Stephen R. Covey No organization has ever become great without exceptional leadership - without leaders who can connect the efforts of their teams to the critical objectives of the organization, who can tap the full potential of each individual on their team? It takes a leadership mind-set, skill-set, and tool-set. This audio is the synthesis of Dr. Stephen R. Covey's two-day interactive and intensive workshop on leadership. The proven principles of the 7 Habits are applied to leadership roles as Covey teaches managers and other leaders how to define their contributions, develop greater influence, leverage hidden resources, give constructive feedback, and unleash the full potential of their team against critical priorities. The 7 Habits approach helps developing leaders unleash the talents and capability of their team against the organization's highest priorities.

Stephen R. Covey In The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, author Stephen R. Covey presents a holistic, integrated, principle-centered approach for solving personal and professional problems. With penetrating insights and pointed anecdotes, Covey reveals a step-by-step pathway for living with fairness, integrity, honesty, and human dignity — principles that give us the security to adapt to change and the wisdom and power to take advantage of the opportunities that change creates.

Stephen R. Covey In The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, author Stephen R. Covey presents a holistic, integrated, principle-centered approach for solving personal and professional problems. With penetrating insights and pointed anecdotes, Covey reveals a step-by-step pathway for living with fairness, integrity, service, and human dignity — principles that give us the security to adapt to change and the wisdom and power to take advantage of the opportunities that change creates.

Stephen R. Covey In the more than fifteen years since its publication, the classic The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People has become an international phenomenon with over fifteen million copies sold. Tens of millions of people in business, government, schools, and families, and, most important, as individuals have dramatically improved their lives and organisations by applying the principles of Stephen R. Covey's classic book.

The world, though, is a vastly changed place. The challenges and complexity we all face in our relationships, families, professional lives, and communities are of an entirely new order of magnitude. Being effective as individuals and organisations is no longer merely an option — survival in today's world requires it. But in order to thrive, innovate, excel, and lead in what Covey calls the ”New Knowledge Worker Age“, we must build on and move beyond effectiveness. The call of this new era in human history is for greatness; it's for fulfillment, passionate execution, and significant contribution.

Accessing the higher levels of human genius and motivation in today's new reality requires a sea change in thinking: a new mind-set, a new skill-set, a new tool-set — in short, a whole new habit. The crucial challenge of our world today is this: to find our voice and inspire others to find theirs. It is what Covey calls the 8th Habit.

So many people feel frustrated, discouraged, unappreciated, and undervalued — with little or no sense of voice or unique contribution. The 8th Habit is the answer to the soul's yearning for greatness, the organisation's imperative for significance and superior results, and humanity's search for its ”voice“. Profound, compelling, and stunningly timely, this groundbreaking new book of next-level thinking gives a clear way to finally tap the limitless value-creation promise of the ”Knowledge Worker Age“. The 8th Habit shows how to solve such common dilemmas asž

•People want peace of mind and good relationships, but also want to keep their lifestyle and habits. •Relationships are built on trust, but most people think more in terms of ”me“  my wants, my needs, my rights. •Management wants more for less; employees want more of ”what's in it for me“ for less time and effort. •Businesses are run by the economic rules of the marketplace; organisations are run by the cultural rules of the workplace. •Society operates by its dominant social values, but must live with the consequences of the inviolable operation of natural laws and principles.

Covey's new book will transform the way we think about ourselves and our purpose in life, about our organisations, and about humankind. Just as The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People helped us focus on effectiveness, The 8th Habit shows us the way to greatness.

Rodd Wagner, Ph.D. James K. Harter 12: The Elements of Great Managing is the long-awaited sequel to the 1999 runaway bestseller First, Break All the Rules. Grounded in Gallup's 10 million employee and manager interviews spanning 114 countries, 12 follows great managers as they harness employee engagement to turn around a failing call center, save a struggling hotel, improve patient care in a hospital, maintain production through power outages, and successfully face a host of other challenges in settings around the world.
Authors Rodd Wagner and James K. Harter weave the latest Gallup insights with recent discoveries in the fields of neuroscience, game theory, psychology, sociology, and economics. Written for managers and employees of companies large and small, 12 explains what every company needs to know about creating and sustaining employee engagement

Ivan Misner, Michelle R. Donovan In many ways, success at networking is the uncommon application of common knowledge. Most people understand that networking is important to their success—they just lack a step-by-step process to get the results they want. Almost no one really implements a comprehensive methodology that will build a business through networking. Thus, the need to network is 'common knowledge,' and the development of the methodology required to be successful at it is the 'uncommon application.'

By reading this book, you will experience the true essence and meaning of networking. The 29% Solution gives you the answers to two conflicting questions that a business owner or salesperson faces every day: How can I tend to my existing clients while at the same time network for new business? and, Should I place higher value on my current clients or on new clients?

Robert Greene Amoral, cunning, ruthless, and instructive, this piercing work distills three thousand years of the history of power in to forty-eight well explicated laws. As attention—grabbing in its design as it is in its content, this bold volume outlines the laws of power in their unvarnished essence, synthesizing the philosophies of Machiavelli, Sun-tzu, Carl von Clausewitz, and other great thinkers. Some laws teach the need for prudence ("Law 1: Never Outshine the Master"), the virtue of stealth ("Law 3: Conceal Your Intentions"), and many demand the total absence of mercy ("Law 15: Crush Your Enemy Totally"), but like it or not, all have applications in real life. Illustrated through the tactics of Queen Elizabeth I, Henry Kissinger, P. T. Barnum, and other famous figures who have wielded—or been victimized by—power, these laws will fascinate any reader interested in gaining, observing, or defending against ultimate control.

Florist's Review

Vince Poscente NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER! For everyone feeling trampled by the speed of life and business, author Vince Poscente reveals how to get ahead of the rush once and for all in The Age of Speed. Unraveling the notion that in today's world we need to slow down, Poscente illustrates why harnessing the power of speed is the ultimate solution for those seeking less stress, less busyness, and more balance.

Seth Godin Every marketer tells a story. And if they do it right, we believe them. We believe that wine tastes better in a $20 glass than a $1 glass. We believe that an $80,000 Porsche Cayenne is vastly superior to a $36,000 VW Touareg, which is virtually the same car. We believe that $225 Pumas will make our feet feel better-and look cooler-than $20 no-names . . . and believing it makes it true.

Successful marketers don't talk about features or even benefits. Instead, they tell a story. A story we want to believe.

This is a book about doing what consumers demand-painting vivid pictures that they choose to believe. Every organization-from nonprofits to car companies, from political campaigns to wineglass blowers-must understand that the rules have changed (again). In an economy where the richest have an infinite number of choices (and no time to make them), every organization is a marketer and all marketing is about telling stories.

Marketers succeed when they tell us a story that fits our worldview, a story that we intuitively embrace and then share with our friends. Think of the Dyson vacuum cleaner or the iPod.

But beware: If your stories are inauthentic, you cross the line from fib to fraud. Marketers fail when they are selfish and scurrilous, when they abuse the tools of their trade and make the world worse. That's a lesson learned the hard way by telemarketers and Marlboro.

This is a powerful book for anyone who wants to create things people truly want as opposed to commodities that people merely need.

Bill Wasik Breaking news, fresh gossip, tiny scandals, trumped-up crises-every day we are distracted by a culture that rings our doorbell and runs away. Stories spread wildly and die out in mere days, to be replaced by still more stories with ever shorter life spans. Through the Internet the news cycle has been set spinning even faster now that all of us can join the fray: anyone on a computer can spread a story almost as easily as The New York Times, CNN, or People. As media amateurs grow their audience, they learn to think like the pros, using the abundant data that the Internet offers-hit counters, most e-mailed lists, YouTube views, download tallies-to hone their own experiments in viral blowup.

And Then There's This is Bill Wasik's journey along the unexplored frontier of the twenty-first century's rambunctious new-media culture. He covers this world in part as a journalist, following "buzz bands" as they rise and fall in the online music scene, visiting with viral marketers and political trendsetters and online provocateurs. But he also wades in as a participant, conducting his own hilarious experiments: an e-mail fad (which turned into the worldwide "flash mob" sensation), a viral website in a month-long competition, a fake blog that attempts to create "antibuzz," and more. He doesn't always get the results he expected, but he tries to make sense of his data by surveying what real social science experiments have taught us about the effects of distraction, stimulation, and crowd behavior on the human mind. Part report, part memoir, part manifesto, part deconstruction of a decade, And Then There's This captures better than any other book the way technology is changing our culture.

Ayn Rand At last, Ayn Rand's masterpiece is available to her millions of loyal readers in trade paperback.

With this acclaimed work and its immortal query, "Who is John Galt?", Ayn Rand found the perfect artistic form to express her vision of existence. Atlas Shrugged made Rand not only one of the most popular novelists of the century, but one of its most influential thinkers.

Atlas Shrugged is the astounding story of a man who said that he would stop the motor of the world—and did. Tremendous in scope, breathtaking in its suspense, Atlas Shrugged stretches the boundaries further than any book you have ever read. It is a mystery, not about the murder of a man's body, but about the murder—and rebirth—of man's spirit.

* Atlas Shrugged is the "second most influential book for Americans today" after the Bible, according to a joint survey conducted by the Library of Congress and the Book of the Month Club

Daniel Dorling, Mark Newman, Anna Barford 366 full-color cartographic maps cover a vast array of subjects, providing a definitive reference on how regions and countries compare in resources, production, consumption, and more. Advances in technology have made widespread and detailed data gathering easier, resulting in a deluge of statistics on subjects as diverse as literacy rates, military spending, overweight children, television viewing figures, and endangered species. But how do we represent and compare data from one part of the world to another in a useful way? Here, sophisticated software combined with comprehensive analysis of every aspect of life represents the world as it really is. Digitally modified maps depict the areas and countries of the world not by their physical size but by their demographic importance on a vast range of topics.

The rainforests of South America, with thirty percent of the world's fresh water, make the continent balloon in an analysis of water resources, whereas Kuwait, dependent on desalinated seawater, disappears from the map. Fuel use, alcohol consumption, population, malaria: here are hundreds of key indicators to the way we live.

This innovative and exceptionally accessible reference work will be an indispensable tool for journalists, economists, marketers, politicians, financiers, environmentalists, and scholars. Its cartograms are augmented by graphs, tables, and full commentaries. 366 full-color maps

Emily Giffin From the author of the smash hits Something Borrowed and Something Blue comes a novel that explores the question: is there ever a deal-breaker when it comes to true love?
First comes love. Then comes marriage. Then comes . . . a baby carriage? Isn’t that what all women want?
 
Not so for Claudia Parr. And just as she gives up on finding a man who feels the same way, she meets warm, wonderful Ben. Things seem too good to be true when they fall in love and agree to buck tradition with a satisfying, child-free marriage. Then the unexpected occurs: one of them has a change of heart. One of them wants children after all.
 
This is the witty, heartfelt story about what happens to the perfect couple when they suddenly want different things. It’s about feeling that your life is set and then realizing that nothing is as you thought it was—and that there is no possible compromise. It’s about deciding what is most important in life, and taking chances to get it. But most of all, it’s about the things we will do—and won’t do—for love.

Bill Hybels, Mark Mittelberg This proven action plan will show you how to impact the spiritual lives of friends, family members, co-workers, and others.

Bathroom Readers' Institute Finally—after seven years and seven volumes of bestselling bathroom reading, the Bathroom Reader's Institute has compiled an incredible stand-alone (or sit-alone) volume—400 pages of the funniest, weirdest, most intriguing articles, quotes, and puzzles from previous editions, plus 200 new pages of new material.

Malcolm Gladwell How do we make decisions—good and bad—and why are some people so much better at it than others? Thats the question Malcolm Gladwell asks and answers in the follow-up to his huge bestseller, The Tipping Point. Utilizing case studies as diverse as speed dating, pop music, and the shooting of Amadou Diallo, Gladwell reveals that what we think of as decisions made in the blink of an eye are much more complicated than assumed. Drawing on cutting-edge neuroscience and psychology, he shows how the difference between good decision-making and bad has nothing to do with how much information we can process quickly, but on the few particular details on which we focus. Leaping boldly from example to example, displaying all of the brilliance that made The Tipping Point a classic, Gladwell reveals how we can become better decision makers—in our homes, our offices, and in everyday life. The result is a book that is surprising and transforming. Never again will you think about thinking the same way.

William Kamkwamba, Bryan Mealer William Kamkwamba was born in Malawi, a country where magic ruled and modern science was mystery. It was also a land withered by drought and hunger, and a place where hope and opportunity were hard to find. But William had read about windmills in a book called Using Energy, and he dreamed of building one that would bring electricity and water to his village and change his life and the lives of those around him. His neighbors may have mocked him and called him misala—crazy—but William was determined to show them what a little grit and ingenuity could do.

Enchanted by the workings of electricity as a boy, William had a goal to study science in Malawi's top boarding schools. But in 2002, his country was stricken with a famine that left his family's farm devastated and his parents destitute. Unable to pay the eighty-dollar-a-year tuition for his education, William was forced to drop out and help his family forage for food as thousands across the country starved and died.

Yet William refused to let go of his dreams. With nothing more than a fistful of cornmeal in his stomach, a small pile of once-forgotten science textbooks, and an armory of curiosity and determination, he embarked on a daring plan to bring his family a set of luxuries that only two percent of Malawians could afford and what the West considers a necessity—electricity and running water. Using scrap metal, tractor parts, and bicycle halves, William forged a crude yet operable windmill, an unlikely contraption and small miracle that eventually powered four lights, complete with homemade switches and a circuit breaker made from nails and wire. A second machine turned a water pump that could battle the drought and famine that loomed with every season.

Soon, news of William's magetsi a mphepo—his "electric wind"—spread beyond the borders of his home, and the boy who was once called crazy became an inspiration to those around the world.

Here is the remarkable story about human inventiveness and its power to overcome crippling adversity. The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind will inspire anyone who doubts the power of one individual's ability to change his community and better the lives of those around him.

John Medina Most of us have no idea what's really going on inside our heads. Yet brain scientists have uncovered details every business leader, parent, and teacher should know—such as the brain's need for physical activity to work at its best.

How do we learn? What exactly do sleep and stress do to our brains? Why is multi-tasking a myth? Why is it so easy to forget—and so important to repeat new information? Is it true that men and women have different brains?

In Brain Rules, molecular biologist Dr. John Medina shares his lifelong interest in how the brain sciences might influence the way we teach our children and the way we work. In each chapter, he describes a brain rule—what scientists know for sure about how our brains work—and then offers transformative ideas for our daily lives.

Medina's fascinating stories and sense of humor breathe life into brain science. You'll learn why Michael Jordan was no good at baseball. You'll peer over a surgeon's shoulder as he finds, to his surprise, that we have a Jennifer Aniston neuron. You'll meet a boy who has an amazing memory for music but can't tie his own shoes.

You will discover how:

- Every brain is wired differently
- Exercise improves cognition
- We are designed to never stop learning and exploring
- Memories are volatile
- Sleep is powerfully linked with the ability to learn
- Vision trumps all of the other senses
- Stress changes the way we learn

In the end, you'll understand how your brain really works—and how to get the most out of it.

About the DVD The Brain Rules DVD, included with this book, is a lively tour of the 12 brain rules. You will experience firsthand Medina's rare gift for making science fun, accessible, and relevant. The DVD will take your understanding of the book to the next level.

Scott Deming PRAISE FOR THE BRAND WHO CRIED "WOLF"

"Powerful brands command. Read this insightful book and allow Scott to share how to make your brand stand out and deliver you buckets of money!"
—Mark Victor Hansen, bestselling author of the Chicken Soup for the Soul(r) series

"Deming's approach to branding is not about gimmicks. It's about relationships-the real formula for building and sustaining your brand and your business."
—Rieva Lesonsky, Editorial Director, Entrepreneur magazine

"It doesn't matter what you sell. We're all selling service. Deming's book shows businesses of all sizes how to create incredible brand power through innovative service levels. The Brand Who Cried Wolf will not end up on your book shelf; it will stay in your briefcase or on your desk as a daily reference guide. If you want to grow your business, get this book!"
—John Valletta, President, Super 8 Motels

"Deming's revelations on creating an emotionally engaging experience between you and your customer are without equal!"
—Joel Bauer, bestselling coauthor of How to Persuade People Who Don't Want to Be Persuaded

"The Brand Who Cried Wolf explains how every customer interaction, large or small, impacts your brand's image and reputation. This is an easy-to-read book— veryone in your organization needs to own."
—Patrick Sweeney, coauthor of the New York Times bestseller Succeed on Your Own Terms; cohost of the nationally syndicated radio show Winning in Business

"Deming delivers an essential message to businesses and delivers in a way you won't forget. You know the fairy tales, just adapt it to your unique brand: you!"
—Wayne Kandas, CFP and host of nationally syndicated Bloomberg Radio

"Stories sell, and that's what helps sell the ideas in this brilliant book. If you're in business-any business-you need this book. Get it now!"
—Robert G. Allen, bestselling coauthor of Cracking the Millionaire Code; CEO of The Enlightened Millionaire Institute

Chapter 8: Just Call Me Slick!

People Really Hate to be "Sold"

What We’ve Accomplished So Far

By now you know that branding is not exclusively about business identity in the form of a logo or advertising.  You might recognize the Nike brand from its iconic swoosh logo.  You might immediately think of McDonald’s when you think of fast food because McDonald’s commercials are ubiquitous, but by this point, you know that icons and awareness do not constitute a brand.

You also know that big businesses are not the only brands.  Your business does not have to be the size of GM, Microsoft, AOL Time Warner or Wal-Mart.  Your business could be run out of your home with you as the sole employee.  You could conduct business from a small office with a single assistant, or in a store with several employees.  The size, scope, and location of your business does not change the fact that it’s a brand, nor should any of these factors truly impact your brand if you’re focusing on one-on-one relationships.

Businesses are not the only brands, either.  Every individual is a brand, as are organizations from non-profits to political parties to social clubs.  For example, the Gates Foundation, the Red Cross, UNICEF, Make-A-Wish Foundation, Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, Kiwanis Clubs, Rotary Clubs, Republican Party, and Democratic Party — all are brands.  The concept of branding I’ve been articulating is personal, which means everyone needs to develop one.

Each category — from individuals to organizations to businesses large and small — brings with it its own brand development challenges.  At the same time, however, these challenges are minimized when you understand your brand identity.  Throughout this book, I have written about creating unique and memorable experiences for your customers.   Chapter 2 defined a brand in terms of establishing relationships with your customers.  Chapter 3 distinguished between types of experiences you can generate for your customers, and differentiated a brand experience from ones that are merely transactional or simply meet customer expectations.  Chapter 4 highlighted the importance of changing your perspective to adopt your customer’s point of view, rather than emphasize your product or service.  Chapter 5 analyzed the results of changing your perspective.  Chapter 6 admonished you to avoid overstating your own worth.  Finally, Chapter 7 focused on the ripple effects of your actions.  Thus, most of the facets of branding I’ve been articulating since the beginning of this book have emphasized how you affect the customer’s perceptions.  In other words, I’ve been talking about the customer’s connection to your brand.  Now I’m going to talk about how you perceive your own brand, and about your connection to your own brand.

Creating An Authentic Brand Identity: Sincerity Can’t Be Faked!

First, you must take stock of your brand identity.  In the Introduction to this book I stated that everyone is a brand.  Everyone has a brand identity, but not everyone understands their own brand correctly, or even knows what it is.  You cannot develop an authentic, sincere brand without this understanding.  And you cannot create brand evangelists — people who trust you and praise your brand every chance they get — without an authentic, sincere brand.  You earn someone’s trust through your actions, so you’d better know how to act!

Understanding your brand identity, and developing the trust that turns your customers into evangelists, involves knowing what your own beliefs and values are.  The fact is, when you walk in your customer’s shoes, when you change your perspective to deliver the impossible, you’re reflecting a core element of your identity, your values, and your beliefs.  When you are sincere about trying to understand your customers’ needs, desires, and what they’d truly love from you, a genuine connection is made that is the foundation of trust between you and your customers.

Compassion and sincerity can’t be faked.  Branding is not a matter of putting on a persona that others will like.  It’s not playing a role, putting on a mask, or pretending — all that is superficial, a veneer that covers up the “real” you.  Moreover, a veneer can be quickly spotted.  I don’t think there’s anyone that hasn’t had the experience of being “sold.”  It’s uncomfortable precisely because it’s not authentic.  The experience simply feels hollow.  Think about the slick car salesman who’s “going to do what it takes to get you into this car!”  Maybe he’s heavy on the ‘hale fellow well met,’ demeanor, or drenches you with flattery.  When the time comes to make an offer on the car, he engages in an overly dramatic show of anxiety.  “I’m gonna see my manager right now and see if I can talk him into this one.  Between you and me, he’s having a bad day, but I’m really gonna work on him.”  Eventually, the long, drawn out ceremonial dance ends with you signing the lease or sale papers, but you walk away knowing the whole experience could have been different, and you dread the prospect of going through it again.

Why do you dread it?  What has soured you on going through the process again?  In a word: insincerity.  Insincerity is the wolf trotting around in sheep’s clothing pretending to be something he’s not.  When you experience a wolf in sheep’s clothing, you’re soured on future interactions.  It is this sort of insincerity that destroys a brand or prevents an authentic one from being established.

The car salesman example is cliché, just like the sales girl at the clothing store who tells you every single piece of clothing you try on looks so good!  Though they’re cliché for a reason, we tend to forget just what that reason is.  We instantly recognize the cliché, but not what made it true in the first place.

Oren Harari Everywhere, products are being commoditized, services are being imitated, and traditional barriers to market entry are collapsing. To sustain competitive advantage in today's Copycat Economy, companies must break from the pack. This book will show how. Oren Harari starts by touring "Commodity Hell," and identifying 10 common mistakes that keep companies trapped in the pack. Next, Harari introduces six strategies for propelling your organization where competitors can't follow. Learn how to dominate markets (and when to leave them); how to create a "higher cause" that will mobilize stakeholders; and how to build a pipeline of cool, compelling products, in any industry. Harari reveals new ways to take customers far beyond mere "satisfaction," and shows how to innovate in even the most prosaic areas of a business. Learn how to avoid destructive mergers, and buy what really matters: talent, imagination, foresight, speed, rebelliousness, and inspiration. Finally, Harari offers a candid "12 Step" program for transforming leadership behavior to lead the charge — and leave competitors in the dust.

Michael Shellenberger; Ted Nordhaus Environmental insiders Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus triggered a firestorm of controversy with their self-published essay, "The Death of Environmentalism." In it, they argued that global warming is far more complex than past pollution problems. American values have changed dramatically since the environmental movement's greatest victories in the 1960s, yet environmentalists keep fighting the same battles without realizing that the battle field has changed. Noting a connection between the failures of environmentalism and the failures of the entire left-leaning political agenda, the authors point the way toward an aspirational politics that will resonate with modern American values and be capable of tackling our most pressing challenges.

Ben Mezrich #1 National Bestseller!
The amazing inside story about a gambling ring of M.I.T. students who beat the system in Vegas — and lived to tell how.

Robin Hood meets the Rat Pack when the best and the brightest of M.I.T.'s math students and engineers take up blackjack under the guidance of an eccentric mastermind. Their small blackjack club develops from an experiment in counting cards on M.I.T.'s campus into a ring of card savants with a system for playing large and winning big. In less than two years they take some of the world's most sophisticated casinos for more than three million dollars. But their success also brings with it the formidable ire of casino owners and launches them into the seedy underworld of corporate Vegas with its private investigators and other violent heavies.

Filled with tense action, high stakes, and incredibly close calls, Bringing Down the House is a nail-biting read that chronicles a real-life Ocean's Eleven. It's one story that Vegas does not want you to read.

Jim Collins, Jerry I. Porras "This is not a book about charismatic visionary leaders. It is not about visionary product concepts or visionary products or visionary market insights. Nor is it about just having a corporate vision. This is a book about something far more important, enduring, and substantial. This is a book about visionary companies." So write Jim Collins and Jerry Porras in this groundbreaking book that shatters myths, provides new insights, and gives practical guidance to those who would like to build landmark companies that stand the test of time.

Drawing upon a six-year research project at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business, Collins and Porras took eighteen truly exceptional and long-lasting companies — they have an average age of nearly one hundred years and have outperformed the general stock market by a factor of fifteen since 1926 — and studied each company in direct comparison to one of its top competitors. They examined the companies from their very beginnings to the present day — as start-ups, as midsize companies, and as large corporations. Throughout, the authors asked: "What makes the truly exceptional companies different from other companies?"

What separates General Electric, 3M, Merck, Wal-Mart, Hewlett-Packard, Walt Disney, and Philip Morris from their rivals? How, for example, did Procter & Gamble, which began life substantially behind rival Colgate, eventually prevail as the premier institution in its industry? How was Motorola able to move from a humble battery repair business into integrated circuits and cellular communications, while Zenith never became dominant in anything other than TVs? How did Boeing unseat McDonnell Douglas as the world's best commercial aircraft company — what did Boeing have that McDonnell Douglas lacked?

By answering such questions, Collins and Porras go beyond the incessant barrage of management buzzwords and fads of the day to discover timeless qualities that have consistently distinguished out-standing companies. They also provide inspiration to all executives and entrepreneurs by destroying the false but widely accepted idea that only charismatic visionary leaders can build visionary companies.

Filled with hundreds of specific examples and organized into a coherent framework of practical concepts that can be applied by managers and entrepreneurs at all levels, Built to Last provides a master blueprint for building organizations that will prosper long into the twenty-first century and beyond.

Ben Mezrich He played in casinos around the world with a plan to make himself richer than anyone could possibly imagine — but it would nearly cost him his life.

Semyon Dukach was known as the Darling of Las Vegas. A legend at age twenty-one, this cocky hotshot was the biggest high roller to appear in Sin City in decades, a mathematical genius with a system the casinos had never seen before and couldn't stop — a system that has never been revealed until now; that has nothing to do with card counting, wasn't illegal, and was more powerful than anything that had been tried before.

Las Vegas. Atlantic City. Aruba. Barcelona. London. And the jewel of the gambling crown — Monte Carlo.

Dukach and his fellow MIT students hit them all and made millions. They came in hard, with stacks of cash; big, seemingly insane bets; women hanging on their arms; and fake identities. Although they were taking classes and studying for exams during the week, over the weekends they stormed the blackjack tables only to be harassed, banned from casinos, threatened at gunpoint, and beaten in Vegas's notorious back rooms.

The stakes were high, the dangers very real, but the players were up to the challenges, consequences be damned. There was Semyon Dukach himself, bored with school and broke; Victor Cassius, the slick, brilliant MIT grad student who galvanized the team; Owen Keller, with stunning ability but a dark past that would catch up to him; and Allie Simpson, bright, clever, and a feast for the eyes.

In the classroom, they were geeks. On the casino floor, they were unstoppable.

Busting Vega$ is Dukach's unbelievably true story; a riveting account of monumental greed, excess, hubris, sex, love, violence, fear, and statistics that is high-stakes entertainment at its best.

Chris Ballard Do we each have a dream job that we are, by nature or nurture, uniquely meant for? To answer this question, Chris Ballard set out to talk to people who found work they love way off the beaten path. The Butterfly Hunter is a rollicking narrative of what he discovered, and reveals insights the rest of us can use to find passion in our work.

The Butterfly Hunter begins its roundup of quirky characters in unusual professions with Spiderman Mulholland, a former Marine, who rappels to suicidal spots on sheer building faces to assess damage or make repairs. (And yes, that’s his legal name.) Through Spiderman, Ballard learns that one can find a calling by following one’s wildest idiosyncrasies. Along the way he learns the history of window-washing, why it is that some people enter risky professions, and the best way to jump off a 230-foot building.

His adventures continue as he meets America’s top lumberjill, an NFL kicking coach who has never kicked a ball in his life, a MacArthur genius who’s spent his life in remote jungles chasing butterflies, and the movie trailer voice-over artist known as the Voice of God.

These ten characters each reveal an aspect of the search for a life’s work, and reaffirm for Ballard that we, too, can discover a calling if only we look in the right place. As with true love, there aren’t seven steps to finding it, but The Butterfly Hunter teaches us what it looks like when it’s real.

John P. Kotter You've got a good idea. You know it could make a crucial difference for you, your organization, your community. You present it to the group, but get confounding questions, inane comments, and verbal bullets in return. Before you know what's happened, your idea is dead, shot down. You're furious. Everyone has lost: Those who would have benefited from your proposal. You. Your company. Perhaps even the country.

It doesn't have to be this way, maintain John Kotter and Lorne Whitehead. In Buy-In, they reveal how to win the support your idea needs to deliver valuable results. The key? Understand the generic attack strategies that naysayers and obfuscators deploy time and time again. Then engage these adversaries with tactics tailored to each strategy. By "inviting in the lions" to critique your idea—and being prepared for them—you'll capture busy people's attention, help them grasp your proposal's value, and secure their commitment to implementing the solution.

The book presents a fresh and amusing fictional narrative showing attack strategies in action. It then provides several specific counterstrategies for each basic category the authors have defined—including:

· Death-by-delay: Your enemies push discussion of your idea so far into the future it's forgotten.

· Confusion: They present so much data that confidence in your proposal dies.

· Fearmongering: Critics catalyze irrational anxieties about your idea.

· Character assassination: They slam your reputation and credibility.

Smart, practical, and filled with useful advice, Buy-In equips you to anticipate and combat attacks—so your good idea makes it through to make a positive change.

Peter Kinch Real estate, like any other investment, is a means to an end: that end might be a secondary source of income, a strategic plan for your retirement, or a way to attain complete financial independence. Whatever your goal is, you've decided that real estate is a tool you want to use. So how do you use it? How do you make it work for you and avoid getting burned in the market? And how much of it do you need to fulfill your ambitions?

