Featuring lessons learned from successful businesses in the world's poorest countries, Jessica Jackley's Clay Water Brick will motivate readers to more deeply appreciate the incredible entrepreneurial potential that exists in every human being on this planet--especially themselves."The heart of entrepreneurship is never about what we have. It's about what we do." Meet Patrick, who had next to nothing and started a thriving business using just the ground beneath his feet . . .Blessing, who built her shop right in the middle of the road, refusing to take the chance that her customers might pass her by . . .Constance, who cornered the banana market in her African village with her big personality and sense of mission.Patrick, Blessing, Constance, and many others are among the poorest of the world's poor. And yet they each had crucial lessons to teach Jessica Jackley--lessons about resilience, creativity, perseverance, and, above all, entrepreneurship.For as long as she could remember, Jackley, the co-founder of the revolutionary microlending site Kiva, had a singular and urgent ambition: to help alleviate global poverty. While in her twenties, she set off for Africa to finally meet the people she had long dreamed of helping. The insights of those she met changed her understanding. Today she believes that many of the most inspiring entrepreneurs in the world are not focused on high-tech ventures or making a lot of money; instead, they wake up every day and build better lives for themselves, their families, and their communities, regardless of the things they lack or the obstacles they encounter. As Jackley puts it, "The greatest entrepreneurs succeed not because of what they possess but because of what they are determined to do."In Clay Water Brick, Jackley challenges readers to embrace entrepreneurship as a powerful force for change in the world. She shares her own story of founding Kiva with little more than a laptop and a dream, and the stories and the lessons she has learned from those across the globe who are doing the most with the least.Praise for Clay Water Brick "Jessica Jackley didn't wait for permission to change the world--she just did it. It turns out that you can too."--Seth Godin, author of What to Do When It's Your Turn "Fascinating . . . gripping . . . bursting with lessons . . . Jessica Jackley has written a remarkable book . . . so thoroughly well meaning and engagingly put it is too magnetic to put down."--Financial Times"Clay Water Brick is a tremendously inspiring read. Jessica Jackley, the virtuoso co-founder of the revolutionary microlending platform Kiva, shares uplifting stories and compelling lessons on entrepreneurship, resilience, and character."--Adam Grant, author of Give and Take"A blueprint for anyone who wants to make the world a better place and find fulfillment in the process, no matter how scarce their resources or how steep the challenge."--Arianna Huffington"This book is inspirational. And honest and practical. . . . Well written, thoughtful: a selfless account of how to succeed by doing right and following your heart."--Booklist

    In this riveting and timely memoir, the groundbreaking journalist unpacks lessons on race, identity, and success through her own journey, from navigating her way as the unstoppable child of an unlikely interracial marriage in small-town California to finding herself on the frontlines of a modern movement for the next generation of change makers. Welteroth moves beyond the headlines and highlight reels to share the profound lessons and struggles of being a barrier-breaker across so many intersections. As a young boss and often the only Black woman in the room, she’s had enough of the world telling her—and all women—they’re not enough. As she learns to rely on herself by looking both inward and upward, we’re ultimately reminded that we’re more than enough.

    She is also a big-time realist who has figured out that S&M–seduction and manipulation–is the secret to winning over (and surpassing) the big guys. In Seducing the Boys Club, DiSesa shows that you can, in fact, leave your male colleagues in the dust–but not by following the rules you learned in business school. By playing the roles of den mother, fraternity brother, little sister, and hard-nosed boss, DiSesa navigated the choppy, macho-minded waters of the workplace. All the “bad boys” in her life–and there are many–have provided a wealth of devilishly amusing stories and cautionary tales that DiSesa is only too happy to pass on. Ah, revenge can be sweet, but the truth is that she came to love those boys as much as they love her–which is the whole point.DiSesa asserts that women need to meld their feminine characteristics (nurturing, compassion, listening) with the traits of their male counterparts (competitiveness, decisiveness, combativeness) to expand their professional horizons. In Seducing the Boys Club, DiSesa shares her practical, outrageous, and even controversial maxims for making it, including:• Learn to appreciate men. Men like women who like them.• Remember that women are biologically wired to succeed.• If you want to make a name for yourself, find a mess and fix it. A secure and comfortable job only holds you back.• Don’t assume that men never listen. They listen like a dog does.• Don’t be a quiet achiever.• Act brave and you will look brave.• Screw the rules. Make up your own.Whether dead-on funny or deadly serious, DiSesa is always on her game, always on message, and absolutely on target as she arms women with the can-do confidence and no-compromises attitude they need to climb as high as their ambition can carry them–while keeping their standards impeccable and their integrity intact. Not for women only, this book should be read by men, too . . . though it won’t give them any defense against a woman who can truly seduce a boys club!From the Hardcover edition.

