The definitive guide for Main Street readers who want to make sense of what's happening on Wall Street and better understand how we got here and what we need to know to in days to come. Written by seasoned financial writer Dave Kansas this official Wall Street Journal guide will be filled with practical information revealing what the crisis means for reader's financial lives and what steps they should be taking now to inform and protect themselves.

In Remember Me, Time writer Lisa Takeuchi Cullen has created a humorous and poignant chronicle of her travels around the country to discover how Americans are reinventing the rites of dying. What she learned is that people no longer want to take death lying down; instead, they're taking their demise into their own hands and planning the afterparty. Cullen hears stories of modern-day funerals: lobster-shaped caskets and other unconventional containers for corpses; cremated remains turned into diamonds; and even mishaps like dove releases gone horribly wrong. Eye-opening, funny, and unforgettable, Remember Me gives an account of the ways in which Americans are designing new occasions to mark death by celebrating life.

Want freedom from management, mediocrity and moronsEver wonder what the best bosses know that you don'tDo you want to have great employees, people who don't need to be managed and who make everyone around them work harder and raise the department to a higher standardThe Gifted Boss is management guru Dale Dauten's classic yet revolutionary guidebook on teaching managers how to spot and court talent and how to give great employees what they want and need. This is a comprehensive system full of valuable insight and lessons aimed at creating the best work environment for the best people. Throughout The Gifted Boss, Dale Dauten defines his different breed of leader as one who is able to shape a business environment and culture that is a magnet for self-motivated employees. Dauten's starting point is a powerful fact about hiring great employees: the best ones are almost never in the job market. His system also includes a discussion of "ideal turnover" and how the great managers employ "the secret skill" of "de-hiring" to gracefully move mediocre employees up or out. Throughout his discussions, Dauten incorporates priceless knowledge gained from an exhaustive search for America's best bosses. The wisdom he acquired was startling, and it pertained to every type of organization: "Different isn't always better, but better is always different." The Gifted Boss has already earned itself a cult following. Now, based on conversations with hundreds of readers, Dauten has revised his work by adding a quick-start guide to help his audience get fast results and a discussion guide to help executives share the book with their teams. Though new technology continues to bring new changes to communication in the workplace, The Gifted Boss still remains the essential guide to maneuvering the tricky world of managing the modern employee. It belongs on every businessperson's desk.

Wall Street is a funny business. All you have is your reputation. Taint it and someone else will fill your shoes. Longevity comes from maintaining that reputation. Ask Jack Grubman, the All-Star telecom analyst from Salomon Smith Barney; uber-banker Frank Quattrone at CS First Boston; Morgan Stanley's Mary "Queen of the Net" Meeker; or Merrill Lynch's Henry Blodget.Well, they probably won't tell you anything. But have I got some great stories for you. Successful hedge fund manager Andy Kessler looks back on his years as an analyst on Wall Street and offers this cautionary tale of the intoxicating forces loose in the world of finance that overwhelmed sober analysis.

Kate White New York Times bestselling author, editor in chief of Cosmopolitan for fourteen years, and motivational speaker shares her gutsy secrets to success in this witty, straight-talking new career guide for women.Whether you've just settled into your first work cubicle and have no clue how to go after the success you crave, or you've already got a sweet little office but you aren't sure how to take your career to the next level, I Shouldn't Be Telling You This gives you all the secrets you need to become a success, go big with it, and then savor every second. It is jam-packed with insider strategies, interviews with women at the top of their game, and Kate's advice from her own career running five major magazines (including one of the bestselling women's magazines in the world, Cosmopolitan). She hows you how to break out of the pack, master the learning curve, make bold moves, and, ultimately, have the career you've always lusted for!Kate shares five secrets every woman needs to know how to:Land a Job You're Truly Passionate About Use "Bitch Envy" to Your Advantage Radiate Confidence and Get Buzzed About (Without Worrying What Other People Think)Ask for the Money You Want and Get It Manage Your Career and Not Just Your Job (It's a Whole Different Ball Game!)But more than anything, Kate says, you have to go big or go home do what's unexpected and always keep your career trajectory in mind. It might be tackling a project that no one else is taking on and nailing it then making sure your boss knows it. Or it might be developing a "golden gut" that will help you to break the rules the right way, so you always end up shining. In I Shouldn't Be Telling You This, Kate White shares the kinds of secrets no boss is ever likely to spill all with her irreverent wit and candid style. You'll come away with the know-how you need and you'll feel as though you've just gotten up from a fabulously dishy lunch!

