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.

Haven't women gotten everything they wantEconomic powerSocial influenceBusiness cloutYes, but it turns out that these fantastic gains have come at a heavy price, as consumer goods experts Michael J. Silverstein and Kate Sayre discovered in an unprecedented study of 12,000 women in forty countries.That relentless upward climb has left women feeling stressed out, time starved, and overburdened. As a result, they look to products and services that will help them claw back time, juggle multiple roles, and capture a few moments of enjoyment.Women want more much more, in every category of goods and services. And no matter what their age or economic situation or where they live in the world, women will spend trillions of dollars over the next decade on the brands that truly deliver: Home-cleaning products that enable women to do in an hour what used to take a day Financial-services products that recognize that women control half the United States' wealth Food products that help keep the whole family happy and healthy Health care services designed for working-women's hectic schedules In the coming years, women's influence will be so enormous that it will not only help bring us out of the economic downturn but also create one of the most dramatic market opportunities of our lifetime bigger than the rise of China and India; more sustainable than any bailout package.Through quantitative data, profiles of individual women, and stories of winning companies, Women Want More provides business leaders with the understanding and practices they need to capture their share of the rising "female economy."

End Pain.Foster Personal and Professional Growth.Live Better. While endings are a natural part of business and life, we often experience them with a sense of hesitation, sadness, resignation, or regret. But consultant, psychologist, and bestselling author Dr. Henry Cloud sees endings differently. He argues that our personal and professional lives can only improve to the degree that we can see endings as a necessary and strategic step to something better. If we cannot see endings in a positive light and execute them well, he asserts, the "better" will never come either in business growth or our personal lives.In this insightful and deeply empathetic book, Dr. Cloud demonstrates that, when executed well, "necessary endings" allow us to proactively correct the bad and the broken in our lives in order to make room for the professional and personal growth we seek. However, when endings are avoided or handled poorly as is too often the case good opportunities may be lost, and misery repeated. Drawing on years of experience as an executive coach and a psychologist, Dr. Cloud offers a mixture of advice and case studies to help readers know when to have realistic hope and when to execute a necessary ending in a business, or with an individual; identify which employees, projects, activities, and relationships are worth nurturing and which are not; overcome people's resistance to change and create change that works; create urgency and an action plan for what's important; stop wasting resources needed for the things that really matter. Knowing when and how to let go when something, or someone, isn't working a personal relationship, a job, or a business venture is essential for happiness and success. Necessary Endings gives readers the tools they need to say good-bye and move on.

It's not a question. It is a philosophy to live by. It's Donny Deutsch's motto. And it is the secret possessed by every person with the right stuff the one-in-a-hundred who gets to the top of their team, their company, their business, their industry.If there is an assignment or a promotion up for grabs, a client or account looking for new answers, do you know how to go for itDonny Deutsch built a billion-dollar media business asking himself the basic question, "Why Not Me?" Once the reader asks and answers that question, a world of opportunity opens up. It is a tool to motivate people, build a business, and create a business culture.Often Wrong, Never in Doubt is an inspirational book from one of America's most colorful and exciting entrepreneurs. It's Donny's story. In a fun conversation with the reader, Donny lays out the core principles that propelled him to create tremendous wealth, build a huge and influential business, and become a national personality. Using inside stories of the media, the advertising industry, and a youth spent growing up on the streets of New York, Donny gives the commonsense bottom line that he has learned along the way, broken down into real, relevant, and inspiring lessons that will be useful to everyone from the front-line salesperson to the middle manager to the successful corporate executive. (It's also a useful guide for dating.)

In The Chasm Companion, The Chasm Group's Paul Wiefels presents readers with a new analysis of the ideas introduced in bestselling author Geoffrey Moore's classic books, Crossing the Chasm and Inside the Tornado, and focuses on how to translate these ideas into actionable strategy and implementation programs. This step-by-step fieldbook is organized around three major concepts: how high-tech markets develop, creating market development strategy, and executing go-to-market programs based on the strategy.

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.

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.

All too often our best efforts to accomplish the things we want most to do our jobs well, to make meaningful contributions at home and at work, to have satisfying relationships with loved ones, friends, neighbors, and coworkers are built on bad habits that sabotage us. We feel overwhelmed by our increasingly large to-do list, so we automatically multitask to get more done and end up more stressed and more overloaded. We say something with the hopes of impressing the other person, but instead of end them then spend days trying to repair the damage. We give what we think is a pep talk to our team but they walk away demotivated.How can we be most effective and productive in a world that moves too fast and demands so much of us?In Four Seconds, Peter Bregman shows that the answer is to pause for as few as four seconds the length of a deep breath to replace bad habits and reactions with more productive behaviors. In his trademark style of blending personal anecdotes with practical advice, Bregman reveals some of our most common counter-productive tendencies and describes counter-intuitive strategies for acting more intentionally, including: Why setting goals can actually harm your performance How to use strategic disengagement to recover focus and willpower Why listening not arguing is the best strategy for changing someone's mind How taking responsibility for someone else's failure can actually help you succeed Drawn from Bregman's hugely popular Harvard Business Review blog, this engaging and wise book provides simple solutions to create the results you want without the stress.