Peter Kinch is one of Canada's top mortgage brokers and has helped thousands of investors clarify their dreams and turn them into reality. In The Canadian Real Estate Action Plan, Peter walks you through one of his investor workshops, helping you develop not just a plan, but your plan, including: Defining your end goal, and how much real estate you need to achieve itDetermining the kinds of investments that are right for youIdentifying obstacles to your success, and overcoming themDiscovering financing options and solutions, including recent changes that affect investors

New investors will get the thorough background information they need to get started, while more experienced investors will benefit from exploring alternative options and lesser-known strategies. Both will see how long-term thinking is the key to their portfolio's continued profitability.

The best way to achieve your goals is to plan for your success, and there's no better tool to help you do just that than The Canadian Real Estate Action Plan.

David D'Alessandro “A refreshing message . . . from someone who has fought many corporate wars.” —The New York Times

With the latest stories from D’Alessandro’s neverending collection of corporate derring-do and new insight on the global battlefield, the nationally bestselling Career Warfare is more essential than ever when navigating your way to success.

“D’Alessandro dares to speak the truth. If you don’t manage your own reputation, those around you will. This is no theoretical exercise. In corporate America, people talk about you every day. You can affect what they say.

“With a cut-the-crap sharp eye for the passions, yearnings, and follies that drive every organization, D’Alessandro draws apart the drapes and reveals what it really takes to get ahead in business.” —James Carville, author and Democratic Strategist

“With good jobs becoming harder to find, D’Alessandro’s sage advice is more timely and important than ever, especially for those who are trying to build their personal brands and enhance their careers at the same time.” —Tom Neff, Chairman, U.S., Spencer Stuart “Smart, strategic, and useful career advice from someone who has actually achieved success in the real world.” —Harvey Mackay, author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Swim With The Sharks Without Being Eaten Alive

Adrian Gostick, Chester Elton Since its original publication in 2007, the New York Times bestseller The Carrot Principle has received rave reviews in The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, and The New York Times, and has helped a host of managers to energize their teams, and companies to dramatically boost their business results. The book was even adopted by the prestigious FranklinCovey International training and consulting group for its leadership training. This updated edition couldn't come at a better time, as the economic downturn requires us all to come up with creative and cost-effective ways to stimulate growth and productivity.

Revealing the groundbreaking results of one of the most in-depth management studies ever undertaken, The Carrot Principle shows definitively that the central characteristic of the most successful managers is that they provide their employees with frequent and effective recognition. With independent results from HealthStream Research, and analysis by bestselling leadership experts Adrian Gostick and Chester Elton, this breakthrough study of 200,000 people over ten years found dramatically greater business results when managers offered constructive praise and meaningful rewards in ways that powerfully motivated employees to excel. These managers lead with carrots, not sticks, and in doing so achieve higher:

- Productivity

- Engagement

- Retention

In a new chapter, Gostick and Elton report on the results of an extensive study, conducted by leading research authority Towers Perrin, that confirms the extraordinary effectiveness of the Carrot Principle approach all around the globe.

Drawing on case studies from leading companies including Disney, DHL, KPMG, and Pepsi Bottling Group, Gostick and Elton show how the key to recognition done right is combining it with four other core traits of effective leadership. Gostick and Elton walk readers through exactly how to use the simple but powerful methods they have discovered all great managers use to provide their employees with this effective recognition, which can be learned easily and will produce immediate results.

Great recognition can be done in a matter of moments — and it doesn't take budget-busting amounts of money. Following these simple steps will make you a high-performance leader and take your team to a new level of achievement.

Karen Armstrong Moving from the Paleolithic age to the present, Karen Armstrong details the great lengths to which humankind has gone in order to experience a sacred reality that it called by many names, such as God, Brahman, Nirvana, Allah, or Dao. Focusing especially on Christianity but including Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Chinese spiritualities, Armstrong examines the diminished impulse toward religion in our own time, when a significant number of people either want nothing to do with God or question the efficacy of faith. Why has God become unbelievable? Why is it that atheists and theists alike now think and speak about God in a way that veers so profoundly from the thinking of our ancestors?

Answering these questions with the same depth of knowledge and profound insight that have marked all her acclaimed books, Armstrong makes clear how the changing face of the world has necessarily changed the importance of religion at both the societal and the individual level. And she makes a powerful, convincing argument for drawing on the insights of the past in order to build a faith that speaks to the needs of our dangerously polarized age. Yet she cautions us that religion was never supposed to provide answers that lie within the competence of human reason; that, she says, is the role of logos. The task of religion is “to help us live creatively, peacefully, and even joyously with realities for which there are no easy explanations.” She emphasizes, too, that religion will not work automatically. It is, she says, a practical discipline: its insights are derived not from abstract speculation but from “dedicated intellectual endeavor” and a “compassionate lifestyle that enables us to break out of the prism of selfhood.”

Robert T. Kiyosaki, Sharon L. Lechter The Cashflow Quadrant is the follow-up guide to finding the financial fast track that best works for you. It reveals the strategies necessary for moving beyond just job security to greater financial security by generating wealth from four selective financial quadrants.

Tim Brown The myth of innovation is that brilliant ideas leap fully formed from the minds of geniuses. The reality is that most innovations come from a process of rigorous examination through which great ideas are identified and developed before being realized as new offerings and capabilities.

This book introduces the idea of design thinking‚ the collaborative process by which the designer′s sensibilities and methods are employed to match people′s needs not only with what is technically feasible and a viable business strategy. In short‚ design thinking converts need into demand. It′s a human−centered approach to problem solving that helps people and organizations become more innovative and more creative.

Design thinking is not just applicable to so−called creative industries or people who work in the design field. It′s a methodology that has been used by organizations such as Kaiser Permanente to icnrease the quality of patient care by re−examining the ways that their nurses manage shift change‚ or Kraft to rethink supply chain management. This is not a book by designers for designers; this is a book for creative leaders seeking to infuse design thinking into every level of an organization‚ product‚ or service to drive new alternatives for business and society.

Jack Canfield, Mark Victor Hansen, Jeff Aubery, Mark Donnelly, Chrissy Donnelly The coauthors of Chicken Soup for the Golfer's Soul, USA Today's #1 bestselling sports book of 1999, bring readers this sure-fire hit for fathers celebrating the joys and challenges of fatherhood.

New dads, granddads, single dads and dads-to-be - this book offers them all an entertaining and inspiring collection of stories on the triumphs and trials of the amazing journey called fatherhood. Chapters include: Special Moments, Overcoming Obstacles, Insights and Lessons, The Joys of Fatherhood, Across the Generations, and Achieving Dreams. By sharing true experiences and insights, this book provides reassurance to fathers and a reminder to cherish the special moments in life.

C. S. Lewis The Chronicles of Narnia adult paperback now has a movie still cover!

"Excellent for Homeschool Use"

Margaret Butteriss "Coaching Corporate MVPs provides a very effective guide for developing this small group of high-impact performers within an organization. It makes a compelling case for a customized approach with coaching at its core, and also provides very practical examples of approaches that have been successful across a wide range of organizations and individual situations." — David Denison, President and CEO, Canadian Pension Plan Investment Board 

"For multinational companies, if you have not identified your MVPs at all levels of leadership and put plans in place to develop and retain them, you will not be able to compete in the future. This book provides a comprehensive framework for understanding the theory and application of a talent management strategy as well as countless global examples of successful companies and their practice. This is a must read for executives, HR professionals or anyone in management involved in ensuring the right people in the right roles have a plan for ongoing coaching and development. If you already have a process in place, this book provides a great way to identify best practice to enable you to take your process to the next level! Enjoy!" — Emily Lundi Mallett, Director, Global Learning and Organization Effectiveness, Beckman Coulter, Inc. 

"The author offers a compelling case to support the organization's MVPs...the 'go-to' people who are every company's most valuable and irreplaceable resources. Her guidance is superb and her examples and cases, excellent." — Katherine D. Williams, Senior Director, Leadership and Organization Development, Genzyme Corporation 

"Coaching Corporate MVPs presents a comprehensive and elegant summary of not only the best practices - the 'what' - but also the best processes and purposes - the 'how' and 'why' - an organization can use to support the development of their most talented people/" — Larry M. Starr, Director/Chair of Graduate Studies, Organizational Dynamic, School of Arts and Sciences, University of Pennsylvania

John William McCluskey, Lois E. Frevert The Complete Book of Wedding Toasts contains over 300 toasts for every member of the wedding party, plus appropriate poems, essays, Scripture verses, wedding history and traditions. The book contains toasts for the many occasions that lead up to the wedding ceremony itself—showers, bridal luncheons, rehearsal dinners, etc. It offers toasts to the bride and groom from their parents, siblings, and wedding attendants, and includes sample toasts that the bride and groom can use to toast each other and their families. This book will help you to compose and deliver a heartfelt, meaningful tribute that will be remembered long after the wedding is over.

JAMES H. FOWLER NICHOLAS CHRISTAKIS

Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan, Al Switzler Foreword by Stephen R. Covey, Author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

A PAPERBACK ORIGINAL

"Most books make promises. This one delivers. These skills have not only helped us to change the culture of our company, but have also generated new techniques for working together in ways that enabled us to win the largest contract in our industry's history."—Dain M. Hancock, President, Lockheed Martin Aeronautics

A powerful, seven-step approach to handling difficult conversations with confidence and skill

"Crucial" conversations are interpersonal exchanges at work or at home that we dread having but know we cannot avoid. How do you say what needs to be said while avoiding an argument with a boss, child, or relationship partner? Crucial Conversations offers readers a proven seven-point strategy for achieving their goals in all those emotionally, psychologically, or legally charged situations that can arise in their professional and personal lives. Based on the authors' highly popular DialogueSmart training seminars, the techniques are geared toward getting people to lower their defenses, creating mutual respect and understanding, increasing emotional safety, and encouraging freedom of expression. Among other things, readers also learn about the four main factors that characterize crucial conversations, and they get a powerful six-minute mastery technique that prepares them to work through any highimpact situation with confidence.

Dan Brown While in Paris on business, Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon receives an urgent late-night phone call: the elderly curator of the Louvre has been murdered inside the museum. Near the body, police have found a baffling cipher. While working to solve the enigmatic riddle, Langdon is stunned to discover it leads to a trail of clues hidden in the works of Da Vinci — clues visible for all to see — yet ingeniously disguised by the painter.

Langdon joins forces with a gifted French cryptologist, Sophie Neveu, and learns the late curator was involved in the Priory of Sion — an actual secret society whose members included Sir Isaac Newton, Botticelli, Victor Hugo, and Da Vinci, among others.

In a breathless race through Paris, London, and beyond, Langdon and Neveu match wits with a faceless powerbroker who seems to anticipate their every move. Unless Langdon and Neveu can decipher the labyrinthine puzzle in time, the Priory's ancient secret — and an explosive historical truth — will be lost forever.

THE DA VINCI CODE heralds the arrival of a new breed of lightning-paced, intelligent thriller…utterly unpredictable right up to its stunning conclusion.

TED BARRIS

Tony Hsieh In his first book, Tony Hsieh - the hip, iconoclastic, and widely-admired CEO of Zappos, the online shoe retailer - - explains how he created a corporate culture with a commitment to service that aims to improve the lives of its employees, customers, vendors, and backers. Using anecdotes and stories from his own life experiences, and from other companies, Hsieh provides concrete ways that companies can achieve unprecedented success. He details many of the unique practices at Zappos, such as their philosophy of allocating marketing money into the customer experience, the importance of Zappos's Core Values ("Deliver WOW through Service"), and the reason why Zappos's number one priority is company culture and his belief that once you get the culture right, everything else - great customer service, long-term branding - will happen on its own. Finally, Delivering Happiness explains how Zappos employees actually apply the Core Values to improving their lives outside of work, proving that creating happiness and record results go hand-in-hand.

Michael Specter In this provocative and headline- making book, Michael Specter confronts the widespread fear of science and its terrible toll on individuals and the planet.

In Denialism, New Yorker staff writer Michael Specter reveals that Americans have come to mistrust institutions and especially the institution of science more today than ever before. For centuries, the general view had been that science is neither good nor bad-that it merely supplies information and that new information is always beneficial. Now, science is viewed as a political constituency that isn't always in our best interest. We live in a world where the leaders of African nations prefer to let their citizens starve to death rather than import genetically modified grains. Childhood vaccines have proven to be the most effective public health measure in history, yet people march on Washington to protest their use. In the United States a growing series of studies show that dietary supplements and "natural" cures have almost no value, and often cause harm. We still spend billions of dollars on them. In hundreds of the best universities in the world, laboratories are anonymous, unmarked, and surrounded by platoons of security guards-such is the opposition to any research that includes experiments with animals. And pharmaceutical companies that just forty years ago were perhaps the most visible symbol of our remarkable advance against disease have increasingly been seen as callous corporations propelled solely by avarice and greed.

As Michael Specter sees it, this amounts to a war against progress. The issues may be complex but the choices are not: Are we going to continue to embrace new technologies, along with acknowledging their limitations and threats, or are we ready to slink back into an era of magical thinking? In Denialism, Specter makes an argument for a new Enlightenment, the revival of an approach to the physical world that was stunningly effective for hundreds of years: What can be understood and reliably repeated by experiment is what nature regarded as true. Now, at the time of mankind's greatest scientific advances-and our greatest need for them-that deal must be renewed.

Emily Pilloton In January of 2008, with a thousand dollars, a laptop and an outsized conviction that design can change the world, rising San Francisco-based product designer and activist Emily Pilloton launched Project H Design, a radical non-profit that supports, inspires and delivers life-improving humanitarian product design. "We need to go beyond 'going green' and to enlist a new generation of design activists," she wrote in an influential manifesto. "We need big hearts, bigger business sense and the bravery to take action now."
Featuring more than 100 contemporary design products and systems—safer baby bottles, a high-tech waterless washing machine, low-cost prosthetics for landmine victims, Braille-based Lego-style building blocks for blind children, wheelchairs for rugged conditions, sugarcane charcoal, universal composting systems, DIY soccer balls—that are as fascinating as they are revolutionary, this exceptionally smart, friendly and well-designed volume makes the case for design as a tool to solve some of the world's biggest social problems in beautiful, sustainable and engaging ways—for global citizens in the developing world and in more developed economies alike. Particularly at a time when the weight of climate change, global poverty and population growth are impossible to ignore, Pilloton challenges designers to be changemakers instead of "stuff creators." Urgent and optimistic, a compendium and a call to action, Design Revolution is easily the most exciting design publication to come out this year.
Emily Pilloton is the founder and Executive Director of Project H Design, a global industrial design nonprofit with eight chapters around the world. Trained in architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, and product design at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Pilloton started Project H in 2008 to provide a conduit and catalyst for need-based product design that empowers individuals, communities and economies. Current Project H initiatives include water transport and filtration systems in South Africa and India; an educational math playground built for elementary schools in Uganda and North Carolina; a homeless-run design coop in Los Angeles; and design concepts for foster care education and therapy in Austin, Texas.
Allan Chochinov is Editor in Chief of Core77.com, and writes and lectures widely on the impact of design on contemporary culture.

Donald A. Norman Donald Norman's best-selling plea for user-friendly design, with more than 175,000 copies sold to date, is now a Basic paperback.

First, businesses discovered quality as a key competitive edge; next came service. Now, Donald A. Norman, former Director of the Institute for Cognitive Science at the University of California, reveals how smart design is the new competitive frontier. The Design of Everyday Things is a powerful primer on how—and why—some products satisfy customers while others only frustrate them.

Joshua Porter No matter what type of web site or application you’re building, social interaction among the people who use it will be key to its success. They will talk about it, invite their friends, complain, sing its high praises, and dissect it in countless ways. With the right design strategy you can use this social interaction to get people signing up, coming back regularly, and bringing others into the fold. With tons of examples from real-world interfaces and a touch of the underlying social psychology theory, Joshua Porter shows you how to design your next great social web application.

Inside, you’ll discover:
• The real reasons why people participate online and the psychology behind them
• The Usage Lifecycle—or how people use your web application over time
• How to get people past that trickiest of hurdles: sign-up
• What to do when you’ve launched a web application and nobody is using it
• How to analyze the effectiveness of your application screens and flows
• How to grow your social web application from zero users to 1000—and beyond

Designing for the social web is about much more than adding features. It’s about embracing the social interaction of the people who make you successful—and then designing smartly to encourage it.

Youngme Moon Why trying to be the best … competing like crazy … makes you mediocre

Every few years a book—through a combination of the author’s unique voice, storytelling ability, wit, and insight—simply breaks the mold. Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods is one example. Richard Feynman’s “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!” is another.
 
Now comes Youngme Moon’s Different, a book for “people who don’t read business books.” Actually, it’s more like a personal conversation with a friend who has thought deeply about how the world works … and who gets you to see that world in a completely new light.
 
If there is one strain of conventional wisdom pervading every company in every industry, it’s the absolute importance of “competing like crazy.” Youngme Moon’s message is simply “Get off this treadmill that’s taking you nowhere. Going tit for tat and adding features, augmentations, and gimmicks to beat the competition has the perverse result of making you like everyone else.” Different provides a highly original perspective on what it means to offer something that is meaningfully different—different in a manner that is both fundamental and comprehensive.
 
Youngme Moon identifies the outliers, the mavericks, the iconoclasts—the players who have thoughtfully rejected orthodoxy in favor of an approach that is more adventurous. Some are even “hostile,” almost daring you to buy what they are selling. The MINI Cooper was launched with fearless abandon: “Worried that this car is too small? Look here. It’s even smaller than you think.”
 
These are players that strike a genuine chord with even the most jaded consumers. In fact, almost every success story of the past two decades has been an exception to the rule. Simply go to your computer and compare AOL and Yahoo! with Google. The former pile on feature upon feature to their home pages, while Google is like an austere boutique, dominating a category filled with “extras.”
 
Different shows how to succeed in a world where conformity reigns…but exceptions rule.

Philip Yancey "Is God listening? "Can he be trusted?" In this book, Yancey tackles the questions caused by a God who doesn't always do what we think he's supposed to do.

Robert Herjavec

Michael E. Gerber In this first new and totally revised edition of the over two million copy bestseller, The E-Myth, Michael Gerber dispels the myths surrounding starting your own business and shows how commonplace assumptions can get in the way of running a business. Next, he walks you through the steps in the life of a business — from entrepreneurial infancy through adolescent growing pains to the mature entrepreneurial perspective: the guiding light of all businesses that succeed — and shows how to apply the lessons of franchising to any business, whether it is a franchise or not. Finally, Gerber draws the vital, often overlooked distinction between working on your business and working in your business. After you have read The E-Myth Revisited, you will truly be able to grow your business in a predictable and productive way.

Technica Pacifica Sams Technical Publishing expands on its long history in the consumer electronics industry with Easy X10 Projects for Creating a Smart Home. Aimed at the savvy, do-it-yourself consumer, this book will assist the reader with the design and installation of home automation devices related to the X10 technologies.

X10 technology gives the do-it-yourselfer the ability to automate the home in an affordable and efficient way. This book provides detailed instructions on utilizing the X10 technology to automate many areas of your home, with components readily found at your local home improvement center. X10 related components are perfect for existing as well as new construction, and can easily be utilized in rental units as well. Easy X10 Projects for Creating a Smart Home takes the reader through a series of steps, from simple projects, to the more complex ones, addressing the interfacing of your personal computer, wireless controls, and voice controls.

Technica Pacifica has a diverse staff of writers who are also teachers in varying fields from journalism to engineering, economics, insurance and construction. Their focus is to write concise and simple instructions that are dedicated to the task of creating clear and understandable text.

Topics addressed include: ·Lights ·Security Systems ·HVAC ·Voice Control Systems ·Budget considerations ·System set-up ·Computer Controls

Lynne Truss A panda walked into a cafe. He ordered a sandwich, ate it, then pulled out a gun and shot the waiter. 'Why?' groaned the injured man. The panda shrugged, tossed him a badly punctuated wildlife manual and walked out. And sure enough, when the waiter consulted the book, he found an explanation. 'Panda,' ran the entry for his assailant. 'Large black and white mammal native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.' We see signs in shops every day for "Banana's" and even "Gateaux's". Competition rules remind us: "The judges decision is final." Now, many punctuation guides already exist explaining the principles of the apostrophe; the comma; the semi-colon. These books do their job but somehow punctuation abuse does not diminish. Why? Because people who can't punctuate don't read those books! Of course they don't! They laugh at books like those! Eats, Shoots and Leaves adopts a more militant approach and attempts to recruit an army of punctuation vigilantes: send letters back with the punctuation corrected. Do not accept sloppy emails. Climb ladders at dead of night with a pot of paint to remove the redundant apostrophe in "Video's sold here".

Ken Robinson, Lou Aronica A breakthrough book about talent, passion, and achievement from one of the world's leading thinkers on creativity and self-fulfillment.

The Element is the point at which natural talent meets personal passion. When people arrive at the Element, they feel most themselves and most inspired and achieve at their highest levels. With a wry sense of humor, Ken Robinson looks at the conditions that enable us to find ourselves in the Element and those that stifle that possibility. Drawing on the stories of a wide range of people, including Paul McCartney, Matt Groening, Richard Branson, Arianna Huffington, and Bart Conner, he shows that age and occupation are no barrier and that this is the essential strategy for transform­ing education, business, and communities in the twenty-first century.

Amielle Lake, Andrew Kakabadse, Nada Kakabadse The Elephant Hunters is based on years of in-depth research and hundreds of interviews with leading figures in the world of finance. With the 'Elephant' as the big deal and the 'Hunter' as the moneyman, this book examines the personal qualities and behavior necessary to join a big name bank, then tracks down what it takes to acquire the kind of wealth that some can only dream of. Given special attention is one of the most powerful hunters of all, the woman - in the trade glowingly termed the 'powerbitch'. Her instinct to track her prey and close the deal is a feat of discipline, intellect and cunning. 
If you want to know more about the people who drive our lives and can remould societies, read this book.

Orson Scott Card Winner of the Hugo and Nebula Awards

For the perfect holiday gift for the reader on your list, pick up this special gift edition of one of the most beloved Science Fiction novels ever written.   Andrew "Ender" Wiggin thinks he is playing computer simulated war games at the Battle School; he is, in fact, engaged in something far more desperate. Ender is the most talented result of Earth's desperate quest to create the military genius that the planet needs in its all-out war with an alien enemy.   Is Ender the general Earth needs? The only way to find out is to throw the child into ever harsher training, to chip away and find the diamond inside, or destroy him utterly. Ender Wiggin is six years old when it begins. He will grow up fast. But Ender is not the only result of the experiment. The war with the Formics has been raging for a hundred years, and the quest for the perfect general has been underway for almost as long. Ender's two older siblings, Peter and Valentine, are every bit as unusual as he is, but in very different ways.   Between the three of them lie the abilities to remake a world. If, that is, the world survives.

Gary Ryan Blair Everything Counts! is an execution strategy for inspiring excellence and driving exceptional results.

Too many people and organizations are mired in a mediocrity of their own making. They focus their attention and efforts on getting the big things right, but they ignore the little things that often make a big difference. As a result, reputations are damaged, brands diluted, and loyalty is lost by blatant disregard for the small stuff which negatively impacts the customer experience. For years, we've been taught not to sweat the small stuff, but in the real world of business, Everything Counts.

Everything Counts is a call to greater awareness and with awareness comes a responsibility to raise the performance bar. It offers a powerful operating philosophy that will steer your organization to reach higher levels of growth, productivity, and performance. From the smallest customer contact to the most minute details of product quality, the little things add up to a pretty big deal. Serving as the definitive guide on organizational and personal mastery, this book gives you a foundation for unparalleled customer service, superior quality, and consistent performance. A proven system for organizing, aligning, and improving all your efforts in sales, service, and performance improvementShows how concentrating on the small things leads to growth, productivity, personal success, and business greatnessHelps you motivate your people and teams to achieve better results on both the personal and organizational level

Everything Counts reminds us that seemingly small things can make tremendous differences. The purpose of this book is to help you internally define and take ownership of the most fundamental principle behind achieving results beyond you expectations-a single idea with an actionable focus-Everything Counts!

Paul Facella, Adina Genn What is it about McDonald's that has enabled it to produce more millionaires from within its ranks than any company in history?

What earns the undying respect and loyalty of its franchisees, vendors, and 47 million customers served daily, from Moscow to Evansville to Rio de Janeiro?

And how does it continue to expand its products, retool its image, and become more popular with each passing year?

Few authors are as qualified to answer those questions as company insider Paul Facella. Beginning behind the counter at age 16, Paul literally grew up at McDonald's. From counter, to grill, to Regional Vice President, he has, over the course of his distinguished 34-year career, developed an intimate knowledge of the fast-food giant's management practices and culture. He's also forged personal ties to its legendary leaders, including founder Ray Kroc and CEOs Fred Turner, Mike Quinlan, Jack Greenberg, former President Ed Rensi, and current CEO Jim Skinner.

Everything I Know Ab out Business I Learned at McDonald's delivers an up-close-and-personal look at a company where talent is cultivated and encouraged to thrive, from the individual restaurant to the corner office. With the help of in-depth interviews and “in their own words” commentaries from company executives, franchisees, and vendors, he explores McDonald's result-driven culture, and reveals the core principles, first laid down by founder Ray Kroc in 1955, that have successfully guided the company for more than five decades.

Finally, Paul distills all that knowledge and experience into powerful lessons on teamwork, leadership, integrity, communication, and relationship building that you'll use to achieve stellar results in your company-whether your goal is to build an international business empire of your own, or just the best darned shop in town.

Dolf de Roos Ordinary properties in New Zealand that have provided extraordinary profits for the owner.

Peter M. Senge Leading management guru Peter M Senge defines the five business 'disciplines' which together help to build learning organizations. These companies will be the successful ones in the coming decade because of their ability to learn, to absorb new ideas, theories and practices at all employee levels and use them to competitive advantage. Shared vision, teamwork and leverage are the main themes of this book.

Michael Watkins Whether challenged with taking on a startup, turning a business around, or inheriting a high-performing unit, a new leader's success or failure is determined within the first 90 days on the job.

In this hands-on guide, Michael Watkins, a noted expert on leadership transitions, offers proven strategies for moving successfully into a new role at any point in one's career. The First 90 Days provides a framework for transition acceleration that will help leaders diagnose their situations, craft winning transition strategies, and take charge quickly.

Practical examples illustrate how to learn about new organizations, build teams, create coalitions, secure early wins, and lay the foundation for longer-term success. In addition, Watkins provides strategies for avoiding the most common pitfalls new leaders encounter, and shows how individuals can protect themselves-emotionally as well as professionally-during what is often an intense and vulnerable period.

Concise and actionable, this is the survival guide no new leader should be without.

"Few companies develop a systematic 'on-boarding' process for their new leaders, even though this is a critical function with major organizational implications. Michael Watkins's The First 90 Days provides a powerful framework and strategies that will enable new leaders to take charge quickly. It is an invaluable tool for that most vulnerable time-the transition."

-Goli Darabi, Senior Vice President, Corporate Leadership & Succession Management, Fidelity Investments

"Every job-private- or public-sector, civilian or military-has its breakeven point, and everyone can accelerate their learning. Read this book at least twice: once before your next transition-before getting caught up in the whirl and blur of new faces, names, acronyms, and issues; then read it again after you've settled in, and consider how to accelerate transitions for your next new boss and for those who come to work for you."

-Colonel Eli Alford, U.S. Army

"Watkins provides an excellent road map, telling us what all new leaders need to know and do to accelerate their learning and success in a new role. The First 90 Days should be incorporated into every company's leadership development strategy, so that anyone making a transition in an organization can get up to speed quicker and smarter."

-Suzanne M. Danielle, Director of Global Leadership Development, Aventis

"Michael Watkins has nailed a huge corporate problem and provided the solution in one fell swoop. The pressure on new leaders to hit the ground running has never been greater, and the likelihood and cost of failure is escalating. Watkins's timing with The First 90 Days is impeccable."

-Gordon Curtis, Principal, Curtis Consulting

"The First 90 Days is a must-read for entrepreneurs. Anyone who's been the CEO of a start-up or early-stage company knows that you go through many 90-day leadership transitions in the course of a company's formative years. In this groundbreaking book, Michael Watkins provides crucial insights, as well as a toolkit of techniques, to enable you to accelerate through these transitions successfully."

-Mike Kinkead, President and CEO, timeBLASTER Corporation, serial entrepreneur, and Cofounder and Trustee, Massachusetts Software Council

Marcus Buckingham, Curt Coffman The greatest managers in the world seem to have little in common. They differ in sex, age, and race. They employ vastly different styles and focus on different goals. Yet despite their differences, great managers share one common trait: They do not hesitate to break virtually every rule held sacred by conventional wisdom. They do not believe that, with enough training, a person can achieve anything he sets his mind to. They do not try to help people overcome their weaknesses. They consistently disregard the golden rule. And, yes, they even play favorites. This amazing book explains why.

Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman of the Gallup Organization present the remarkable findings of their massive in-depth study of great managers across a wide variety of situations. Some were in leadership positions. Others were front-line supervisors. Some were in Fortune 500 companies; others were key players in small, entrepreneurial companies. Whatever their situations, the managers who ultimately became the focus of Gallup's research were invariably those who excelled at turning each employee's talent into performance.

In today's tight labor markets, companies compete to find and keep the best employees, using pay, benefits, promotions, and training. But these well-intentioned efforts often miss the mark. The front-line manager is the key to attracting and retaining talented employees. No matter how generous its pay or how renowned its training, the company that lacks great front-line managers will suffer. Buckingham and Coffman explain how the best managers select an employee for talent rather than for skills or experience; how they set expectations for him or her — they define the right outcomes rather than the right steps; how they motivate people — they build on each person's unique strengths rather than trying to fix his weaknesses; and, finally, how great managers develop people — they find the right fit for each person, not the next rung on the ladder. And perhaps most important, this research — which initially generated thousands of different survey questions on the subject of employee opinion — finally produced the twelve simple questions that work to distinguish the strongest departments of a company from all the rest. This book is the first to present this essential measuring stick and to prove the link between employee opinions and productivity, profit, customer satisfaction, and the rate of turnover.

There are vital performance and career lessons here for managers at every level, and, best of all, the book shows you how to apply them to your own situation.