One of the nations' foremost financial consultants shares 78 proven ways to cut costs dramatically, send productivity through the roof, and, in just six months, double profits.

You can't win a fight with your boss.If you have ever thought otherwise, then you're dead wrong. And you're career is over, too.In this lively guide to surviving the pitfalls of the modern corporate environment, Tom Markert, a senior executive at information giant ACNielsen, presents 56 practical rules that every employee, manager, and executive must follow in order to find corporate success. With rules such as "Work hard and smart" and "Find a good boss" Markert addresses some of the most important questions facing corporate executives today. Here, in colorful and inspiring language, he offers practical advice on how to impress and make your boss look good, how to position yourself for success, and how to address work and social situations that every employee must conquer.And, most important, Markert covers the number one question in any employee's mind: How do I work with my bossHere, this book becomes an indispensable guide to corporate life. Markert draws on his experience to illustrate these rules with telling, and often funny, anecdotes about people who have not followed the rules and paid the ultimate corporate price -- failure, embarrassment, and a career stopped dead in its tracks.

Do you own or plan to own a small businessDo you work for a small business and desire to better understand your bossDo you know someone who owns a business and wants to be stronger, more focused, and more successfulThis is the book for you.The truth is that many business books offer a lot of wonderful sounding theories, but they have little practical application in the real world of small business. Common Sense Business is full of life-and-death ideas. Follow Steve Gottry's advice and your business will live and thrive. Ignore it and your business could founder or die. Benefit from Gottry's experience as an entrepreneur who grew a hugely successful media agency, experienced a harrowing business failure, then rebounded with a new business and a fresh start on life.Common Sense Business tells you how to succeed throughout every phase of the small business life cycle -- from starting to operating, growing, and even closing down a business. No matter the state of the economy or the maturity of your business, you will find winning solutions to the questions and situations you face every day. Steve Gottry will help you understand yourself; your employees, customers, and vendors; and how people come together to form a successful business. You will learn how to maximize your business's assets and how to ward off those threats that could eat away at your resources and peace of mind, including debt, sloppiness, addiction, and fear. Warm, honest, funny, and factual, entrepreneur Steve Gottry tells the whole truth about successfully managing a business through good times and bad.

This expert, one-of-a-kind handbook shows you how to ensure that your inheritance instructions will be carried out the way you want them to be; protect your children's inheritance from creditors, ex-spouses, addictions, tax troubles, mismanagement, squandering, and other risks of loss; prevent family conflict that can arise when parents die and children divide the family money leave more money to your children and grandchildren, and less to the IRS; avoid creating inheritance problems in your family with cautionary tales of inheritance planning gone bad; understand why you still have to deal with estate tax issues even if your net worth falls below the new death-tax-exemption.

William Ury, coauthor of the classic bestseller on negotiation Getting to Yes, has taught tens of thousands of people from all walks of life managers, salespeople, students, parents, lawyers, and diplomats how to become better negotiators. Over the years, Ury has discovered that the greatest obstacle to successful agreements and satisfying relationships is not the other side, as difficult as they can be. The biggest obstacle is actually ourselves our natural tendency to react in ways that do not serve our true interests.But this obstacle can also become our biggest opportunity, Ury argues. If we learn to understand and influence ourselves first, we lay the groundwork for understanding and influencing others. In this indispensable prequel to Getting to Yes, Ury draws deeply on his personal and professional experience negotiating conflicts around the world to present a practical method to help you get to yes with yourself first, dra-matically improving your ability to get to yes with others. Extraordinarily useful and elegantly simple, Getting to Yes with Yourself is an essential guide to achieving the inner satisfaction that will, in turn, make your life better, your relationships healthier, your family happier, your work more productive, and the world around you more peaceful.

