Time is not money.Time is more important than money. Today's customers are overwhelmed, overworked, and overstressed, and it seems that everyone from CEOs to soccer moms is short on time and inundated with information. As a result, despite the availability of 24/7 commerce and countless ways of engaging people in our multiscreen (mobile, TV, and PC) economy, companies find it more difficult than ever to claim even a fraction of the 1,440 minutes in their customers' precious 24 hours. In The 24-Hour Customer, Adrian C. Ott, CEO of a successful Silicon Valley consultancy, argues that companies need to strategically harness the ebbs and flows of customer time and attention in order to win in today's competitive landscape. She explores the economics of time and attention, including why customers will devote hours addicted to social networks, yet will say "I have no time!" to other offerings. Based on extensive research and real-world results with market-leading companies, this book provides tools, such as Time-Value Tradeoffs and Time-ographics, that pinpoint opportunities to increase revenue and gain market traction. Filled with fascinating case studies from companies like Johnson Johnson, Amazon, and iPhone app start-ups, The 24-Hour Customer offers fresh ideas for capitalizing on the elements of time, attention, and value to innovate never-before-considered products, services, and programs for today's ber-connected, multitasking customer. Readers will discover how: Zipcar utilized time-slicing to redefine automobile ownership and grew by 70 percent, while the auto industry struggled in 2009; Netflix, Hulu, and others time-shifted to movies on-demand, ultimately restructuring the entertainment industry; P&G leveraged inattention by enabling habit-formation for some of its most successful brands. This book shares the latest strategic weapons for achieving market leadership and will change the way executives think about their businesses and their customers.

Award-winning journalist and leading consumer advocate William J. McGee offers a shocking, essential exposé that reveals the real state of the "friendly skies."From outsourced call centers in India to the Alabama location where all lost baggage ends up, William J. McGee crisscrossed the country and traveled around the globe immersing himself deep into the world of commercial airlines. And what he found was shocking.McGee interviewed countless industry insiders pilots, TSA security screeners, FAA inspectors, legislators, the CEOs of the major carriers, and even Ralph Nader and Steven Slater, the disgruntled flight attendant who famously jettisoned a JetBlue flight. Here he reveals how airline executives are cutting costs in "a mad race to the bottom" by delegating flights to second-tier regional airlines and outsourcing critical aircraft maintenance and repairs to unlicensed "mechanics" in China, Singapore, Mexico, and El Salvador. And while the U.S. airlines have raked in tens of billions of dollars for checked baggage alone in recent years, our skies (and our airports) are not getting any safer. What's more, McGee explains how both political parties and all branches of the U.S. government have conspired to place corporate interests above the interests of consumers, workers, the nation's economy, and even the planet itself. Attention All Passengers will change the way you view the airline industry and make you think twice the next time you see the fasten seat belts sign.

The fault line -- that dangerous, unstable seam in the economy where powerful innovations and savage competition meet and create market-shattering tremors. Every company lives on it; no manager can control it. In the original edition of Living on the Fault Line, Geoffrey Moore presented a compelling argument for using shareholder value (or share price) as the key driver in management decisions. Moore now revisits his argument in the post-Internet bubble world, proving that the methods he espouses are more germane than ever and showing companies how to use them to survive and thrive in today's demanding economy. Extending the themes of Crossing the Chasm and Inside the Tornado, his first two books on the dynamics of the high-tech markets, Moore shows why sensitivity to stock price is the single most important lever for managing in the future, both as a leading indicator of shifts in competitive advantage and as an employee motivator for making necessary changes in organizations heretofore impervious to change. This revised and updated edition includes: A deeper emphasis on core versus context, which has emerged as the key distinction in allocating resources to improve shareholder value A new Competitive Advantage Grid that will aid managers in achieving and sustaining competitive advantage, the most important component in managing for shareholder value An expanded Value Discipline Model as it relates to the Competitive Advantage Grid Analysis of the powerful new trend toward core/context analysis and outsourcing production duties Updated models of organizational change for each stage of market development As disruptive forces continue to buffet the marketplace and rattle the staid practices of the past, Moore offers a brilliant set of navigational tools to help meet today's most compelling management challenges.

