Why?In an era of growing cultural pessimism, many thoughtful individuals believe that different civilisations – especially Islam and the West – cannot live together in peace. The ten countries of ASEAN provide a thriving counter-example of civilizational co-existence. Here 625m people live together in peace. This miracle was delivered by ASEAN.In an era of growing economic pessimism, where many young people believe that their lives will get worse in coming decades, Southeast Asia bubbles with optimism. In an era where many thinkers predict rising geopolitical competition and tension, ASEAN regularly brings together all the world’s great powers.Stories of peace are told less frequently than stories of conflict and war. ASEAN’s imperfections make better headlines than its achievements. But in the hands of thinker and writer Kishore Mahbubani, the good news story is also a provocation and a challenge to the rest of the world."This excellent book explains, in clear and simple terms, how and why ASEAN has become one of the most successful regional organizations in the world."George Yeo"A powerful and passionate account of how, against all odds, ASEAN transformed the region and why Asia and the world need it even more today."Amitav Acharya“Kishore and I have written that the world is coming together in a Fusion of Civilisations. This book documents beautifully how ASEAN has achieved this fusion. The ASEAN story is hugely instructive and this book tells it very well.”Larry SummersKishore Mahbubani is Dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore, and author of The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East. Jeffery Sng is a writer and former diplomat based in Bangkok, co-author of A History of the Thai-Chinese.

    Confident America has been conquered, Satan prepares to initiate the final stage of his master plan, but it requires a willing partner—will she say yes?Convinced his demon general Lord Nefarious has successfully conquered America, Satan himself now decides it’s time for him to step out of the shadows and complete his master plan. But for it to succeed, he must find a willing partner… On the run, frightened, and alone, Rae is cornered one fateful night in a rundown motel room by the devil himself. He has a once-in-eternity offer for her—the chance to change the world forever. But to convince her to freely accept it, Satan needs to connect with Rae’s past, present, and future to prove to her he can be trusted after all. A showdown for the ages is officially on, and humanity hangs in the balance.

    Sunstein, bestselling author and President Obama’s “Regulatory Czar,” helped to oversee a revolution in better government. He explains how and why—and what comes next.The future of government arrived four years ago. Government became simpler, it became smarter, and Cass Sunstein was at the center of it all. Drawing on state-of-the-art work in behavioral psychology and economics, Sunstein, as administrator of the powerful White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), quietly helped save the nation billions of dollars while preventing thousands of deaths and countless illnesses and accidents. All this was accomplished in part through the extraordinary power of nudges—low-cost, seemingly modest policies that preserve freedom of choice. In combination with smart, disciplined cost-benefit analysis, nudges are simplifying government and making it far more effective.Twenty-first century insights now inform simplified mortgage and student loan applications, the labeling of food and energy-efficient cars, financial reform, and health care reform. New principles—democratizing data, presenting individuals and businesses with the most salient information, ensuring that the better outcome is the automatic outcome—are transforming government. Countless regulations are being streamlined or eliminated. Transparent review of which rules are working, and which aren’t, is becoming the norm. Citing numerous examples from his years in the first term of the Obama Administration, and projecting forward into a data-driven future, Simpler provides a new understanding of how government can work.

    But the full impact of the crises we have recently faced will create far more problems, and unless you're prepared, you'll struggle to regain your financial footing.In The Great Reflation, author Tony Boeckh helps you understand how these crises, and the policies passed to jumpstart the economy, will play out for investments and business, and provides you with the tools to excel in today's rapidly evolving financial landscape. He reveals how similar episodes compare with the current crises and what this could mean for your financial future.Arms you with practical insights that will allow you to evaluate different investment options Explores the implications of the end of the private debt cycle, the possible rise of a new age of thrift, and the new government debt crisis Reveals how you can profit from once-in-a-lifetime opportunities as well as proper portfolio allocation strategies While things may never return to "normal," you can still make choices that will allow you to prosper. This book will show you how.

    Unfortunately, most of us were never taught how to think and communicate about money. The Money Code is a modern tale of one person's journey to uncover the five secrets to living his one best financial life. Through his voyage, you will learn how to:- Prevent bad decisions about money- Identify your Money Mind‚ Fear, Happiness, or Commitment and how it affects every financial decision you make- Use a custom checklist to improve your entire financial life- Clearly discuss decisions about money with the ones you love- Finally take control of your financial life

    You want sugar-coated cliches that go down easy? Seek them elsewhere - this book isn't for the faint heart. Kennedy steers you along the bumpy road to growing a business, showing you potholes along the way.Expose yourself to Dan's "25 Eternal Business Truths" and prepare for a lot of chin-rubbing insight. Get Dan Kennedy's take on your sales, cash flow, payroll, productivity, and on getting out of trouble wherever it arises. It's the kind of streetwise wisdom his readers (and high-paying consulting clients) swear by - all the way to the bank.