Leading pricing expert Rafi Mohammed shows businesses how to reap a financial windfall and foster growth using the underutilized and often overlooked strategy of setting prices. The 1% Windfall reveals how modest incremental changes to an everyday business practice pricing can yield significant rewards. Illustrating the power of pricing, a study of the Global 1200 found that if companies raised prices by just 1%, their average operating profits would increase by 11%. Using a 1% increase in price, some companies would see even more growth in percentage of profit: Sears, 155%; McKesson, 100%; Tyson, 81%; Land O'Lakes, 58%; and Whirlpool, 35%.The good news is that better pricing is more than simply raising prices. Instead, the key is to offer customers a variety of pricing options. This strategy is win-win: profits to companies and choices for consumers. But how do executives and managers set the right priceUnderpinned by sound empirical research and real-life anecdotes, The 1% Windfall addresses this fundamental question. This book offers guidelines that any company whether a multinational conglomerate, a small business, or even a nonprofit can follow to create a comprehensive pricing strategy for any product or service. In addition, these versatile techniques and tools provide solutions to avert a slump in a recession, offset the impact of inflation, or battle a new competitor. The result is a mind-opening, clear blueprint for com-panies to price for profit and growth.

The first book to explain the new world of alternative investing, showing how anyone can use nontraditional options to significantly increase returns and lower risksThe world's elite investors have long relied on alternative investments to produce superior returns. Until now, these strategies were the exclusive purview of institutions and the superwealthy, but today any informed investor can play the same game. A rainbow of investment options timber, start-ups, master limited partnerships (MLPs), hedged strategies, managed futures, infrastructure, peer-to-peer lending, farmland, and dozens of other nontraditional strategies can provide dramatically better gains, with less total risk, than the standard choices. In The Alternative Answer, Bob Rice, Bloomberg TV's Alternative Investments Editor, leads an entertaining and easy- to-understand tour of this world, and suggests specific alternative investments for all four key of a portfolio: safely generating more current income, decreasing risks of economic shocks, significantly increasing long-term profits, and protecting purchasing power over time.Regardless of experience or net worth, readers will learn exactly how to substantially improve investment performance in the same way that the world's best investors already do. Stocks and bonds alone aren't nearly enough. Investors need an alternative answer and now they have it.

Drawing on his experience as a leader in some of the nation's largest corporations, Baum issues a convincing call for honest, ethical, "transparent" dealing throughout the business world. Baum outlines the management techniques he uses within and without the company to get outstanding results without skirting the rules or bending the truth. Baum maintains that by fostering trust, integrity and accountability at all levels within the corporation, managers can stop the erosion of employee loyalty, restore consumer trust in brands, products, and American business. Baum teaches executives fresh ways of managing Wall Street analysts, communicating with shareholders, and wading through the complex maze of social responsibility issues.As a member of six corporate boards, Baum offers unique insight into transparent leadership, including the advantages and pitfalls of corporate governance, and the pressures executives face in reporting earnings. He also discusses the importance of setting standards for ethical business practices, yet highlights the dangers of government regulations that may result in excessive compliance costs at the expense of shareholders, creative risk taking, and innovation.