The Second City has launched the careers of celebrated comic performers such as Tina Fey and Stephen Colbert and produced award-winning content. But it's the actual improvisational process developed and honed over the years by The Second City that has become its legacy. Players master an ability to co-create in ensembles, using philosophies that celebrate a "Yes, And" approach. They embrace authenticity and failure, and espouse the idea of "following the follower," which allows any member of the team to assume a leadership role. For more than two decades, The Second City has taken these same principles in thousands of corporate clients, showing leaders how to apply the tools of improv to common business challenges. Here, for the first time, Second City executives Kelly Leonard and Tom Yorton describe how you can use the same skills that thrill audiences around the world to improve your emotional intelligence, increase creativity, and learn to pivot out of tight and uncomfortable situations. In this engaging, often humorous, and highly practical book, you will learn how to become a more compelling leader and a more collaborative follower by employing the seven elements of improv: Yes, And, by which you give every idea a chance to be acted on; Ensemble, reconciling the needs of individuals with those of the broader team; Co-creation, which highlights the importance of dialogue in creating new products, processes, and relationships; Authenticity, or being unafraid to speak truth to power, challenge convention, and break the rules; Failure, teaching us that not only is it okay to fail, but we should always include it as part of our process; Follow the Follower, which gives any member of the group the chance to assume a leadership role; Listening, in which you learn to stay in the moment, and know the difference between listening to understand and listening merely to respond. When we are fiercely following the tenets of improvisation, we generate ideas both quickly and efficiently, we weather storms with more aplomb, and we don't work burdened by a fear of failure. Even better, these qualities are fully transferable to our lives outside the office. More people are beginning to recognize what The Second City has known for a long time: In the midst of a revolution in how we learn, communicate, and work, professional success often rests on the same pillars that form the foundation of great comedy: Creativity, Communication, and Collaboration. That's where improvisation comes in.

From New York Times bestselling financial guru Julie Stav comes The Money in You!, a spot-on primer that pinpoints your financial personality, thus helping you to overcome the self-imposed hurdles that keep you from living the rich life of your dreams. Socrates' guiding rule was "Know thyself." These words are of eternal significance, and, arguably, no better advice has ever been given to man or woman. Yet, what would Socrates have said if he had to dispense practical financial advice in today's hyper-spending, debt-saturated climateWith the myriad pressures involved in building wealth, instilling practical spending habits in ourselves and our kids, and ultimately establishing a life in which money is abundant and our fiscal future secure, undoubtedly he would tell us, "Know thy financial self." In The Money In You!, Julie Stav introduces us to five different financial personality types. According to Julie, it is our financial nature—the way we handle money matters—that forecasts our financial future. Julie shows readers that no amount of data or market expertise trumps the fundamental truth we all forget—that building wealth, attaining security, and establishing personal success can only be achieved when we recognize our strengths and weaknesses. If we are in touch with our motivations, our desires, and our innate tendencies, we can shed the guilt of making the same mistakes over and over; we can halt the vicious cycle of overspending, debt, and ruined relationships. It is then that we are able to restructure our lives to fit our individual goals, whether it's learning to play the stock market or just saving for shoes. Finally, Julie shows us how to establish healthy relationships with the people who are affected by our financial decisions, and who affect us with theirs. Endlessly entertaining, this book will initiate feisty discussions over just who we are and how we interact with others. Julie Stav will both delight and inform.

Serial entrepreneur and journalist Shane Snow delves into the reasons why some people and some organizations are able to achieve incredible things in implausibly short time frames, showing how each of us can use these "smartcuts" to rethink convention and accelerate success.Why do some companies attract millions of customers in mere months while others flopHow did Alexander the Great, YouTube phenom Michelle Phan, and Tonight Show host Jimmy Fallon dash to the top in less time than it takes most of us to get a midlevel promotionHow do high-growth businesses, world-class heart surgeons, and underdog marketers beat the norm?Like computer hackers, a handful of innovators in every era use lateral thinking to find better routes to stunning accomplishments. Throughout history, the world's biggest successes have been achieved by those who refuse to follow the expected course and buck the norm.Smartcuts is about bucking the norm. In it, Snow shatters common wisdom about success, revealing how conventions like "paying dues" prevent progress, why kids shouldn't learn multiplication tables, and how, paradoxically, it's easier to build a huge business than a small one.Smartcuts tells the stories of innovators who dared to work differently and lays out practical takeaways for the rest of us. It's about applying entrepreneurial and technological concepts to success, and how, by emulation, we too can leapfrog competitors, grow businesses, and fix society's problems faster than we think.

