Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success


Adam M. Grant - 2013
    But today, success is increasingly dependent on how we interact with others. It turns out that at work, most people operate as either takers, matchers, or givers. Whereas takers strive to get as much as possible from others and matchers aim to trade evenly, givers are the rare breed of people who contribute to others without expecting anything in return. Using his own pioneering research as Wharton's youngest tenured professor, Grant shows that these styles have a surprising impact on success. Although some givers get exploited and burn out, the rest achieve extraordinary results across a wide range of industries. Combining cutting-edge evidence with captivating stories, this landmark book shows how one of America's best networkers developed his connections, why the creative genius behind one of the most popular shows in television history toiled for years in anonymity, how a basketball executive responsible for multiple draft busts transformed his franchise into a winner, and how we could have anticipated Enron's demise four years before the company collapsed - without ever looking at a single number. Praised by bestselling authors such as Dan Pink, Tony Hsieh, Dan Ariely, Susan Cain, Dan Gilbert, Gretchen Rubin, Bob Sutton, David Allen, Robert Cialdini, and Seth Godin-as well as senior leaders from Google, McKinsey, Merck, Estee Lauder, Nike, and NASA - Give and Take highlights what effective networking, collaboration, influence, negotiation, and leadership skills have in common. This landmark book opens up an approach to success that has the power to transform not just individuals and groups, but entire organizations and communities.

The Art Of The Long View: Planning For The Future In An Uncertain World


Peter Schwartz - 1991
    Only stories--scenarios--and our ability to visualize different kinds of futures adequately capture these intangibles.In The Art of the Long View, now for the first time in paperback and with the addition of an all-new User's Guide, Peter Schwartz outlines the scenaric approach, giving you the tools for developing a strategic vision within your business.Schwartz describes the new techniques, originally developed within Royal/Dutch Shell, based on many of his firsthand scenario exercises with the world's leading institutions and companies, including the White House, EPA, BellSouth, PG&E, and the International Stock Exchange.

Lincoln's Story: The Wayfarer


Vel - 2012
    He did not claim he was God’s agent. Did he believe in God? Did he look for a sign when he was desperate? Did he follow the Divine Will? Many believers are not followers; many followers are not believers. Is he a believer or a follower or both?

The Forever War


Dexter Filkins - 2008
    We go into the homes of suicide bombers and into street-to-street fighting with a battalion of marines. We meet Iraqi insurgents, an American captain who loses a quarter of his men in eight days, and a young soldier from Georgia on a rooftop at midnight reminiscing about his girlfriend back home. A car bomb explodes, bullets fly, and a mother cradles her blinded son.Like no other book, The Forever War allows us a visceral understanding of today’s battlefields and of the experiences of the people on the ground, warriors and innocents alike. It is a brilliant, fearless work, not just about America’s wars after 9/11, but ultimately about the nature of war itself.

Infantry Attacks


Erwin Rommel - 1937
    Even when the legend surrounding his invincibility was overturned at El Alamein, the aura surrounding Rommel himself remained unsullied. As a leader of a small unit in the First World War, he proved himself an aggressive and versatile commander, with a reputation for using the battleground terrain to his own advantage, for gathering intelligence, and for seeking out and exploiting enemy weaknesses. Rommel graphically describes his own achievements, and those of his units, in the swift-moving battles on the Western Front, in the ensuing trench warfare, in the 1917 campaign in Romania, and in the pursuit across the Tagliamento and Piave rivers. This classic account seeks out the basis of his astonishing leadership skills, providing an indispensable guide to the art of war written by one of its greatest exponents.

Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World


Liaquat Ahamed - 2009
    In fact, as Liaquat Ahamed reveals, it was the decisions taken by a small number of central bankers that were the primary cause of the economic meltdown, the effects of which set the stage for World War II and reverberated for decades. In Lords of Finance, we meet the neurotic and enigmatic Montagu Norman of the Bank of England, the xenophobic and suspicious Émile Moreau of the Banque de France, the arrogant yet brilliant Hjalmar Schacht of the Reichsbank, and Benjamin Strong of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, whose façade of energy and drive masked a deeply wounded and overburdened man. After the First World War, these central bankers attempted to reconstruct the world of international finance. Despite their differences, they were united by a common fear—that the greatest threat to capitalism was inflation— and by a common vision that the solution was to turn back the clock and return the world to the gold standard. For a brief period in the mid-1920s they appeared to have succeeded. The world’s currencies were stabilized and capital began flowing freely across the globe. But beneath the veneer of boom-town prosperity, cracks started to appear in the financial system. The gold standard that all had believed would provide an umbrella of stability proved to be a straitjacket, and the world economy began that terrible downward spiral known as the Great Depression. As yet another period of economic turmoil makes headlines today, the Great Depression and the year 1929 remain the benchmark for true financial mayhem. Offering a new understanding of the global nature of financial crises, Lords of Finance is a potent reminder of the enormous impact that the decisions of central bankers can have, of their fallibility, and of the terrible human consequences that can result when they are wrong.

Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life


Nir Eyal - 2019
    Later, as you're about to get back to work, a colleague taps you on the shoulder to chat. At home, screens get in the way of quality time with your family. Another day goes by, and once again, your most important personal and professional goals are put on hold.  What would be possible if you followed through on your best intentions? What could you accomplish if you could stay focused and overcome distractions? What if you had the power to become "indistractable"?  International best-selling author, former Stanford lecturer, and behavioral design expert, Nir Eyal, wrote Silicon Valley's handbook for making technology habit-forming. Five years after publishing Hooked, Eyal reveals distraction's Achilles' heel in his groundbreaking new book.  In Indistractable, Eyal reveals the hidden psychology driving us to distraction. He describes why solving the problem is not as simple as swearing off our devices: Abstinence is impractical and often makes us want more.  Eyal lays bare the secret of finally doing what you say you will do with a four-step, research-backed model. Indistractable reveals the key to getting the best out of technology, without letting it get the best of us.  Inside, Eyal overturns conventional wisdom and reveals: Why distraction at work is a symptom of a dysfunctional company culture - and how to fix it  What really drives human behavior and why "time management is pain management"  Why your relationships (and your sex life) depend on you becoming indistractable  How to raise indistractable children in an increasingly distracting world Empowering and optimistic, Indistractable provides practical, novel techniques to control your time and attention - helping you live the life you really want.

Intelligence Analysis: A Target-Centric Approach


Robert M. Clark - 2003
    In countering asymmetric threats and non-state adversaries, the model is simply outmoded. A flatter, horizontal, networked solution has proven much more effective in today's world. In his second edition, Robert Clark--former CIA analyst and executive in the Intelligence Directorate--explains how a collaborative, target-centric process both attends to the needs of the customer and promotes more effective collection. Based on feedback from users, early chapters introduce the concept of model synthesis more gradually. Recent intelligence events--with the Iraqi WMD Commission Report at center stage--illustrate the importance of target-centric analysis. This revision also includes broader treatment of collection strategies, systems analysis, and analyst-customer interaction as well as more attention to denial and deception, and to both counterterrorism and counterintelligence analysis. This new edition contains updates of the practical information and day-to-day details from the previous book told as only an experienced intelligence hand could. Extensive descriptions of the art of target modeling and organizational analysis, as well as thoroughly detailed overviews of the quantitative and predictive techniques used in intelligence analysis make this book an essential tool for illuminating an often shadowy world.

Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA


Tim Weiner - 2007
    Its mission was to know the world. When it did not succeed, it set out to change the world. Its failures have handed us, in the words of President Eisenhower, “a legacy of ashes.”Now Pulitzer Prize–winning author Tim Weiner offers the first definitive history of the CIA—and everything is on the record. LEGACY OF ASHES is based on more than 50,000 documents, primarily from the archives of the CIA itself, and hundreds of interviews with CIA veterans, including ten Directors of Central Intelligence. It takes the CIA from its creation after World War II, through its battles in the cold war and the war on terror, to its near-collapse after September 11th, 2001.Tim Weiner’s past work on the CIA and American intelligence was hailed as “impressively reported” and “immensely entertaining” in The New York Times.The Wall Street Journal called it “truly extraordinary . . . the best book ever written on a case of espionage.” Here is the hidden history of the CIA: why eleven presidents and three generations of CIA officers have been unable to understand the world; why nearly every CIA director has left the agency in worse shape than he found it; and how these failures have profoundly jeopardized our national security.

Microtrends Squared: The New Small Forces Driving Today's Big Disruptions


Mark J. Penn - 2018
    Ten years ago, he showed how the behavior of one small group can exert an outsized influence over the whole of America. His bestselling Microtrends highlighted dozens of tiny, counterintuitive trends that have since come to fruition, from the explosion of internet dating to the recent split within the Republican Party. Today, the world is in perplexing upheaval, and microtrends are more influential than ever. In this environment, Penn offers a necessary perspective. Microtrends Squared makes sense of what is happening in the world today. Through fifty new microtrends, Penn illuminates the shifts that are coming in the next decade. He pinpoints the unseen hand behind new power relationships that have emerged—as fringe voters and reactionary politics have found their revival, as online influencers overshadow traditional media, and as the gig economy continues to invade new swathes of industry. He speaks to the next wave of developments coming in technology, social movements, and even dating. Offering a clear vision of the future of business, politics, and culture, Microtrends Squared is a must-read for innovators and entrepreneurs, political and business leaders, and for every curious reader looking to under­stand the wave of the future when it is just a ripple.

The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding From You


Eli Pariser - 2011
    Instead of giving you the most broadly popular result, Google now tries to predict what you are most likely to click on. According to MoveOn.org board president Eli Pariser, Google's change in policy is symptomatic of the most significant shift to take place on the Web in recent years - the rise of personalization. In this groundbreaking investigation of the new hidden Web, Pariser uncovers how this growing trend threatens to control how we consume and share information as a society-and reveals what we can do about it.Though the phenomenon has gone largely undetected until now, personalized filters are sweeping the Web, creating individual universes of information for each of us. Facebook - the primary news source for an increasing number of Americans - prioritizes the links it believes will appeal to you so that if you are a liberal, you can expect to see only progressive links. Even an old-media bastion like "The Washington Post" devotes the top of its home page to a news feed with the links your Facebook friends are sharing. Behind the scenes a burgeoning industry of data companies is tracking your personal information to sell to advertisers, from your political leanings to the color you painted your living room to the hiking boots you just browsed on Zappos.In a personalized world, we will increasingly be typed and fed only news that is pleasant, familiar, and confirms our beliefs - and because these filters are invisible, we won't know what is being hidden from us. Our past interests will determine what we are exposed to in the future, leaving less room for the unexpected encounters that spark creativity, innovation, and the democratic exchange of ideas.While we all worry that the Internet is eroding privacy or shrinking our attention spans, Pariser uncovers a more pernicious and far-reaching trend on the Internet and shows how we can - and must - change course. With vivid detail and remarkable scope, The Filter Bubble reveals how personalization undermines the Internet's original purpose as an open platform for the spread of ideas and could leave us all in an isolated, echoing world.