Why are otherwise smart and competent people such lousy investorsIndividual investors give up as much as two-thirds of their potential investment returns in misguided efforts to beat the market and most don't even realize it.Ashvin B. Chhabra, chief investment officer of one of the world's largest wealth management firms, explains that an important idea has gotten lost amid the relentless pursuit of investment returns. Rather than trying to beat the market, your primary goal should be to construct an investment strategy that creates a solid safety net and enables you to pursue your dreams and aspirations.With no more guarantee of lifelong jobs or pensions, all of us bear the burden of investing wisely. But many of us focus on the wrong set of investment activities, such as identifying the next great start-up or star fund manager, or simply beating a market benchmark. Even the standard framework for investing, modern portfolio theory, offers an incomplete solution. Meanwhile, the grand debates in finance, such as indexing versus active management, prioritize the wrong set of issues.We need a framework that shifts the focus of investment strategy from portfolios and markets to individuals and the objectives that really matter: protection against unexpected financial crises or retirement planning. Whatever matters most to you paying for your kid's education, starting your own business, endowing your favorite charity, or traveling the world you need a road map to help you achieve both your essential and aspirational goals.In The Aspirational Investor, Ashvin B. Chhabra outlines a groundbreaking yet intuitive approach to managing wealth, based on the identification of key goals and the careful allocation of resources and risks. The Wealth Allocation Framework will help you connect your investment portfolio with your life's goals, and accommodate the three seemingly incompatible objectives that must underpin every sound wealth management strategy: the need for financial security in the face of unknowable risks, the desire to maintain current living standards despite inflation, and the opportunity for life-changing wealth creation.Chhabra's pioneering work illuminates some surprising facts about how people get very wealthy, and reinterprets the success formulas of investing greats such as Warren Buffett and David Swensen. Chhabra also offers a novel perspective: If the markets don't really care about you, as surely they do not, then why should you spend all your time and effort trying to beat them?Raising the bar for what we should expect from our investment portfolios and from our investment advisors The Aspirational Investor is a thoughtful, practical guide for any investor, regardless of income or wealth level.

Learn the keys to Outstanding Success and reveal the millionaire in your mirror Despite never being, as he admits, the best communicator, the most talented manager, or the smartest guy in the room, Gene Bedell quickly worked his way up the corporate ladder accumulating career earnings that put him among the country's top one percent of earners while doing what he loved and always putting family first. By looking at his own career and the careers of others who have achieved Outstanding Success people who all started with nothing he found it was possible for those who put their minds to it to become wealthy while spending their careers doing work they love. Now, in The Millionaire in the Mirror, Bedell reveals how you too can find career fulfillment while earning millions without social connections, an Ivy League education, an MBA, or the kind of earth-shattering managerial talent that makes the world take notice and how you can do it without destroying your personal life, resorting to hucksters' get-rich-quick schemes, or opting out of a traditional career path. Inside you'll find the seven success strategies that will revitalize your days at work, helpful tips for getting "unstuck" at any age or phase of your career, and answers to the crucial career questions that are asked far too infrequently. Approachable but authoritative, this is the book for everyday people who have extraordinary potential. If you have the desire and drive to achieve truly Outstanding Success, you can turn the person you see in the mirror into the millionaire you're destined to become.

In Everything Is Possible, Dan Abraham, the legendary founder of Slim-Fast, recounts the story of his personal and business life, starting from his childhood and army years and his purchase of Thompson Medical for $5,000 when he was in his early twenties, and culminating in the sale of Slim-Fast for $2.3 billion in 2000. At the heart of Everything Is Possible are 16 life lessons that Abraham has picked up in sixty years of a hard-working business career. Among them: ?There is no such thing as a mistake (see pages 198–202) ?Why I always insured that my suppliers made a profit (see pages 208–9) ?The philosophy of continuous improvement (see pages 202–5) ?If you have a theory and the facts dispute it, drop your theory (pages 205–8) ?The realization that we all have both good and bad luck in our lives, but many of us don't prepare for either (pages 216–9) ?I never saw a man pick a fight with a stronger man (pages 191–5) But this memoir, a brilliant guide for anyone starting and growing a business, is about far more than business. Abraham tells the heartwarming story of growing up in a modest home in Long Beach, New York, and the lessons he learned from his mother, father, and one high school teacher that have guided him ever since. And there is more, much more: a discussion of his beliefs about the pleasure of giving; what he has learned from Judaism about ethics and the Golden Rule; and what he learned from his experiences with the FDA about the importance of compromise and about the necessity to fight hard when you believe you're right. At a time, when newspapers are filled with reports of business fraud and deceptions, and when so many people believe that to have spectacular success in business you have to be ruthless and dishonest, this is an account of a business life that has been lived honorably, passionately, and successfully, and with fun. Everything Is Possible is a book to be savored and shared with young and old alike.