When small- and medium-sized business owners first hear George Cloutier's rules, they often think he's a madman. His controversial rules for doing business rules that aren't taught at Harvard Business School include:The best family business has one member.Weekends are for working, not playing golf or coaching.Never pay your vendors on time.Wear your control freak badge with pride.Quit denial: if your business is failing during a recession, it's your fault. As the founder and CEO of American Management Services, Cloutier has emerged as "the leading advocate for small business" (Reuters), having spent over thirty years guiding business owners through the tough choices that line the road to profitability. He and his company have worked with more than six thousand companies, averting certain ruin for some and generating seemingly impossible growth and profitability for others.Cloutier graduated from Harvard College and Harvard Business School, but the lessons in this book aren't from there. Unlike his classmates, most of whom headed straight to Wall Street, Cloutier has been on the docks at 2 a.m. counting heads of lettuce for food distributors to make sure nothing would disappear without a waybill. He's spent long, overnight hours in truck stops, making sure sticky fingers stayed out of the tills. Cloutier and his colleagues at American Management Services become personal pitt bulls to the CEOs who hire them, doing whatever it takes to bring their clients' businesses back into long-term profitability.Profits Aren't Everything, They're the Only Thing is the long- overdue wake-up call for 23 million small- and midsize business owners across America. This book serves up the hard-boiled, unadulterated truth to aspiring and established entrepreneurs, without apologies. His no-nonsense advice may be hard to hear at times, but it works.

Who's really driving oil and gas pricesHow much oil is leftHow far will Big Oil go to get it, and at what cost to the environment, human rights, the economy, worker safety, public health, and democracy?Here, at last, are the answers we've been looking for and the inside story on Big Oil.In The Tyranny of Oil, Antonia Juhasz investigates the true state of the companies collectively known as "Big Oil," uncovering their unparalleled global financial power, their political dominance, and their increasingly destructive plans for the future. And she tells us what we can do about it.A tool for meaningful change that blends history, original investigative research and reporting, candid interviews with key insiders, and a unique focus on activism, The Tyranny of Oil is required reading for every concerned global citizen.

#131 The Case of the Two-Cent CandyYears ago, I wrote about a retail store in the Palo Alto environs a good one, which had a box of two-cent candies at the checkout. I subsequently remember that "little" parting gesture of the two-cent candy as a symbol of all that is Excellent at that store. Dozens of people who have attended seminars of mine from retailers to bankers to plumbing-supply-house owners have come up to remind me, sometimes 15 or 20 years later, of "the two-cent candy story," and to tell me how it had a sizable impact on how they did business, metaphorically and in fact.Well, the Two-Cent Candy Phenomenon has struck again with oomph and in the most unlikely of places.For years Singapore's "brand" has more or less been Southeast Asia's "place that works." Its legendary operational efficiency in all it does has attracted businesses of all sorts to set up shop there. But as "the rest" in the geographic neighborhood closed the efficiency gap, and China continued to rise-race-soar, Singapore decided a couple of years ago to "rebrand" itself as not only a place that works but also as an exciting, "with it" city. (I was a participant in an early rebranding conference that also featured the likes of the late Anita Roddick, Deepak Chopra, and Infosys founder and superman N. R. Narayana Murthy.)Singapore's fabled operating efficiency starts, as indeed it should, at ports of entry the airport being a prime example. From immigration to baggage claim to transportation downtown, the services are unmatched anywhere in the world for speed and efficiency.Saga . . . Immigration services in Thailand, three days before a trip to Singapore, were a pain. ("Memorable.") And entering Russia some months ago was hardly a walk in the park, either. To be sure, and especially after 9/11, entry to the United States has not been a process you'd mistake for arriving at Disneyland, nor marked by an attitude that shouted "Welcome, honored guest."Singapore immigration services, on the other hand:The entry form was a marvel of simplicity. The lines were short, very short, with more than adequate staffing.The process was simple and unobtrusive.And:The immigration officer could have easily gotten work at Starbucks; she was all smiles and courtesy.And:Yes!Yes!And . . . yes!There was a little candy jar at each Immigration portal!The "candy jar message" in a dozen ways:"Welcome to Singapore, Tom!! We are absolutely beside ourselves with delight that you have decided to come here!"Wow!Wow!Wow!Ask yourself . . . now:What is my (personal, department, project, restaurant, law firm) "Two-Cent Candy"?Does every part of the process of working with us/me include two-cent candies?Do we, as a group, "think two-cent candies"?Operationalizing: Make "two-centing it" part and parcel of "the way we do business around here." Don't go light on the so-called substance but do remember that . . . perception is reality . . . and perception is shaped by two-cent candies as much as by that so-called hard substance.Start: Have your staff collect "two-cent candy stories" for the next two weeks in their routine "life" transactions. Share those stories. Translate into "our world." And implement.Repeat regularly.Forever.(Recession or no recession you can afford two cents.)(In fact, it is a particularly Brilliant Idea for a recession you doubtless don't maximize Two-Cent Opportunities. And what opportunities they are.)

