Whether you're online, in a classroom, an office, a town hall—or just hoping to get through a family dinner with a stubborn relative—dialogue shuts down when perspectives clash. Heated debates often lead to insults and shaming, blocking any possibility of productive discourse. Everyone seems to be on a hair trigger.In How to Have Impossible Conversations, Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay guide you through the straightforward, practical, conversational techniques necessary for every successful conversation—whether the issue is climate change, religious faith, gender identity, race, poverty, immigration, or gun control. Boghossian and Lindsay teach the subtle art of instilling doubts and opening minds. They cover everything from learning the fundamentals for good conversations to achieving expert-level techniques to deal with hardliners and extremists. This book is the manual everyone needs to foster a climate of civility, connection, and empathy."This is a self-help book on how to argue effectively, conciliate, and gently persuade. The authors admit to getting it wrong in their own past conversations. One by one, I recognize the same mistakes in me. The world would be a better place if everyone read this book."  —Richard Dawkins, author of Science in the Soul and Outgrowing God

    How wrong he was. In What Am I Bid? he tells of life after the events he described in his previous memoirs, An Auctioneer's Lot and Sold to the Man with the Tin Leg, to bring his story up to date. From dodgy cars to fakes in the sales room; angry livestock, mangled silverware and tortuous--not to mention muddy--experiences in local markets and farm sales, Serrell has been there, done that, and got the hoof prints on his suit to prove it.

    Using case histories, personal experiences and his own inviting writing and teaching style, Preet Bharara shows the thought process we need to best achieve truth and justice in our daily lives and within our society.Preet Bharara has spent much of his life examining our legal system, pushing to make it better, and prosecuting those looking to subvert it. Bharara believes in our system and knows it must be protected, but to do so, we must also acknowledge and allow for flaws in the system and in human nature.     The book is divided into four sections: Inquiry, Accusation, Judgment and Punishment. He shows why each step of this process is crucial to the legal system, but he also shows how we all need to think about each stage of the process to achieve truth and justice in our daily lives.     Bharara uses anecdotes and case histories from his legal career--the successes as well as the failures--to illustrate the realities of the legal system, and the consequences of taking action (and in some cases, not taking action, which can be just as essential when trying to achieve a just result).      Much of what Bharara discusses is inspiring--it gives us hope that rational and objective fact-based thinking, combined with compassion, can truly lead us on a path toward truth and justice. Some of what he writes about will be controversial and cause much discussion. Ultimately, it is a thought-provoking, entertaining book about the need to find the humanity in our legal system--and in our society.

    In his breakthrough handbook, Ditch the Pitch, Steve Yastrow, founder of a successful business strategy consulting firm, asks us to throw out everything we've been taught about pitching to customers. Steve’s advice: tear up your sales pitch and instead improvise persuasive conversations.Ditch the Pitch is an essential read for salespeople, business managers, and anyone wishing to persuade those around them. Organized into six habits, with each habit consisting of three practices necessary for mastery, Ditch the Pitch is designed to teach Yastrow's approach to fresh, spontaneous, persuasive conversations. These new skills will show the reader how to identify the details that make each customer unique and subsequently navigate a conversation that focuses on the right message for the right customer at the right time.Throughout the book, the author quotes well-known improv comedians and musicians. He translates the techniques these artists use when improvising to create persuasive situations with customers. With the new confidence Ditch the Pitch offers, you will become master of the art of on-the-spot, engaging, and effective customer interactions. Let go of pre-written scripts and embrace Yastrow's guidelines for effortlessly enabling spontaneous conversations that persuade customers to say "yes."

     In 2007 and 2008, Time named Paul Allen, the cofounder of Microsoft, one of the hundred most influential people in the world. Since he made his fortune, his impact has been felt in science, technology, business, medicine, sports, music, and philanthropy. His passion, curiosity, and intellectual rigor-combined with the resources to launch and support new initiatives-have literally changed the world. In 2009 Allen discovered that he had lymphoma, lending urgency to his desire to share his story for the first time. In this long-awaited memoir, Allen explains how he has solved problems, what he's learned from his many endeavors-both the triumphs and the failures-and his compelling vision for the future. He reflects candidly on an extraordinary life. The book also features previously untold stories about everything from the true origins of Microsoft to Allen's role in the dawn of private space travel (with SpaceShipOne) and in discoveries at the frontiers of brain science. With honesty, humor, and insight, Allen tells the story of a life of ideas made real.