    Its manufacturing underpins the world's economy; its military is growing at the fastest rate of any nation and its leader - Xi Jinping - is to set the pace and tone of world affairs for decades.In 2017 Xi Jinping became part of the constitution - an honour not seen since Chairman Mao. Here, China expert Kerry Brown guides us through the world according to Xi: his plans to make China the most powerful country on earth and to eradicate poverty for its citizens. In this captivating book we discover Xi's beliefs, how he thinks about communism, and how far he is willing to go to defend it.

    Pearce deftly shows us the hidden worlds that sustain a Western lifestyle, and he does it by examining the sources of everything in his own life; as an ordinary citizen of the Western world, he, like all of us, is an "eco-sinner." In Confessions of an Eco-Sinner, Pearce surveys his home and then launches on a global tour to track down, among other things, the Tanzanians who grow and harvest his fair-trade coffee (which isn't as fair as one might hope), the Central American plantations that grow his daily banana (a treat that may disappear forever), the women in the Bangladeshi sweatshops who sew his jeans, the Chinese factory cities where the world's computers are made, and the African afterlife for old cell phones. It's a fascinating portrait, by turns sobering and hopeful, of the effects the world's more than 6 billion inhabitants-all eating, consuming, making-have on our planet, and of the working and living conditions of the people who produce most of these goods.

    They have universally been proven wrong. Meanwhile, those who have bet on human resourcefulness have almost always been correct.In his widely praised book Ecoscam, Ronald Bailey strongly countered environmentalist alarmism, using facts to demonstrate just how wildly overstated many claims of impending ecological doom really were. Now, twenty years later, the Reason Magazine science correspondent is back to assess the future of humanity and the global biosphere. Bailey finds, contrary to popular belief, that many present ecological trends are quite positive. Including: Falling cancer incidence rates in the United States. The likelihood of a declining world population by mid-century. The abundant return of agricultural land to nature as the world reaches peak farmland. A proven link between increases in national wealth and reductions in air and water pollution Global warming is a problem, but the cost of clean energy could soon fall below that of fossil fuels.In The End of Doom, Bailey avoids polemics and offers a balanced, fact-based and ultimately hopeful perspective on our current environmental situation. Now isn't that a breath of fresh air?

      Switch by Chip Heath and Dan Heath| Key Takeaways, Analysis & Review Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard (2010) is about how to bring about change in an organization. Its main focus is changing behavior by appealing to the rational and emotional sides of people’s psyches. To generate change, authors Chip and Dan Heath maintain, a leader must connect with both sides, the rational and the emotional. This is because sometimes, one side can work against the other and sabotage successful change. The rational side tends to analyze possibilities for change so much that it becomes unable to act—so change never occurs. The emotional side is ready, or even eager, to act on change, but it can act compulsively and without focus. This means that changes based solely on emotion are likely to fail. To bring about real change, a leader must stimulate the emotional side of a group’s psyche to get the process of change underway, then harness its rational side to give this change a concerted direction…  This companion to Switch includes: Overview of the book Important People Key Takeaways Analysis of Key Takeaways and much more!

    The costs of this overwork are enormous, both personally and societally. This bracing collection of essays is both a wide-ranging analysis of the phenomenon and a blueprint for change. With contributions by such notable names as Vicki Robin, author of Your Money or Your Life, and David Korten, author of When Corporations Rule the World, this book shows what ordinary citizens can do to restore balance to themselves and their communities. Take Back Your Time is the official handbook for Take Back Your Time Day, a national event rallying support for reclaiming a proper work-life balance.

    This book connects Lean tools to the Lean journey, shows how to identify and eliminate waste, and aids the reader in seeing Lean for what it truly is: to create a learning and problem solving culture. Written to educate the entire organization on the fundamentals of Lean thinking, this is the perfect source to engage all team members at all levels of an organization.