Here is the bestselling guide that created a new game plan for marketing in high-tech industries. Crossing the Chasm has become the bible for bringing cutting-edge products to progressively larger markets. This edition provides new insights into the realities of high-tech marketing, with special emphasis on the Internet. It's essential reading for anyone with a stake in the world's most exciting marketplace.

Thirty-nine of America's most successful business leaders share the most important decisions of their careers and the life and career lessons they hold for us all. When former CEO Harlan Steinbaum decided to buy back his retail drug chain with his partners, his life changed dramatically. The personal impact that this one business decision this "tough call" had on Steinbaum made him wonder if others had experienced similar kinds of defining moments in their own careers. To find out, he reached out to some of the most successful people in the country leaders from companies such as Verizon, Chrysler, ESPN, Ogilvy & Mather, Enterprise Rent-A-Car, WellPoint, and Panera Bread Company to pinpoint the career-defining decisions that were integral to their success. The result is Tough Calls from the Corner Office, a treasure trove of rich business wisdom, stories of tough decisions and hard-won victories, and lessons from a lifetime of achievement in the world of business.Tough Calls from the Corner Office offers inspiring stories, lessons, principles, strategies, ideas, and solutions drawn from every stage in a successful career, from early key choices to the final leave-taking from the world of work. Given unprecedented access to such visionaries as Union Square Hospitality Group's Danny Meyer, ESPN's Bill Rasmussen, Build-A-Bear's Maxine Clark, and Let's Make a Deal's Monty Hall, Steinbaum shares their experiences, told in their own words, so that others may learn from them. In a time when many people are at professional crossroads, Tough Calls from the Corner Office offers inspiration and the confidence to believe that tough decisions can be the first step to extraordinary success.

Too many leadership failures. Too many career derailments. Too many toxic workplaces filled with disengaged, distrustful employees. Jeffrey Pfeffer, a professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and the author of Power, offers an incisive dissection of the multibillion-dollar leadership industry and presents ways to fix its many problems.In Leadership BS, Jeffrey Pfeffer pulls back the curtain, showing how leadership really works and why so many leadership development efforts fail. In this forthright and persuasive critique, Pfeffer argues that much of the oft-repeated wisdom about leadership is based more on hope than reality, on wishes rather than data, on beliefs instead of science. In an age when transparency is considered a virtue, Pfeffer makes the case that strategic misrepresentation isn't as harmful as you think, that breached agreements are a part of business, that immodesty is frequently a path to success, and that relying on the magnanimity of your boss is a bad bet.Using research findings from social psychology, sociology, and sociobiology, and filled with practical, actionable advice, Leadership BS encourages readers to finally stop accepting sugar-laced but toxic potions as cures and to understand the realities of organizations and human behavior.To make real change, Pfeffer argues, we need to get beyond the half-truths and self-serving stories that are so prominent in the mythology of leadership. In calling BS on so much conventional wisdom, Leadership BS offers both a provocative, scientific examination of how leadership actually works and how it doesn't and a pre*ion for leaders future and present.