    It will also explore the pressures of modern-day teaching, revealing exactly what it takes to wrangle a chaotic classroom (or seven) on a weekly basis. From the absolute characters found in the staffroom to school-trip mishaps and everything else inbetween, Put A Wet Paper Towel on It is a must-read for teachers and parents alike.So sit up straight, four legs on your chair, fingers on lips and get ready to take a trip down memory lane. And remember – when in doubt, just put a wet paper towel on it.

    Levitin shifts his keen insights from your brain on music to your brain in a sea of details.The information age is drowning us with an unprecedented deluge of data. At the same time, we’re expected to make more—and faster—decisions about our lives than ever before. No wonder, then, that the average American reports frequently losing car keys or reading glasses, missing appointments, and feeling worn out by the effort required just to keep up.But somehow some people become quite accomplished at managing information flow. In The Organized Mind, Daniel J. Levitin, PhD, uses the latest brain science to demonstrate how those people excel—and how readers can use their methods to regain a sense of mastery over the way they organize their homes, workplaces, and time.With lively, entertaining chapters on everything from the kitchen junk drawer to health care to executive office workflow, Levitin reveals how new research into the cognitive neuroscience of attention and memory can be applied to the challenges of our daily lives. This Is Your Brain on Music showed how to better play and appreciate music through an understanding of how the brain works. The Organized Mind shows how to navigate the churning flood of information in the twenty-first century with the same neuroscientific perspective.

    In The 50th Law, hip hop and pop culture icon 50 Cent (aka Curtis Jackson) joins forces with Robert Greene, bestselling author of The 48 Laws of Power, to write a bible for success in life and work based on a single principle: fear nothing.With intimate stories from 50 Cent's life on the streets and in the boardroom as he rose to fame after the release of his album Get Rich or Die Tryin, as well as examples of others who have overcome adversity through understanding and practicing The 50th Law, this deeply inspirational book is perfect for entrepreneurs as well as anyone interested in the extraordinary life of Curtis Jackson.

    Infrastructure engineers use a software version of this “chaos monkey” to test online services’ robustness—their ability to survive random failure and correct mistakes before they actually occur. Tech entrepreneurs are society’s chaos monkeys, disruptors testing and transforming every aspect of our lives, from transportation (Uber) and lodging (AirBnB) to television (Netflix) and dating (Tinder). One of Silicon Valley’s most audacious chaos monkeys is Antonio García Martínez.After stints on Wall Street and as CEO of his own startup, García Martínez joined Facebook’s nascent advertising team, turning its users’ data into profit for COO Sheryl Sandberg and chairman and CEO Mark “Zuck” Zuckerberg. Forced out in the wake of an internal product war over the future of the company’s monetization strategy, García Martínez eventually landed at rival Twitter. He also fathered two children with a woman he barely knew, committed lewd acts and brewed illegal beer on the Facebook campus (accidentally flooding Zuckerberg's desk), lived on a sailboat, raced sport cars on the 101, and enthusiastically pursued the life of an overpaid Silicon Valley wastrel.Now, this gleeful contrarian unravels the chaotic evolution of social media and online marketing and reveals how it is invading our lives and shaping our future. Weighing in on everything from startups and credit derivatives to Big Brother and data tracking, social media monetization and digital “privacy,” García Martínez shares his scathing observations and outrageous antics, taking us on a humorous, subversive tour of the fascinatingly insular tech industry. Chaos Monkeys lays bare the hijinks, trade secrets, and power plays of the visionaries, grunts, sociopaths, opportunists, accidental tourists, and money cowboys who are revolutionizing our world. The question is, will we survive?

     In the past few years, mindfulness and other approaches to self-awareness have begun to transform the American workplace. But while it is increasingly widely accepted in the business world that the most direct route to success lies in adopting practices that actively promote a leader’s self-awareness, social skill, and emotional intelligence, the best and most efficient path to developing a more conscious workforce often remains unclear. The 9 Types of Leadership provides a pathway to greater self-awareness and social skillfulness. It will help you orient yourself when you get caught up in people problems that you don’t know how to work your way out of. By providing extremely detailed and accurate descriptions of nine recognizable personalities, The 9 Types of Leadership is an unmatched tool for business people to use to decode the mysteries involved in understanding why people do what they do, why we have conflicts with some people but not others and how we can become aware of our blind spots. Most importantly, it can help leaders know themselves in a deeper way so they can more effectively lead others.

