Wal-Mart: The Bully of Bentonville: How the High Cost of Everyday Low Prices is Hurting America


Anthony Bianco - 2006
    consumer-product company. More than 138 million shoppers visit one of its 5,300 stores each week. But Wal-Mart’s “everyday low prices” come at a tremendous cost to workers, suppliers, competitors, and consumers.The Bully of Bentonville exposes the zealous, secretive, small-town mentality that rules Wal-Mart and chronicles its far-reaching consequences. In a gripping, richly textured narrative, Anthony Bianco shows how Wal-Mart has driven down retail wages throughout the country, how their substandard pay and meager health-care policy and anti-union mentality have led to a large scales exploitation of workers, why their aggressive expansion inevitably puts locally owned stores out of business, and how their pricing policies have forced suppliers to outsource work and move thousands of jobs overseas. Based on interviews with Wal-Mart employees, managers, executives, competitors, suppliers, customers, and community leaders, The Bully of Bentonville brings the truths about Wal-Mart into sharp focus.

Jeremy Thorpe (Abacus Books)


Michael Bloch - 2014
    When he became leader of the Liberal Party in 1967 at the age of just thirty-seven, he seemed destined for truly great things. But as his star steadily rose so his nemesis drew ever nearer: a time-bomb in the form of Norman Scott, a homosexual wastrel and sometime male model with whom Jeremy had formed an ill-advised relationship in the early 1960s. Scott's incessant boasts about their 'affair' became increasingly embarrassing, and eventually led to a bizarre murder plot to shut him up for good. Jeremy was acquitted of involvement but his career was in ruins.Michael Bloch's magisterial biography is not just a brilliant retelling of this amazing story; ten years in the making, it is also the definitive character study of one of the most fascinating figures in post-war British politics.

The Cycle: A Practical Approach to Managing Arts Organizations


Michael M. Kaiser - 2013
    According to Kaiser, successful arts organizations pursue strong programmatic marketing campaigns that compel people to buy tickets, enroll in classes, and so on—in short, to participate in the organization’s programs. Additionally, they create exciting activities that draw people to the organization as a whole. This institutional marketing creates a sense of enthusiasm that attracts donors, board members, and volunteers. Kaiser calls this group of external supporters the family. When this hidden engine is humming, staff, board, and audience members, artists, and donors feel confidence in the future. Resources are reinvested in more and better art, which is marketed aggressively; as a result, the “family” continues to grow, providing even more resources. This self-reinforcing cycle underlies the activities of all healthy arts organizations, and the theory behind it can be used as a diagnostic tool to reveal—and remedy—the problems of troubled ones. This book addresses each element of the cycle in the hope that more arts organizations around the globe—from orchestras, theaters, museums, opera companies, and classical and modern dance organizations to service organizations and other not-for-profit cultural institutions—will be able to sustain remarkable creativity, pay the bills, and have fun doing so!

Strategic Management: Concepts and Cases: Competitiveness and Globalization


Michael A. Hitt - 2000
    Written by highly respected experts and prestigious scholars, Hitt/Ireland/Hoskisson's STRATEGIC MANAGEMENT: COMPETITIVENESS AND GLOBALIZATION, CONCEPTS AND CASES, 10E provides an intellectually rich, yet thoroughly practical analysis of strategic management today. This unique text is the only one to integrate the classic industrial organization model with a resource-based view of the firm to give readers a complete understanding of how today's businesses use strategic management to establish a sustained competitive advantage. The authors present cutting-edge research and strategic management trends within a strong global focus, using memorable examples from more than 600 companies. A wealth of learning features and selection of 30 all-new compelling cases prepare your students to face the broad range of critical issues confronting contemporary managers. Engaging video cases, CengageNOW online teaching tools, and a complete electronic business library keeps study current and relevant.

The Leadership Challenge Workbook


James M. Kouzes - 2003
     The Workbook's easy-to-use worksheets make efficient planning simple and practical and supports your success in three ways:Reflection: Think about your approach to leadership and become more conscious about how well you engage in each of the Practices.Application Apply the Practices and commitments to all your projects.Implications Record what you've learned about yourself, your team, your organization, and your project. Develop your leadership potential with The Leadership Challenge Workbook!

Read to Lead: The Simple Habit That Expands Your Influence and Boosts Your Career


Jeff Brown - 2021
    It's responsible for unlocking limitless creativity and influence. It's known to reduce stress, improve decision-making skills, and make you a better leader. What is it? Reading. And it's the single best thing you can do to improve yourself professionally.Reading more and better books creates opportunities for you to learn new skills, rise above your competition, and build a successful career. In Read to Lead you'll learn- why you need to read like your career depends on it- the five science-backed reasons reading will help you build your career- how to absorb a book into your bloodstream- a technique that can double (or triple!) your reading speed- tips on creating a lifetime reading habit- and moreIf you want to lead a more satisfied life, have more intelligent conversations, and broaden your mind, you need to read to lead!