Mitch Albom Plot Eddie is a wounded war veteran, an old man who has lived, in his mind, an uninspired life. His job is fixing rides at a seaside amusement park. On his 83rd birthday, a tragic accident kills him, as he tries to save a little girl from a falling cart. He awakes in the afterlife, where he learns that heaven is not a destination. It's a place where your life is explained to you by five people, some of whom you knew, others who may have been strangers. One by one, from childhood to soldier to old age, Eddie's five people revisit their connections to him on earth, illuminating the mysteries of his "meaningless" life, and revealing the haunting secret behind the eternal question: "Why was I here?" Personal Details Collection Status In Collection Index 10 Read It Yes Links Amazon US Product Details LoC Classification PS3601.L335F59 2003 Dewey 813/.6

Susan R. Barry When neuroscientist Susan Barry was fifty years old, she took an unforgettable trip to Manhattan. As she emerged from the dim light of the subway into the sunshine, she saw a view of the city that she had witnessed many times in the past but now saw in an astonishingly new way. Skyscrapers on street corners appeared to loom out toward her like the bows of giant ships. Tree branches projected upward and outward, enclosing and commanding palpable volumes of space. Leaves created intricate mosaics in 3D. With each glance, she experienced the deliriously novel sense of immersion in a three dimensional world.

Barry had been cross-eyed and stereoblind since early infancy. After half a century of perceiving her surroundings as flat and compressed, on that day she was seeing Manhattan in stereo depth for first time in her life. As a neuroscientist, she understood just how extraordinary this transformation was, not only for herself but for the scientific understanding of the human brain. Scientists have long believed that the brain is malleable only during a “critical period” in early childhood. According to this theory, Barry’s brain had organized itself when she was a baby to avoid double vision – and there was no way to rewire it as an adult. But Barry found an optometrist who prescribed a little-known program of vision therapy; after intensive training, Barry was ultimately able to accomplish what other scientists and even she herself had once considered impossible.

A revelatory account of the brain’s capacity for change, Fixing My Gaze describes Barry’s remarkable journey and celebrates the joyous pleasure of our senses.

Gene C. Hayden A practical guide to achieving your goals - from starting a business to running a marathon - despite anything and everything life throws at you.

We all have an idea or project that we'd like to pursue, and countless reasons why we can't: it may be that it's too expensive, or we lack the time, confidence, or skills. Inevitably, there are obstacles that get between us and our aspirations, but those who achieve their goals know that strategies exist for getting past these barriers.

First as a journalist and then as a certified life and career coach, Gene C. Hayden interviewed achievers from all walks of life - artists, executives, professionals, small business owners - who tackled insecurities and obstacles on the road to success. Those consulted didn't have any special advantages to ease their way, but they did have the follow-through factor, a practical mindset that drives action towards a goal, regardless of circumstance. And most importantly, Gene tells us that this is something anyone can learn. With her vast experience, realistic advice, and encouraging voice, Gene is the perfect guide for those who are eager to achieve their ambitions.

Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner Which is more dangerous, a gun or a swimming pool? What do schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers have in common? Why do drug dealers still live with their moms? How much do parents really matter? What kind of impact did Roe v. Wade have on violent crime?

These may not sound like typical questions for an economist to ask. But Steven D. Levitt is not a typical economist. He is a much heralded scholar who studies the stuff and riddles of everyday life-;from cheating and crime to sports and child rearing-;and whose conclusions regularly turn the conventional wisdom on its head. He usually begins with a mountain of data and a simple, unasked question. Some of these questions concern life-and-death issues; others have an admittedly freakish quality. Thus the new field of study contained in this book: freakonomics.

Through forceful storytelling and wry insight, Levitt and co-author Stephen J. Dubner show that economics is, at root, the study of incentives-;how people get what they want, or need, especially when other people want or need the same thing. In Freakonomics, they set out to explore the hidden side of ... well, everything. The inner workings of a crack gang. The truth about real-estate agents. The myths of campaign finance. The telltale marks of a cheating schoolteacher. The secrets of the Ku Klux Klan.

What unites all these stories is a belief that the modern world, despite a surfeit of obfuscation, complication, and downright deceit, is not impenetrable, is not unknowable, and-;if the right questions are asked-;is even more intriguing than we think. All it takes is a new way of looking. Steven Levitt, through devilishly clever and clear-eyed thinking, shows how to see through all the clutter.

Freakonomics establishes this unconventional premise: If morality represents how we would like the world to work, then economics represents how it actually does work. It is true that readers of this book will be armed with enough riddles and stories to last a thousand cocktail parties. But Freakonomics can provide more than that. It will literally redefine the way we view the modern world.

Chris Anderson The New York Times bestselling author heralds the future of business in Free.

In his revolutionary bestseller, The Long Tail, Chris Anderson demonstrated how the online marketplace creates niche markets, allowing products and consumers to connect in a way that has never been possible before. Now, in Free, he makes the compelling case that in many instances businesses can profit more from giving things away than they can by charging for them. Far more than a promotional gimmick, Free is a business strategy that may well be essential to a company's survival.

The costs associated with the growing online economy are trending toward zero at an incredible rate. Never in the course of human history have the primary inputs to an industrial economy fallen in price so fast and for so long. Just think that in 1961, a single transistor cost $10; now Intel's latest chip has two billion transistors and sells for $300 (or 0.000015 cents per transistor—effectively too cheap to price). The traditional economics of scarcity just don't apply to bandwidth, processing power, and hard-drive storage.

Yet this is just one engine behind the new Free, a reality that goes beyond a marketing gimmick or a cross-subsidy. Anderson also points to the growth of the reputation economy; explains different models for unleashing the power of Free; and shows how to compete when your competitors are giving away what you're trying to sell.

In Free, Chris Anderson explores this radical idea for the new global economy and demonstrates how this revolutionary price can be harnessed for the benefit of consumers and businesses alike.

Bob Rae In January of 1996, when Bob Rae declared he was stepping down as the leader of the Ontario New Democratic Party, the media was full of praise for the former premier of Ontario. In From Protest to Power, Rae provides a surprising, frank look back at his time in politics. Shedding light on his rise to power from radical student politics to becoming the leader of the first NDP government to hold power in Ontario. He takes a look at his incredible life from Rhodes Scholar at Oxford and studying with philosopher Isaiah Berlin to his life as a family man.

In the fall of 2006, with Bob Rae running for the federal leadership of the Liberal Party, it is time for us to examine his remarkable life once more. A life that has been motivated by the belief that politics and public service matter.

As he says in the new introduction, “I am running because I care deeply about my country. I want it to stay strong. I want it to stay together. And I want to play whatever part I can to help make those things happen.”

Learn more about what makes Bob run.

Gabe Zichermann, Joselin Linder Advertising is dead. You may not realize it, but you and everyone you know engages, possibly unsuspectingly, in some form of a game multitasking as an ingenious marketing device. Game-Based Marketing illustrates the pervasiveness of games today in business marketing, and how to better use them to create an engaged and loyal customer base. Game-Based Marketing will:Explain the growing phenomenon of game-based marketing and how it worksShow marketers how to develop games to incorporate into their marketing strategyShare fascinating examples of marketing games already in play including Jigsaw.com; Chase Picks Up The Tab; the iconic McDonald’s Monopoly Game that reportedly generates nearly one-hundred million dollars in incremental revenue per year; and United Airlines Mileage Plus where team pint competitions and real-world scavenger hunts for miles accrue millions annually.

Provocative and instructive, Game-Based Marketing’s message is clear: Use the tools in this book to put games in your marketing mix now… or you’ll be out of the game altogether.

Seymour Schulich This is a mentoring book primarily for the 20-to-40-year-old with entrepreneurial aspirations. Many older folks will also derive considerable inspiration from the life and business lessons contained in Get Smarter.

In examining his own life Seymour Schulich, a Canadian billionaire and philanthropist, realized that at age 20 he-like others his age-knew very little and was aware of that fact. At 30, he writes, one thinks one has acquired a lot of wisdom.

Upon later reflection, however, he realized he knew very little at that age, too!

Get Smarter is Schulich`s brilliantly idiosyncratic and informative attempt to impart lessons learned in a lifetime to today’s youth by someone who has achieved success in both his personal and professional life. In short, stand-alone chapters he covers such universal issues as:

-How to make a decision
-Manage all types of relationships
-Choose a career
-Deal with adversity
-Key business issues
-Investing lessons

Website

Roger Fisher, William L. Ury, Bruce Patton This is by far the best thing I've ever read about negotiation. It is equally relevant for the individual who would like to keep his friends, property, and income and the statesman who would like to keep the peace. —John Kenneth Galbraith.

Mike McCardell Mike McCardell, the legendary Vancouver reporter who tries to restore people's faith in living after they've finished watching the appalling mayhem on the evening news, is back with another collection of simple but irresistible stories: there are the ownerless shoes, sitting day after day in a washroom used mainly by big-time celebrities. There are the big cajones one daren't mention and the magic dachshund whose poop can clear the snow off driveways. There is the roving women's fitness group that performs for a homeless man who lives in a shopping cart. There is the one that got away, always the best one. But most of all there's the tireless reporter combing the streets of his modern big city, looking for inspiring acts of humanity amid the urban roar. And always, always finding them.

Carol Off In 1993, Canadian peacekeepers in Croatia were plunged into the most significant fighting Canada had seen since the Korean War. Their extraordinary heroism was covered up and forgotten. The ghosts of that battlefield have haunted them ever since.

Canadian peacekeepers in Medak Pocket, Croatia, found no peace to keep in September 1993. They engaged the forces of ethnic cleansing in a deadly firefight and drove them from the area under United Nations protection. The soldiers should have returned home as heroes. Instead, they arrived under a cloud of suspicion and silence.

In Medak Pocket, members of the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry did exactly the job they were trained — and ordered — to do. When attacked by the Croat army they returned fire and fought back valiantly to protect Serbian civilians and to save the UN mandate in Croatia. Then they confronted the horrors of the offensive’s aftermath — the annihilation by the Croat army of Serbian villages. The Canadians searched for survivors. There were none.

The soldiers came home haunted by these atrocities, but in the wake of the Somalia affair, Canada had no time for soldiers’ stories of the horrific compromises of battle — the peacekeepers were silenced. In time, the dark secrets of Medak’s horrors drove many of these soldiers to despair, to homelessness and even suicide.

Award-winning journalist Carol Off brings to life this decisive battle of the Canadian Forces. The Ghosts of Medak Pocket is the complete and untold story.

From the Hardcover edition.

Bill Clinton Here, from Bill Clinton, is a call to action. Giving is an inspiring look at how each of us can change the world. First, it reveals the extraordinary and innovative efforts now being made by companies and organizations—and by individuals—to solve problems and save lives both “down the street and around the world.” Then it urges us to seek out what each of us, “regardless of income, available time, age, and skills,” can do to help, to give people a chance to live out their dreams.

Bill Clinton shares his own experiences and those of other givers, representing a global flood tide of nongovernmental, nonprofit activity. These remarkable stories demonstrate that gifts of time, skills, things, and ideas are as important and effective as contributions of money. From Bill and Melinda Gates to a six-year-old California girl named McKenzie Steiner, who organized and supervised drives to clean up the beach in her community, Clinton introduces us to both well-known and unknown heroes of giving. Among them:

Dr. Paul Farmer, who grew up living in the family bus in a trailer park, vowed to devote his life to giving high-quality medical care to the poor and has built innovative public health-care clinics first in Haiti and then in Rwanda;
a New York couple, in Africa for a wedding, who visited several schools in Zimbabwe and were appalled by the absence of textbooks and school supplies. They founded their own organization to gather and ship materials to thirty-five schools. After three years, the percentage of seventh-graders who pass reading tests increased from 5 percent to 60 percent;'
Oseola McCarty, who after seventy-five years of eking out a living by washing and ironing, gave $150,000 to the University of Southern Mississippi to endow a scholarship fund for African-American students;
Andre Agassi, who has created a college preparatory academy in the Las Vegas neighborhood with the city’s highest percentage of at-risk kids. “Tennis was a stepping-stone for me,” says Agassi. “Changing a child’s life is what I always wanted to do”;
Heifer International, which gave twelve goats to a Ugandan village. Within a year, Beatrice Biira’s mother had earned enough money selling goat’s milk to pay Beatrice’s school fees and eventually to send all her children to school—and, as required, to pass on a baby goat to another family, thus multiplying the impact of the gift.

Clinton writes about men and women who traded in their corporate careers, and the fulfillment they now experience through giving. He writes about energy-efficient practices, about progressive companies going green, about promoting fair wages and decent working conditions around the world. He shows us how one of the most important ways of giving can be an effort to change, improve, or protect a government policy. He outlines what we as individuals can do, the steps we can take, how much we should consider giving, and why our giving is so important.

Bill Clinton’s own actions in his post-presidential years have had an enormous impact on the lives of millions. Through his foundation and his work in the aftermath of the Asian tsunami and Hurricane Katrina, he has become an international spokesperson and model for the power of giving.

“We all have the capacity to do great things,” President Clinton says. “My hope is that the people and stories in this book will lift spirits, touch hearts, and demonstrate that citizen activism and service can be a powerful agent of change in the world.”

Marcus Buckingham Beginning with the million-copy bestsellers First, Break All the Rules and Now, Discover Your Strengths, Marcus Buckingham jump-started the strengths movement that is now sweeping the work world, from business to government to education. Now that the movement is in full swing, Buckingham's new book answers the ultimate question: How can you actually apply your strengths for maximum success at work?

Research data show that most people do not come close to making full use of their assets at work — in fact, only 17 percent of the workforce believe they use all of their strengths on the job. Go Put Your Strengths to Work aims to change that through a six-step, six-week experience that will reveal the hidden dimensions of your strengths. Buckingham shows you how to seize control of your assets and rewrite your job description under the nose of your boss. You will learn:

• Why your strengths aren't "what you are good at" and your weaknesses aren't "what you are bad at."

• How to use the four telltale signs to identify your strengths.

• The simple steps you can take each week to push your time at work toward those activities that strengthen you and away from those that don't.

• How to talk to your boss and your colleagues about your strengths without sounding like you're bragging and about your weaknesses without sounding like you're whining.

• The fifteen-minute weekly ritual that will keep you on your strengths path your entire career.

With structured exercises that will become part of your regular workweek and proven tactics from people who have successfully applied the book's lessons, Go Put Your Strengths to Work will arm you with a radically different approach to your work life. As part of the book's program you'll take an online Strengths Engagement Track, a focused and powerful gauge that has proven to be the best way to measure the level of engagement of your strengths or your team's strengths. You can also download the first two segments of the renowned companion film series Trombone Player Wanted.

Go Put Your Strengths to Work will open up exciting uncharted territory for you and your organization. Join the strengths movement and thrive.

Jim Collins Jim Collins Answers the Social Sector with a Monograph to Accompany Good to Great. 30-50% of those who bought Good to Great work in the Social Sector.

This monograph is a response to questions raised by readers in the social sector. It is not a new book.Jim Collins wants to avoid any confusion about the monograph being a book by limiting its distribution to online retailers.Based on interviews and workshops with over 100 social sector leaders.The difference between successful organizations is not between the business and the social sector, the difference is between good organizations and great ones.

Jim Collins The Challenge
Built to Last, the defining management study of the nineties, showed how great companies triumph over time and how long-term sustained performance can be engineered into the DNA of an enterprise from the verybeginning.

But what about the company that is not born with great DNA? How can good companies, mediocre companies, even bad companies achieve enduring greatness?

The Study
For years, this question preyed on the mind of Jim Collins. Are there companies that defy gravity and convert long-term mediocrity or worse into long-term superiority? And if so, what are the universal distinguishing characteristics that cause a company to go from good to great?

The Standards
Using tough benchmarks, Collins and his research team identified a set of elite companies that made the leap to great results and sustained those results for at least fifteen years. How great? After the leap, the good-to-great companies generated cumulative stock returns that beat the general stock market by an average of seven times in fifteen years, better than twice the results delivered by a composite index of the world's greatest companies, including Coca-Cola, Intel, General Electric, and Merck.

The Comparisons
The research team contrasted the good-to-great companies with a carefully selected set of comparison companies that failed to make the leap from good to great. What was different? Why did one set of companies become truly great performers while the other set remained only good?

Over five years, the team analyzed the histories of all twenty-eight companies in the study. After sifting through mountains of data and thousands of pages of interviews, Collins and his crew discovered the key determinants of greatness — why some companies make the leap and others don't.

The Findings
The findings of the Good to Great study will surprise many readers and shed light on virtually every area of management strategy and practice. The findings include: Level 5 Leaders: The research team was shocked to discover the type of leadership required to achieve greatness.The Hedgehog Concept (Simplicity within the Three Circles): To go from good to great requires transcending the curse of competence.A Culture of Discipline: When you combine a culture of discipline with an ethic of entrepreneurship, you get the magical alchemy of great results. Technology Accelerators: Good-to-great companies think differently about the role of technology.The Flywheel and the Doom Loop: Those who launch radical change programs and wrenching restructurings will almost certainly fail to make the leap.

“Some of the key concepts discerned in the study,” comments Jim Collins, "fly in the face of our modern business culture and will, quite frankly, upset some people.”

Perhaps, but who can afford to ignore these findings?

Dena Dyer Busy mothers need encouragement, community, and, sometimes, a counselor on speed dial! Dena Dyer — herself a busy young mom — uses real-life stories, scripture, and gentle humor to soothe the souls of frazzled females. By being honest and vulnerable about the ways God has shown Himself to her as she's struggled with motherhood, Dena hopes to help moms realize that they're not alone—and they're not crazy! She says, "I surely don’t have it all together (in fact, I usually can't even find it all), but I do have a Coach who holds me together. And I long to come alongside you as a fellow runner, not an expert, to cheer you on in your daily race."

Endorsements:

With complete honesty and "been there, done that" humor, Dena Dyer's Grace for the Race: Meditations for Busy Moms treats us moms to the very things we need most...understanding, laughter, and soul rest.

—-Lisa Espinoza Johnson, author of Days of Whine and Noses—Pep Talks for Tuckered Out Moms

Dena Dyer writes this encouraging devotional with vulnerability and wisdom which will refresh the hearts of busy moms in whatever season of life they find themselves.

—-Cheri Fuller, speaker and author of the bestselling When Mothers Pray, The Mom You're Meant to Be, and other books

Dena Dyer's Grace for the Race reminds me of Anne Morrow Lindbergh's Gifts from the Sea. I love her poignant reflections.

—-Marsha Marks, author of If I Ignore it, It will Go Away and Other Lies I Thought Were True

As a mother of seven, I appreciate a book that allows me to escape the hectic pace of motherhood and take an oasis break for a moment or two. Dena Dyer has created a delightful haven with words for busy moms. I highly recommend this wonderful book. In one gentle stroke it will lighten your load, rejuvenate your sense of fun, and refresh your spirit. —-Ellie Kay, "America's Financial Expert" (R) and author of eight books including A Woman's Guide to Family Finance

Charlene Li, Josh Bernoff Corporate executives are struggling with a new trend: people using online social technologies (blogs, social networking sites, YouTube, podcasts) to discuss products and companies, write their own news, and find their own deals. This groundswell is global, it s unstoppable, it affects every industry and it s utterly foreign to the powerful companies running things now.

When consumers you ve never met are rating your company s products in public forums with which you have no experience or influence, your company is vulnerable. In Groundswell, Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff of Forrester, Inc. explain how to turn this threat into an opportunity.

Using tools and data straight from Forrester, you ll learn how to:

-Evaluate new social technologies as they emerge

-Determine how different groups of consumers are participating in social technology arenas

-Apply a four-step process for formulating your future strategy

-Build social technologies into your business including monitoring your brand value, talking with the groundswell through marketing and PR campaigns, and energizing your best customers to recruit their peers

Timely and insightful, this book is required reading for executives seeking to protect and strengthen their company s public image.

"Groundswell is jammed with big ideas, useful stories, and quotable stats. This is the new industrial revolution. Are you on board?"

-Seth Godin, author, Meatball Sundae

"This book will rock your world, if social technology hasn't rocked it already. It's a tsunami of unstoppable force. Amazon, Procter & Gamble, Facebook, Google, and Dell are profiting from the crest of the wave. Are you? Li and Bernoff are the apostles of the tsunami. This book will be your bible."

-Scott Cook, Founder and Chairman of the Executive Committee, Intuit

Groundswell provides practical advice on how to stay nimble and flexible in an ever-morphing digital world. Enabling your company to respond to change quickly especially when talking to and supporting your consumers is essential for business success.

-Cathie Black, President, Hearst Magazines

"The first phase of the Internet was about getting everyone connected. In this next phase, which changes the way we work, live, play, and learn, we re starting to realize the value of those connections as well as the new communications and experiences those interactions lead to the human network. Groundswell effectively documents this shift and underscores the opportunities available to all from this major market transition."

-John T. Chambers, Chairman and CEO, Cisco

"Heed the Groundswell! It's critical reading and helped us master the new dynamics of social media."

-Christina Norman, President, MTV

"Groundswell is a comprehensive look at the tidal wave of change engulfing marketers. Nobody should attempt to engage the newly empowered and emboldened consumer without first hearing what Li and Bernoff have to say on the subject."

-Clark Kokich, CEO, Avenue A | Razorfish

"Social technologies and the groundswell impact every business and organization worldwide. Li and Bernoff have written an insightful book that takes a refreshing research-driven approach to helping businesses transform themselves and successfully navigate this new dynamic landscape."

-Steve Rubel, Senior Vice President, Edelman Digital, and columnist for Advertising Age

Keith Sawyer Creativity has long been thought to be an individual gift, best pursued alone; schools, organizations, and whole industries are built on this idea. But what if the most common beliefs about how creativity works are wrong?

Group Genius tears down some of the most popular myths about creativity, revealing that creativity is always collaborative—even when you're alone. Sharing the results of his own acclaimed research on jazz groups, theater ensembles, and conversation analysis, Keith Sawyer shows us how to be more creative in collaborative group settings, how to change organizational dynamics for the better, and how to tap into our own reserves of creativity.

Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn The Gulag Archipelago is Solzhenitsyn’s attempt to compile a literary-historical record of the vast system of prisons and labor camps that came into being shortly after the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia in 1917 and that underwent an enormous expansion during the rule of Stalin from 1924 to 1953. Various sections of the three volumes describe the arrest, interrogation, conviction, transportation, and imprisonment of the Gulag’s victims by Soviet authorities over four decades. The work mingles historical exposition and Solzhenitsyn’s own autobiographical accounts with the voluminous personal testimony of other inmates that he collected and committed to memory during his imprisonment.Upon publication of the first volume of The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn was immediately attacked in the Soviet press. Despite the intense interest in his fate that was shown in the West, he was arrested and charged with treason on February 12, 1974, and was exiled from the Soviet Union the following day.

Shawn Achor Our most commonly held formula for success is broken.
 
Conventional wisdom holds that if we work hard we will be more successful, and if we are more successful, then we’ll be happy. If we can just find that great job, win that next promotion, lose those five pounds, happiness will follow. But recent discoveries in the field of positive psychology have shown that this formula is actually backward: Happiness fuels success, not the other way around. When we are positive, our brains become more engaged, creative, motivated, energetic, resilient, and productive at work. This isn’t just an empty mantra. This discovery has been repeatedly borne out by rigorous research in psychology and neuroscience, management studies, and the bottom lines of organizations around the globe.
           
In The Happiness Advantage, Shawn Achor, who spent over a decade living, researching, and lecturing at Harvard University, draws on his own research—including one of the largest studies of happiness and potential at Harvard and others at companies like UBS and KPMG—to fix this broken formula. Using stories and case studies from his work with thousands of Fortune 500 executives in 42 countries, Achor explains how we can reprogram our brains to become more positive in order to gain a competitive edge at work.
           
Isolating seven practical, actionable principles that have been tried and tested everywhere from classrooms to boardrooms, stretching from Argentina to Zimbabwe, he shows us how we can capitalize on the Happiness Advantage to improve our performance and maximize our potential. Among the principles he outlines:
 

   • The Tetris Effect: how to retrain our brains to spot patterns of possibility, so we can see—and seize—opportunities wherever we look.
   • The Zorro Circle: how to channel our efforts on small, manageable goals, to gain the leverage to gradually conquer bigger and bigger ones.
   • Social Investment: how to reap the dividends of investing in one of the greatest predictors of success and happiness—our social support network

 
A must-read for everyone trying to excel in a world of increasing workloads, stress, and negativity, The Happiness Advantage isn’t only about how to become happier at work. It’s about how to reap the benefits of a happier and more positive mind-set to achieve the extraordinary in our work and in our lives.

Clay Shirky A revelatory examination of how the wildfirelike spread of new forms of social interaction enabled by technology is changing the way humans form groups and exist within them, with profound long-term economic and social effects-for good and for ill

A handful of kite hobbyists scattered around the world find each other online and collaborate on the most radical improvement in kite design in decades. A midwestern professor of Middle Eastern history starts a blog after 9/11 that becomes essential reading for journalists covering the Iraq war. Activists use the Internet and e-mail to bring offensive comments made by Trent Lott and Don Imus to a wide public and hound them from their positions. A few people find that a world-class online encyclopedia created entirely by volunteers and open for editing by anyone, a wiki, is not an impractical idea. Jihadi groups trade inspiration and instruction and showcase terrorist atrocities to the world, entirely online. A wide group of unrelated people swarms to a Web site about the theft of a cell phone and ultimately goads the New York City police to take action, leading to the culprit's arrest.

With accelerating velocity, our age's new technologies of social networking are evolving, and evolving us, into new groups doing new things in new ways, and old and new groups alike doing the old things better and more easily. You don't have to have a MySpace page to know that the times they are a changin'. Hierarchical structures that exist to manage the work of groups are seeing their raisons d'tre swiftly eroded by the rising technological tide. Business models are being destroyed, transformed, born at dizzying speeds, and the larger social impact is profound.

One of the culture's wisest observers of the transformational power of the new forms of tech-enabled social interaction is Clay Shirky, and Here Comes Everybody is his marvelous reckoning with the ramifications of all this on what we do and who we are. Like Lawrence Lessig on the effect of new technology on regimes of cultural creation, Shirky's assessment of the impact of new technology on the nature and use of groups is marvelously broad minded, lucid, and penetrating; it integrates the views of a number of other thinkers across a broad range of disciplines with his own pioneering work to provide a holistic framework for understanding the opportunities and the threats to the existing order that these new, spontaneous networks of social interaction represent. Wikinomics, yes, but also wikigovernment, wikiculture, wikievery imaginable interest group, including the far from savory. A revolution in social organization has commenced, and Clay Shirky is its brilliant chronicler.

Roger Connors, Tom Smith A simple, proven approach to improve accountability and your company's bottom line.

The economy crashes, the government misfires, businesses fail, leaders don't lead, managers don't manage, and the people we count on for the results that affect our own performance don't follow through, leaving us asking, "How did that happen?"

All the surprises caused by a lack of personal accountability plague almost every organization today, from the political arena to every large and small business. How Did That Happen? offers a proven way to eliminate these nasty surprises, gain an unbeatable competitive edge, and enhance performance by holding others accountable the positive, principled way.

As the experts on workplace accountability and authors of The Oz Principle, the classic book on personal accountability, Roger Connors and Tom Smith now tackle the next crucial step everyone can take, whether as a manager, supervisor, CEO, or individual performer: creating greater accountability in all the people on whom you depend.

Connors and Smith have spent decades implementing their approach to creating greater accountability in some of the world's most admired companies. Through hundreds of successful client applications, they have proven that organizational accountability can be the single most important factor in ensuring a company's success. Now, they present the Accountability Sequence, a systematic and sensible approach that includes two essential components: The Outer Ring, which reveals how to establish expectations and positive accountability connections with everyone in the Expectations Chain. The Inner Ring, which shows how to manage unmet expectations when people fail to deliver and thereby reverse the misfortune of missed results.

Using case studies, practical models, and self-assessments, the authors make it possible for anyone to install accountability as a central part of their daily work, their team's efforts, or an overall corporate culture-and, in turn, increase profits and generate better results.

Tom Rath, Ph.D. Donald O. Clifton EXPANDED ANNIVERSARY EDITION Includes: updated research updated content removable workbook for individual and team development

How did you feel after your last interaction with another person?

Did that person — your spouse, best friend, coworker, or even a stranger — "fill your bucket" by making you feel more positive? Or did that person "dip from your bucket," leaving you more negative than before?

The #1 New York Times and #1 BusinessWeek bestseller, How Full Is Your Bucket? reveals how even the briefest interactions affect your relationships, productivity, health, and longevity.
Organized around a simple metaphor of a dipper and a bucket, and grounded in 50 years of research, this book will show you how to greatly increase the positive moments in your work and your life — while reducing the negative.

Filled with discoveries, powerful strategies, and engaging stories, How Full Is Your Bucket? is sure to inspire lasting changes and has all the makings of a timeless classic. (edited by author)

Dale Carnegie How to Win Friends and Influence People is the first, and still the finest, book of its kind. One of the best-known motivational books in history, Dale Carnegie's groundbreaking work has sold millions of copies, has been translated into almost every known written language, and has helped countless people succeed in both their business and personal lives.

First published in 1937, Carnegie's advice has remained relevant for generations because he addresses timeless questions about the fine art of getting along with people: How can you make people like you instantly? How can you persuade people to agree with you? How can you speak frankly to people without giving offense? The ability to read others and successfully navigate any social situation is critically important to those who want to get a job, keep a job, or simply expand their social network.

The core principles of this book, originally written as a practical, working handbook on human relations, are proven effective. Carnegie explains the fundamentals of handling people with a positive approach; how to make people like you and want to help you; how to win people to your way of thinking without conflict; and how to be the kind of leader who inspires quality work, increased productivity, and high morale.

As Carnegie explains, the majority of our success in life depends on our ability to communicate and manage personal relationships effectively, whether at home or at work. How to Win Friends and Influence People will help you discover and develop the people skills you need to live well and prosper.