    But while traveling he met a young boy begging on the streets of India, who after being asked what he wanted most in the world, simply answered, “A pencil.” This small request led to a staggering series of events that took Braun backpacking through dozens of countries before eventually leaving one of the world’s most prestigious jobs to found Pencils of Promise, the organization he started with just $25 that has since built more than 200 schools around the world.The Promise of a Pencil chronicles Braun’s journey to find his calling, as each chapter explains one clear step that every person can take to turn your biggest ambitions into reality, even if you start with as little as $25. His story takes readers behind the scenes with business moguls and village chiefs, world-famous celebrities and hometown heroes. Driven by compelling stories and shareable insights, this is a vivid and inspiring book that will give you the tools to make your own life a story worth telling.*All proceeds from this book will support Pencils of Promise.

    He gave up a six-figure income as a lawyer to make $12 an hour as a personal trainer. Then, married with a 3-month old baby, he signed a lease to launch a yoga center in the heart of New York City. . . the day before 9/11. But he survived, and along the way he developed a fresh approach to transforming uncertainty, risk of loss, and exposure to judgment into catalysts for innovation, creation, and achievement.Properly understood and harnessed, fear and uncertainty can become fuel for creative genius rather than sources of pain, anxiety, and suffering. In business, art, and life, creating on a world-class level demands bold action and leaps of faith in the face of great uncertainty. But that uncertainty can lead to fear, anxiety, paralysis, and destruction. It can gut creativity and stifle innovation. It can keep you from taking the risks necessary to do great work and craft a deeply-rewarding life. And it can bring companies that rely on innovation grinding to a halt.That is, unless you know how to use it to your advantage. Fields draws on leading-edge technology, cognitive-science and ancient awareness-focusing techniques in a fresh, practical, non-dogmatic way. His approach enables creativity and productivity on an entirely different level and can turn the once-tortuous journey into a more enjoyable quest. Fields will reveal how to:Make changes to your workflow that unlock buried creative potential. Build "creation hives" -- supportive groups that can supercharge and humanize the process. Tap social technology and user co-creation to add clarity, certainty, and sanity, even if you're an artist or solo-creator. Develop a set of personal practices and mindset shifts that let you not just tolerate, but invite and even amplify, uncertainty as a catalyst for genius.Drawing on extensive case studies and research, Fields shares a set of detailed personal practices and environmental changes that can not only humanize the creative process, but also allow individuals and teams to stay more open to opportunity and play a bigger creative game.

    You’ve seen cobblers, carpenters, cricketers, trains, villages, towns and cities. What makes Piyush different is the perspective from which he views the same things you’ve seen, his ability to store all that he sees into some recesses of his brain and then retrieve them at short notice when he needs to. That ability combined with his love, passion and understanding of advertising and of consumers make him the master storyteller that he is. In Pandeymonium, Piyush talks about his influences, right from his childhood in Jaipur and being a Ranji cricketer, to his philosophy, failures and lessons in advertising in particular and life in general. Lucid, inspiring and unputdownable, this memoir gives you an inside peek into the mind and creative genius of the man who defines advertising in India.

    Along the way, we encounter black holes, turtles, snakes, dragons, axe-sharpening, and yak-shaving—and take a guided tour through the theories and methods, both brilliant and misguided, that litter the history of software development, from the famous ‘mythical man-month’ to Extreme Programming. Not just for technophiles but for anyone captivated by the drama of invention, Dreaming in Code offers a window into both the information age and the workings of the human mind.

    The findings will surprise many readers and, quite frankly, upset others.The ChallengeBuilt 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 very beginning. 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 StudyFor 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 StandardsUsing 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 ComparisonsThe 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? The FindingsThe 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.

    At once a memoir, meditation on the artistic process, and advice on craft, Still Writing is an intimate and eloquent companion to living a creative life.Through a blend of deeply personal stories about what formed her as a writer, tales from other authors, and a searching look at her own creative process, Shapiro offers her gift to writers everywhere: an elegant guide of hard-won wisdom and advice for staying the course. "The writer's life requires courage, patience, empathy, openness. It requires the ability to be alone with oneself. Gentle with oneself. To be disciplined, and at the same time, take risks." Writers--and anyone with an artistic temperament--will find inspiration and comfort in these pages. Offering lessons learned over twenty years of teaching and writing, Shapiro brings her own revealing insights to weave an indispensable almanac for modern writers.Like Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird, Virginia Woolf's A Writer's Diary, and Stephen King's On Writing, Dani Shapiro's Still Writing is a lodestar for aspiring scribes and an eloquent memoir of the writing life.

    Increasingly, brands vie for our attention from insidious angles that target our emotional responses (scent, taste, sound, and touch). In an ever-faster, more competitive global landscape fueled both by the rise of cheaper, foreign brands and by so-called house-brands (the eponymous brands of Wal-Mart, Target, and the like), American companies are in a mad dash to keep up. Branding, or identity-making, has begun to replace the research and development of yore. From the fertile crescent of branding (Cincinnati), to the laboratories of sensory specialists (musicologists and "noses"), Lucas Conley takes us on a long-overdue journey through the strange culture that is our own. As hilarious as it is frightening, Conley's investigation into the phenomenon of rampant commercialism (often backed by little substance), offers an illuminating portrait of an age of obsession.