    You want to learn about the path I took that eventually led me to Zappos, and the lessons I learned along the way. You want to learn from all the mistakes we made at Zappos over the years so that your business can avoid making some of the same ones. You want to figure out the right balance of profits, passion, and purpose in business and in life. You want to build a long-term, enduring business and brand. You want to create a stronger company culture, which will make your employees and coworkers happier and create more employee engagement, leading to higher productivity. You want to deliver a better customer experience, which will make your customers happier and create more customer loyalty, leading to increased profits. You want to build something special. You want to find inspiration and happiness in work and in life. You ran out of firewood for your fireplace. This book makes an excellent fire-starter.

    From "Bartleby the Scrivener" to The Office, from the steno pool to the open-plan cubicle farm, Cubed is a fascinating, often funny, and sometimes disturbing anatomy of the white-collar world and how it came to be the way it is—and what it might become.In the mid-nineteenth century clerks worked in small, dank spaces called “counting-houses.” These were all-male enclaves, where work was just paperwork. Most Americans considered clerks to be questionable dandies, who didn’t do “real work.” But the joke was on them: as the great historical shifts from agricultural to industrial economies took place, and then from industrial to information economies, the organization of the workplace evolved along with them—and the clerks took over. Offices became rationalized, designed for both greater efficiency in the accomplishments of clerical work and the enhancement of worker productivity. Women entered the office by the millions, and revolutionized the social world from within. Skyscrapers filled with office space came to tower over cities everywhere. Cubed opens our eyes to what is a truly "secret history" of changes so obvious and ubiquitous that we've hardly noticed them. From the wood-paneled executive suite to the advent of the cubicles where 60% of Americans now work (and 93% of them dislike it) to a not-too-distant future where we might work anywhere at any time (and perhaps all the time), Cubed excavates from popular books, movies, comic strips (Dilbert!), and a vast amount of management literature and business history, the reasons why our workplaces are the way they are—and how they might be better.

     And You're About to Learn How to Use His Memory Strategies to Learn Faster, Be More Productive and Achieve More Success Most people never tap into 10% of their potential for memory. In this book, you're about to learn: How the World's Top Memory Experts Concentrate and Remember Any Information at Will, and How You Can Too Do you ever feel like you're too busy, too stressed or just too distracted to concentrate and get work done? In Unlimited Memory, you'll learn how the world's best memory masters get themselves to concentrate at will, anytime they want. When you can easily focus and concentrate on the task at hand, and store and recall useful information, you can easily double your productivity and eliminate wasted time, stress and mistakes at work. In this book, you'll find all the tools, strategies and techniques you need to improve your memory. About the Author For over 20 years, KEVIN HORSLEY has been analyzing the mind and memory and its capacity for brilliance. He is one of only a few people in the world to have received the title International Grandmaster of Memory. He is a World Memory Championship medalist, and a two-time World Record holder for The Everest of memory tests. Kevin is also an author of four books, and the designer of a times table game with the Serious Games Institute at North-West University Vaal Campus. Kevin is a professional speaker, and assists organizations in improving their learning, motivation, creativity, and thinking.

    Today, the approach of using the dividend yield to identify values in blue chip stocks still outperforms most investment methods on a risk-adjusted basis.Written by Kelley Wright, Managing Editor of Investment Quality Trends, with a new Foreword by Geraldine Weiss, this book teaches a value-based strategy to investing, one that uses a stock's dividend yield as the primary measure of value. Rather than emphasize the price cycles of a stock, the company's products, market strategy or other factors, this guide stresses dividend-yield patterns.Details a straightforward system of investing in stick-to-quality blue-chip stocks with reliable dividend histories Discusses how to buy and sell when dividend yields instruct you to do so Investors looking for safety and transparency will quickly discover how dividends offer the yields they desire With Dividends Still Don't Lie, you'll gain the confidence to make sophisticated stock market decisions and obtain solid value for your investment dollars.

    Most leaders need reminding everyday that with their privileges comes responsibility and obligation. If any young man or woman seeking to become a leader and not a manager only reads one book on leadership, let it be this one!