Transform Your Workplace!Imagine a company where people are excited about coming to work and giving their best efforts every day. In this innovative and engrossing business parable, Harry Paul and Ross Reck show managers at all levels how they can immediately and easily increase productivity by tapping into the discretionary effort of the people who work for them. Starting from the most basic aspect of business reality that people intentionally regulate the amount of effort they put into their jobs based upon how they feel they're being treated the authors point out that the most important part of the job of every manager, team leader, supervisor, and executive is to treat people in such a way that they become excited about applying all their discretionary effort toward performing their jobs.At the book's center is the story of Nancy Kim, a human resources director at a magazine that is struggling with all the problems associated with unhappy employees low productivity and morale along with high absenteeism and turnover. After she openly challenges the CEO's new management-by-the-numbers system, she's charged with turning the situation around immediately. Filled with real-world studies, Instant Turnaround! shows anyone how to turn the workplace into a destination a place where working hard feels like hardly working because it's engaging, enjoyable, and fulfilling.

Today we all face more impossible challenges than ever before. But flash foresight lets you transform the impossible into the possible, revealing hidden opportunities and allowing you to solve your biggest problems before they happen. Daniel Burrus is one of the world's leading forecasters, corporate strategists, and visionaries. Over the past quarter century, he has established a reputation worldwide for his exceptional record of accurately predicting the future of technological change and its direct impact on the business world."Wouldn't it be amazing if you could predict the future and be right?" writes Burrus. "You can: all you have to do is leave out the parts you could be wrong about! And the amazing thing is, when you know where to look, there's more than enough you can be right about to make all the difference."From small businesses to multinationals, individual careers to entire industries, Flash Foresight looks at how Burrus's seven radical flash foresight "triggers" have transformed dozens of careers, fortunes, and lives. Both engaging and enlightening, Flash Foresight provides an easy-to-implement blueprint for applying the same strategies to your own business, enabling you to see the invisible and do the impossible.In the past, flash foresight was useful. Today, as the pace of technological change accelerates almost beyond the point of comprehension, it's an imperative.

The media coach and Emmy Award-winning correspondent Bill McGowan shares his secrets of pitch-perfect communications, showing readers how to communicate with confidence.During the pivotal moments of our lives, results are often determined not only by our actions but by our words as well. Saying the right thing the right way can make the difference between sealing the deal or losing the account, advancing your career or suffering a demotion. During these moments, it's important to be pitch perfect to use precisely the right tone to convey the right message to the right person at the right time. Such pitch-perfect moments are crucial in our personal and professional journeys. In Pitch Perfect, the renowned media coach Bill McGowan shows you how to craft just the right message. Along the way, McGowan lays out his Seven Principles of Persuasion, including: The Scorsese Principle: Hold your audience's attention with visual images. Direct the film that plays in your listener's mind. The No-Tailgating Principle: Avoid verbal fender-benders and career-wrecking moments by maintaining a safe talking distance. When in doubt, stop talking and listen. The Pasta-Sauce Principle: Cure boredom by boiling down your message, making it as rich and brief as possible. In Pitch Perfect, you'll learn how to overcome all these communication pitfalls. The Seven Principles of Persuasion are as easy to learn, implement, and master as they are effective. The right language both verbal and nonverbal can make you more confident, persuasive, and certain. It can stir people to listen closely to your every word and to remember you long after you've left the room.