    You should never quit your day job, but your ultimate goal should be to quit your day job. It's an endless, confusing, and often controversial conversation that, despite our bare-it-all culture, still remains taboo. In Scratch, Manjula Martin has gathered interviews and essays from established and rising authors to confront the age-old question: how do creative people make money? As contributors including Jonathan Franzen, Cheryl Strayed, Roxane Gay, Nick Hornby, Susan Orlean, Alexander Chee, Daniel Jose Older, Jennifer Weiner, and Yiyun Li candidly and emotionally discuss money, MFA programs, teaching fellowships, finally getting published, and what success really means to them, Scratch honestly addresses the tensions between writing and money, work and life, literature and commerce. The result is an entertaining and inspiring book that helps readers and writers understand what it's really like to make art in a world that runs on money-and why it matters.

    Every aircraft is equipped with an almost indestructible black box. When there is an accident, the box is opened, the data is analyzed, and the reason for the accident excavated. This ensures that procedures are adapted so that the same mistake doesn’t happen again. With this method, the industry has created an astonishing safety record.For pilots working in a safety-critical industry, getting it wrong can have deadly consequences. But most of us have a relationship with failure that impedes progress, halts innovation, and damages our lives. We don’t acknowledge it or learn from it —though we often think we do.Moving from anthropology to psychology and from history to complexity theory, Matthew Syed explains why even when we think we have 20/20 hindsight, our vision’s still fuzzy. He offers a radical new idea: that the most important determinant of success in any field, whether sports, business, or life, is an acknowledgment of failure and a willingness to engage with it. This is how we learn, progress and excel. This approach explains everything from biological evolution and the efficiency of markets to the success of the Mercedes F1 team and the mindset of David Beckham.Using a cornucopia of interviews, gripping stories, and sharp-edged science, Syed explores the intimate relationship between failure and success, and shows why we need to transport black box thinking into our own lives. If we wish to unleash our potential, we must diagnose and break free of our failures. Part manifesto for change, part intellectual adventure, this groundbreaking book reveals how to do both.

    Regardless of your budget, you are almost certainly overspending on television, radio, and print ads, yet neglecting the number-one resource you have at your disposal: the Internet. Content marketing is no longer about keyword-stuffing and link-building; in fact, using those tactics today gets your page shuffled to the bottom of the heap. Quality content is the key to success, and you already have the ingredients in-house. This book shows you how to structure an effective content strategy using the same proven principles that have revolutionized marketing for all types of businesses, across industries.Author Marcus Sheridan's pool company struggled after the housing collapse; today, they're one of the largest pool installers in the U.S., turning away millions of dollars in business they simply cannot accommodate every year. How did he manage it? He answered questions. This book shows you how Marcus's strategy can work for your business, and how to use your keyboard to bring customers through the door.Boost your company's web presence with methods that work Build a level of trust that generates customer evangelism Leverage your in-house resources to produce winning content Utilize tactics that work, regardless of industry or sector When people have questions, they ask a search engine. If you have answers, the right content strategy will get them to the top of the search results and seen by millions of eyes every day. Drop the marketing-speak, stop "selling," and start answering. Be seen as an authority, not just another advertisement. They Ask You Answer describes a fresh approach to marketing and the beginning of big things for your business.

    Shattering the myth of muses, higher powers, even creative “types,” Jonah Lehrer demonstrates that creativity is not a single gift possessed by the lucky few. It’s a variety of distinct thought processes that we can all learn to use more effectively.Lehrer reveals the importance of embracing the rut, thinking like a child, daydreaming productively, and adopting an outsider’s perspective (travel helps). He unveils the optimal mix of old and new partners in any creative collaboration, and explains why criticism is essential to the process. Then he zooms out to show how we can make our neighborhoods more vibrant, our companies more productive, and our schools more effective.You’ll learn about Bob Dylan’s writing habits and the drug addictions of poets. You’ll meet a Manhattan bartender who thinks like a chemist, and an autistic surfer who invented an entirely new surfing move. You’ll see why Elizabethan England experienced a creative explosion, and how Pixar’s office space is designed to spark the next big leap in animation.Collapsing the layers separating the neuron from the finished symphony, Imagine reveals the deep inventiveness of the human mind, and its essential role in our increasingly complex world. http://www.jonahlehrer.com/

    He gives us his personal thoughts on life’s big questions and turning points, mining his own experience to tell us what he’s learned along the way. From lessons his father taught him at the Vicarage in Kildare where he grew up, to what he learned in Borneo in his days working for Royal Dutch Shell, and later, in America, where corporate scandals have shaken our understanding of what is ethical and what is acceptable in business, and finally in Italy, where on a whim he decided to buy and fix up an old house in Tuscany. Throughout the book, he asks us to look at what we value — is it money? Family? Time? What is the role of work in our life? What do we find fulfilling? As our working lives blend ever more into the rest of who we are, Charles Handy has emerged as an invaluable social thinker. It is hard to imagine a better or wiser guide to life’s big questions.