    . . It quoted [CFO] Jeff McMahon addressing the company’s creditors and cautioning them against a rash judgment. “Don’t assume that there is a smoking gun.”Sherron knew Enron well enough to know that the company was in extreme spin mode…Power Failure is the electrifying behind-the-scenes story of the collapse of Enron, the high-flying gas and energy company touted as the poster child of the New Economy that, in its hubris, had aspired to be “The World’s Leading Company,” and had briefly been the seventh largest corporation in America.Written by prizewinning journalist Mimi Swartz, and substantially based on the never-before-published revelations of former Enron vice-president Sherron Watkins, as well as hundreds of other interviews, Power Failure shows the human face beyond the greed, arrogance, and raw ambition that fueled the company’s meteoric rise in the late 1990s. At the dawn of the new century, Ken Lay’s and Jeff Skilling's faces graced the covers of business magazines, and Enron’s money oiled the political machinery behind George W. Bush’s election campaign. But as Wall Street analysts sang Enron’s praises, and its stock spiraled dizzyingly into the stratosphere, the company’s leaders were madly scrambling to manufacture illusory profits, hide its ballooning debt, and bully Wall Street into buying its fictional accounting and off-balance-sheet investment vehicles. The story of Enron’s fall is a morality tale writ large, performed on a stage with an unforgettable array of props and side plots, from parking lots overflowing with Boxsters and BMWs to hot-house office affairs and executive tantrums. Among the cast of characters Mimi Swartz and Sherron Watkins observe with shrewd Texas eyes and an insider’s perspective are: CEO Ken Lay, Enron’s “outside face,” who was more interested in playing diplomat and paving the road to a political career than in managing Enron’s high-testosterone, anything-goes culture; Jeff Skilling, the mastermind behind Enron’s mercenary trading culture, who transformed himself from a nerdy executive into the personification of millennial cool; Rebecca Mark, the savvy and seductive head of Enron’s international division, who was Skilling’s sole rival to take over the company; and Andy Fastow, whose childish pranks early in his career gave way to something far more destructive. Desperate to be a player in Enron’s deal-making, trader-oriented culture, Fastow transformed Enron’s finance department into a “profit center,” creating a honeycomb of financial entities to bolster Enron’s “profits,” while diverting tens of millions of dollars into his own pocketsAn unprecedented chronicle of Enron’s shocking collapse, Power Failure should take its place alongside the classics of previous decades – Barbarians at the Gate and Liar’s Poker – as one of the cautionary tales of our times.From the Hardcover edition.

    And they never looked back.The Minimalists write essays about living a meaning a meaningful life with less stuff for their online audience of more than 100,000 monthly readers at TheMinimalists.com. They have been featured in the Wall Street Journal, CBS, NBC, FOX, NPR, CBC, Zen Habits, and numerous other outlets. Simplicity: Essays is The Minimalists’ fifth book and second essay collection, a follow-up to their bestselling Minimalism: Essential Essays. In the two years since the authors quit their six-figure corporate jobs and embraced simpler lives, they have written more than 200 essays on the subject of simple living. Simplicity: Essays serves as a “best of” collection for their most important collaborative writings.This 151-page book contains 46 edited and revised essays about living a meaningful life with less stuff, including “UnAmerican Dream,” “Asking Friends & Family to Embrace Change,” and “I Am Not the Center of the Universe.” It also includes a special forward by The Minimalists and two unpublished essays that can’t be found anywhere else: “Simplicity” and “The Worst Christmas Ever.”The order of the essays in this collection is deliberate; they are meant to be read in sequence from beginning to end. Doing so will result in an experience that is different from reading these essays individually throughout the web, connecting various concepts that may otherwise seem unconnected. These essays were written to encourage readers to think critically about the excess in their lives and, ultimately, to take action towards living more intentionally. This collection is short enough to be read in a few sittings, or it can be digested slowly, reading one essay a day for six weeks, applying its principals each day to your own life.

    And it's easier than you think.If you're like most entrepreneurs, you started your business so you could be your own boss, make the money you deserve, and live life on your own terms. In reality, you're bogged down in the daily grind, constantly putting out fires, answering an endless stream of questions, and continually hunting for cash.Now, Mike Michalowicz, the author of Profit First and other small-business bestsellers, offers a straightforward step-by-step path out of this dilemma. In Clockwork, he draws on more than six years of research and real life examples to explain his simple approach to making your business ultra-efficient.Among other powerful strategies, you will discover how to:- Make your employees act like owners: Free yourself from micromanaging by using a simple technique to empower your people to make smart decisions without you.- Pinpoint your business's most important function: Unleash incredible efficiency by identifying and focusing everyone on the one function that is most crucial to your business.- Know what to fix next: Most entrepreneurs try to fix every inefficiency at once and end up fixing nothing. Use the weakest link in the chain method to find the one fix that will add the most value now.Whether you have a staff of one, one hundred, or somewhere in between, whether you're a new entrepreneur or have been overworked and overstressed for years, Clockwork is your path to finally making your business work for you.