Every era has its merger every era has its story. For the New Media age it was an even bigger disaster: the AOL-Time Warner deal. At the time AOL and Time Warner were considered a matchless combination of old media content and new media distribution. But very soon after the deal was announced things started to go bad and then from bad to worse. Less than four years after the deal was announced, every significant figure in the deal -save the politically astute Richard Parsons has left the company, along with scores of others. Nearly a $100 billion was written off and a stock that once traded at $100 now trades near $10.What happenedWhere did it all go wrongIn this deeply sourced and deftly written book, Nina Munk gives us a window into the minds of two of the oddest men to ever run billion-dollar empires. Steve Case, the boy wonder who built AOL one free floppy disk at a time, was searching for a way out of the New Economy. Meanwhile Jerry Levin, who'd made his reputation as a visionary when he put HBO on satellite distribution, was searching for a monumental deal. These two men, more interested in their place in history than their personal fortunes, each thought they were out-smarting the other.

The secrets to success in business aren't secrets at all. They are simple and obvious, but we overlook them. This life-changing book offers the short-cut road to success – in business and beyond giving digestible and effective advice that actually works, served up with inspirational anecdotes in a humorous style. 'The Obvious' is a refreshingly simple and original business book. Business guru James Dale shows how the principles, values, and strategies that make businesses successful are those simple ideas that apply to life. Listening opens up worlds to you, paying attention puts you at an advantage over people who don't even show up, and telling the truth beats lying ten times out of ten. Try the simple – it's almost always more effective than the complicated. You'll find this book not only a sharp, cut-to-the-chase career book, but also an handbook of engaging wisdom that will bring you fast solutions to problems in any area of your life. 'The Obvious' reveals the eight core lessons you need to remember – each full of humour and fascinating anecdotes about the world's most successful movers and shakers. You'll find compelling real-life examples of the 'simple=success' formula from companies such as Apple and IBM, Ikea and Starbucks, as well as innovative people from Thomas Edison and Bill Gates, to Woody Allen and Steven Spielberg. Some ‘Obvious’ life-lessons that work: ? Simple is Better Than Complicated – ask if you don't know; shut up and listen; be nice – it gets results. ? Be Honest – the truth is powerful; apologies work; an excuse is not a reason; take responsibility – 'I will do it' gets you noticed. ? Open Your Mind – failure is a good teacher; bosses are not all idiots – learn from them. ? Energy Gives You the Edge – patience is a virtue; so is impatience; 'Do it today' – the key to effectiveness. Readable, fast-paced and entertaining, 'The Obvious' is for anyone's business bookshelf, from the CEO to the postroom, HR director to the entire sales force – or anyone wanting to be successful in life.

The management secrets that experts and top professionals use. Get results fast with this quick, easy guide to the fundamentals of Management. Includes how to: ? Build a goal-oriented team ? Successfully manage individuals, teams and projects ? Set clear goals and give quality feedback ? Get things done on time and on budget ? Deal with difficult situations

The project management secrets that experts and top professionals use. Get results fast with this quick, easy guide to the fundamentals of Project Management. Includes how to: ? Deliver a successful project from start to finish ? Communicate effectively with people at all levels ? Manage changes and control scope creep ? Identify and deal with risks ? Work with common project management methodologies

The negotiating secrets that experts and top professionals use. Get results fast with this quick, easy guide to the fundamentals of Negotiating. Includes how to: ? Set clear goals and limits ? Understand your potential adversary or partner ? Use and interpret body language ? Deal with difficult people ? Close brilliant deals