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.

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.

Bubbles from hot stocks in the 1920s to hot stocks in the 1990s are much-lamented features of contemporary economic life. Time and again, American investors, seduced by the lures of quick money, new technologies, and excessive optimism, have shown a tendency to get carried away. Time and again, they have appeared foolish when the bubble burst. The history of finance is filled with tragic tales of shattered dreams, bankruptcies, and bitter recriminations.But what if the I-told-you-so lectures about bubbles tell only half the storyWhat if bubbles accomplish something that can only be seen in retrospectWhat if the frenzy of irrational economic enthusiasm lays the groundwork for sober-minded opportunities, growth, and innovationCould it be that bubbles wind up being a competitive advantage for the bubble-prone U.S. economy?In this entertaining and fast-paced book you'll laugh as much as you cry Daniel Gross convincingly argues that every bubble has a golden lining. From the 19th-century mania for the telegraph to the current craze in alternative energy, from railroads to real estate, Gross takes us on a whirlwind tour of reckless investors and pie-in-the-sky promoters, detailing the mania they created but also the lasting good they left behind. In one of the great ironies of history, Gross shows how the bubbles once generally seen as disastrous have actually helped build the commercial infrastructures that have jump-started American growth. If there is a secret to the perennial resilience and exuberance of the American economy, Gross may just have found it in our peculiar capacity to blow financial bubbles and successfully clean up the mess.

World-renowned experts on Gender Intelligence argue that it is time to move beyond politics and fairness to build an economic business case for gender diversity in the workplace.For too long, companies have played the numbers game attempting to tackle the problem of gender imbalance through affirmative action, numeric standards, and quotas. Yet these efforts have had no measurable impact on the number of women in leadership or on a company's bottom line. Meanwhile, the dominant paradigm of traditional business remains the same.In Gender Intelligence, Barbara Annis and Keith Merron introduce a revolutionary and effective approach that is fundamentally altering the cultures of major corporations around the world. They uncover the forces that create the current condition of gender inequality and reveal, for the first time, the powerful principles that are bringing about a shift in thinking. They highlight organizations that have made the transformation from a focus on gender equity to the more powerful objective of welcoming the natural differences between men and women, which ultimately produces greater economic value. Gender Intelligence proves that the true measure of gender equality does not reside in a percentage but in the untapped power of men and women openly working and winning together.

Americans spend more than $11 billion a year on self-help products everything from books to diet pills to career coaches to seminars. So why with all this time, money, and energy being spent are so few people living the life they really wantWhy are millions of smart, talented, motivated people still going through life with one foot on the brakeHere's the real Secret: You don't need any more how-to-succeed information to reach your full potential.The problem isn't lack of motivation or lack of information. The real problem is that most people focus on the "how-to" aspects of success taught by traditional self-help programs, without coming to terms with what productivity expert Noah St. John calls your "head trash" the subconscious, emotional roadblocks that prevent people from acting on their real hopes, dreams, and ambitions. In this groundbreaking book, based on work with thousands of clients around the world, Noah St. John has created a remarkable, step-by-step approach that helps you achieve long-term happiness, success, and wealth. In The Secret Code of Success, you will learn how to: Eliminate the causes of self-sabotage and fear of success Allow yourself to make more money Remove stress while dramatically increasing personal productivity Improve relationships with coworkers, family, and friends Experience enhanced feelings of happiness, connection, and love The Secret Code of Success shows that, when it comes to success, the conscious mind is exactly the wrong place to start. It's only when we first conquer the self-sabotage of our subconscious (which accounts for 90 percent of our behavior) that we can truly begin to enjoy a life filled with success. This insight is at the core of The Secret Code of Success and leads to Noah's revolutionary 7-step method for eliminating these psychological obstacles. True financial freedom and personal success is possible at last!The Secret Code of Success shows you how to get your foot off the brake and start living the life you deserve.