A Commonwealth of Thieves: The Improbable Birth of Australia


Thomas Keneally - 2005
    The squalid and turbulent prisons of London were overflowing, and crime was on the rise. Even the hulks sifting at anchor in the Thames were packed with malcontent criminals and petty thieves. So the English government decided to undertake the unprecedented move of shipping off its convicts to a largely unexplored landmass at the other end of the world.Using the personal journals and documents that were kept during this expedition, historian/novelist Thomas Keneally re-creates the grueling overseas voyage, a hellish, suffocating journey that claimed the lives of many convicts. Miraculously, the fleet reached the shores of what was then called New South Wales in 1788, and after much trial and error, the crew managed to set up a rudimentary yet vibrant settlement. As governor of the colony, Phillip took on the challenges of dealing with unruly convicts, disgruntled officers, a bewildered, sometimes hostile native population, as well as such serious matters as food shortages and disease. Moving beyond Phillip, Keneally offers captivating portrayals of Aborigines, who both aided and opposed Phillip, and of the settlers, including convicts who were determined to overcome their pasts and begin anew.With the authority of a renowned historian and the narrative grace of a brilliant novelist, Thomas Keneally offers an insider’s perspective into the dramatic saga of the birth of a vibrant society in an unfamiliar land. A Commonwealth of Thieves immerses us in the fledgling penal colony and conjures up colorful scenes of the joy and heartbreak, the thrills and hardships that characterized those first four improbable years. The result is a lively and engrossing work of history, as well as a tale of redemption for the thousands of convicts who started new lives thousands of miles from their homes.

What Good Is Grand Strategy?: Power and Purpose in American Statecraft from Harry S. Truman to George W. Bush


Hal Brands - 2013
    In this important book, Hal Brands explains why grand strategy is a concept that is so alluring--and so elusive--to those who make American statecraft. He explores what grand strategy is, why it is so essential, and why it is so hard to get right amid the turbulence of global affairs and the chaos of domestic politics. At a time when grand strategy is very much in vogue, Brands critically appraises just how feasible that endeavor really is.Brands takes a historical approach to this subject, examining how four presidential administrations, from that of Harry S. Truman to that of George W. Bush, sought to do grand strategy at key inflection points in the history of modern U.S. foreign policy. As examples ranging from the early Cold War to the Reagan years to the War on Terror demonstrate, grand strategy can be an immensely rewarding undertaking--but also one that is full of potential pitfalls on the long road between conception and implementation. Brands concludes by offering valuable suggestions for how American leaders might approach the challenges of grand strategy in the years to come.

Shackleton's Way: Leadership Lessons from the Great Antarctic Explorer


Margot Morrell - 1998
    Today the public can't get enough of this once-forgotten explorer, and his actions have made him a model for great leadership and masterful crisis management. Now, through anecdotes, the diaries of the men in his crew, and Shackleton's own writing, Shackleton's leadership style and time-honored principles are translated for the modern business world. Written by two veteran business observers and illustrated with ship photographer Frank Hurley's masterpieces and other rarely seen photos, this practical book helps today's leaders follow Shackleton's triumphant example.

It's Your Ship: Management Techniques from the Best Damn Ship in the Navy


D. Michael Abrashoff - 2002
    New York Times BestsellerWhen Captain Abrashoff took over as commander of USS Benfold, it was like a business that had all the latest technology but only some of the productivity. Knowing that responsibility for improving performance rested with him, he realized he had to improve his own leadership skills before he could improve his ship. Within months, he created a crew of confident and inspired problem-solvers eager to take the initiative and responsibility for their actions. The slogan on board became "It's your ship," and Benfold was soon recognized far and wide as a model of naval efficiency. How did Abrashoff do it? Against the backdrop of today's United States Navy, Abrashoff shares his secrets of successful management including: See the ship through the eyes of the crew: By soliciting a sailor's suggestions, Abrashoff drastically reduced tedious chores that provided little additional value.Communicate, communicate, communicate: The more Abrashoff communicated the plan, the better the crew's performance. His crew eventually started calling him "Megaphone Mike," since they heard from him so often.Create discipline by focusing on purpose: Discipline skyrocketed when Abrashoff's crew believed that what they were doing was important.Listen aggressively: After learning that many sailors wanted to use the GI Bill, Abrashoff brought a test official aboard the ship-and held the SATs forty miles off the Iraqi coast. From achieving amazing cost savings to winning the highest gunnery score in the Pacific Fleet, Captain Abrashoff's extraordinary campaign sent shock waves through the U.S. Navy. It can help you change the course of your ship, no matter where your business battles are fought.