David Magee What we can all learn from the strategies that have made Toyota the world’s best car company

Everyone who follows the auto industry knows that Toyota has had an amazing twenty-five-year run, rising from humble Japanese start-up to thriving global giant. But the big puzzle is how Toyota did it while so many other car companies have struggled or failed.

Journalist David Magee dug deeply into Toyota’s past and present, interviewing senior executives who rarely talk to the press, along with many other sources. And he found that the company’s famous mastery of lean production is only part of the story. Magee explains the surprising power of Toyota’s corporate culture, which includes:

• Focusing on the long term: While most companies worry about the next quarter, Toyota is thinking about the next quarter century

• Jumping beyond the current trend: When Ford was still ramping up its gas-guzzling SUVs, Toyota was very quietly taking a huge lead on hybrids

• Making quality everyone’s responsibility: Toyota expects people at every level to think and act like quality-control inspectors

• Managing individual strengths: Toyota is revolutionizing the way people are managed, to maximize their strengths instead of criticizing their weaknesses

The lessons that Magee explains here will be valuable for managers in all disciplines and industries.

Arnold Bennett This classic personal time-management book originally published in 1908 has inspired generations of men and women to live deliberate lives. Not just another collection of timesaving tips, this book is more of a challenge to leave behind mundane everyday concerns, focus on pursuing one's true desires, and live the fullest possible life. Reflection, concentration, and study techniques make it easier to accomplish more truly rewarding undertakings than anyone ever dreamed possible.

Frances Cole Jones “The invaluable advice in How to Wow guarantees your success in any meeting situation, from the boardroom to the breakfast table.”
–Keith Ferrazzi, author of Never Eat Alone

In today’s fast-paced world, where an elevator ride with your CEO can turn into an impromptu meeting, your lunch date can become a job interview, and your conversation at a cocktail party may be a preamble to a potential business merger, knowing how to market yourself in any situation is vital. Corporate coach Frances Cole Jones has helped numerous CEOs, celebrities, and public personalities present their best selves on camera and onstage, in boardrooms and in person; now in her new book, How to Wow, she shares her strategies for making your mark in business and in life.

Every encounter, Jones believes, provides you with an opportunity to positively influence colleagues, employers, neighbors–even competitors. Not only your words, but your tone of voice and your body language speak volumes. The question, however, is: Are they working together to say what you want them to, as effectively as possible?

Inside, you’ll learn how to

• leave a lasting impression with a simple introduction
• effectively employ the twelve most persuasive words in the English language and command the stage, boardroom, or lunch table
• read nonverbal responses accurately–and shift negative ones immediately
• motivate your team under deadline
• interview fearlessly and flawlessly
• write the perfect pitch, résumè, cover letter, or e-mail
• deliver speeches that bring people to their feet
• transform a PowerPoint presentation into a powerful success

With easy-to-follow advice, amusing anecdotes, and immediately employable hints, Jones’s guidelines can keep you cool (even in hot water). From asking the right questions to giving the right answers, How to Wow will provide you with the confidence to be calm and commanding in all you do and to wow anyone anywhere anytime.

Mark Murphy Push employees to their full potential with “tough love” leadership!

“Provides the tools managers need to take ‘average’ employees and create a culture of accountable, fully engaged people. Managers will learn to recognize their leadership style and understand how they, too, can become Hundred Percenters.”
Laura Christiansen, Vice President Human Resources, VTech Communications, Inc.

"Heavily-researched and loaded with tools and examples, this book shows you how to challenge your employees to achieve the kind of extraordinary results and innovations that every CEO dreams about. Every leader needs to read this book!"
Ned Fitch, CEO, Kalahari Tea

"Murphy finds that most workplaces are brimming with untapped talent. Only it's suppressed by goal-setting that discourages big ideas and leaders who focus on happiness rather than greatness."
Training Magazine

We’ve all heard the saying that a happy employee is a motivated employee. But what if that’s not true?

Leadership IQ CEO Mark Murphy says the “happy employee” philosophy doesn’t work. A study of more than 500,000 leaders and employees shows that despite the billions of dollars organizations spend to satisfy and engage workers, 72% of employees admit they’re still not giving their best effort at work. Rather, it’s leaders who focus on making their people great—not happy—who inspire Hundred Percenter performance.

If you talk to the employees behind today’s great innovations, you’re unlikely to hear, “I was inspired by a boss who coddles me.” Instead you’d probably hear, “My boss challenges me and pushes me past my limits.” Most workplaces are brimming with untapped talent— only it’s suppressed by leaders who fail to connect with and challenge employees to unleash their true potential.

Here are just a few of the big ideas in Hundred Percenters: The harder the goals you set, the better your employees will performYou should never use a Compliment Sandwich to deliver feedbackTalented Terrors—people with great skills and a bad attitude—can destroy your company cultureBefore you can start motivating Hundred Percenters, you have to stop demotivating themYou should never ask your employees if they’re “satisfied”

This groundbreaking book debunks management fads that don’t apply to today’s workplace and provides the facts, theories, and direction you need to become a 100% Leader. Apply Murphy’s leadership lessons and you’ll see innovation, productivity, and profits soar, while employee turnover rates plummet. Hundred Percenters will bring out the best in your workforce.

Matthew E. May What made the Sopranos finale one of the most-talked-about events in television history?

Why is sudoku so addictive and the iPhone so irresistible?

What do Jackson Pollock and Lance Armstrong have in common with theoretical physicists and Buddhist monks?

Elegance.

In this thought-provoking exploration of why certain events, products, and people capture our attention and imaginations, Matthew E. May examines the elusive element behind so many innovative breakthroughs in fields ranging from physics and marketing to design and popular culture. Combining unusual simplicity and surprising power, elegance is characterized by four key elements—seduction, subtraction, symmetry, and sustainability. In a compelling, story-driven narrative that sheds light on the need for elegance in design, engineering, art, urban planning, sports, and work, May offers surprising evidence that what’s “not there” often trumps what is.

In the bestselling tradition of The Tipping Point, Made to Stick, and The Black Swan, In Pursuit of Elegance will change the way you think about the world.

Michael Ondaatje

Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, David Maxfield, Ron McMillan, Al Switzler An INFLUENCER motivates others to change.

An INFLUENCER replaces bad behaviors with powerful new skills.

An INFLUENCER makes things happen.

This is what it takes to be an INFLUENCER.

Whether you're a CEO, a parent, or merely a person who wants to make a difference, you probably wish you had more influence with the people in your life. But most of us stop trying to make change happen because we believe it is too difficult, if not impossible. We develop complicated coping strategies when we should be learning the tools and techniques of the world's most influential people.

But this is about to change. From the bestselling authors who taught the world how to have Crucial Conversations comes Influencer, a thought-provoking book that combines the remarkable insights of behavioral scientists and business leaders with the astonishing stories of high-powered influencers from all walks of life. You'll be taught each and every step of the influence process-including robust strategies for making change inevitable in your personal life, your business, and your world. You'll learn how to: Identify a handful of high-leverage behaviors that lead to rapid and profound change.Apply strategies for changing both thoughts and actions.Marshall six sources of influence to make change inevitable.

Influencer takes you on a fascinating journey from San Francisco to Thailand where you'll see how seemingly “insignificant” people are making incredibly significant improvements in solving problems others would think impossible. You'll learn how savvy folks make change not only achievable and sustainable, but inevitable. You'll discover why some managers have increased productivity repeatedly and significantly-while others have failed miserably.

No matter who you are, or what you do, you'll never learn a more valuable or important set of principles and skills. Once you tap into the power of influence, you can reach out and help others work smarter, grow faster, live, look, and feel better, even save lives. The sky is the limit…for an Influencer.

Are you an Influencer ?

Find out at www.influencerbook.com

”You don't have to be a manager to realize that no one likes being told what to do. Yet lectures are still the main way we try to get people to change their behavior. Fortunately, social learning academics have been studying alternatives for decades. Patterson and his fellow consultants have now collected their findings in this engaging, example-rich book. The key message is hardly new, but it has gotten more sophisticated: Managers need to get out of the way and facilitate, not manage, the process of change for employees. They can do this by offering vicarious experiences, restructured environments, peer pressure, and frequent tests-all geared so that people embrace the change as authentic to them, not imposed by an outsider. Missing are only success stories of organizations that persuaded managers to drop their controlling habits and choose to be mere facilitators.”-John T. Landry, Harvard Business Review

Steven Johnson Bestselling author Steven Johnson recounts—in dazzling, multidisciplinary fashion—the story of the brilliant man who embodied the relationship between science, religion, and politics for America’s Founding Fathers.

The Invention of Air is a book of world-changing ideas wrapped around a compelling narrative, a story of genius and violence and friendship in the midst of sweeping historical change that provokes us to recast our understanding of the Founding Fathers.

It is the story of Joseph Priestley—scientist and theologian, protégé of Benjamin Franklin, friend of Thomas Jefferson—an eighteenth-century radical thinker who played pivotal roles in the invention of ecosystem science, the discovery of oxygen, the founding of the Unitarian Church, and the intellectual development of the United States. And it is a story that only Steven Johnson, acclaimed juggler of disciplines and provocative ideas, can do justice to.

In the 178 0s, Priestley had established himself in his native England as a brilliant scientist, a prominent minister, and an outspoken advocate of the American Revolution, who had sustained long correspondences with Franklin, Jefferson, and John Adams. Ultimately, his radicalism made his life politically uncomfortable, and he fled to the nascent United States. Here, he was able to build conceptual bridges linking the scientific, political, and religious impulses that governed his life. And through his close relationships with the Founding Fathers—Jefferson credited Priestley as the man who prevented him from abandoning Christianity—he exerted profound if little-known influence on the shape and course of our history.

As in his last bestselling work, The Ghost Map, Steven Johnson here uses a dramatic historical story to explore themes that have long engaged him: innovation and the way new ideas emerge and spread, and the environments that foster these breakthroughs. And as he did in Everything Bad Is Good for You, Johnson upsets some fundamental assumptions about the world we live in—namely, what it means when we invoke the Founding Fathers—and replaces them with a clear-eyed, eloquent assessment of where we stand today.

Mark Loeffler Investing in Rent-to-Own Property is the distillation of years of investment experience in real estate. It is a both strategy and a system, which provides stable, proven returns for the investor. On the flip side of the coin, the homebuyer is provided a house that fits their needs and budget.

 

Why should an investor have rent-to-own as part of his or her investment portfolio? This book lays out in clear detail the benefits of rent-to-own and how to get started with a rent-to-own strategy. Loaded with tips and case studies, here are the core components of the system: How to identify propertiesHow to carry out due diligenceSmart financing strategiesHow to market your system and attract interested tenants-homebuyersHow to identify and choose tenants-homebuyersThe rent-to-own contractObligations of the investor to the tenant-homebuyerObligations of the tenant-homebuyer to the investorThe team of experts: agent, lawyer, lender, home inspector, accountantExit strategies

 

There are many singles and couples who for a variety of reasons opt for a rent-to-own opportunity. For some it's an opportunity to check out a location for a couple of years so that they're certain it's the house and neighborhood they want for the long-term; for others it's the desire to own a home but need to grow their down payment-having a nice home while they save is a terrific option. The expertise of the investor in identifying the right property and providing the right financing is another significant aspect for the tenant-homebuyer.

 

The benefits for the investor are many: a solid property in an area where the fundamentals are strong; great tenants who respect the property; a profitable investment even with a downturn in the market.   

  Investing in Rent-to-Own Property is the quintessential tool for investors who have yet to take advantage of a proven money-maker or for those investors who want the benefit of a proven system to build their portfolio.

Noel M. Tichy, Warren G. Bennis “With good judgment, little else matters. Without it, nothing else matters.”

Whether we’re talking about United States presidents, CEOs, Major League coaches, or wartime generals, leaders are remembered for their best and worst judgment calls. In the face of ambiguity, uncertainty, and conflicting demands, the quality of a leader’s judgment determines the fate of the entire organization. That’s why judgment is the essence of leadership.

Yet despite its importance, judgment has always been a fairly murky concept. The leadership literature has been conspicuously quiet on what, exactly, defines it. Does judgment differ from common sense or gut instinct? Is it a product of luck? Of smarts? Or is there a process for making consistently good calls?

Noel Tichy and Warren Bennis have each spent decades studying and teaching leadership and advising top CEOs such as Jack Welch and Howard Schultz. Now, in their first collaboration, they offer a powerful framework for making tough calls when the stakes are high and the right path is far from obvious. They show how to recognize the critical moment before a judgment call, when swift and decisive action is essential, and also how to execute a decision after the call.

Tichy and Bennis bring their three-dimensional model to life with interviews with world-class leaders who have thrived or suffered because of their judgment calls. These stories include:

• Jeff Immelt, CEO of General Electric, whose judgment to grow through research and development transformed GE into the world’s premier technology growth company.
• Joel Klein, chancellor of the New York City Department of Education, who made tough calls about teachers, students, and parents while turning around a troubled school system.
• Jim McNerney, CEO of Boeing, whose strategic judgment helped him reinvigorate his company and restore a culture of trust and respect.
• The late general Wayne Downing, who found an unexpected opportunity in the midst of crisis when he led the Special Operations raid to capture Manuel Noriega.
• A. G. Lafley, CEO of Procter & Gamble, who bet $57 billion to purchase Gillette and reinvent his company.
• Brad Anderson, CEO of Best Buy, who made the call to commit totally to a customer-centric strategy and led his people to execute it.

Whether you’re running a small department or a global corporation, Judgment will give you a framework for evaluating any situation, making the call, and correcting if necessary during the execution phase. It will show you how to handle the overlapping domains of people, strategy, and crisis management. And it will help you teach your entire team to make the right call more often.

No organization can afford to neglect this crucial discipline—and no previous book has ever brought it into such clear focus.

Ram Charan The new grand theory of leadership by Ram Charan . . . The breakthrough book that links know-how—the skills of people who know what they are doing— with the personal and psychological traits of the successful leader.

How often have you heard someone with a commanding presence deliver a bold vision that turned out to be nothing more than rhetoric and hot air? All too often we mistake the appearance of leadership for the real deal. Without a doubt, intelligence, vision, and the ability to communicate are important. But something big is missing: the know-how of running a business—the capacity to take it in the right direction, do the right things, make the right decisions, deliver results, and leave the people and the business better off than they were before.

For well over four decades, Ram Charan has been learning in the most visceral way the underlying reasons why leaders succeed and fail. As one of the most influential advisers to top management teams of leading companies around the world, he has had a front-row seat to observe the cause and effect of leadership practices and behaviors.

Ram Charan’s insight into the real content of leadership provides you with the eight fundamental skills needed for success in the twenty-first century:

• Positioning (and, when necessary, repositioning) your business by zeroing in on the central idea that meets customer needs and makes money
• Connecting the dots by pinpointing patterns of external change ahead of others
• Shaping the way people work together by leading the social system of your business
• Judging people by getting to the truth of a person
• Molding high-energy, high-powered, high-ego people into a working team of leaders in which they equal more than the sum of their parts
• Knowing the destination where you want to take your business by developing goals that balance what the business can become with what it can realistically achieve
• Setting laser-sharp priorities that become the road map for meeting your goals
• Dealing creatively and positively with societal pressures that go beyond the economic value creation activities of your business

Know-How is the missing link of leadership. By showing how the eight know-hows link to, interact with, and reinforce personal and psychological traits, Ram Charan provides a holistic and innovative portrait of successful leaders of the twenty-first century.

Daniel Lipkowitz Reveal, explore, and celebrate the fascinating LEGO® story in The LEGO® Book. From its beginnings in a carpenter's workshop and the development of the first plastic brick, to the group's current position as an international brand, a timeline highlights key moments in LEGO® history.

Fascinating facts on every significant LEGO® product line, theme park, video game, artwork, competition, club, collectible and more combine with images from the LEGO Group's photo archives-many seen here for the first time-and inspiring ideas on how to make a variety of things from just a few bricks. Packaged in a beautiful slip case with cutting-edge design, this two-volume set also features Standing Small-a 96-page book celebrating the minifigure.

LEGO, the LEGO logo, the Brick configuration and the Minifigure are trademarks of the LEGO Group. ©2009 The LEGO Group.

Robert Irwin Offers responses for just about every situation, what to say, how to say it, and what not to say, including samples of letters landlords need on a day to day basis. Provides hands-on tips for the novice and experienced landlord alike. Softcover. DLC: Real estate management.

Harvey Sawler Moosehead Breweries and its long-time owner, the Oland family, is the last of the independent Canadian beer companies. From the moment in 1867 when family matriarch Susannah Oland began brewing beer in her Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, backyard, the Oland name has been synonymous with Maritime beer and, perhaps more importantly, successful family business. Last Canadian Beer is the story of the Oland family's long tenure running one of Canada's most popular breweries in the face of increasing pressure from international brew giants. While other beer brands have sold out to American and European interests, Moosehead has remained fiercely independent. The author sets out to answer three primary questions: Who are the Olands?; What has made them successful?; and How will the Olands continue to keep Moosehead as an independently owned family business?

John Maeda Received an Honorable Mention in the Communication and Cultural Studies category of the 2005 Professional/Scholarly Publishing Annual Awards Competition presented by the Association of American Publishers, Inc.

Finally, we are learning that simplicity equals sanity. We're rebelling against technology that's too complicated, DVD players with too many menus, and software accompanied by 75-megabyte "read me" manuals. The iPod's clean gadgetry has made simplicity hip. But sometimes we find ourselves caught up in the simplicity paradox: we want something that's simple and easy to use, but also does all the complex things we might ever want it to do. In The Laws of Simplicity, John Maeda offers ten laws for balancing simplicity and complexity in business, technology, and design—guidelines for needing less and actually getting more.

Maeda—a professor in MIT's Media Lab and a world-renowned graphic designer—explores the question of how we can redefine the notion of "improved" so that it doesn't always mean something more, something added on.

Maeda's first law of simplicity is "Reduce." It's not necessarily beneficial to add technology features just because we can. And the features that we do have must be organized (Law 2) in a sensible hierarchy so users aren't distracted by features and functions they don't need. But simplicity is not less just for the sake of less. Skip ahead to Law 9: "Failure: Accept the fact that some things can never be made simple." Maeda's concise guide to simplicity in the digital age shows us how this idea can be a cornerstone of organizations and their products—how it can drive both business and technology. We can learn to simplify without sacrificing comfort and meaning, and we can achieve the balance described in Law 10. This law, which Maeda calls "The One," tells us: "Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious, and adding the meaningful."

James M. Kouzes, Barry Z. Posner The most trusted resource on becoming a leader is now updated and revised for a new generation.

This leadership classic continues to be a bestseller after three editions and twenty years in print. It is the gold standard for research-based leadership, and the premier resource on becoming a leader. This new edition, with streamlined text, more international and business examples, and a graphic redesign, is more readable and accessible than ever before.

The Leadership Challenge, Fourth Edition, has been extensively updated with the latest research and case studies, and offers inspiring new stories of real people achieving extraordinary results. The authors' central theme remains the same and is more relevant today than ever: "Leadership is Everyone?s Business." Their "five practices" and "ten commitments" have been proven by hundreds of thousands of dedicated, successful leaders. This edition, with almost one-third new material, emphasizes the global community and refocuses on business leaders.

John C. Maxwell Leadership Gold took leadership guru John C. Maxwell a lifetime to write, and it delivers his most valuable lessons from forty years of leading.

A leader among leaders, John Maxwell promised himself early in his career that he wouldn't write this book until he was sixty. And now it's finally here. Leadership Gold took Maxwell a lifetime to write, and it delivers his most valuable lessons from forty years of leading. With his signature style, Maxwell comes alongside like a mentor, candidly taking readers through what feels like a one-on-one leadership program. Leadership Gold offers the best of the best, the tried-and-true lessons that no one but Maxwell can share.

Ram Charan, Stephen Drotter, James Noel An updated and revised version of the bestselling The Leadership Pipeline – the critical resource for how companies can grow leaders from the inside. 

 In business, leadership at every level is a requisite for company survival. Yet the leadership pipeline –the internal strategy to grow leaders – in many companies is dry or nonexistent. Drawing on their experiences at many Fortune 500 companies, the authors show how organizations can develop leadership at every level by identifying future leaders, assessing their corporate confidence, planning their development, and measuring their results.

New to this edition is 65 pages of new material to update the model, share new stories and add new advice based on the ten more years of experience. The authors have also added a "Frequently Asked Questions" section to the end of each chapter.

Arbinger Institute Since it’s original publication nine years ago, Leadership and Self-Deception has become an international word-of-mouth phenomenon. Rather than tapering off, it has sold more copies each year since 2004 than it did in any of the first four years after publication. The book’s central insight—that the key to leadership lays not in what we do, but in who we are—has proved to have powerful resonances not only for organizational leadership, but in readers’ personal lives as well. Leadership and Self-Deception uses an entertaining story about an executive facing challenges at work and at home to expose the precise psychological processes that conceal our true motivations and intentions from us and trap us in a “box” of endless self-justification. Most importantly, the book shows us the way out.

This new edition has been revised throughout to make the story more readable and compelling. And drawing on the extensive correspondence they’re received over the years the authors have added a section that outlines the many ways that readers have been using Leadership and Self-Deception, focusing on five specific areas: hiring, teambuilding, conflict resolution, accountability, and personal growth and development.

Jason Jennings From the author of the bestselling It's Not the Big That Eat the Small,It's the Fast That Eat the Slow comes a vital new guide to increasing business productivity without adding employees or other overhead costs

Managers and CEOs are always looking for ways to keep productivity high, and recent economic shakiness has only reinforced their need. Now Jason Jennings, a bestselling author and international business consultant, offers a groundbreaking look at how to boost productivity and your bottom line.

In Less Is More, Jennings shares tested and successful programs from the leading giants in industry and presents new trends that businesses of all sizes will be able to implement. Inside, you'll learn how to:

* increase sales 300 percent without increasing head count
* become 10 times more efficient
* keep track of every penny
* use technology and automation in your favor

Written in the same breezy, informative style of Jennings's previous book, Less Is More is sure to join its predecessor on bestseller lists nationwide.

Tim Sanders Are you wondering how you can improve your relationships with your friends and family?

Are you curious how to get or keep the job of your dreams?

Do you want to become a more popular person?

This book will show you how to do all that by raising your likeability factor—or how much other people like you.

After all, life is a series of popularity contests. The choices other people make about you determine your health, wealth, and happiness. And decades of research prove that people choose who they like. They vote for them, they buy from them, they marry them, and they spend precious time with them.

The good news is that you can arm yourself for the contest and win life’s battles for preference. How? By being likeable.

The more you are liked—or the higher your likeability factor—the happier your life will be. This book will show you how to raise that likeability factor by teaching you how to boost four critical elements of your personality:

•Friendliness: your ability to communicate liking and openness to others

•Relevance: your capacity to connect with others’ interests, wants, and needs

•Empathy: your ability to recognize, acknowledge, and experience other people’s feelings

•Realness: the integrity that stands behind your likeability and guarantees its authenticity

What happens when you improve in these areas and boost your likeability factor?

•You bring out the best in others

•You survive life’s challenges

•You have better health—and even improve others’ health, too

•You outperform in your daily roles

•You win the popularity contests that define your life

Join me for a few hours and I’ll share the results of hundreds of thousands of pages of research, numerous seminars, and hundreds of interviews with people just like you! Together let’s build our likeability factor and improve our lives!

Also available as a Random House AudioBook

Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Irene Testot-Ferry The Little Prince is a classic tale of equal appeal to children and adults. On one level it is the story of an airman's discovery, in the desert, of a small boy from another planet - the Little Prince of the title - and his stories of intergalactic travel, while on the other hand it is a thought-provoking allegory of the human condition. First published in 1943, the year before the author's death in action, this translation contains Saint-Exupery's delightful illustrations.

Chris Anderson What happens when the bottlenecks that stand between supply and demand in our culture go away and everything becomes available to everyone?

"The Long Tail" is a powerful new force in our economy: the rise of the niche. As the cost of reaching consumers drops dramatically, our markets are shifting from a one-size-fits-all model of mass appeal to one of unlimited variety for unique tastes. From supermarket shelves to advertising agencies, the ability to offer vast choice is changing everything, and causing us to rethink where our markets lie and how to get to them. Unlimited selection is revealing truths about what consumers want and how they want to get it, from DVDs at Netflix to songs on iTunes to advertising on Google.

However, this is not just a virtue of online marketplaces; it is an example of an entirely new economic model for business, one that is just beginning to show its power. After a century of obsessing over the few products at the head of the demand curve, the new economics of distribution allow us to turn our focus to the many more products in the tail, which collectively can create a new market as big as the one we already know.

The Long Tail is really about the economics of abundance. New efficiencies in distribution, manufacturing, and marketing are essentially resetting the definition of what’s commercially viable across the board. If the 20th century was about hits, the 21st will be equally about niches.

Richard Dowis It's not all in the delivery. Here's expert guidance on how to write a dynamic speech. Splashy slides, confident body language, and a lot of eye contact are fine and well. But if a speech is rambling, illogical, or just plain boring, the impact will be lost.

Now everyone can learn to give powerful, on-target speeches that capture an audience's attention and drive home a message. The key is not just in the delivery techniques, but in tapping into the power of language.

Prepared by an award-winning writer, this authoritative speech-writing guide covers every essential element of a great speech, including outlining and organizing, beginning with a bang, making use of action verbs and vivid nouns, and handling questions from the audience. Plus, the book includes excerpts from some of history's most memorable speeches—eloquent words to contemplate and emulate.

Tim Sanders Are you wondering what the next killer app will be? Do you want to know how you can maintain and add to your value during these rapidly changing times? Are you wondering how the word love can even be used in the context of business?

Instead of wondering, read this book and find out how to become a lovecat—a nice, smart person who succeeds in business and in life.

How do you become a lovecat? By sharing your intangibles. By that I mean:
Your knowledge: everything that comes from all the books that I’ll encourage you to devour.
Your network: the collection of friends and contacts you now have, which I’ll teach you how to grow and nurture.
Your compassion: that human warmth you already possess—in these pages I’ll convince you that you can show it freely at the office.

What happens when you do all this?
* You become a rich source of information to all around you.
* You are seen as a person with valuable insight.
* You are perceived as generous to a fault, producing surprise and delight.
* You double your business intelligence in one year.
* You triple your network of personal relationships in two years.
* You quadruple the number of colleagues in your life who love you like family.

In short, you become one of those amazing, outstanding people to whom everyone turns, who leads rather than follows, who never runs out of ideas, contacts, or friendship.

Here’s the real scoop: Nice guys don’t finish last. They rule!

From the Hardcover edition.

Christopher Moore

Chip Heath, Dan Heath Mark Twain once observed, “A lie can get halfway around the world before the truth can even get its boots on.” His observation rings true: Urban legends, conspiracy theories, and bogus public-health scares circulate effortlessly. Meanwhile, people with important ideas–business people, teachers, politicians, journalists, and others–struggle to make their ideas “stick.”

Why do some ideas thrive while others die? And how do we improve the chances of worthy ideas? In Made to Stick, accomplished educators and idea collectors Chip and Dan Heath tackle head-on these vexing questions. Inside, the brothers Heath reveal the anatomy of ideas that stick and explain ways to make ideas stickier, such as applying the “human scale principle,” using the “Velcro Theory of Memory,” and creating “curiosity gaps.”

In this indispensable guide, we discover that sticky messages of all kinds–from the infamous “kidney theft ring” hoax to a coach’s lessons on sportsmanship to a vision for a new product at Sony–draw their power from the same six traits.

Made to Stick is a book that will transform the way you communicate ideas. It’s a fast-paced tour of success stories (and failures)–the Nobel Prize-winning scientist who drank a glass of bacteria to prove a point about stomach ulcers; the charities who make use of “the Mother Teresa Effect”; the elementary-school teacher whose simulation actually prevented racial prejudice. Provocative, eye-opening, and often surprisingly funny, Made to Stick shows us the vital principles of winning ideas–and tells us how we can apply these rules to making our own messages stick.

Bill Strickland “Success is the point where your most authentic talents, passion, values, and experiences intersect with the chance to contribute to some greater good.”
—Bill Strickland

According to MacArthur Fellowship “genius” award winner Bill Strickland, a successful life is not something you simply pursue, it is something that you create, moment by moment. It is a realization Strickland first came to when, as a poor kid growing up in a rough neighborhood of Pittsburgh, he encountered a high school ceramics teacher who took him under his wing and went on to transform his life.

Over the past thirty years, Bill Strickland has been transforming the lives of thousands of people through the creation of Manchester Bidwell, a jobs training center and community arts program. Working with corporations, community leaders, and schools, he and his staff strive to give disadvantaged kids and adults the opportunities and tools they need to envision and built a better, brighter future.

Strickland believes that every one of us has the potential for remarkable achievement. Every one of us can accomplish the impossible in our lives if given the right inspiration and motivation to do so. We all make ourselves “poor” in one way or another when we accept that we are not smart enough, experienced enough, or talented enough to accomplish something. Bill Strickland works with the least advantaged among us, and if he can help them achieve the impossible in their lives, think what each of us can do.

Among Bill Strickland’s beliefs:

People are born into this world as assets, not liabilities. It’s all in the way we treat people (and ourselves) that determines a person’s outcome

The sand in the hourglass flows only one way. Stop going through the motions of living—savor each and every day. Life is here and now, not something waiting for you in the future.

You don’t have to travel far to change the life you’re living. Bill grew up in the Pittsburgh ghetto, four blocks from where he came to build one of the foremost job training centers in the world. He now speaks before CEOs and political leaders, church congregations and civic leaders. You only need to change your thinking to remake your world.

Through lessons from his own life experiences, and those of countless others who have overcome their circumstances and turned their lives around, Make the Impossible Possible shows how all of us can build on our passions and strengths, dream bigger and set the bar higher, achieve meaningful success and help mentor and inspire the lives of others.