You are a good person. You are one of the 84 million Americans who volunteer with a charity. You are part of a national donor pool that contributes nearly $200 billion to good causes every year. But you wonder: Why don't your efforts seem to make a differenceFifteen years ago, Robert Egger asked himself this same question as he reluctantly climbed aboard a food service truck for a night of volunteering to help serve meals to the homeless. He wondered why there were still people waiting in line for soup in this day and age. Where were the drug counselors, the job trainers, and the support team to help these men and women get off the streetsWhy were volunteers buying supplies from grocery stores when restaurants were throwing away unused fresh food every nightWhy had politicians, citizens, and local businesses allowed charity to become an end in itselfWhy wasn't there an efficient way to solve the problemRobert knew there had to be a better way. In 1989, he started the D.C. Central Kitchen by collecting unused food from local restaurants, caterers, and hotels and bringing it back to a central location where hot, nutritious meals were prepared and distributed to agencies around the city. Since then, the D.C. Central Kitchen has been named one of President Bush Sr.'s Thousand Points of Light and has become one of the most respected and emulated nonprofit agencies in the world, producing and distributing more than 4,000 meals a day. Its highly successful 12-week job-training program equips former homeless transients and drug addicts with culinary and life skills to gain employment in the restaurant business. In Begging for Change, Robert Egger looks back on his experience and exposes the startling lack of logic, waste, and ineffectiveness he has encountered during his years in the nonprofit sector, and calls for reform of this $800 billion industry from the inside out. In his entertaining and inimitable way, he weaves stories from his days in music, when he encountered legends such as Sarah Vaughan, Mel Torme, and Iggy Pop, together with stories from his experiences in the hunger movement -- and recently as volunteer interim director to help clean up the beleaguered United Way National Capital Area. He asks for nonprofits to be more innovative and results-driven, for corporate and nonprofit leaders to be more focused and responsible, and for citizens who contribute their time and money to be smarter and more demanding of nonprofits and what they provide in return. Robert's appeal to common sense will resonate with readers who are tired of hearing the same nonprofit fund-raising appeals and pity-based messages. Instead of asking the "who" and "what" of giving, he leads the way in asking the "how" and "why" in order to move beyond our 19th-century concept of charity, and usher in a 21st-century model of change and reform for nonprofits. Enlightening and provocative, engaging and moving, this book is essential reading for nonprofit managers, corporate leaders, and, most of all, any citizen who has ever cared enough to give of themselves to a worthy cause.

The definitive guide to turning the Millennials' great expectations into even greater results The Millennial generation (those born between 1982 and 2000) has rapidly entered the workforce in greater numbers, but its introduction to the workplace has been anything but seamless. In fact, many companies already report attention-grabbing stories about: the mother who called HR to complain when her Millennial daughter got a mediocre performance review; the new hire who dialed the CEO directly to tell him what the company could be doing better; the young employee who revealed a confidential new product on her Facebook page before it was made public. Clashes like these are happening in workplaces around the world, and they leave leaders and coworkers scratching their heads and wondering, "What do these Millennials wantWhy are they so differentHow do we get the good ones in the doorHow do we keep them there without alienating the other generations?" Going forward, a company's success will depend upon knowing the answers to these questions, because they are the keys to motivating this new generation and to taking advantage of the amazing potential it possesses. In The M-Factor, Baby Boomer Lynne Lancaster and Generation Xer David Stillman draw on cutting-edge case studies, findings from large-scale surveys, and hundreds of interviews to identify the seven trends essential for understanding and managing the Millennials: the role of the parents, entitlement, the search for meaning, great expectations, the need for speed, social networking, and collaboration. Observant, humorous, and savvy, this book the ultimate guide to Millennials in the workplace offers valuable insights and practical, take-action tips and solutions that Traditionalists, Boomers, Gen Xers, and even Millennials can use to bridge generational gaps, be more productive, and achieve organizational success like never before.

What if there were a clear set of instructions to help you bring your best ideas to lifeAs with a recipe, you could take a compelling idea and with concrete steps, transform it into something extraordinary. As a professor at Stanford University, Tina Seelig has dedicated her career to teaching the practice of moving from imagination to implementation. In Insight Out, she welcomes you into her classroom and crisply defines the core concepts of imagination, creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship, presenting an elegant and much-needed model she calls the "Invention Cycle." This new approach enables you to see obstacles as opportunities, inspire others to share your vision, and ultimately bring more ideas to fruition. Filled with surprising research, examples from her Stanford classroom, and stories from around the world—Silicon Valley to San Quentin State Prison, rural Pakistan to the North Pole—Insight Out offers essential and unexpected strategies that will help bring even the slightest flicker of an idea to life. Equally useful for students, educators, entrepreneurs, and would-be innovators in all fields, this is an essential road map for anyone who wants to get ideas out of their head and into the world.

