just the man to engineer the deal for Sharon and his old college bestie - if only he can be motivated to the task! Unfortunately, a horrifying divorce followed his fabulously successful days in New York investing, and all the fizz has gone out of Desmond. Now he's fallen under the spell of the latest corporate office business paradigms - empowered, customer-oriented, and up to his ears in Total Quality Management, he has sunk to become the living, breathing antithesis of the high-IQ free-form ball of energy that is Sharon, and the rambling pop-culture astral philosopher (and connoisseur of exotic beers) that is Billie. In only a week, surrounded on every side by the oddball denizens of the L. A. megalopolis, Dez quickly thaws to become a man born again, forever changed by his chance encounter with two savvy screw-the-rules cowgirls of the new millennium. Contributor Bio:  Day, George George S. Day is the Geoffrey T. Boisi Professor and codirector of the Mack Center for Technological Innovation at The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. Chairman of the board for the American Marketing Association, he is a former executive director of the Marketing Science Institute and has served as a consultant to GE, IBM, Metropolitan Life, Marriott, and other corporations. His books include Peripheral Vision, Wharton on Managing Emerging Technologies, and The Market Driven Organization. Day lives in Bryn Mawr, PA. Christine Moorman is the T. Austin Finch, Sr. Professor and founder and director of The CMO Survey (www.cmosurvey.org) at The Fuqua School of Business, Duke University. Former member of the board of directors of the American Marketing Association and trustee for the Marketing Science Institution, she coedited the book Assessing Marketing Strategy Performance, authored more than 60 journal articles, reports, and conference proceedings, and speaks at universities and companies around the world. Moorman lives in Chapel Hill, NC.