Eric W. Sanderson On September 12, 1609, Henry Hudson first set eyes on the land that would become Manhattan. It's difficult for us to imagine what he saw, but for more than a decade, landscape ecologist Eric Sanderson has been working to do just that. Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City is the astounding result of those efforts, reconstructing, in words and images, the wild island that millions of New Yorkers now call home.
By geographically matching an 18th-century map of Manhattan's landscape to the modern cityscape, combing through historical and archaeological records, and applying modern principles of ecology and computer modeling, Sanderson is able to re-create the forests of Times Square, the meadows of Harlem, and the wetlands of downtown. Filled with breathtaking illustrations that show what Manhattan looked like 400 years ago, Mannahatta is a groundbreaking work that gives readers not only a window into the past, but inspiration for green cities and wild places of the future.   Library Journal:"You don't have to be a New Yorker to be enthralled by this book. Highly recommended."

San Francisco Chronicle:
"[A]n exuberantly written and beautifully illustrated exploration of pre-European Gotham."

The New York Times Book Review:
"'Mannahatta' is a cartographical detective tale. . ."

"The fact-intense charts, maps and tables offered in abundance here are fascinating, and even kind of sexy. And the middle of the book, the two-page spread of Mannahatta in all its primeval glory-the visual denouement of a decade's research-feels a little like a centerfold." 

"Upon closing the book you feel revved up, at the very least, and are likely to see a way to build a future that is more aligned with what once was than with what can no longer be."

Michael Tasner “With the rapid change for marketers and businesses, knowing the right thing to do is a must. It’s do or die. Marketing in the Moment gives the reader the right tools to win and now!”

—Jeffrey Hayzlett, Chief Marketing Officer of Kodak, author of The Mirror Test

 

“The online marketing world is changing fast, and nobody knows for sure what’s coming next. This book can help you be better prepared for the changes that are already afoot.”

—Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, author of Delivering Happiness

 

“Why go to an expensive Internet marketing course when everything you need for Web 3.0 is right here? With Internet marketing growing by leaps and bounds, it might seem difficult to keep up. But after reading Tasner’s book, learning his many easy-to-learn practical strategies, I’m ready to conquer the Internet. I strongly recommend this book.”

—Joseph Sugarman, Chairman of BluBlocker Corporation, author of Advertising Secrets of the Written Word

 

“This powerful book is loaded with great ideas to help you attract more customers and make more sales—immediately!”

—Brian Tracy, author of The Art of Closing the Sale

 

“If you cannot generate money online after implementing the realistic insights and strategies revealed in Tasner’s book, Marketing in the Moment, then throw in the towel—game over!”

—Joel Bauer, author, speaker, and mentor

 

With the explosion in Web, mobile, and social media marketing channels, you have an extraordinary array of new marketing options to choose from. Which ones work? How do you make them work—without wasting a fortune on trial and error? Get this book, that’s how!

 

Top Web marketing consultant Michael Tasner has written the definitive practical guide to driving maximum value from next-generation Web, online, mobile, and social marketing. Drawing from his innovative marketing techniques, Tasner has written the first book on Web 3.0 marketing. Tasner helps marketers, entrepreneurs, and managers move beyond hype and high-level strategy to proven tactics and successful ground-level execution.

 

You’ll discover which new marketing technologies deliver the best results and which hardly ever pay for themselves...how to use virtual collaboration to accomplish marketing projects faster and at lower cost...how to build realistic, practical action plans for the next three months, six months, and twelve months.

 

Whatever you sell, wherever you compete, no matter how large or small your company is, this book will help you build leads, traffic, sales, market share—and profits! Capitalizing on the new “content marketing”
The megashift from blogging to microblogging—and what it means to you A world run by smartphones: iPhones, BlackBerrys, and beyond
Reaching a billion cellphone users: SMS, MMS, mobile ads, voice broadcasts, and more Plurk? UStream? Joost? Tumblr? iGoogle?
Profiting from the sites and tools you may never have heard of Your Web marketing 360-degree review
Systematically optimizing everything you’re already doing online

Ricardo Semler A Brazilian executive's success story describes how he turned around an aging, stagnant company that defied recession, strikes, and inflation by eliminating nine layers of management and instilling democratic practices. Reprint.

Eugene H. Peterson Written in the same kind of language you'd use to talk with friends, write a letter, or discuss politics, The Message preserves the authentic, earthy flavor and expressive character of the Bible. With more than six million copies sold, Eugene Peterson's unique paraphrase has opened up new understanding and insight into God's Word. The Message brings the life-changing power of the New Testament, the passion of the Psalms, and the practical wisdom of Proverbs into easy-to-read modern language that echoes the rhythm and idiom of the original Greek and Hebrew.

Stephen Young Should you sweat the small stuff?

Absolutely, says Stephen Young-especially when it comes to those critical behaviors that can make or break performance. The reason is simple: no matter what you think you're saying, your words, gestures, and tone of voice can actually communicate something entirely different.

Too often, negative micromessages undermine morale, business opportunities, and ultimately your organization. Micromessaging examines the nuanced behaviors that we all blindly use and react to in our dealings with others. Yet as Young points out, these micromessages can reveal a lot about our own-and our superiors'-biases and preconceived notions. Learning how to constructively address these behaviors can bring about positive change.

Young offers a common language for encouraging open discussion in the workplace, along with skills to identify and address familiar micromessages; tools for deploying microadvantages; and real-life workplace scenarios, self-assessments, and solutions that help readers interpret and alter ingrained behaviors and their effects. He delivers valuable information on Cruicial leadership skills and how to acquire themUniversal workplace cultural issuesHow expectations affect the performance of othersWays to speak fairly, not falselyTechniques that eliminate group thinkHow to reset the "filters" you use to "screen" others

Based on research from MIT, Young's approach has already helped numerous Fortune 500 clients, including Merck, Intel, Lockheed Martin, Starbucks, IBM, Boeing, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Cisco, and Raytheon to increase leadership effectiveness. With its proven wisdom, you can experience what so many business executives worldwide have discovered and make it a powerful part of your leadership skill set.

Gary Keller, Dave Jenks, Jay Papasan Forget the old paradigm of financial success—that a big house, a fancy car and a great job mean you’ve made it. True financial wealth has a different measure—it’s about having the unearned income to finance your life mission without having to work. Gary Keller, best-selling author and self-made millionaire, teaches you what school never did—how to leave the daily grind and acquire long-term financial freedom through investing real estate.

 

The Millionaire Real Estate Investor offers straightforward strategies and wisdom gleaned from research and interviews with over 120 real life millionaire real estate investors. Ordinary people who have achieved extraordinary financial success. Like Wendy Patton who bought her first investment property when she was living in a hotel, made just $20,000 a year and owed as much in student loans—Wendy has since sold over 600 homes. Like Carlos Herbon who immigrated to the US with only $120 in his pocket and who now owns over 250 rental units and his own property management company….  The Millionaire Real Estate Investor is the first investment book to take a serious look at how anyone can achieve financial freedom.

 

Learn how to:

• Think Like a Million: Develop the mind-set and financial strategies of a millionaire investor

•  Buy a Million: Amass a portfolio with a market value of a million dollars

•  Own a Million: Turn investments into a business with ever-increasing net worth

•  Receive a Million: Build an investment empire that provides a million dollars a year in passive income

 

A blend of insights, instruction and inspiration, The Millionaire Real Estate Investor is a priceless tool for novice and veteran alike.

Carol Dweck World-renowned Stanford University psychologist Carol Dweck, in decades of research on achievement and success, has discovered a truly groundbreaking idea–the power of our mindset.

Dweck explains why it’s not just our abilities and talent that bring us success–but whether we approach them with a fixed or growth mindset. She makes clear why praising intelligence and ability doesn’t foster self-esteem and lead to accomplishment, but may actually jeopardize success. With the right mindset, we can motivate our kids and help them to raise their grades, as well as reach our own goals–personal and professional. Dweck reveals what all great parents, teachers, CEOs, and athletes already know: how a simple idea about the brain can create a love of learning and a resilience that is the basis of great accomplishment in every area.

Nick Bantock

Susan D. Blum "Classroom Cheats Turn to Computers." "Student Essays on Internet Offer Challenge to Teachers." "Faking the Grade." Headlines such as these have been blaring the alarming news of an epidemic of plagiarism and cheating in American colleges: more than 75 percent of students admit to having cheated; 68 percent admit to cutting and pasting material from the Internet without citation.

Professors are reminded almost daily that many of today's college students operate under an entirely new set of assumptions about originality and ethics. Practices that even a decade ago would have been regarded almost universally as academically dishonest are now commonplace. Is this development an indication of dramatic shifts in education and the larger culture? In a book that dismisses hand-wringing in favor of a rich account of how students actually think and act, Susan D. Blum discovers two cultures that exist, often uneasily, side by side in the classroom.

Relying extensively on interviews conducted by students with students, My Word! presents the voices of today's young adults as they muse about their daily activities, their challenges, and the meanings of their college lives. Outcomes-based secondary education, the steeply rising cost of college tuition, and an economic climate in which higher education is valued for its effect on future earnings above all else: These factors each have a role to play in explaining why students might pursue good grades by any means necessary. These incentives have arisen in the same era as easily accessible ways to cheat electronically and with almost intolerable pressures that result in many students being diagnosed as clinically depressed during their transition from childhood to adulthood.

However, Blum suggests, the real problem of academic dishonesty arises primarily from a lack of communication between two distinct cultures within the university setting. On one hand, professors and administrators regard plagiarism as a serious academic crime, an ethical transgression, even a sin against an ethos of individualism and originality. Students, on the other hand, revel in sharing, in multiplicity, in accomplishment at any cost. Although this book is unlikely to reassure readers who hope that increasing rates of plagiarism can be reversed with strongly worded warnings on the first day of class, My Word! opens a dialogue between professors and their students that may lead to true mutual comprehension and serve as the basis for an alignment between student practices and their professors' expectations.

Garr Reynolds When we learn to present naked, we reach our audiences by communicating the essence of the message, stripping away all that is unnecessary and embracing the ideas of simplicity, clarity, honesty, integrity, and passion. If "slideware" is used, the slides never steal the show or rise above serving a strong but simple supportive role. The ideas in the presentation may or may not be radical, earth shattering, or new, but there is freshness to the approach and content that makes a lasting impression.

In this invaluable resource from the author for the best-selling books Presentation Zen and Presentation Zen Design, you will discover how to get to the core of your message and deliver presentations that are as natural as they are memorable. Whether you are just in the planning stages or need advice for a talk that begins in an hour, you'll find wisdom in The Naked Presenter that you can use to connect deeply with your audience and deliver a great presentation.

David J. Lieberman How many times have you been manipulated or taken advantage of by someone's lies? Are you tired of being deceived, tricked, and fooled? Finally, renowned behaviorist David J. Lieberman shows you how to stop the lies and uncover the truth— in any conversation or situation. In a simple, user-friendly format, Dr. Lieberman gives you the tools to determine, with uncanny accuracy, if you are being lied to.

Utilizing newly developed techniques in hypnosis and psycholinguistics, this book also shows you how to easily influence anyone to tell the truth— within minutes. Use it in any situation, from casual conversation to in-depth interviews. Never Be Lied to Again is chock-full of colorful examples and engaging scenarios to help you keep from being taken advantage of and give you that extra edge. Use these groundbreaking techniques to take control of every personal and business situation...and never be lied to again.

Keith Ferrazzi, Tahl Raz Do you want to get ahead in life?

Climb the ladder to personal success?

The secret, master networker Keith Ferrazzi claims, is in reaching out to other people. As Ferrazzi discovered early in life, what distinguishes highly successful people from everyone else is the way they use the power of relationships—so that everyone wins.

In Never Eat Alone, Ferrazzi lays out the specific steps—and inner mindset—he uses to reach out to connect with the thousands of colleagues, friends, and associates on his Rolodex, people he has helped and who have helped him.

The son of a small-town steelworker and a cleaning lady, Ferrazzi first used his remarkable ability to connect with others to pave the way to a scholarship at Yale, a Harvard MBA, and several top executive posts. Not yet out of his thirties, he developed a network of relationships that stretched from Washington’s corridors of power to Hollywood’s A-list, leading to him being named one of Crain’s 40 Under 40 and selected as a Global Leader for Tomorrow by the Davos World Economic Forum.

Ferrazzi's form of connecting to the world around him is based on generosity, helping friends connect with other friends. Ferrazzi distinguishes genuine relationship-building from the crude, desperate glad-handling usually associated with “networking.” He then distills his system of reaching out to people into practical, proven principles. Among them:

Don’t keep score: It’s never simply about getting what you want. It’s about getting what you want and making sure that the people who are important to you get what they want, too.

“Ping” constantly: The Ins and Outs of reaching out to those in your circle of contacts all the time—not just when you need something.

Never eat alone: The dynamics of status are the same whether you’re working at a corporation or attending a society event— “invisibility” is a fate worse than failure.

In the course of the book, Ferrazzi outlines the timeless strategies shared by the world’s most connected individuals, from Katherine Graham to Bill Clinton, Vernon Jordan to the Dalai Lama.

Chock full of specific advice on handling rejection, getting past gatekeepers, becoming a “conference commando,” and more, Never Eat Alone is destined to take its place alongside How to Win Friends and Influence People as an inspirational classic.

C.K. Prahalad, M.S. Krishnan Named one of the "Best Books on Innovation, 2008" by BusinessWeek magazine

From the greatest minds in business today comes a groundbreaking new blueprint for executing the next stage of customer-created value. C.K. Prahalad, the world's premier business thinker, and IT scholar M.S. Krishnan unveil the critical missing link in connecting strategy to execution—building organizational capabilities that allow companies to achieve and sustain continuous change and innovation.

The New Age of Innovation reveals that the key to creating value and the future growth of every business depends on accessing a global network of resources to co-create unique experiences with customers, one at a time. To achieve this, CEOs, executives, and managers at every level must transform their business processes, technical systems, and supply chain management, implementing key social and technological infrastructure requirements to create an ongoing innovation advantage.

In this landmark work, Prahalad and Krishnan explain how to accomplish this shift—one where IT and the management architecture form the corporation's fundamental foundation. This book provides strategies for Redesigning systems to co-create value with customers and connect all parts of a firm to this processMeasuring individual behavior through smart analyticsCeaselessly improving the flexibility and efficiency in all customer-facing and back-end processesTreating all involved individuals—customers, employees, investors, suppliers—as uniqueWorking across cultures and time-zones in a seamless global networkBuilding teams that are capable of providing high-quality, low-cost solutions rapidly

To successfully compete on the battlefields of 21st-century business, companies must reinvent their processes and culture in order to sustain innovative solutions. The New Age of Innovation is a complete program for achieving this transformation to meet the needs of the end consumer of the future.

Joseph Michelli 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 customersEmpowering employees by treating them with the utmost respectAnticipating customers' unexpressed needs and concernsDeveloping 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.

Stephenie Meyer Legions of readers entranced by Twilight are hungry for more and they won't be disappointed. In New Moon, Stephenie Meyer delivers another irresistible combination of romance and suspense with a supernatural twist. The "star-crossed" lovers theme continues as Bella and Edward find themselves facing new obstacles, including a devastating separation, the mysterious appearance of dangerous wolves roaming the forest in Forks, a terrifying threat of revenge from a female vampire and a deliciously sinister encounter with Italy's reigning royal family of vampires, the Volturi. Passionate, riveting, and full of surprising twists and turns, this vampire love saga is well on its way to literary immortality.

Richard H. Jorgensen To the question "Is it possible to build wealth in today's real estate market?" veteran investor Richard Jorgensen answers with an emphatic "Yes!" He backs that up with this realistic, hard-nosed real estate investment program designed to propel novices and pros to financial independence via savvy rental housing management.|Revised to reflect the current post-real estaste boom era realities, this edition covers every aspect of the landlording process, from the basics of buying, finances, tax matters, and sweat equity to managing fixer-uppers, handling the crucial tenant-landlord relationship, and finding hidden gems in rural real estate. Numerous photographs, including a complete apartment complex rehab series-complement the text's realistic, wealth-building focus on becoming a successful landlord.

David Meerman Scott For marketers, The New Rules of Marketing and PR shows you how to leverage the potential that Web-based communication offers your business. Finally, you can speak directly to customers and buyers, establishing a personal link with the people who make your business work. This one-of-a-kind guide includes a step-by-step action plan for harnessing the power of the Internet to create compelling messages, get them in front of customers, and lead those customers into the buying process.

Jon Gordon Negativity in the workplace costs businesses billions of dollars and impacts the morale, productivity and health of individuals and teams. "In The No Complaining Rule: Positive Ways to Deal with Negativity at Work, Jon Gordon, a bestselling author, consultant and speaker, shares an enlightening story that demonstrates how you can conquer negativity and inspire others to adopt a positive attitude." Based on one company’s successful No Complaining Rule, the powerful principles and actionable plan are practical and easy-to-follow, making this book an ideal read for managers, team leaders and anyone interested in generating positive energy.

Bruce Tulgan This book will frame Generation Y (children born between 1978-1991) for corporate leaders and managers at time when the corporate world is desperate to recruit and retain worked in this age group. It will debunk dozens of myths, including that young employees have no sense of loyalty, won't do grunt work, won't take direction, want to interact only with computers, and are only about money.

This book will make a unique contribution in four key ways:

It will disprove the idea that the key to recruiting, retaining, and managing this generation is to somehow make the workplace more "fun." To the contrary, Tulgan argues that the key to winning the respect of this generation, and getting the best effort out of them, is to carefully manage their expectations by never downplaying any negative aspect of a job.

He will show managers how this Generation thinks transactionally in all negotiations. For them it's about what they will do for you today and what you will do for them today, not tomorrow, not five years from today, but today.

He will explain why they have no interest in tying their futures to your corporation. But he will also make clear that they do have a well thought-out plan for themselves, one that requires that every job they take build up their skill sets, so they become more valuable employees for someone else—if and when you do not fulfill your end of the bargain, or drag your feet in doing so.

But most of all, it will explain to corporate leaders that for this generation their personal life comes first, so that each job they take must accommodate itself to some need defined by their personal life. Tulgan argues that until you know the personal need the job can satisfy for a potential employee, you and the applicant may be talking past each other. Those needs are so beyond the imagination of most bosses that Tulgan devotes a third of the book to explaining how they affect the job decisions of this generation.

Dean R. Koontz, Phil Parks When the death of their creator leaves them without protection, a band of magic living toys must attempt a dangerous journey across the city to another toyshop, while under attack from evil toys serving the Dark One.

Allan Leighton There have been many books on leadership, but here at last is one that actually draws on the wisdom of those in the know. Acting on his belief that you get the most done in the first 20 minutes of a meeting, Allan Leighton invited top businessmen and women to spend just 20 minutes talking about their views on leadership. And he has talked to an astonishing range of them—established giants such as Philip Green and Rupert Murdoch; the new generation of leaders—Andy Hornby at HBOS and Justin King at Sainsbury; and entrepreneurial figures including James Dyson and Gulam Noon of Noon Foods. He has gone even further by interviewing the nation's top financial journalists, whose views can help make a company soar or sink; the money men, whose support is critical for investment and acquisition; the politicians, who help create the climate in which businesses can thrive or falter. Thought-provoking, often surprising, and always insightful, the resulting book is a fascinating, 360-degree view of what it takes to be a business leader in today's cut-throat global economy.

Roger L. Martin If you want to be as successful as Jack Welch, Larry Bossidy, or Michael Dell, read their autobiographical advice books, right? Wrong, says Roger Martin in The Opposable Mind. Though following "best practice" can help in some ways, it also poses a danger: By emulating what a great leader did in a particular situation, you'll likely be terribly disappointed with your own results. Why? Your situation is different. Instead of focusing on what exceptional leaders do, we need to understand and emulate how they think. Successful businesspeople engage in what Martin calls integrative thinking—creatively resolving the tension in opposing models by forming entirely new and superior ones. Drawing on stories of leaders as diverse as AG Lafley of Procter & Gamble, Meg Whitman of eBay, Victoria Hale of the Institute for One World Health, and Nandan Nilekani of Infosys, Martin shows how integrative thinkers are relentlessly diagnosing and synthesizing by asking probing questions—including "What are the causal relationships at work here?" and "What are the implied trade-offs?" Martin also presents a model for strengthening your integrative thinking skills by drawing on different kinds of knowledge—including conceptual and experiential knowledge. Integrative thinking can be learned, and The Opposable Mind helps you master this vital skill.

Al Gore It is now abundantly clear that we have at our fingertips all of the tools we need to solve the climate crisis. The only missing ingredient is collective will.

Properly understood, the climate crisis is an unparalleled opportunity to finally and effectively address many persistent causes of suffering and misery that have long been neglected, and to transform the prospects of future generations, giving them a chance to live healthier, more prosperous lives as they continue their pursuit of happiness.

Our Choice gathers in one place all of the most effective solutions that are available now and that, together, will solve this crisis. It is meant to depoliticize the issue as much as possible and inspire readers to take action—not only on an individual basis but as participants in the political processes by which every country, and the world as a whole, makes the choice that now confronts us.

There is an old African proverb that says, "If you want to go quickly, go alone; if you want to go far, go together."

We have to go far, quickly.

We can solve the climate crisis. It will be hard, to be sure, but if we can make the choice to solve it, I have no doubt whatsoever that we can and will succeed.

—AL GORE, from the introduction

Al Gore is the cofounder and chairman of Current TV, an Emmy Award-winning, independently owned cable and satellite television news and information network for young people based on viewer-created content, citizen journalism, and investigative reporting. He is also cofounder and chairman of Generation Investment Management, a firm focused on a new approach to sustainable investing. Gore is a partner with the venture capial firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, a member of the Board of Directors of Apple, and a senior advisor to Google. He is a visiting professor at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and chairs a nonprofit organization designed to help solve the climate crisis-the Alliance for Climate Protection-to which he is donating 100 percent of his earnings from this book.   Gore was first elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1976 and then to the U.S. Senate in 1984 and 1990. He was inaugurated as the 45th vice president of the United States on January 20, 1993, and served for eight years. He is the author of the bestsellers Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit, An Inconvenient Truth, and The Assault on Reason and was featured in an Academy Award-winning documentary. He was a corecipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007.   Al Gore lives in Nashville, Tennessee. Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis is an inspiring call to action for those ready to fight for solutions that really work—including some bold initiatives that were deemed impossible only a short time ago but are now gaining support around the world. Since the publication of The New York Times bestseller An Inconvenient Truth, Mr. Gore has led more than thirty "Solutions Summits" with top scientists, engineers, and policy experts to examine every solution to the climate crisis in depth and detail. Our Choice draws on conclusions developed through those summits as well as on extensive independent research, describing how the bold choices necessary to save the earth’s climate should also be the foundations of policies worldwide to create new jobs and stimulate sustainable economic progress.

From Al Gore's Introduction

"It is now abundantly clear that we have at our fingertips all of the tools we need to solve the climate crisis. The only missing ingredient is collective will.

Properly understood, the climate crisis is an unparalleled opportunity to finally and effectively address many persistent causes of suffering and misery that have long been neglected, and to transform the prospects of future generations, giving them a chance to live healthier, more prosperous lives as they continue their pursuit of happiness.

Our Choice gathers in one place all of the most effective solutions that are available now and that, together, will solve this crisis. It is meant to depoliticize the issue as much as possible and inspire readers to take action—not only on an individual basis but as participants in the political processes by which every country, and the world as a whole, makes the choice that now confronts us.

There is an old African proverb that says, "If you want to go quickly, go alone; if you want to go far, go together."

We have to go far, quickly.

We can solve the climate crisis. It will be hard, to be sure, but if we can make the choice to solve it, I have no doubt whatsoever that we can and will succeed."

As they did with An Inconvenient Truth, former Vice President Gore and Mrs. Tipper Gore will donate 100 percent of the proceeds of the book to the Alliance for Climate Protection, a nonprofit, nonpartisan group dedicated to spreading awareness about the climate crisis and how to solve it. Our Choice features 100 percent recycled paper, locally produced and sourced editions, low VOC inks, and is carbon neutral. "It’s the grand compendium of all that we know about how to undertake this most difficult of transitions. Gore’s new volume is the indispensable one-stop shop for the cutting edge thinking about how we’re going to solve this problem."—Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature "In a new book that marks an evolution in his thinking, Al Gore recognizes that the debate over climate change can be more about doing well while doing good."—John Meachan, Newsweek
 
"Authoritative, exhaustive, reasoned, erudite."—Sharon Begley, Newsweek   “The clarity of his argument and the fissile power of his analysis combine to elevate Our Choice into the top-ranking environmental books of our time."—Financial Times   "There is no greater champion of the climate imperative than Al Gore. [He] distills his mastery of the topic into clean, readable prose, and illustrates it with gorgeous glossy photos and accessible—nd eye-opening—charts. After you read Gore's book, you will see why the choice must be made right now."—Huffington Post

"Ken-Burns-meets-global-warming, with vivid diagrams of how technologies work and lavish color photos."—Philadelphia Inquirer

"In his almost 30 years of crusading against global warming, Al Gore has worn a variety of hats. In roughly chronological order these include: congressman, senator, author, vice president, traveling evangelist, filmmaker, investment adviser, and Nobel Peace Prize winner. Now, with the publication of his new book, Our Choice, Gore has unveiled a fresh and most unexpected talent: the book’s opening chapter of concludes with a poem he wrote—21 lines of verse that are equal parts beautiful, evocative, and disturbing . . . Our Choice devotes entire chapters to a range of various solutions, from solar, wind, and energy efficiency to agriculture and forestry policies that actually reverse global warming by sucking carbon dioxide from the air and storing it in soil and plants. In these chapters, we find much the same Al Gore who in 1992 published the best-seller Earth In The Balance: a science wonk who has plainly done lots of research and deep thinking and wants to share every last bit of it with you. It’s a valuable service, especially these days, when every week seems to bring developments in green technologies. Still, the level of detail and the sheer complexity and length of many of Gore’s sentences will doubtless lead many readers to skim these sections. Not so the poem. Gore wrote it, I’m told, because his editor nixed his request to include a separate chapter on the impacts of climate change. After all, Our Choice is supposed to be about solutions, not gloom and doom. (The most common criticism of An Inconvenient Truth, the documentary that won Gore an Oscar in 2007, was that it was silent on what to do about global warming.) Undeterred by his editor’s ruling, Gore re-imagined his impacts chapter in poetic form. The result is a surprisingly accomplished, nuanced piece of writing. The images Gore conjures in his (untitled) poem turn a neat trick: they are visually specific and emotionally arresting even as they are scientifically accurate . . . Another reader-friendly feature of Our Choice is the multitude of stunning photographs it contains. There are actually more pages of photos than of text. The shots range from a thousand solar panels atop the Vatican to a worker standing amid blackened, dead fish after a sewage spill near Rio de Janeiro, to a close-up of George W. Bush receiving a kiss on the cheek from Saudi King Abdullah after Bush was awarded the King Abdul Aziz Order of Merit in 2008. (Who says Gore lacks a sense of irony?) It’s usually a mistake to read too much literal meaning into poetry. But the final lines of Gore’s poem certainly apply to the governments that will gather in Copenhagen from December 7 to 18 for what is regarded as humanity’s last chance to avert absolutely catastrophic climate change. 'The shepherd cries / The hour of choosing has arrived / Here are your tools.' Is Gore himself that shepherd? No matter. What counts is that the hour of choosing has indeed arrived and, as documented in Our Choice, we do have the tools to survive—if we choose to employ them."—Mark Hertsgaard, Vanity Fair

"Besides being in...

Malcolm Gladwell In this stunning new book, Malcolm Gladwell takes us on an intellectual journey through the world of "outliers"—the best and the brightest, the most famous and the most successful. He asks the question: what makes high-achievers different? His answer is that we pay too much attention to what successful people are like, and too little attention to where they are from: that is, their culture, their family, their generation, and the idiosyncratic experiences of their upbringing. Along the way he explains the secrets of software billionaires, what it takes to be a great soccer player, why Asians are good at math, and what made the Beatles the greatest rock band.

Brilliant and entertaining, OUTLIERS is a landmark work that will simultaneously delight and illuminate.

John G. Miller "Outstanding! hits the nail on the head in every way: Practical content, terrific stories, and an easy read. Miller has provided a road map for organizations to become exceptional—just follow the path laid out. Definitely a must read!"
—Dave Ramsey, author of Total Money Makeover and host of The Dave Ramsey Show

Every day outstanding organizations do things and promote values that ensure they will retain customers, grow revenues, increase market share, and build their reputations. People in these organizations hold values and take actions— individually and collectively—that are not always easy or obvious but are fundamentally powerful.

Informed by his own commitment to the concept of personal accountability and enlivened by compelling true stories from exceptional organizations, in this insightful and accessible book John Miller identifies the principles and behaviors that distinguish such organizations from the pack and provides readers with ways to integrate them into their own work.

With its pithy entries that carry significant impact, Outstanding is by turns a playbook, a guide, and an inspiration. It is filled with practical ideas that can—and should—be used every single day by individuals and teams from the boardroom to the stockroom for creating a distinguished organization with which customers and stakeholders will want to work.

Roger Connors, Tom Smith, Craig Hickman A decade ago, The Oz Principle took the business world by storm. At its root, the principle works like this: Like Dorothy and the gang in The Wizard of Oz, most businesspeople have the tools to succeed, but when things go wrong they blame circumstance or others instead of looking within for the true cause of unsatisfactory results. Once individuals learn to accept responsibility, they can use the Oz Principle to become better leaders.

Now, with corporate scandals in the headlines and the culture of victimization running rampant at every level of the business world, Roger Connors, Tom Smith, and Craig Hickman return with a new edition of The Oz Principle. Fully revised, this edition will update the statistics, concepts, and relevant companies through fresh, timely anecdotes and stories.

John Grisham The hill people and the Mexicans arrived on the same day. It was a Wednesday, early in September 1952. The Cardinals were five games behind the Dodgers with three weeks to go, and the season looked hopeless. The cotton, however, was waist-high to my father, over my head, and he and my grandfather could be heard before supper whispering words that were seldom heard. It could be a "good crop."