The engrossing, often scandalous saga of one of the wealthiest, longest-lasting, and most colorful family dynasties in the history of American commerce a cautionary tale about prosperity, profligacy, hubris, and the blessings and dark consequences of success.From countless bar signs, stadium scoreboards, magazine ads, TV commercials, and roadside billboards, the name Budweiser has been burned into the American consciousness as the "King of Beers." Over a span of more than a century, the company behind it, Anheuser-Busch, has attained legendary status. A jewel of the American Industrial Revolution, in the hands of its founders the sometimes reckless and always boisterous Busch family of St. Louis, Missouri it grew into one of the most fearsome marketing machines in modern times. In Bitter Brew, critically acclaimed journalist Knoedelseder paints a fascinating portrait of immense wealth and power accompanied by a barrelful of scandal, heartbreak, tragedy, and untimely death.This engrossing, vivid narrative captures the Busch saga through five generations. At the same time, it weaves a broader story of American progress and decline over the past 150 years. It's a cautionary tale of prosperity, hubris, and loss.

The inside story of the power struggle that rocked Wall Street's most prestigious financial institution What began with a shot over the bow ended in a shocking coup d'etat. In less than four months a group of eight retired executives orchestrated a stunning revolt within Morgan Stanley, the venerable and until recently most successful financial services firm on Wall Street. Now acclaimed journalist and historian Patricia Beard brings together the entire behind-the-scenes story in Blue Blood and Mutiny, a real-life business thriller exposing the tale that shook high finance. In March 2005 the business world woke up to an unprecedented full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal calling for the removal of Morgan Stanley's CEO. It was paid for by a cohort of eight former Morgan Stanley executives, including an ex-chairman and an ex-president, who soon would be dubbed the "Eight Grumpy Old Men." Their target was CEO Philip Purcell, a midwesterner who had come to power following Morgan Stanley's 1997 merger with Dean Witter Discover, where Purcell had been chief executive. In his eight years as CEO, Purcell had presided over a 50 percent decline in stock price since its peak in 2000 and a series of high-profile government and civil lawsuits that had tarnished the company's once-sterling reputation. Just a few months after the Journal ad, Purcell would retire under pressure, and former president John Mack, who had been pushed out by Purcell, was appointed CEO. The "Eight Grumpy Old Men" won the battle.The revolt of the Eight is about more than the stock price, or any bottom-line metrics: it signals a clash of cultures and a battle for the soul of American business. Since its founding, Morgan Stanley has been an elite enterprise guided by J. P. Morgan Jr.'s motto "A First Class Business in a First Class Way." The House of Morgan stood for something larger than success with honor; its ethos was unique some would say sacred and the eight retired executives believed this ideal had been undermined during Purcell's reign.Opening the long-closed doors of a bastion of Wall Street that has maintained the strictest privacy until now, Blue Blood and Mutiny weaves the history of Morgan Stanley with the inside story of the fight for dominance between two competing business cultures one, the collegial meritocracy handed down from the days of J. P. Morgan, and the other, a cold, contemporary corporate model. Here is the season's must-read book for anyone who wants to understand the future of American business.

There's no doubt about it, today's workplace is an uncertain and treacherous territory. Newspaper headlines are proclaiming near record-high levels of unemployment, and, in these tough times, companies are making swift judgments about human capital. The bottom line: No job is safe. But there are tried and true ways to fight off sudden unemployment successfully, and the number one weapon in your arsenal is workplace expert and television and radio personality Stephen Viscusi's career manifesto, Bulletproof Your Job. Based on four simple strategies for dodging the layoff bullet and a long list of ways to implement these strategies, Bulletproof Your Job may save you from your worst enemy at work which just so happens to be you.Quite simply, observe these imperative rules:Be visible. Be easy. Be useful. Be ready. With plenty of distinct action items, dozens of anecdotal illustrations and examples, and lists and tips for adapting bulletproof strategies to your own situation, Bulletproof Your Job will show you how to leverage the black-and-white stuff your title, salary, and tenure with the gray stuff your relationship with coworkers, visibility in the workplace, and ability to make your boss look good to ward off the pink stuff the dreaded layoff notice. While you're at it, you'll be creating a long-term strategy for job security and career advancement that ensures you'll never feel this vulnerable again.