Innovation as Usual: How to Help Your People Bring Great Ideas to Life


Paddy Miller - 2013
    Every so often employees are sent to “Brainstorm Island”: an off-site replete with trendy lectures, creative workshops, and overenthusiastic facilitators. But once they return, it’s back to business as usual.Innovation experts Paddy Miller and Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg suggest a better approach. They recommend that leaders at all levels become “innovation architects,” creating an ecosystem in which people engage in key innovation behaviors as part of their daily work.In short, this book is about getting to a state of “innovation as usual,” where regular employees—in jobs like finance, marketing, sales, or operations—make innovation happen in a way that’s both systemic and sustainable.Instead of organizing brainstorming sessions, idea jams, and off-sites that rarely result in success, leaders should guide their people in what the authors call the “5 + 1 keystone behaviors” of innovation: focus, connect, tweak, select, stealthstorm, (and the + 1) persist:• Focus beats freedom: Direct people to look only for ideas that matter to the business• Insight comes from the outside: Urge people to connect to new worlds• First ideas are flawed: Challenge people to tweak and reframe their initial ideas• Most ideas are bad ideas: Guide people to select the best ideas and discard the rest• Stealthstorming rules: Help people navigate the politics of innovation• Creativity is a choice: Motivate everyone to persist in the five keystone behaviorsUsing examples from a wide range of companies such as Pfizer, Index Ventures, Lonza, Go Travel, Prehype, DSM, and others, Innovation as Usual lights the way toward embedding creativity in the DNA of the workplace.So cancel that off-site. Instead, read Innovation as Usual—and put innovation at the core of your business.

Rick Steves Pocket Barcelona


Rick Steves - 2013
    Everything a busy traveler needs is easy to access: a neighborhood overview, city walks and tours, sights, handy food and accommodations charts, an appendix packed with information on trip planning and practicalities, and a fold-out city map.Rick Steves Pocket Barcelona includes the following walks and tours:• Ramblas Ramble• Barri Gotic and Cathedral Tour• Picasso Museum Tour• Eixample Walk• Sagrada Familia Tour

Followership: How Followers Are Creating Change and Changing Leaders


Barbara Kellerman - 2008
    Barbara Kellerman argues that, over time, followers have played increasingly vital roles. For two key reasons, this trend is now accelerating. Followers are becoming more important, and leaders less. Through gripping stories about a range of people and places—from multinational corporations such as Merck, to Nazi Germany, to the American military after 9/11—Kellerman makes key distinctions among five different types of followers: Isolates, Bystanders, Participants, Activists, and Diehards. And she explains how they relate not only to their leaders but also to each other. Thanks to Followership, we can finally appreciate the ways in which those with relatively fewer sources of power, authority, and influence are consequential. Moreover, they are getting bolder and more strategic. As Kellerman makes crystal clear, to fixate on leaders at the expense of followers is to do so at our peril. The latter are every bit as important as the former, which makes this book required reading for superiors and subordinates alike.

Flawless Execution: Use the Techniques and Systems of America's Fighter Pilots to Perform at Your Peak and Win the Battles of the Business World


James D. Murphy - 2005
    At Mach 2, the instrument panel of an F-15 is screaming out information, the horizon is a blur, the wingman is occupied, the jet is hanging on the edge -- and yet fighter pilots routinely handle the stress. It's not much different in today's unforgiving business world. One slipup and your company is bankrupt before your employees know what hit them.What works on the squadron level for F-15 pilots will also work for your marketing team, sales force, or research and development group. By analyzing the work environment and attacking its centers of gravity in parallel, you'll begin to utilize the Plan-Brief-Execute-Debrief-Win cycle that will rapidly impact your business's future success. U.S. fighter squadrons have been using this program for nearly fifty years to reduce their mistake rate, cut casualties and equipment losses, and rack up an envious victory record. Now, with Flawless Execution, your business can too.

The Leadership Experience


Pat Lane - 2004
    It is written for courses teaching leadership theory and application. The Leadership Experience integrates recent ideas and practices with established scholarly research in a way that makes the topic of leadership come alive.

Team Building: Proven Strategies for Improving Team Performance


W. Gibb Dyer Jr. - 1972
    The ideas are proven by several decades of experience and well-supported in the text with numerous examples.