Thus begins the new novel from John Grisham, a story inspired by his own childhood in rural Arkansas. The narrator is a farm boy named Luke Chandler, age seven, who lives in the cotton fields with his parents and grandparents in a little house that's never been painted. The Chandlers farm eighty acres that they rent, not own, and when the cotton is ready they hire a truckload of Mexicans and a family from the Ozarks to help harvest it.

For six weeks they pick cotton, battling the heat, the rain, the fatigue, and, sometimes, each other. As the weeks pass Luke sees and hears things no seven-year-old could possibly be prepared for, and finds himself keeping secrets that not only threaten the crop but will change the lives of the Chandlers forever.

A Painted House is a moving story of one boy's journey from innocence to experience.

On-sale February 6, 2001.

Spencer Johnson

Grace Livingston Hill Grace Livingston Hill gives us a Cinderella-type heroine to sympathize with in part two of the Miranda trilogy. Day after day Phoebe is subjected to living as a servant in her brother's home, picked on by her hateful sister-in-law, and forced to endure matchmaking schemes influenced by greed. Marriage to an ill-tempered man with several misbehaving children seems to be her lot, and her hope is about to be snuffed out. Could a chance encounter in the woods change the direction of her life and finally introduce her to someone who could care about her?

Andy Nulman Pow! Radical new methods for reaching jaded, cynical consumers

Put simply, when it comes to your business, your new idea, even yourself, this book can be the difference between a "Who cares?" and a "Holy cow!"

Business, both big and small, is in desperate need of new ways to inspire bored and cynical consumers who have grown weary of the same old song and dance. In today’s information economy, it doesn’t matter how many people you reach, but how much attention they pay. And the best way to get attention is with the powerful, but largely misunderstood, element of surprise.

Pow! Enter Andy Nulman with the art of surprise marketing. An explosive new outlook, surprise marketing solidifies the bond between you and your customers like nothing else, and keeps them coming back for more by providing a continuous flow of what they never expected. Pow! Right Between the Eyes reveals the secrets, theories, and tactics of surprise marketing, and wields outrageous real-world examples (and even more outrageous tools like "The Lubricant to Yes" and "Euphoric Shock") to help expand the boundaries of the extreme and create a bigger bang for bigger profits.

On his quest to unlock the secret of why some things knock your socks off and others put you to sleep, Nulman shares insights from director Alfred Hitchcock, designer Philippe Starck, playwright David Mamet, Family Guy creator Seth McFarlane, Harvard psychologists, songwriters, bloggers, and even the inventor of Pirate Booty snack chips. And he shows how today’s smartest companies are winning big with surprises stories like:

• How Oprah’s shocking announcement that "Everybody gets a car!" sent her Web site traffic up 800% and helped the Pontiac G6 outsell its competitors by 20%

• How Target earns $7 billion a year in free publicity with stunts like a floating temporary store in New York’s Hudson River or putting on a vertical fashion show where acrobat models walked down the side of Rockefeller Center

• How Bear Naked Granola reversed the trick-or-treat tradition by sending costumed street teams door-to-door to give away granola samples on Halloween

Andy Nulman is a wildly-successful businessman and even wilder public speaker who first learned the power of surprise working with Jay Leno, Jerry Seinfeld, Jim Carrey, and many other comedians as the cofounder and CEO of the Just For Laughs Festival, the world’s largest comedy event. His book shares hilarious and effective surprise promotions that he himself dreamed up for the event and in his current position as cofounder, President, and CMO of Airborne Mobile, which brings brands like Maxim, Family Guy, and the NFL to the mobile media world.

Don’t forget to read the book’s two forewords by the legendary John Cleese and CBS Late Late Show host Craig Ferguson. Surprising choices for a business book? Well…what did you expect?

Linda Kaplan Thaler, Robin Koval Linda Kaplan Thaler and Robin Koval have moved to the top of the advertising industry by following a simple but powerful philosophy: it pays to be nice. Where so many companies encourage a dog eat dog mentality, the Kaplan Thaler Group has succeeded through chocolate and flowers. In The Power of Nice, through their own experiences and the stories of other people and businesses, they demonstrate why, contrary to conventional wisdom, nice people finish first.

Turning the well-known adage of “Nice Guys Finish Last” on its ear, The Power of Nice shows that “nice” companies have lower employee turnover, lower recruitment costs, and higher productivity. Nice people live longer, are healthier, and make more money. In today’s interconnected world, companies and people with a reputation for cooperation and fair play forge the kind of relationships that lead to bigger and better opportunities, both in business and in life.

Kaplan Thaler and Koval illustrate the surprising power of nice with an array of real-life examples from the business arena as well as from their personal lives. Most important, they present a plan of action covering everything from creating a positive impression to sweetening the pot to turning enemies into allies. Filled with inspiration and suggestions on how to supercharge your career and expand your reach in the workplace, The Power of Nice will transform how you live and work.

Linda Kaplan Thaler, Robin Koval The authors of the national bestseller THE POWER OF NICE once again tackle conventional wisdom with a provocative and counterintuitive book about the importance of sweating the small stuff in our lives and in our careers.

Our smallest actions and gestures often have outsized impact on our biggest goals, say Linda Kaplan Thaler and Robin Koval. Did you double-check that presentation one last time, or hold the elevator for a stranger? Going that extra inch – whether with a client, customer, family member, or friend – speaks volumes to others about our talent, personality, and motivations. After all, if we can’t take care of the small details, how can we be counted on to deliver when it really matters?

In today’s challenging times, bigger isn’t always better. In fact, it’s often the baby steps that put us on the path to delivering a true competitive advantage. The real secret to getting ahead in life and in our careers is to refocus our attention on the small details that, if disregarded, can sabotage a multimillion-dollar ad campaign or undermine your most important relationships. Kaplan Thaler and Koval show how to get more of what you want with surprisingly less than you’d imagine.

Written in the same entertaining, story-driven style that made THE POWER OF NICE the go-to book for finishing first, THE POWER OF SMALL demonstrates how all of us can harness the power of small to improve and reinvent our lives. It’s the ultimate guide to shrinking your outlook to broaden your horizons.

Get SMALL and get going!

Steve Cone Powerlines, the exceptional slogans that people remember long after the campaign ends, stand out from the barrage of marketing messages consumers face each day. A product, service, company, candidate, or an organization with a powerline outshines the competition every time.

Steve Cone, author of 'Steal These Ideas!,' reveals the secrets to contemporary marketing's biggest mystery: how to conjure the phrase that will make a product irresistable and memorable. This book restores the lost art of creating killer slogans to its proper place: front and center in every campaign.

Drawing on examples of great and not-so-great lines from marketing, politics, and popular culture, Cone provides an irreverant, intelligent, and insightful primer on a singularly important aspect of brand building.

Carmine Gallo “The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs reveals the operating system behind any great presentation and provides you with a quick-start guide to design your own passionate interfaces with your audiences.” —Cliff Atkinson, author of Beyond Bullet Points and The Activist Audience

Apple CEO Steve Jobs’s wildly popular presentations have set a new global gold standard—and now this step-by-step guide shows you exactly how to use his crowd-pleasing techniques in your own presentations. The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs is as close as you’ll ever get to having the master presenter himself speak directly in your ear. Communications expert Carmine Gallo has studied and analyzed the very best of Jobs’s performances, offering point-by-point examples, tried-and-true techniques, and proven presentation secrets that work every time. With this revolutionary approach, you’ll be surprised at how easy it is to sell your ideas, share your enthusiasm, and wow your audience the Steve Jobs way.

“No other leader captures an audience like Steve Jobs does and, like no other book, The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs captures the formula Steve uses to enthrall audiences.”
—Rob Enderle, The Enderle Group

“Now you can learn from the best there is—both Jobs and Gallo. No matter whether you are a novice presenter or a professional speaker like me, you will read and reread this book with the same enthusiasm that people bring to their iPods."
—David Meerman Scott, bestselling author of The New Rules of Marketing & PR and World Wide Rave

Garr Reynolds In his internationally acclaimed, best-selling book Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery, presentation master Garr Reynolds gave readers the framework for planning, putting together, and delivering successful presentations. Now, he takes us further into the design realm and shows how we can apply time-honored design principles to presentation layouts.

Throughout Presentation Zen Design, Garr shares his lessons on designing effective presentations that contain text, graphs, color, images, and video. After establishing guidelines for each of the various elements, he explains how to achieve an overall harmony and balance using the tenets of Zen simplicity. Not only will you discover how to design your slides for more professional-looking presentations, you’ll learn to communicate more clearly and will accomplish the goal of making a stronger, more lasting connection with your audience.

Garr Reynolds Presentation designer and internationally acclaimed communications expert Garr Reynolds, creator of the most popular Web site on presentation design and delivery on the net — presentationzen.com — shares his experience in a provocative mix of illumination, inspiration, education, and guidance that will change the way you think about making presentations with PowerPoint or Keynote. Presentation Zen challenges the conventional wisdom of making "slide presentations" in today’s world and encourages you to think differently and more creatively about the preparation, design, and delivery of your presentations. Garr shares lessons and perspectives that draw upon practical advice from the fields of communication and business. Combining solid principles of design with the tenets of Zen simplicity, this book will help you along the path to simpler, more effective presentations.

Aileen Pincus An update of one of the key Essential Managers titles, Presenting gives you the tricks of the trade to make presentations with confidence. Part of the best-selling Essential Managers series, this book will carry the same livery on the jacket, but will have new text and a completely modern, updated design.

Daniel Goleman (Author) Annie McKee (Author) Richard E. Boyatzis (Author)

Piers Steel Procrastination or at least lack of motivation is endemic. A massive 95% of us admit to procrastinating. For 20% of us the problem is chronic and it affects our health and wealth, success and happiness. And the problem is getting worse rates have quadrupled since the 1970s. We all recognise it, we all want to understand it and to have a breakthrough moment that helps us be more productive, less guilty and ultimately happier. Scientifically rigorous, hugely entertaining, compelling and readable, this book will solve your problems of procrastination and get you motivated to live the life you want. Based on 10 years of award winning scientific research and written by the foremost scientist in the field, this book contains new techniques for dealing with the problem. There are still scientifically proven techniques for controlling and improving motivation that have not yet been tapped and translated into accessible terms this is the book that does it for the first time.

Steve Hamm Personal computing has reshaped economies and industries, and is transforming how we express ourselves and relate to one another. The most personal of personal computers are the portables. We carry these gadgets with us wherever we go, whether they’re laptops, smartphones, or the coolest new Web-surfing devices. The Race for Perfect tells the story of two generations of entrepreneurs, designers, and engineers as they have struggled to make ever-better portables.

Steve Hamm takes the reader into a world where inspiration, design, engineering, and marketing come together to produce wave upon wave of the innovative products that we love to talk about and use. From the earliest days of portable computing, 40 years ago, entrepreneurs and designers have pushed forward relentlessly in a quest to create the perfect device. Their efforts have produced a few fabulous successes and many failures. But they never give up. They’re driven by the basic rule of the tech industry: innovate or die.

In addition to a fascinating read, The Race for Perfect offers valuable lessons for business people in any industry, revealing how they must

INNOVATE constantly to differentiate their products
CREATE design principles that are timeless
INTEGRATE design and engineering so products are both useful and fun to use
IMPROVE quality and convenience without compromise
TAP social networks to turn customers into fans

At the center of this tale is the story of a single product, Lenovo’s ThinkPad X300 laptop. Lenovo, the first Chinese company to seek to establish a global consumer brand, bought IBM’s PC division in 2005 primarily to get the company’s storied ThinkPad laptops. The X300 was conceived as a “halo” product that would draw customers to Lenovo’s entire line. Woven through The Race for Perfect is a case study of how this ambitious company, with teams in Japan, the United States, and China, marshaled its resources to pursue laptop perfection. As X300 came close to the finish line, it collided head-on with Apple’s super-slim MacBook Air—-with surprising results.

Guy Kawasaki More uncommon common sense from the bestselling author of The Art of the Start.

In Silicon Valley slang, a “bozo explosion” is what causes a lean, mean, fighting machine of a company to slide into mediocrity. As Guy Kawasaki puts it, “If the two most popular words in your company are partner and strategic, and partner has become a verb, and strategic is used to describe decisions and activities that don’t make sense” . . . it’s time for a reality check.

For nearly three decades, Kawasaki has earned a stellar reputation as an entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and irreverent pundit. His 2004 bestseller, The Art of the Start, has become the most acclaimed bible for small business. And his blog is consistently one of the fifty most popular in the world.

Now, Kawasaki has compiled his best wit, wisdom, and contrarian opinions in handy book form. From competition to customer service, innovation to marketing, he shows readers how to ignore fads and foolishness while sticking to commonsense practices. He explains, for instance:

• How to get a standing ovation
• The art of schmoozing
• How to create a community
• The top ten lies of entrepreneurs
• Everything you wanted to know about getting a job in Silicon Valley but didn’t know who to ask

Provocative, useful, and very funny, this “no bull shiitake” book will show you why readers around the world love Guy Kawasaki.

Kevin Carroll How do you ignite creativity, problem solving, and risk taking to score big in business? According to bestselling author Kevin Carroll, it’s child’s play!

Former 76ers athletic trainer Kevin Carroll, has turned his childhood passion for playing ball into a bestselling franchise. In this fun and thoughtful follow-up to his bestselling Rules of the Red Rubber Ball (2007), Carroll switches the playing field to the workplace, where innovation, motivation, engagement, and teamwork are the headline issues. Drawing on “play profiles” from thought leaders, change agents, and business leaders, he explains how to bring a sense of play into the workplace to stimulate creativity, encourage risk-taking, achieve goals—and have a great time doing it.

Fully illustrated, with 31 profiles of successful “players” including ESPN president George Bodenheimer, bestselling authors Seth Godin and Malcolm Gladwell, Food Network host Duff Goldman, South Bronx activist Majora Carter, renowned author Paulo Coehlo, and many others

Nancy Duarte Product Description

Presentations are meant to inform, inspire, and persuade audiences. So why then do so many audiences leave feeling like they've wasted their time? All too often, presentations don't resonate with the audience and move them to transformative action.

Just as the author's first book helped presenters become visual communicators, Resonate helps you make a strong connection with your audience and lead them to purposeful action. The author's approach is simple: building a presentation today is a bit like writing a documentary. Using this approach, you'll convey your content with passion, persuasion, and impact. Author has a proven track record, including having created the slides in Al Gore's Oscar-winning An Inconvenient TruthFocuses on content development methodologies that are not only fundamental but will move people to actionUpends the usual paradigm by making the audience the hero and the presenter the mentorShows how to use story techniques of conflict and resolution

Presentations don't have to be boring ordeals. You can make them fun, exciting, and full of meaning. Leave your audiences energized and ready to take action with Resonate.

Create a S.T.A.R. Moment
Presentation Tips from Resonate

Create a moment where you dramatically drive the big idea home by intentionally placing Something They’ll Always Remember—a S.T.A.R. moment—in each presentation. This moment should be so profound or so dramatic that it becomes what the audience chats about at the water cooler or appears as the headline of a news article. Planting a S.T.A.R. moment in a presentation keeps the conversation going even after it’s over and helps the message go viral.

Since you might be presenting to an audience that sees lots of presentations—like a venture capitalist or a customer who is reviewing several vendors—you want to stand out two weeks after you presented, when they’re making their final decision. You want them to remember YOU instead of all the other presenters they encountered.

The S.T.A.R. moment should be a significant, sincere, and enlightening moment during the presentation that helps magnify your big idea—not distract from it.

There are five types of S.T.A.R. moments:

• Memorable Dramatization: Small dramatizations convey insights. They can be as simple as a prop or demo, or something more dramatic, like a reenactment or skit.

• Repeatable Sound Bites: Small, repeatable sound bites help feed the press with headlines, populate and energize social media channels with insights, and give employees a rally cry.

• Evocative Visuals: A picture really is worth a thousand words—and a thousand emotions. A compelling image can become an unforgettable emotional link to your information.

• Emotive Storytelling: Stories package information in a way that people remember. Attaching a great story to the big idea makes it easily repeatable beyond the presentation.

• Shocking Statistics: If statistics are shocking, don’t gloss over them; draw attention to them.

The S.T.A.R. moment shouldn’t be kitschy or cliché. Make sure it’s worthwhile and appropriate, or it could end up coming off like a really bad summer camp skit. Know your audience and determine what will resonate best with them. Don’t create something that’s overly emotionally charged for an audience of biochemists.

S.T.A.R. moments create a hook in the audience’s minds and hearts. They tend to be visual in nature and give the audience insights that supplement solely auditory information. 

Famous S.T.A.R. Moments
Richard Feynman
Richard Feynman helped investigate the space shuttle Challenger disaster. He quickly identified the failure of a crucial O-ring as the probable cause of the explosion. To illustrate his point, he bent and clamped a piece of the rubber O-ring and secretly placed it in a cup of ice water. At a perfectly timed moment, he loosened the clamp and as the rubber slowly uncurled he said, “…[F]or more than a few seconds, there is no resilience in this particular material when it is at a temperature of 32 degrees.” The press went nuts because it should have expanded in a millisecond.

Bill Gates
Through his philanthropy, Bill Gates hopes to solve some of the world’s biggest problems, including malaria. In his 2009 TED talk, Gates established the gravity of this disease by stating that millions have died, and 200 million people are suffering from it at any given time. He then stated that more money is spent developing baldness drugs on behalf of wealthy men than on fighting malaria for the poor. At that moment, he released a jar of mosquitoes into the room saying, “There’s no reason only poor people should have the experience.”

Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs is a master at unveiling Apple products in intriguing ways. “This is the MacBook Air,” he said in January 2008, “so thin it even fits inside one of those envelopes you see floating around the office.” With that, Jobs walked to the side of the stage, picked up one such envelope, and pulled out a MacBook Air. The audience went wild as the sound of hundreds of cameras clicking and flashing filled the auditorium. “You can get a feel for how thin it is. It has a full-size keyboard and full-size display. Isn’t it amazing? It’s the world’s thinnest notebook,” said Jobs.

Case Study: Michael Pollan
Memorable Dramatization

Michael Pollan is a natural storyteller who teaches people where food comes from. His books, The Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food, have reshaped how Americans think about the current food system.

When Pollan spoke at Pop!Tech in the fall of 2009, there was one point in particular where he wanted to leave a deep impression on the audience. He and his team had calculated how much crude oil it takes to create a fast food double cheeseburger. It was a staggering amount, and he wanted that message to stick.

When he was introduced at the beginning of his presentation, Pollan walked on stage carrying a paper bag from a fast food chain. “A little something for later,” he said. He placed it on a table in the middle of the stage and started his presentation—thereby leaving the audience in suspense about the prop on the table.

Later, when Pollan was drawing connections between oil and the food supply, he said, “I want to show you how much oil goes into producing this [cheeseburger].” He pulled out the burger from the paper bag. Then he pulled out an empty eight-ounce glass and a container full of oil. He filled the glass with oil. “But that’s not all. You need another eight ounces.” He reached under the table and pulled out a second glass. Then he did it again. And again. In all, it took twenty-six ounces of oil to produce one double cheeseburger.

Showing the audience the burger next to the crude oil used to produce it was a disturbing visual—one that the audience would almost certainly remember the next time they made food choices.

Steve Kerr It's one of the thorniest management problems around: dealing with unmotivated, low-performing employees. It's easy to point the finger of blame at them. But in most companies, it's the reward system, not the workforce, that's causing poor attitudes and performance: many reward systems actually discourage desired behaviors while rewarding the very actions that drive executives crazy.

In Reward Systems: Does Yours Deliver? Steve Kerr describes the steps you must take to create an effective reward system:

Clarify what you mean by "performance" — in ways that help employees understand how they can support what you're trying to accomplish
Devise an effective performance-measurement system that distinguishes between metrics used for control and those used for employees' development
Design a reward system that motivates people to do what you want them to do while also meeting their needs

To get the most from employees, you don't need to add headcount, upgrade your IT capabilities, or hire consultants. You do need to develop the right reward system. This book shows you how.

From our new Memo to the CEO series — solutions-focused advice from today's leading practitioners.

Jason Fried, David Heinemeier Hansson Most business books give you the same old advice: Write a business plan, study the competition, seek investors, yadda yadda. If you're looking for a book like that, put this one back on the shelf.

Rework shows you a better, faster, easier way to succeed in business. Read it and you'll know why plans are actually harmful, why you don't need outside investors, and why you're better off ignoring the competition. The truth is, you need less than you think. You don't need to be a workaholic. You don't need to staff up. You don't need to waste time on paperwork or meetings. You don't even need an office. Those are all just excuses. 

What you really need to do is stop talking and start working. This book shows you the way. You'll learn how to be more productive, how to get exposure without breaking the bank, and tons more counterintuitive ideas that will inspire and provoke you.

With its straightforward language and easy-is-better approach, Rework is the perfect playbook for anyone who’s ever dreamed of doing it on their own. Hardcore entrepreneurs, small-business owners, people stuck in day jobs they hate, victims of "downsizing," and artists who don’t want to starve anymore will all find valuable guidance in these pages.

Robert T. Kiyosaki, Sharon L. Lechter With 16 priceless lessons that reduce risk through proper planning, this powerhouse guide removes the mystique from successful investing by helping readers switch from thinking poor to thinking rich.

Robert T. Kiyosaki, Sharon L. Lechter The way to achieve the goal of a lifetime.Its the dream that is quickly becoming a realitymaking so much money at an early age that you could decide when to retire, knowing full well that you have enough stashed away to ensure a life of comfort. In this new book, the fifth in the Rich Dad series, financial guru Robert Kiyosaki provides practical insight on how to put together a financial plan which will not only make you prosperous, but will also allow you to map out the freedom to choose your own retirement age.Retire Young Retire Rich follows the smash success of the four previously published titles in the Rich Dad series, all of which are New York Times bestsellers. The series has also appeared on the Wall Street Journal, Business Week, USA Today, and countless other business bestseller lists.Rich Dad Poor Dad is a starting point for anyone looking to gain control of their financial future. USA Today

Lynda Resnick, Francis Wilkinson NATIONAL BESTSELLER

POM Wonderful. FIJI Water. Teleflora. The Franklin Mint. Lynda Resnick's marketing triumphs read like an encyclopedia of branding. She is the smartest and hardest-working marketing brain in the business - the kind of marketer who can sell "ice sculptures to Eskimos." But her brilliant ideas aren't simply the result of random inspiration; they're the products of a systematic approach to marketing that any company — large or small — can adapt to achieve success. In RUBIES IN THE ORCHARD, she divulges her secrets for creating some of the world's most memorable and iconic brands, and the bull's-eye strategies to sell them.

Resnick believes that every company can find "rubies" in its orchard, elements of intrinsic value that consumers will desire. Here, she shows how every successful marketing campaign begins with uncovering these hidden gems, and communicating their value honestly and transparently to the consumer.

Through Resnick's behind-the-scenes narrative, we learn the secrets of her extraordinary successes, including: POM Wonderful, the wildly popular 100% pomegranate juice that created an entirely new product category out of a fickle and obscure fruit; and FIJI Water, a fledgling brand she transformed into the #1 premium bottled water in America, with sales that have increased 300% since 2004.

A born marketer, Resnick shares tales from a remarkable life, from opening her own ad agency at age 19 to the time she famously overpaid for Jackie Kennedy's pearls at auction, then transformed her "mistake" into tens of millions in sales for the Franklin Mint. Here for the first time, Resnick reveals her systematic approach to breaking through marketplace clutter and consumer cynicism, and creating blockbuster brands with true staying power.

Stephen M.R. Covey From Stephen R. Covey's eldest son comes a revolutionary new path towards productivity and satisfaction. Trust, says Stephen M.R. Covey, is the very basis of the new global economy, and he shows how trust—and the speed at which it is established with clients, employees and constituents—is the essential ingredient for any high–performance, successful organization.

For business leaders and public figures in any arena, The Speed of Trust offers an unprecedented and eminently practical look at exactly how trust functions in our every transaction and relationship—from the most personal to the broadest, most indirect interaction—and how to establish trust immediately so that you and your organization can forego the time–killing, bureaucratic check–and–balance processes so often deployed in lieu of actual trust.

Tim Sanders Even the actions of a single person can help to change the world. How? Through simple acts of leadership and compassion. Open up this book, and discover the true stories of people whose actions have caused a chain reaction at work and in their communities. Among them:
A manager who gives an employee some supportive praise, and as a result literally saves his life (page 231).

A small group of bank tellers who spearhead a movement to raise millions of dollars for breast cancer, making it the biggest fundraiser in North America, and enhancing their company’s reputation (page 213).

A sales manager who gets a copy of a groundbreaking book that leads to a transformation of the company’s operations. As a result, hundreds of millions of pounds of carpet waste avoid the landfill, and the company sparks a revolution in its industry (page 12).

A “responsibility revolution” is shaking up corporate America. In this provocative and insightful book, bestselling author Tim Sanders reveals why companies must to go beyond making a profit and start making a difference.

Every one of us, regardless of title or position, can inspire our companies to change the way they do business, helping them to become a positive force for enriching people, communities, and the environment. When this happens, not only do we help save the world, we help save our companies from becoming irrelevant. We also become part of what Sanders calls the Responsibility Revolution.

Companies that don’t participate in this revolution risk becoming obsolete. Today customers, employees, and investors are demanding that companies focus on their social responsibilities—not just their bottom lines. Sixty-five percent of American consumers say they would change to brands associated with a good cause if price and quality were equal; 66 percent of recent college graduates will not work for companies with poor social values. And more than sixty million people are willing to pay a premium for socially and environmentally responsible products.

In SAVING THE WORLD AT WORK, Tim Sanders offers concrete suggestions on how all of us can help our companies join the Responsibility Revolution. Drawing on extensive interviews with hundreds of employees and CEOs, and illuminated by countless stories of people who are making a difference in the workplace and in the world, Sanders offers practical advice every individual and company can use to make the world a better place—now and in the future.

Gordon Binder, Philip Bashe Widely regarded as the most innovative, successful biotech firm ever, Amgen led its industry in revenue and sales growth in 2007. Top magazines including Fortune and Industry Week have repeatedly named it one of America's best companies to work for.

In Science Lessons, Gordon Binder—CEO and chairman during 1988-2000—describes Amgen's climb to success. Revealing the highs and lows it experienced in the race to develop blockbuster drugs, he takes readers from the time Amgen had just three months of capital in the bank and no viable products in the pipeline to its spectacular success. The turning point? The 1989 launch of Epogen, which dramatically helped kidney dialysis patients suffering from debilitating anemia. Other landmark drugs, including Neupogen, would follow.

Through engaging anecdotes and cogent insights, Binder weaves a fascinating tale while offering his unique brand of practical management advice. Using the principals of the scientific method, he shares his recommendations for tackling pressing business challenges—such as managing creative employees, navigating the IPO process, and protecting intellectual property.

This colorful first-person account showcases the visionary science and daring business strategy that made Amgen great—offering valuable lessons for all companies.

John P. Kotter Most organizational change initiatives fail spectacularly (at worst) or deliver lukewarm results (at best). In his international bestseller Leading Change, John Kotter revealed why change is so hard, and provided an actionable, eight-step process for implementing successful transformations. The book became the change bible for managers worldwide.

Now, in Urgency, Kotter shines the spotlight on the crucial first step in his framework: creating a sense of urgency by getting people to actually see and feel the need for change.

Why focus on urgency? Without it, any change effort is doomed. Kotter reveals the insidious nature of complacency in all its forms and guises.

In this exciting new book, Kotter explains:
How to go beyond "the business case" for change to overcome the fear and anger that can suppress urgencyWays to ensure that your actions and behaviors — not just your words — communicate the need for changeHow to keep fanning the flames of urgency even after your transformation effort has scored some early successes

Written in Kotter's signature no-nonsense style, this concise and authoritative guide helps you set the stage for leading a successful transformation in your company.

Sophie Kinsella “This expensive, glossy world is where I’ve been headed all along. Limos and flowers; waxed eyebrows and designer clothes from Barneys. These are my people; this is where I’m meant to be.”
–Becky Bloomwood

Universally beloved by readers, Sophie Kinsella’s national bestseller, Confessions of a Shopaholic, introduced the irrepressible one-woman shopping phenomenon, Becky Bloomwood. Now, in this hilarious follow-up, Becky and her credit cards are headed across the Atlantic....

With her shopping excesses (somewhat) in check and her career as a TV financial guru thriving, Becky’s biggest problem seems to be tearing her entrepreneur boyfriend, Luke, away from work for a romantic country weekend. And worse, figuring out how to “pack light.” But packing takes on a whole new meaning when Luke announces he’s moving to New York for business–and he asks Becky to go with him!

Before you can say “Prada sample sale,” Becky has landed in the Big Apple, home of Park Avenue penthouses and luxury department stores.

Surely it’s only a matter of time until she becomes an American TV celebrity, and she and Luke are the toast of Gotham society. Nothing can stand in their way, especially with Becky’s bills miles away in London.

But then an unexpected disaster threatens her career prospects, her relationship with Luke, and her available credit line! Shopaholic Takes Manhattan–but will she have to return it?

Patrick Lencioni In yet another page-turner, New York Times best-selling author and acclaimed management expert Patrick Lencioni addresses the costly and maddening issue of silos, the barriers that create organizational politics. Silos devastate organizations, kill productivity, push good people out the door, and jeopardize the achievement of corporate goals.

As with his other books, Lencioni writes Silos, Politics, and Turf Wars as a fictional—but eerily realistic—story. The story is about Jude Cousins, an eager young management consultant struggling to launch his practice by solving one of the more universal and frustrating problems faced by his clients. Through trial and error, he develops a simple yet ground-breaking approach for helping them transform confusion and infighting into clarity and alignment.

Emily Giffin From theNew York Timesbestselling author of Something Borrowedcomes a novel that shows how someone with a 'perfect life' can lose it all-and then find everything D arcy thought she had it all figured out: The more beautiful the girl, the more charmed her life. Never mind substance. Never mind playing by the rules. Never mind karma.But Darcy's neat, perfect world turns upside down when her best friend, Rachel, the plain-Jane, 'good girl,' steals her fianc, while Darcy finds herself pregnant, dumped by two men, and completely alone for the first time in her life.Darcy tries to recover, fleeing to her childhood friend living in London and resorting to her tried-and-true methods for getting what she wants. But as she attempts to recreate her glamorous life on a new continent, Darcy finds that her rules no longer apply. It is only then that Darcy can begin her journey toward self-awareness, forgiveness, and motherhood.Something Blueis a charming and complex portrait of one woman and her surprising discoveries about the true meaning of friendship, love and happily-ever-after.

Geoffrey Miller A leading evolutionary psychologist probes the hidden instincts behind our working, shopping, and spending

Evolutionary psychology-the compelling science of human nature-has clarified the prehistoric origins of human behavior and influenced many fields ranging from economics to personal relationships. In Spent Geoffrey Miller applies this revolutionary science's principles to a new domain: the sensual wonderland of marketing and status seeking that we call American consumer culture. Starting with the basic notion that the goods and services we buy unconsciously advertise our biological potential as mates and friends, Miller examines the hidden factors that dictate our choices in everything from lipstick to cars, from the magazines we read to the music we listen to. With humor and insight, Miller analyzes an array of product choices and deciphers what our decisions say about ourselves, giving us access to a new way of understanding-and improving-our behaviors. Like Freakonomics or The Tipping Point, Spent is a bold and revelatory book that illuminates the unseen logic behind the chaos of consumerism and suggests new ways we can become happier consumers and more responsible citizens.

Joseph Michelli WAKE UP AND SMELL THE SUCCESS!

You already know the Starbucks story. Since 1992, its stock has risen a staggering 5,000 percent! The genius of Starbucks success lies in its ability to create personalized customer experiences, stimulate business growth, generate profits, energize employees, and secure customer loyalty-all at the same time.

The Starbucks Experience contains a robust blend of home-brewed ingenuity and people-driven philosophies that have made Starbucks one of the world's most admired companies, according to Fortune magazine. With unique access to Starbucks personnel and resources, Joseph Michelli discovered that the success of Starbucks is driven by the people who work there-the partners -and the special experience they create for each customer. Michelli reveals how you can follow the Starbucks way to Reach out to entire communitiesListen to individual workers and consumersSeize growth opportunities in every marketCustom-design a truly satisfying experience that benefits everyone involved

Filled with real-life insider stories, eye-opening anecdotes, and solid step-by-step strategies, this fascinating book takes you deep inside one of the most talked-about companies in the world today.

For anyone who wants to learn from the best-and be the best-The Starbucks Experience is a rich, heady brew of unforgettable user-friendly ideas.

Simon Sinek Why do you do what you do?

Why are some people and organizations more innovative, more influential, and moer profitable than others? Why do some command greater loyalty from customers and employees alike? Even among the successful, why are so few able to repeat their success over and over?

People like Martin Luther King Jr., Steve Jobs, and the Wright Brothers might have little in common, but they all started with why. It was their natural ability to start with why that enabled them to inspire those around them and to achieve remarkable things.

In studying the leaders who've had the greatest influence in the world, Simon Sinek discovered that they all think, act, and communicate in the exact same way — and it's the complete opposite of what everyone else does. Sinek calls this powerful idea The Golden Circle, and it provides a framework upon which organizations can be built, movements can be lead, and people can be inspired. And it all starts with WHY.

Any organization can explain what it does; some can explain how they do it; but very few can clearly articulate why. WHY is not money or profit— those are always results. WHY does your organization exist? WHY does it do the things it does? WHY do customers really buy from one company or another? WHY are people loyal to some leaders, but not others?

Starting with WHY works in big business and small business, in the nonprofit world and in politics. Those who start with WHY never manipulate, they inspire. And the people who follow them don't do so because they have to; they follow because they want to.

Drawing on a wide range of real-life stories, Sinek weaves together a clear vision of what it truly takes to lead and inspire. This book is for anyone who wants to inspire others or who wants to find someone to inspire them.

Adam Werbach This is the definitive work on business strategy for sustainability by the most authoritative voice in the conversation.

More than ever before, consumers, employees, and investors share a common purpose and a passion for companies that do well by doing good. So any strategy without sustainability at its core is just plain irresponsible - bad for business, bad for shareholders, bad for the environment. These challenges represent unprecedented opportunities for big brands - such as Clorox, Dell, Toyota, Procter & Gamble, Nike, and Wal-Mart - that are implementing integral, rather than tangential, strategies for sustainability. What these companies are doing illuminates the book's practical framework for change, which involves engaging employees, using transparency as a business tool, and reaping the rewards of a networked organizational structure.

Leave your quaint notions of corporate social responsibility and environmentalism behind. Werbach is starting a whole new dialogue around sustainability of enterprise and life as we know it in organizations and individuals. Sustainability is now a true competitive strategic advantage, and building it into the core of your business is the only means to ensure that your company - and your world - will survive.

In Strategy for Sustainability, Adam Werbach shows us how sustainability moves beyond compliance-oriented green initiatives to become a key strategy for achieving both competitive advantage and meaningful change. By integrating a systems perspective into business practice and priorities, Werbach lays out a compelling new model for building core business strategy. Gene Kahn, VP, Global Sustainability Officer, General Mills, Inc.

By applying the laws of nature to the laws of business, Werbach provides a trail map that any enterprise or entrepreneur can follow to become a surer, more nimble traveler as our economy enters unchartered terrain. Seth Goldman, Cofounder and TEA-EO, Honest Tea

Tom Rath, Barry Conchie From the author of the long-running # 1 bestseller StrengthsFinder 2.0 comes a landmark study of great leaders, teams, and the reasons why people follow.

Nearly a decade ago, Gallup unveiled the results of a landmark 30-year research project that ignited a global conversation on the topic of strengths. More than 3 million people have since taken Gallup's StrengthsFinder assessment, which forms the core of several books on this topic, including the #1 international bestseller StrengthsFinder 2.0.

In recent years, while continuing to learn more about strengths, Gallup scientists have also been examining decades of data on the topic of leadership. They studied more than 1 million work teams, conducted more than 20,000 in-depth interviews with leaders, and even interviewed more than 10,000 followers around the world to ask exactly why they followed the most important leader in their life.

In Strengths Based Leadership, #1 New York Times bestselling author Tom Rath and renowned leadership consultant Barry Conchie reveal the results of this research. Based on their discoveries, the book identifies three keys to being a more effective leader: knowing your strengths and investing in others' strengths, getting people with the right strengths on your team, and understanding and meeting the four basic needs of those who look to you for leadership.

As you read Strengths Based Leadership, you'll hear firsthand accounts from some of the most successful organizational leaders in recent history, from the founder of Teach For America to the president of The Ritz-Carlton, as they discuss how their unique strengths have driven their success. Filled with novel research and actionable ideas, Strengths Based Leadership will give you a new road map for leading people toward a better future.

Tom Rath From the author of the New York Times bestsellers

How Full Is Your Bucket? (Gallup Press, 2004, Strengths Based Leadership (Gallup Press, 2009), and Wellbeing (Gallup Press, 2010) a book that features the new Wellbeing Finder assessment.

STRENGTHSFINDER 2.0

Do you have the opportunity to do what you do best every day?

Chances are, you don't. All too often, our natural talents go untapped. From the cradle to the cubicle, we devote more time to fixing our shortcomings than to developing our strengths.

To help people uncover their talents, Gallup introduced the first version of its online assessment, StrengthsFinder, in 2001 which ignited a global conversation and helped millions to discover their top five talents.

In its latest national bestseller, StrengthsFinder 2.0, Gallup unveils the new and improved version of its popular assessment, language of 34 themes, and much more (see below for details). While you can read this book in one sitting, you'll use it as a reference for decades.

Loaded with hundreds of strategies for applying your strengths, this new book and accompanying website will change the way you look at yourself — and the world around you — forever.

AVAILABLE EXCLUSIVELY IN STRENGTHSFINDER 2.0
(using the unique access code included with each book)

* A new and upgraded edition of the StrengthsFinder assessment

* A personalized Strengths Discovery and Action-Planning Guide for applying your strengths in the next week, month, and year

* A more customized version of your top five theme report

* 50 Ideas for Action (10 strategies for building on each of your top five themes)

Charles Wyke-Smith Cascading Style Sheets enable you to rapidly create web designs that can be shared by hundreds of web pages, accelerating development times and centralizing text and layout information for easy editing and updates. Stylin’ with CSS teaches you everything you need to know start using CSS in your web development work, from the basics of markup of your content and styling text, through to creating multi-column page layouts without the use of tables. Learn how to create interface components, such as drop-down menus, navigation links, and animated graphical buttons, using only CSS – no JavaScript required. Discover how to design code that will work on the latest standard-compliant browsers, while working around the quirks of the older browsers. With a mastery of CSS, your web design capabilities will move to a new level, and everything you need to know to get your started and build your skills is right here in this book. You’ll be stylin’ in no time!

Ian Ayres Why would a casino try and stop you from losing? How can a mathematical formula find your future spouse? Would you know if a statistical analysis blackballed you from a job you wanted?

Today, number crunching affects your life in ways you might never imagine. In this lively and groundbreaking new book, economist Ian Ayres shows how today's best and brightest organizations are analyzing massive databases at lightening speed to provide greater insights into human behavior. They are the Super Crunchers. From internet sites like Google and Amazon that know your tastes better than you do, to a physician's diagnosis and your child's education, to boardrooms and government agencies, this new breed of decision makers are calling the shots. And they are delivering staggeringly accurate results. How can a football coach evaluate a player without ever seeing him play? Want to know whether the price of an airline ticket will go up or down before you buy? How can a formula outpredict wine experts in determining the best vintages? Super crunchers have the answers. In this brave new world of equation versus expertise, Ayres shows us the benefits and risks, who loses and who wins, and how super crunching can be used to help, not manipulate us.

Gone are the days of solely relying on intuition to make decisions. No businessperson, consumer, or student who wants to stay ahead of the curve should make another keystroke without reading Super Crunchers.

Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner

Chip Heath, Dan Heath Why is it so hard to make lasting changes in our companies, in our communities, and in our own lives?

The primary obstacle is a conflict that's built into our brains, say Chip and Dan Heath, authors of the critically acclaimed bestseller Made to Stick. Psychologists have discovered that our minds are ruled by two different systems - the rational mind and the emotional mind - that compete for control. The rational mind wants a great beach body; the emotional mind wants that Oreo cookie. The rational mind wants to change something at work; the emotional mind loves the comfort of the existing routine. This tension can doom a change effort - but if it is overcome, change can come quickly.

In Switch, the Heaths show how everyday people - employees and managers, parents and nurses - have united both minds and, as a result, achieved dramatic results:

- The lowly medical interns who managed to defeat an entrenched, decades-old medical practice that was endangering patients (see page 242)
- The home-organizing guru who developed a simple technique for overcoming the dread of housekeeping (see page 130)
- The manager who transformed a lackadaisical customer-support team into service zealots by removing a standard tool of customer service (see page 199)

In a compelling, story-driven narrative, the Heaths bring together decades of counterintuitive research in psychology, sociology, and other fields to shed new light on how we can effect transformative change. Switch shows that successful changes follow a pattern, a pattern you can use to make the changes that matter to you, whether your interest is in changing the world or changing your waistline.

Thomas Kelley, Jonathan Littman The author of the bestselling The Art of Innovation reveals the strategies IDEO, the world-famous design firm, uses to foster innovative thinking throughout an organization and overcome the naysayers who stifle creativity.

The role of the devil's advocate is nearly universal in business today. It allows individuals to step outside themselves and raise questions and concerns that effectively kill new projects and ideas, while claiming no personal responsibility. Nothing is more potent in stifling innovation.

Drawing on nearly 20 years of experience managing IDEO, Kelley identifies ten roles people can play in an organization to foster innovation and new ideas while offering an effective counter to naysayers. Among these approaches are the Anthropologist—the person who goes into the field to see how customers use and respond to products, to come up with new innovations; the Cross-pollinator who mixes and matches ideas, people, and technology to create new ideas that can drive growth; and the Hurdler, who instantly looks for ways to overcome the limits and challenges to any situation.

Filled with engaging stories of how companies like Kraft, Procter and Gamble, Cargill and Samsung have incorporated IDEO's thinking to transform the customer experience, THE TEN FACES OF INNOVATION is an extraordinary guide to nurturing and sustaining a culture of continuous innovation and renewal.

Gary Vaynerchuk (Author)

Tim Hurson There are thousands of books about thinking. But there are very few books that provide clear how-to information that can actually help you think better.

Think Better is about Productive Thinking — why it’s important, how it works, and how to use it at work, at home, and at play. Productive Thinking is a game changer — a practical, easy-to-learn, repeatable process that helps people understand more clearly, think more creatively, and plan more effectively. It's based on the thinking strategies that people we celebrate for their creativity have been using for centuries. Tim Hurson brings Productive Thinking out of the closet and presents it in a way that makes it easy for anyone to grasp and use — so you can think better, work better, and do better in every aspect of your life.

Think Better demonstrates how you can start with an intractable technical problem, an unmet consumer need, or a gaping chasm in your business strategy and, by following a clearly defined, practical thinking process, arrive at a robust, innovative solution. Many companies use the Productive Thinking model to generate fresh solutions for tough business problems, and many individuals rely on it to solve pressing personal problems.

The principles you'll find in Think Better are straight-forward: separate your thinking into creative thinking and critical thinking; stay with the question; strive for the “third third” by generating lots and lots of ideas; and look for unexpected connections.

The model consists of six interlocking steps:

Step 1:What's Going On? Explore and truly understand the challenge.

Step 2: What's Success? Envision the ideal outcome and establish success criteria.

Step 3: What's the Question? Pinpoint the real problem or opportunity.

Step 4: Generate Answers List many possible solutions.

Step 5: Forge the Solution Decide which solution is best. Then make it better.

Step 6: Align Resources Create an action plan.

Tim Hurson starts by explaining how we all build inner barriers to effective thinking. He identifies our habits of thinking that severely limit our behavior, from “monkey mind” to “gator brain.” Then he demonstrates how to overcome these barriers.

More than anything, productive thinking is an attitude that will let you look at problems and convert them into opportunities. At the end of this disciplined brainstorming process, you'll have a concrete action plan, complete with timelines and deadlines.

The book is filled with many of Hurson's original brainstorming tools that will empower you to generate, organize, and process ideas. For example, you can identify your best ideas using the five C's: Cull, Cluster, Combine, Clarify and Choose. And you can transform an embryonic idea into a robust solution with POWER, which stands for Positives, Objections, What else?, Enhancements and Remedies.

To create the future, you first must be able to imagine it. Productive thinking is a way to help you do that.

John Brockman "What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?"

This is the question John Brockman, publisher of Edge.org, posed to more than 100 of the world's most influential minds. Exhilarating, visionary, sometimes frightening, but always fascinating, their responses provide an eye-opening road map of our near future.

Khaled Hosseini

Audrey Niffenegger

Malcolm Gladwell This celebrated New York Times bestsellernow poised to reach an even wider audience in paperbackis a book that is changing the way North Americans think about selling products and disseminating ideas. Gladwells new afterword to this edition describes how readers can constructively apply the tipping point principle in their own lives and work. Widely hailed as an important work that offers not only a road map to business success but also a profoundly encouraging approach to solving social problems.

Harper Lee "Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit 'em, but remember it's a sin to kill a mockingbird."

A lawyer's advice to his children as he defends the real mockingbird of Harper Lee's classic novel—a black man charged with the rape of a white girl. Through the young eyes of Scout and Jem Finch, Harper Lee explores with rich humor and unswerving honesty the irrationality of adult attitudes toward race and class in the Deep South of the 1930s. The conscience of a town steeped in prejudice, violence, and hypocrisy is pricked by the stamina and quiet heroism of one man's struggle for justice—but the weight of history will only tolerate so much.

One of the best-loved classics of all time, To Kill a Mockingbird has earned many distinctions since its original publication in 1960. It has won the Pulitzer Prize, been translated into more than forty languages, sold more than thirty million copies worldwide, and been made into an enormously popular movie. Most recent, librarians across the country gave the book the highest of honors by voting it the best novel of the century (Library Journal).

HarperCollins is proud to celebrate the anniversary of the book's publication with this special hardcover edition.

Mike Filey Mike Filey's collection of pictures of Toronto from the earliest days of photography has gained a reputation as one of the most interesting visual archives of the city's history. This classic look at old Toronto portrays scenes of public life from 1860 to 1950, illustrating how dramatically the urban fabric and environment have changed. There are photographs of the beaches and the islands, of mud streets and gas lamps, of steam engines and trolley cars, amusement parks and the ever-changing waterfront. Especially striking are the early photographs of downtown and the aftermaths of the fire of 1904.

Out-of-print for over 20 years, A Toronto Album has sold over 50,000 copies in various editions. It will appeal to Torontonians young and old — and to anyone interested in the evolution of one of the world's fastest growing cities.

Mitchell Kusy, Elizabeth Holloway Praise for Toxic Workplace!

"Toxic Workplace! describes how to identify and best work with toxic personalities. It also provides a systemic approach for creating a culture that's positive and respectful while improving the bottom line. Kusy and Holloway share how their national research translates into real-world practices in organizations. I endorse their practical, concrete approaches that will make a significant difference in organizations today and in the future."
—Gregg Steinhafel, president and CEO, Target Corporation

"Toxic Workplace! brings a rare and valuable view of one of the great challenges facing leaders in today's organizations. It is a significant guidebook to the healthy enterprise of the future, not only because of Kusy and Holloway's systems approach to dealing with toxic personalities, but also their unique practice of creating communities of respectful engagement. This book demonstrates how this impacts both organizational social responsibility and the bottom line."
—Frances Hesselbein, former CEO of the Girl Scouts of the U.S.A.; founding president and chairman of Leader to Leader Institute, formerly The Peter F. Drucker Foundation for Nonprofit Management

"Transforming the culture to support the strategy and mission is the real stuff of leadership. Toxic Workplace! gives you the research-based tools to identify and deal with the 'dark side' of this important dynamic. Read it and you will engage your organization in new, more authentic, and effective ways!"
—Kevin Cashman, author, Leadership from the Inside Out and senior partner, Korn/Ferry Leadership & Talent Consulting

Chris Brogan, Julien Smith How to tap the power of social software and networks to build your business

In Trust Agents, two social media veterans show you how to tap into the power of social networks to build your brand's influence, reputation, and, of course, profits. Today's online influencers are web natives who trade in trust, reputation, and relationships, using social media to accrue the influence that builds up or brings down businesses online.

The book shows how people use online social tools to build networks of influence and how you can use those networks to positively impact your business. Because trust is key to building online reputations, those who traffic in it are "trust agents," the key people your business needs on its side. Delivers actionable steps and case studies that show how social media can positively impact your businessWritten by authors with over ten years of online media experienceShows you how to build and wield influence online to benefit your brandCombines high-level theory with practical step-by-step guidance

If you want your business to succeed, don't sit on the sidelines. Instead, use the Web to build trust with your consumers using Trust Agents.

Paul Osterman "Middle management" is a term associated with relentless downsizing, corporate drudgery, and career dead-ends. Bashed by management gurus, dismissed by social scientists, and painted as victims by the media, middle managers seem permanently relegated to the sidelines of corporate power.

But is this popular picture accurate? Are middle managers really no longer valued by today's performance-driven organizations?

The truth is surprising. MIT management scholar Paul Osterman has analyzed over thirty years' worth of employment data, interviewed a wide sample of managers, and uncovered a very different picture of middle managers today. Not only have their numbers increased dramatically, but middle managers are wealthier, more productive, more autonomous—and they gain real pleasure from their day-to-day work.

But there's another side to the story: while managers have maintained their commitment to their tasks and to their colleagues, they are increasingly cynical and distant from their organizations. They are confused about their future and how to manage their careers. This comes at a time when the value of middle management is much greater than ever before. Organizations must rethink their understanding of this vital workforce segment—now.

Understand the issues for yourself with The Truth About Middle Managers' refreshing and counterintuitive look at what's really going on.

Steve Miller For the past thirty years, Steve Miller has done the messy, unpleasant work of salvaging America's lost companies with such success that the Wall Street Journal has dubbed him "U.S. Industry's Mr. Fix It." From his very first crisis assignment as point man for Lee Iaccoca's rescue team at Chrysler, Miller built an international reputation while fixing major problems in such varied industries as steel, construction, and health care. Most recently, as chairman and CEO of the bankrupt automotive parts manufacturer Delphi Corporation, he has confronted head-on the major issues threatening the survival of Detroit's Big Three.

A battle is being fought in the heart of industrial America—or what is left of it—Miller observes. In the auto industry as well as every manufacturing corporation, management and labor are at loggerheads over wages and the skyrocketing costs of employee benefits. The way out of this battle is often painful and Miller is deeply aware of the high price individual workers and many communities have had to pay as a result.

In this frank and unsparing memoir, Miller reveals a rarely seen side of American management. Miller recounts the inside story of the many turnaround jobs that have led to his renown as Mr. Fix It. But he also paints an intimate picture of his relationship with Maggie Miller, his wife of forty years, with whom Miller shares the credit for his success. Described by Miller as "my mentor and tormentor," Maggie served as his most trusted adviser and kept him focused on what truly matters until her death from brain cancer in 2006.

A deeply moving personal story and timely snapshot of the state of American manufacturing and what it will take to restore it to profitability, The Turnaround Kid is Steve Miller's fascinating look at his education as an American executive.

Kip Christensen, Rex Burningham “Beginning with a good historical survey of writing implements, [the authors] first tackle equipment and basic pens and pencils, then cover style, methodology, and material variations. Some of the more unusual inclusions are pens of antler or checkered polymer clay, and instruments embellished by inlay and wood burning. The last chapter offers selling tips.” —Booklist

Bathroom Readers' Institute Since 1988, millions of people have discovered the relief of having Uncle John in the bathroom with them! No more frantic searches at the last minute for that perfect magazine article. No more agonizing choices between light reading and the serious stuff. Uncle John's Absolutely Absorbing Bathroom Reader collects humorous stories, interesting facts, and useless trivia chosen specifically for temporary reading needs. This edition includes:

*Weird tourist traps
*Who invented daylight savings time?
*The birth of the calendar
*The history of the bra

Plus, it continues with the regular features readers look forward to, such as the stories behind popular songs, the origins of famous phrases, proverbs from prime-time television, and memorable people who made their mark in 15 minutes.

Bathroom Readers' Institute Flush those boring old gifts and give your friends and family something they can really sit down and digest! The Uncle John's Bathroom Reader series is one of the longest-running, most popular humor collections in the publishing industry. It taps into a vast resource of forgotten readers — the 66 percent of North Americans who admit to reading in the bathroom. It's our 15th year and we're still going strong!

Bathroom Readers' Institute

Bathroom Readers' Institute Calling all bathroom readers!

At last...Here it is...The book you've been waiting for! No more frantic searches at the last minute for that perfect magazine article. No agonizing choices between light reading and the serious stuff. This little volume has it all: Entertainment, humor, education, trivia, science, history, pop culture...and more! And it's even divided by length—you can spend a minute with the Quickies, relax with Normal-length articles, or really get comfortable with Long Items.

With Uncle John's Bathroom reader strategically placed in your home, you'll settle in happily and read about:
The Origin of Common Words and Phrases
The Story behind "Louie, Louie"
Deadly curses and Strange Deaths
Politics in The Wizard of Oz
The origin of Silly Putty
Elvis's Visit to the FBI
The Fabulous 60's
And a host of great bathroom topics!

Bathroom Readers' Hysterical Society Philo T. Farnsworth is not a household word despite the fact that he invented something found in most every household: television. Farnsworth is just one of hundreds of subjects in this hefty comic compendium that plumbs the depths in a survey of great lives. Readers also learn about T'sai Lun, the Chinese eunuch who invented paper - and by extension, toilet paper. Other clever unknowns include the inventors of Velcro, Bakelite, and the microwave oven. Of course, not all of the "great lives" here are anonymous. The "Fun with Heretics" section includes Thomas Paine and Rousseau, revealing some unexpected peculiarities. Liberace, Pancho Villa, and Freud happily coexist in this sometimes raunchy romp. Among the topics? "Philosophers Who Got Killed," "Child Geniuses" (and its evil twin, "High School Dropouts"), and much more.

The Bathroom Readers' Hysterical Society The real stories behind famous people and events from ancient to modern times. Anecdotal, thought provoking and organized by topic. Chapters will include: You Said You Knew How to Fire That Thing: Misadventures and Wrong Turns that Challenged History; the 10 Most Important Forgotten People in History; Slips of the Tongue: Simple Mistakes that Led to Great Discoveries and Awful Disasters.

Bathroom Readers' Hysterical Society Once again, Uncle John goes back in time to bring fans more compelling, confounding, and fascinating peeks into the world's past. As always, the slant is on revealing what isn't taught in history class. Here are scintillating sagas of rogues and rascals, diplomacy and disaster, popes and peasants, nices and vices, defeats and victories, royalty and rabble, feuds and famine, battles and breakthroughs, crime and punishment, secrets and scandals, cultural milestones and historical millstones.

Sample topics include Dictators and Their Offspring; Lord Minimus (the world's smallest man and his big successes); Horses in History; How Salt Shaped the Fortunes of Nations; Shoes Through the Ages; Who Were the Knights Templar?; John Dee: Court Astrologer to Elizabeth I; Great Gigs Through History (town crier, food taster, minstrel); and much more. The folks at the Bathroom Readers' Hysterical Society again lay bare the legends and bring forward the facts in a witty, entertaining way that makes this book perfect reading during "business hours."

Bathroom Readers' Institute Uncle John’s team of all-star writers tackled the storied archives for their funniest, weirdest, and most entertaining sports articles ever. And then, to top it off, they added a spectacular bunch of new stories. You don't have to be a sports fan to enjoy these stories of hard-won victory, agonizing defeat, locker room low-jinx, or little-known sports lore. So settle in and read about the origins of football, baseball, basketball, golf, hockey, ping pong, and more; histories of classic games, from poker and pinball to Donkey Kong and Dungeons and Dragons; the science of golf balls, hockey pucks, and Olympic swimmers; sports firsts, lasts, oldests, newests, and weirdests; plus odd bar sports, flagpole-sitting, dumb jocks, mascots gone wild, and much, much more. Divided into short, medium, and long sections, the book is perfect for both quick trips to the bullpen and day-night double-headers.

Bathroom Readers' Institute Compiled by Uncle John’s crack team of investigators, this witty and informative romp serves up a bounty of fascinating facts and tantalizing tidbits about the great game of golf. While it may not settle the question as to whether or not golf is a sport, the book does answer burning questions such as "Where is the largest sand trap?" (Clementon, NJ — a mere half acre); "How much do Americans spend on golf balls?" ($600 million per year); and "Is there a course that offers the chance to play with a live Bengal tiger?" (Yes! The Monu Valley Golf Club in Northern Bangladesh). Golf movies and presidential duffers — the good and the not-quite-so-good — are discussed, and captive audiences can learn the game’s history: its players, equipment, courses, famous flubs, and ever-changing fashions and philosophies. For serious pros, weekend duffers, or just plain fans of the game, this collection is as satisfying as a hole-in-one.

Bathroom Readers' Institute With Uncle John's Curiously Compelling Bathroom Reader, the dedicated folks at the Bathroom Readers’ Institute offer fast-acting, long-lasting relief for their legions of fans who have been suffering without a new infusion of the series’ trademark trivia and obscure and fascinating facts. Number 18 in the series, this book is divided into short, medium, and long sections for any duration of stay. Readers can plunge into such pressing topics as the origin of Punk Rock, the true story behind all those celebrity jailbirds, whether dragons actually exist, strange diets of the rich and famous, great moments in bad TV, and more. This irresistible read, perfect for any mood, also contains a variety of puzzles and brainteasers for readers to ponder.

Bathroom Readers' Institute Featuring hundreds of amusing illustrations, fun fonts, and easy-to-read content, this book is filled with bite-sized tidbits divided into fun categories covering a wide range of subjects. For example, there’s Green Stuff (“Grasshoppers hear with the fronts of their knees”) and Microscopic Miracles (“There are more creatures in your mouth than there are humans on Earth”), and such comical categories as Facts About Feet and Eww, Gross! Like all the books in this series, this one is loaded with surprising factual information, presented in a format irresistible to young readers.

Bathroom Readers' Institute The all-new 22nd edition in the ever-absorbing Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader series is sure to satisfy readers with more than 500 pages of humor, history, science, pop culture, and more. Flush with facts, the book is divided into short, medium, and long sections, making it ideal for brief visits or extended stays. History junkies can get their fix with the stories of the world’s first detective (he was a criminal turned cop), the great social experiments of the 20th century—Prohibition and the New Deal—and the Lost Cloud People of Peru. And cooks can astound their friends and frighten their families with hillbilly recipes like Doctored Back-of-Pig, ’Nebriated Catfish, and Scorched Yellerbelly. Covering everything from super trains and water wars to 3-D television and the history of surfing, Uncle John’s Endlessly Engrossing Bathroom Reader is sure to make every visit to the throne room more memorable.

Bathroom Readers' Institute Where else can people find out about celebrity museums, where Hitler's nephew lived in New York, or how to do an authentic rain dance? In Uncle John's Slightly Irregular Bathroom Reader, of course! Aimed at the legions of literate bathroom lingerers, this toilet tome is filled with pop culture, forgotten history, strange lawsuits, weird news, and unknown origins of all sorts of things from voodoo to anime. Savvy, edifying, intriguing, and irregular trivia — bathroom brains are now occupied. From reality TV shows that almost were (contestants run a cross-country relay race, only they don't hand off a baton — they hand off a monkey!) to kung fu stories (European explorer Ferdinand Magellan died from a head wound after arrogantly drawing his sword on a Filipino man carrying a stick — who happened to be a Kung Fu master!), Uncle John's corners the market on entertainment that's fun and educational for that downtime that would otherwise be wasted.

Bathroom Readers' Institute Topics: History of Political Parties; How we got the Dollar Part 2; First Star Trek Convention; History of Tipping; Story of Garlic; History of Chocolate; Kung Fu; History of Sgt. Pepper, Rock's Greatest Album; History of Peanuts - the cartoon; How Does Soap Work?; History of the Bra; Origin of the Match; Origin of the Paperclip; Origin of Football

Bathroom Readers' Institute The Bathroom Readers’ Institute shows its softer side with hundreds of pages of feel-good stories, told with Uncle John’s inimitable good humor. Uncle John and his friends at the Bathroom Readers’ Institute have been hard at work — eating lots of chicken soup and sharing hugs aplenty — as they put together our most uplifting collection to date. This hefty collection offers inspirational quotes and uplifting true tales, like the Marathon of Hope run by Canada’s Terry Fox, who ran for 143 days straight (more than 3,300 miles)with an artificial leg. Uncle John’s Tales to Inspire is a truly unique celebration of the human spirit and guaranteed to lift one's mood.

Bathroom Readers' Institute Now in its 16th year, The Bathroom Reader — which seems to have replaced the tie as the most popular Father's Day gift idea — has become a movement, with satisfying, easily digested new selections sure to wipe away bathroom boredom. Handily arranged by length — "short" (a quick read), "medium" (1 to 3 pages), and "long" (for those extended visits) — the book covers everything from Americana to The Name Game to Pop Science and Wordplay. Readers can learn the origins of superglue, sample news stories about underwear, read about animals famous for 15 minutes, and learn of unknown heroes of the Wild West. This broad assortment eliminates ennui while wittily educating readers trapped in airports, cars, buses, or lavatories.

Sophie Kinsella Workaholic attorney Samantha Sweeting has just done the unthinkable. She’s made a mistake so huge, it’ll wreck any chance of a partnership.

Going into utter meltdown, she walks out of her London office, gets on a train, and ends up in the middle of nowhere. Asking for directions at a big, beautiful house, she’s mistaken for an interviewee and finds herself being offered a job as housekeeper. Her employers have no idea they’ve hired a lawyer–and Samantha has no idea how to work the oven. She can’t sew on a button, bake a potato, or get the #@%# ironing board to open. How she takes a deep breath and begins to cope–and finds love–is a story as delicious as the bread she learns to bake.

But will her old life ever catch up with her? And if it does…will she want it back?

Sophie Kinsella Workaholic attorney Samantha Sweeting has just done the unthinkable. She’s made a mistake so huge, it’ll wreck any chance of a partnership. Going into utter meltdown, she walks out of her London office, gets on a train, and ends up in the middle of nowhere. Asking for directions at a big, beautiful house, she’s mistaken for an interviewee and finds herself being offered a job as housekeeper. Her employers have no idea they’ve hired a lawyer—and Samantha has no idea how to work the oven. She can’t sew on a button, bake a potato, or get the #@%# ironing board to open. How she takes a deep breath and begins to cope—and finds love—is a story as delicious as the bread she learns to bake. But will her old life ever catch up with her? And if it does…will she want it back?

Alan Moore, David Lloyd In an alternate future in which Germany wins WWII and Britain becomes a fascist state, a vigilante named "V" stalks the streets of London trying to free England of its ideological chains.

James M. Rippe, Weight Watchers Break through the 10 big diet myths!

In this book, renowned expert Dr. James Rippe and Weight Watchers give you the scientific knowledge you need to break through the myths, get off the dieting roller coaster, and shed those pounds for keeps.

Believers Beware!

MYTH #1 You can't lose weight and keep it off

MYTH #2 A few extra pounds don't matter

MYTH #3 Willpower is the key to successful weight loss

MYTH #4 You can lose weight with exercise alone

MYTH #5 Calories don't matter—avoid fats or carbs to lose weight successfully

MYTH #6 You can't lose weight if you have the wrong metabolism or genes

MYTH #7 You can boost your metabolism by what, how, and when you eat

MYTH #8 It doesn't matter how you take the weight off; you can think about keeping it off later

MYTH #9There is only one right approach to losing weight

MYTH #10 Your weight is your problem, and you need to solve it on your own

"Incisive and refreshing. James Rippe and Weight Watchers expose a series of ten myths pervasive in the weight-loss industry, revealing both the kernels of truth they contain and how they have been misinterpreted and distorted."
—Claude Bouchard, Ph.D., Executive Director of the Pennington Biomedical Research Center, Louisiana State University

Marshall Goldsmith, Mark Reiter America’s most sought-after executive coach shows how to climb the last few rungs of the ladder

The corporate world is filled with executives, men and women who have worked hard for years to reach the upper levels of management. They’re intelligent, skilled, and even charismatic. But only a handful of them will ever reach the pinnacle — and as executive coach Marshall Goldsmith shows in this book, subtle nuances make all the difference. These are small "transactional flaws" performed by one person against another (as simple as not saying thank you enough), which lead to negative perceptions that can hold any executive back. Using Goldsmith’s straightforward, jargonfree advice, it’s amazingly easy behavior to change.

Executives who hire Goldsmith for one-on-one coaching pay $250,000 for the privilege. With this book, his help is available for 1/10,000th of the price.

Malcolm Gladwell What is the difference between choking and panicking? Why are there dozens of varieties of mustard-but only one variety of ketchup? What do football players teach us about how to hire teachers? What does hair dye tell us about the history of the 20th century?
In the past decade, Malcolm Gladwell has written three books that have radically changed how we understand our world and ourselves: The Tipping Point; Blink; and Outliers. Now, in What the Dog Saw, he brings together, for the first time, the best of his writing from TheNew Yorker over the same period.
Here is the bittersweet tale of the inventor of the birth control pill, and the dazzling inventions of the pasta sauce pioneer Howard Moscowitz. Gladwell sits with Ron Popeil, the king of the American kitchen, as he sells rotisserie ovens, and divines the secrets of Cesar Millan, the "dog whisperer" who can calm savage animals with the touch of his hand. He explores intelligence tests and ethnic profiling and "hindsight bias" and why it was that everyone in Silicon Valley once tripped over themselves to hire the same college graduate.
"Good writing," Gladwell says in his preface, "does not succeed or fail on the strength of its ability to persuade. It succeeds or fails on the strength of its ability to engage you, to make you think, to give you a glimpse into someone else's head."What the Dog Saw is yet another example of the buoyant spirit and unflagging curiosity that have made Malcolm Gladwell our most brilliant investigator of the hidden extraordinary.

Kevin Carroll In a boldly designed, highly energetic book, Kevin Carroll leads readers through a series of exercises designed to help them discover their Red Rubber Ball—a dream to chase for a lifetime. With a cardboard box to be decorated, punch-out inspiration cards, a removable dream statement, and gatefold pages that can be written on, this engaging new book offers tweens and teens a fun, accessible way to think about their hopes and dreams.

Spencer Johnson From one of the world's most recognized experts on management comes a charming parable filled with insights designed to help readers manage change quickly and prevail in changing times.

Keith Ferrazzi Disregard the myth of the lone professional “superman” and the rest of our culture’s go-it alone mentality. The real path to success in your work and in your life is through creating an inner circle of “lifeline relationships” – deep, close relationships with a few key trusted individuals who will offer the encouragement, feedback, and generous mutual support every one of us needs to reach our full potential. Whether your dream is to lead a company, be a top producer in your field, overcome the self-destructive habits that hold you back, lose weight or make a difference in the larger world, Who’s Got Your Back will give you the roadmap you’ve been looking for to achieve the success you deserve.

Keith Ferrazzi, the internationally renowned thought leader, consultant, and bestselling author of Never Eat Alone, shows us that becoming a winner in any field of endeavor requires a trusted team of advisors who can offer guidance and help to hold us accountable to achieving our goals. It is the reason PH.D candidates have advisor teams, top executives have boards, world class athletes have fitness coaches, and presidents have cabinets.

In this step-by-step guide to the powerful principles behind personal growth and change, you’ll learn how to:

· Master the mindsets that will help you to build deeper, more trusting “lifeline relationships”

· Overcome the career-crippling habits that hold you back, once and for all

· Get further, faster by setting goals in a dramatically more powerful way

· Use “sparring” as a productive tool to make the decisions that will fuel personal success

· Replace the yes men in your life with those who get it and care – and will hold you accountable to achieving your goals

· Lower your guard and let others help!

None of us can do it alone. We need the perspective and advice of a trusted team. And in Who’s Got Your Back, Keith Ferrazzi shows us how to put our own “dream team” together.

Stewart Brand An icon of the environmental movement outlines a provocative approach for reclaiming our planet

According to Stewart Brand, a lifelong environmentalist who sees everything in terms of solvable design problems, three profound transformations are under way on Earth right now. Climate change is real and is pushing us toward managing the planet as a whole. Urbanization-half the world's population now lives in cities, and eighty percent will by midcentury-is altering humanity's land impact and wealth. And biotechnology is becoming the world's dominant engineering tool. In light of these changes, Brand suggests that environmentalists are going to have to reverse some longheld opinions and embrace tools that they have traditionally distrusted. Only a radical rethinking of traditional green pieties will allow us to forestall the cataclysmic deterioration of the earth's resources.

Whole Earth Discipline shatters a number of myths and presents counterintuitive observations on why cities are actually greener than countryside, how nuclear power is the future of energy, and why genetic engineering is the key to crop and land management. With a combination of scientific rigor and passionate advocacy, Brand shows us exactly where the sources of our dilemmas lie and offers a bold and inventive set of policies and solutions for creating a more sustainable society.

In the end, says Brand, the environmental movement must become newly responsive to fast-moving science and take up the tools and discipline of engineering. We have to learn how to manage the planet's global-scale natural infrastructure with as light a touch as possible and as much intervention as necessary.

Daniel H. Pink Lawyers. Accountants. Radiologists. Software engineers. That's what our parents encouraged us to become when we grew up. But Mom and Dad were wrong. The future belongs to a very different kind of person with a very different kind of mind. The era of "left brain" dominance, and the Information Age that it engendered, are giving way to a new world in which "right brain" qualities-inventiveness, empathy, meaning-predominate. That's the argument at the center of this provocative and original book, which uses the two sides of our brains as a metaphor for understanding the contours of our times.

In the tradition of Emotional Intelligence and Now, Discover Your Strengths, Daniel H. Pink offers a fresh look at what it takes to excel. A Whole New Mind reveals the six essential aptitudes on which professional success and personal fulfillment now depend, and includes a series of hands-on exercises culled from experts around the world to help readers sharpen the necessary abilities. This book will change not only how we see the world but how we experience it as well.

Tara Hunt The book that catches the crest of Web 2.0 and shows how any business can harness its power by increasing whuffie, the store of social capital that is the currency of the digital world.

Everyone knows about blogs and social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, and has heard about someone who has used them to grow a huge customer base. Everyone wants to be hands-on, grassroots, and interactive, but what does this mean? And more to the point, how do you do it?

As one who has actually launched a company using the power of online communities, and who now advises large and small companies, Tara Hunt (named by the San Francisco Chronicle, along with luminaries Jimmy Wales and Tim O’Reilly, as a digital Utopian) is the perfect person to do this book.

While The Whuffie Factor will traverse the landscape of Web 2.0 and show how to become a player, it is not just another book about online marketing. People see the huge business potential of the online world and the first impulse is: Let’s throw a bunch of money at it. To which Tara Hunt says: “Stop! Money isn’t the capital of choice in online communities, it is whuffie–social capital–and how to raise it is at the heart of this book.” In the Web 2.0 world, market capital flows from having high social capital. Without whuffie you lose your connections and any recommendations you make will be seen as spam–met with negative reactions and a loss of social capital.

The Whuffie Factor provides businesspeople with a strategic map and specific tactics for the constantly evolving, elusive, and, to some, strange world of on­line communities. By connecting with your customers through community interaction, you’ll raise your social capital, create demand, and sell more product. Consumer loyalty is a direct result of whuffie. With great stories of online business successes and cautionary tales of major missteps–recording industry, anyone?–Tara Hunt reveals how social networking has more influence over buying decisions than any other marketing tool and how your business can tap into the vast world of Web 2.0 to build an unshakable foundation for twenty-first-century-style online success.

For those without millions–even thousands–to throw around, here is a fresh perspective for using social networks to help build a business whether you are a start-up or a Fortune 500 giant. Even those in big rich companies need to learn how to be effective and not waste their money. For them–as well as the entrepreneur–The Whuffie Factor is an eye-opening guide to a world they probably don’t understand all that well.

Don Tapscott, Anthony D. Williams In just the last few years, traditional collaboration—in a meeting room, a conference call, even a convention center—has been superseded by collaborations on an astronomical scale.

Today, encyclopedias, jetliners, operating systems, mutual funds, and many other items are being created by teams numbering in the thousands or even millions. While some leaders fear the heaving growth of these massive online communities, Wikinomics proves this fear is folly. Smart firms can harness collective capability and genius to spur innovation, growth, and success.

A brilliant guide to one of the most profound changes of our time, Wikinomics challenges our most deeply-rooted assumptions about business and will prove indispensable to anyone who wants to understand competitiveness in the twenty-first century.

Based on a $9 million research project led by bestselling author Don Tapscott, Wikinomics shows how masses of people can participate in the economy like never before. They are creating TV news stories, sequencing the human genome, remixing their favorite music, designing software, finding a cure for disease, editing school texts, inventing new cosmetics, or even building motorcycles. You'll read about:

• Rob McEwen, the Goldcorp, Inc. CEO who used open source tactics and an online competition to save his company and breathe new life into an old-fashioned industry.
• Flickr, Second Life, YouTube, and other thriving online communities that transcend social networking to pioneer a new form of collaborative production.
• Mature companies like Procter & Gamble that cultivate nimble, trust-based relationships with external collaborators to form vibrant business ecosystems.

An important look into the future, Wikinomics will be your road map for doing business in the twenty-first century.

William Shakespeare Definitive, comprehensive, and handsome edition presents every one of Shakespeare's great plays-the Comedies, Tragedies and Histories-plus his poems and, of course, the Sonnets. All in one beautifully illustrated volume. B&W illustrations throughout. 1248 pages.

James Surowiecki “No one in this world, so far as I know, has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.”  —H. L. Mencken
 
H. L. Mencken was wrong.

In this endlessly fascinating book, New Yorker columnist James Surowiecki explores a deceptively simple idea that has profound implications: large groups of people are smarter than an elite few, no matter how brilliant—better at solving problems, fostering innovation, coming to wise decisions, even predicting the future.

This seemingly counterintuitive notion has endless and major ramifications for how businesses operate, how knowledge is advanced, how economies are (or should be) organized and how we live our daily lives. With seemingly boundless erudition and in delightfully clear prose, Surowiecki ranges across fields as diverse as popular culture, psychology, ant biology, economic behaviorism, artificial intelligence, military history and political theory to show just how this principle operates in the real world. 

Despite the sophistication of his arguments, Surowiecki presents them in a wonderfully entertaining manner. The examples he uses are all down-to-earth, surprising, and fun to ponder. Why is the line in which you’re standing always the longest? Why is it that you can buy a screw anywhere in the world and it will fit a bolt bought ten-thousand miles away? Why is network television so awful? If you had to meet someone in Paris on a specific day but had no way of contacting them, when and where would you meet? Why are there traffic jams? What’s the best way to win money on a game show? Why, when you walk into a convenience store at 2:00 A.M. to buy a quart of orange juice, is it there waiting for you? What do Hollywood mafia movies have to teach us about why corporations exist?

The Wisdom of Crowds is a brilliant but accessible biography of an idea, one with important lessons for how we live our lives, select our leaders, conduct our business, and think about our world.

Jeff Strong You've seen a few shows on TV, and working with wood looks like it could be quite entertaining and rewarding. After all, you get to create something that you can proudly display to your friends and family. But where and how do you begin to move from expressed interest to hands-on experience?

Woodworking For Dummies shows you how your raw building materials stack up, with everything you wood need to know about hardwood, softwood, plywood, veneer wood, plain-sawn wood, rift-cut wood, quarter-sawn wood, solid wood, man-made wood, and more. This down-to-earth guide gives you the goods on how boards are made from trees and the characteristics of hardwood and softwood species, plus all the buzz on Gearing up with the right toolsPutting safety first in your workshopUsing adhesives and glueWorking with wood jointsSmoothing it out by sanding and fillingAdding color with stains and paintsProtecting your work with topcoats

Whether you want to put together a simple plywood bookcase or an incredible solid oak dining table, Woodworking For Dummies can help you get organized as you craft your plans for a piece that'll reflect your personal touch. You'll discover how to Measure and mark your woodDistinguish among saw designsChoose and use sharpening toolsHone in on hot melt glueSpeed things up with modern frame jointsGet down to the nitty-gritty on nailsApply water-based polyurethanes

This handy reference packs in essential information for the novice woodworker and some advanced tips and tricks to jumpstart any woodworker's existing skills. Detailed illustrations, how-to photos, and a color insert defining the look of different woods and the effects of finishes are sure to inspire a sawdust storm in your busy workshop.

Andy Sernovitz Who Is Talking About You?

Foreword by Seth Godin and Afterword by Guy Kawasaki.

Master the art of word of mouth marketing with this practical hands-on guide.

With straightforward advice and humor, marketing expert Andy Sernovitz will show you how the world's most respected and profitable companies get their best customers for free through the power of word of mouth.

Learn the five essential steps that make word of mouth work and everything you need to get started using them. Understand the real purpose of blogs, communities, viral email, evangelists, and buzz—when to use them and how simple it is to make them work.

Learn what sparks the irrepressible enthusiasm of Apple and TiVo fans. Understand why everyone is talking about a certain restaurant, car, band, or dry cleaner—and why other businesses and products are ignored. Discover why some products become huge successes without a penny of promotion—and why some multi-million-dollar advertising campaigns fail to get noticed.

Open your eyes to a new way of doing business—that honest marketing makes more money, because customers who trust you will talk about you. Learn how to be the remarkable company that people want to share with their friends. (edited by author)

Thomas L. Friedman When scholars write the history of the world twenty years from now, and they come to the chapter "Y2K to March 2004," what will they say was the most crucial development? The attacks on the World Trade Center on 9/11 and the Iraq war? Or the convergence of technology and events that allowed India, China, and so many other countries to become part of the global supply chain for services and manufacturing, creating an explosion of wealth in the middle classes of the world's two biggest nations, giving them a huge new stake in the success of globalization? And with this "flattening" of the globe, which requires us to run faster in order to stay in place, has the world gotten too small and too fast for human beings and their political systems to adjust in a stable manner?

In this brilliant new book, the award-winning New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman demystifies the brave new world for readers, allowing them to make sense of the often bewildering global scene unfolding before their eyes. With his inimitable ability to translate complex foreign policy and economic issues, Friedman explains how the flattening of the world happened at the dawn of the twenty-first century; what it means to countries, companies, communities, and individuals; and how governments and societies can, and must, adapt. The World Is Flat is the timely and essential update on globalization, its successes and discontents, powerfully illuminated by one of our most respected journalists.
Thomas L. Friedman has won the Pulitzer Prize three times for his work at The New York Times. He is the author of three best-selling books: From Beirut to Jerusalem, winner of the National Book Award for nonfiction and still considered to be the definitive work on the Middle East, The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization, and Longitudes and Attitudes: Exploring the World After September 11. He lives in Bethesda, Maryland, with his family. Winner of the Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Book AwardA New York Times Notable Book
A Christian Science Monitor Best Book of the Year A Washington Post Best Book of the YearAn Economist Best Book of the Year  When scholars write the history of the world twenty years from now, and they come to the chapter "Y2K to March 2004," what will they say was the most crucial development? The attacks on the World Trade Center on 9/11 and the Iraq war? Or the convergence of technology and events that allowed India, China, and so many other countries to become part of the global supply chain for services and manufacturing, creating an explosion of wealth in the middle classes of the world's two biggest nations, giving them a huge new stake in the success of globalization? And with this "flattening" of the globe, which requires us to run faster in order to stay in place, has the world gotten too small and too fast for human beings and their political systems to adjust in a stable manner?

In this brilliant new book, the award-winning New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman demystifies the brave new world for readers, allowing them to make sense of the often bewildering global scene unfolding before their eyes. With his inimitable ability to translate complex foreign policy and economic issues, Friedman explains how the flattening of the world happened at the dawn of the twenty-first century; what it means to countries, companies, communities, and individuals; and how governments and societies can, and must, adapt. The World Is Flat is the timely and essential update on globalization, its successes and discontents, powerfully illuminated by one of our most respected journalists. "The World Is Flat continues the franchise Friedman has made for himself as a great explicator of and cheerleader for globalization, building upon his 1999 The Lexus and the Olive Tree. Like its predecessor, this book showcases Friedman's gift for lucid dissections of abstruse economic phenomena, his teacher's head, his preacher's heart, his genius for trend-spotting . . . [This book] also shares some of the earlier volume's excitement (mirroring Rajesh Rao's) and hesitations about whether we're still living in an era dominated by old-fashioned states or in a postmodern, globalized era where states matter far less and the principal engine of change is a leveled playing field for international trade."—Warren Bass, The Washington Post "[An] exciting and very readable account of globalization . . . [Friedman] provides a compelling case that something big is going on . . . One mark of a great book is that it makes you see things in a new way, and Mr. Friedman certainly succeeds in that goal . . . In his provocative account, Mr. Friedman suggests what this brave new world will mean to all of us, in both the developed and the developing worlds."—Joseph E. Stiglitz, The New York Times

"The World Is Flat continues the franchise Friedman has made for himself as a great explicator of and cheerleader for globalization, building upon his 1999 The Lexus and the Olive Tree. Like its predecessor, this book showcases Friedman's gift for lucid dissections of abstruse economic phenomena, his teacher's head, his preacher's heart, his genius for trend-spotting . . . [This book] also shares some of the earlier volume's excitement (mirroring Rajesh Rao's) and hesitations about whether we're still living in an era dominated by old-fashioned states or in a postmodern, globalized era where states matter far less and the principal engine of change is a leveled playing field for international trade."—Warren Bass, The Washington Post

"Nicely sums up the explosion of digital-technology advances during the past 15 years and places the phenomenon in its global context . . . [Friedman] never shrinks from the biggest problems and the thorniest issues . . . Ambitious."—Paul Mangnusson, BusinessWeek

"Excellent . . . [This book's] insight is true and deeply important . . . The metaphor of a flat world, used by Friedman to describe the next phase of globalization, is ingenious . . . The book is done in Friedman's trademark style. You travel with him, meet his wife and kids, learn about his friends and sit in on his interviews . . . [This method] works in making complicated ideas accessible . . . Friedman has a flair for business reporting and finds amusing stories about Wal-Mart, UPS, Dell, and JetBlue, among others, that relate to his basic theme."—Fareed Zakaria, The New York Times Book Review (cover review)

"No one today chronicles global shifts in simple and practical terms quite like Friedman. He plucks insights from his travels and the published press that can leave you spinning like a top."—Clayton Jones, The Christian Science Monitor

"Friedman is such a good reporter and writer that he will keep you turning pages . . . [He] is gifted at reducing big trends into easily digestible bites, providing a readable account of the main forces that have flattened the world."—Peter Hadekel, Montreal Gazette

"Gives us a glimpse of the brave new flat world that is already upon us . . . [Friedman] writes in a playful manner [and] likes to use lists and new expressions [and] while his technique may at times be lighthearted and informal, Friedman's meaning is clear: Accept the new world, adapt to it and prosper, or ignore the new developments at your peril."—Russ L. Juskalian, USA Today

"A brilliant, instantly clarifying metaphor for the latest, arguably the most profound conceptual megashift to rock the world in living memory . . . The World is Flat is well written, a fast read [that] covers all the bases . . . This is an important book."—David Ticoll, The Globe and Mail (Toronto)

"Friedman is a smart guy, a good reporter . . . His best writing [in this book] comes when he acknowledges the problems of globalization."—Kevin Drum, The Washington Monthly

"Before 9/11, New York Times columnist Friedman was best known as the author of The Lexus and the Olive Tree, one of the major popular accounts of globalization and its discontents. Having devoted most of the last four years of his column to the latter as embodied by the Middle East, Friedman picks up where he left off, saving al-Qaeda et al. for the close. For Friedman, cheap, ubiquitous telecommunications have finally obliterated all impediments to international competition, and the dawning 'flat world' is a jungle pitting 'lions' and 'gazelles,' where 'economic stability is not going to be a feature' and 'the weak will fall farther behind.' Rugged, adaptable entrepreneurs, by contrast, will be empowered. The service sector (telemarketing, accounting, computer programming, engineering and scientific research, etc.), will be further outsourced to the English-spoken abroad; manufacturing, meanwhile, will continue to be off-shored to China. As anyone who reads his column knows, Friedman agrees with the transnational business executives who are his main sources that these developments are desirable and unstoppable, and that American workers should be preparing to 'create value through leadership' and 'sell personality' . . . [The book's] last 100 pages on the economic and political roots of global Islamism are filled with the kind of close reporting and intimate yet accessible analysis that have been hard to come by. Add in Friedman's winning first-person interjec...

Noah J. Goldstein, Steve J. Martin, Robert B. Cialdini Small changes can make a big difference in your powers of persuasion

What one word can you start using today to increase your persuasiveness by more than fifty percent?

Which item of stationery can dramatically increase people's responses to your requests?

How can you win over your rivals by inconveniencing them?

Why does knowing that so many dentists are named Dennis improve your persuasive prowess?

Every day we face the challenge of persuading others to do what we want. But what makes people say yes to our requests? Persuasion is not only an art, it is also a science, and researchers who study it have uncovered a series of hidden rules for moving people in your direction. Based on more than sixty years of research into the psychology of persuasion, Yes! reveals fifty simple but remarkably effective strategies that will make you much more persuasive at work and in your personal life, too.

Cowritten by the world's most quoted expert on influence, Professor Robert Cialdini, Yes! presents dozens of surprising discoveries from the science of persuasion in short, enjoyable, and insightful chapters that you can apply immediately to become a more effective persuader. Why did a sign pointing out the problem of vandalism in the Petrified Forest National Park actually increase the theft of pieces of petrified wood? Why did sales of jam multiply tenfold when consumers were offered many fewer flavors? Why did people prefer a Mercedes immediately after giving reasons why they prefer a BMW? What simple message on cards left in hotel rooms greatly increased the number of people who behaved in environmentally friendly ways?

Often counterintuitive, the findings presented in Yes! will steer you away from common pitfalls while empowering you with little known but proven wisdom.

Whether you are in advertising, marketing, management, on sales, or just curious about how to be more influential in everyday life, Yes! shows how making small, scientifically proven changes to your approach can have a dramatic effect on your persuasive powers.

Camille Lavington, Stephanie Losee In the three seconds it takes you to walk through a door and extend your hand to someone for the first time, that person has already made irreversible judgments about you. You send out hundreds of signals about yourself, and people read those signals and react to them long before you've had a chance to say or do anything of substance.

Camille Lavington is a communications consultant who commands substantial fees for teaching personal marketing to business people from corporate executives to mid-level managers. In You've Only Got Three Seconds, she shares her strategies for defining your personal career goals, taking inventory of your strengths and vulnerabilities, and determining what you must do, say, and wear in order to fit the role you want to fulfill.

Personal marketing isn't about social cimbing or trying to be someone you're not. Success at the end of the millennium comes to people who are versatile, who can make positive impressions in any group, who can peg their peers' or superiors' secret agendas, and use psychodynamics to get what they want. With this book, people from entry-level job applicants to stymied executives will be ready to take their internal and external makeovers into the world, make a smashing first impression, and follow through with finesse.

Mark Richardson On the Trail of Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Zen and Now is the story of a story that will appeal to the 5 million readers of the original and serve as an initiation to a whole new generation.

Since its original publication in 1968, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values has touched whole generations of readers with its serious attempt to define “quality” in a world that seems indifferent to the responsibilities that quality brings. Mark Richardson expands that journey with an investigation of his own – to find the enigmatic author of Zen and the Art, ask him a few questions, and place his classic book in context. The result manages to be a biography of Pirsig himself – in the discovery of an unknown life of madness, murder and eventual resolution – and a splendid meditation on creativity and problem-solving, sanity and insanity.

Jeffrey S. Young, William L. Simon iCon takes a look at the most astounding figure in a business era noted for its mavericks, oddballs, and iconoclasts. Drawing on a wide range of sources, Jeffrey Young and William Simon provide new perspectives on the legendary creation of Apple, detail Jobs’s meteoric rise, and the devastating plunge that left him not only out of Apple, but out of the computer-making business entirely. This unflinching and completely unauthorized portrait reveals both sides of Jobs’s role in the remarkable rise of the Pixar animation studio, also re-creates the acrimony between Jobs and Disney’s Michael Eisner, and examines Jobs’s dramatic his rise from the ashes with his recapture of Apple. The authors examine the takeover and Jobs’s reinvention of the company with the popular iMac and his transformation of the industry with the revolutionary iPod. iCon is must reading for anyone who wants to understand how the modern digital age has been formed, shaped, and refined by the most influential figure of the age–a master of three industries: movies, music, and computers.

Nancy Duarte, Duarte Nancy No matter where you are on the organizational ladder, the odds are high that you've delivered a high-stakes presentation to your peers, your boss, your customers, or the general public. Presentation software is one of the few tools that requires professionals to think visually on an almost daily basis. But unlike verbal skills, effective visual expression is not easy, natural, or actively taught in schools or business training programs. slide:ology fills that void.

Written by Nancy Duarte, President and CEO of Duarte Design, the firm that created the presentation for Al Gore's Oscar-winning film, An Inconvenient Truth, this book is full of practical approaches to visual story development that can be applied by anyone. The book combines conceptual thinking and inspirational design, with insightful case studies from the world's leading brands. With slide:ology you'll learn to:

Connect with specific audiencesTurn ideas into informative graphicsUse sketching and diagramming techniques effectivelyCreate graphics that enable audiences to process information easilyDevelop truly influential presentationsUtilize presentation technology to your advantage

Millions of presentations and billions of slides have been produced — and most of them miss the mark. slide:ology will challenge your traditional approach to creating slides by teaching you how to be a visual thinker. And it will help your career by creating momentum for your cause.