Whether we love our jobs or not, the amount of work on our plate has reached unsustainable levels. We start each workday anxious about how we will get it all done, and which important tasks will have to be sacrificed again so we can keep our heads above water. We often respond to our out-of-control to-do lists by focusing on being more efficient trying to get more done in less time.According to Josh Davis, Ph.D., we're going about it the wrong way. The answer is not to get more done faster, but rather to create the conditions for at least two awesome hours of peak productivity each day.Neuroscience and psychology research is revealing what those conditions are. Drawing on this research, Davis explains that our minds operate according to complex factors that, when leveraged the right way, can make us truly effective. Davis shows us five deceptively simple strategies to create the conditions for incredible productivity and to restore sanity and balance to our lives: Maximize the moments in our day when we are between tasks, intentionally choosing what to tackle next Schedule tasks based on their cognitive and emotional demands Learn how to direct attention Feed and move our bodies for short-term benefit Identify how our environment affects our focus and alertness We are capable of impressive feats of comprehension, motivation, and performance when our psychological and biological systems are functioning optimally. Two Awesome Hours will show us how to be our most productive every day.

A Godsend for anyone who’s ever suffered that dread of speaking in public!’ If, like almost everyone, you’re petrified of public speaking, the last thing you want is a lecture! And there lies the brilliance of this unique book’s genuinely innovative approach to the issue: Dee Clayton makes the process of overcoming those negative voices in your head (Your ‘Public Speaking Monkeys!’) and becoming an effective speaker lighthearted and fun! A Godsend for anyone who’s ever suffered that dread, Dee’s refreshingly simple yet amazingly effective multiawardwinning approach has already helped thousands to overcome their fears and become effective and confident public speakers. Significantly, the author’s keenly aware that for most of us, effective public speaking isn’t necessarily an end in itself but a means to other ends for example Dee has already helped company directors to persuade more successfully, doctors to win more funding, mediators to influence international decisions and all kinds of business people to fulfil their potential. What’s more, this is a genuinely practical guide! Unlike most ‘self help’ books on the topic (or any other), this one doesn’t just tell you what to do; in her chatty, good-humored style, Dee explains exactly how, sharing her own experiences and coaxing the reader through a programme that doesn’t just work it even makes public speaking enjoyable! Taming Your Public Speaking Monkeysworks so well because its easy, enjoyable style is underpinned by Dee’s solid, real-life experience of speaking publicly to tens of thousands of people first in her highly successful twenty-year marketing career (communicating for UK household brands such as Jacob’s Creek, Pizza Hut and Jammie Dodgers to name but a few) and now as a public speaking training specialist. Equally vitally, the book draws heavily upon the NeuroLinguistic Programming (NLP) techniques and insights in which Dee is a highly experienced Trainer and Master Practitioner. Taming your Public Speaking Monkeysis a rare find: a self-help book that really helps and best of all the results come to you quickly and stick with you for life!

Person to person networks in the UK have grown over the last 10 years fuelled by the many middle management unemployed caused during the recent downsizing of many international corporations.Self employed people need to network, in the harsh environment of today’s modern job market. Networking is a ready source of employment, and a chance to meet skilled fellow workers to help build teams to complete projects that would otherwise stretch their own skill set.Outside the hours of the working day but inside a framework that people can relate to Breakfast Meetings provide them with rewarding opportunities. This book helps ensure you know how to meet the right people and kickstart your business.‘Building a Business on Bacon and Eggs’ is packed with tips and lists of how to set up thriving networking events and enables the reader to gain the most from any meetings they may hold, it includes checklists for everyone involved in the organization of events, real life stories to illustrate the theories presented as well as what to offer sponsors and how best to achieve the goals of all concerned.The book illustrates evidence of this in the comprehensive checklists throughout the book and summaries at the end of every chapter. If running breakfast meetings is your job, or if you merely wish to learn from the business experiences of other people, or you want to expand your own knowledge to gain the most from the business breakfast club environment this book provides a unique insight through the minds of its three very successful writers. To this end, ‘Breakfast on Bacon and Eggs ‘ is an essential addition to any Book Shops business section.

There is something new in the financial planning world and it is explored to the point that the reader can exploit it in “Hindsight – The Foresight Saga.” Little has been written about the property market and its relationship with the equity markets or the coincidental relationship that that investment relationship has on bankers. This book is aimed at the private investor but also the professional investment manager because it highlights the mechanism that provides for an almost continuous steady flow of positive returns on invested capital and regular savings. The author is a well experienced, highly qualified strategic financial planner and the language used in the book is straightforward and down to earth. The classic marketis identified as a circa fifteen year cycle of at one point inversely correlated market movements that works in direct contrast to a later phase in the classic market TM where property and equity movements are highly correlated in a downward slide. The first having an extremely positive effect on banking and the second, a devastating effect that contributed to bank collapses similar to those in 1979, 1992 and 2008.

The most successful business book of the last decade, Reengineering the Corporation is the pioneering work on the most important topic in business today: achieving dramatic performance improvements. This book leads readers through the radical redesign of a company's processes, organization, and culture to achieve a quantum leap in performance. Michael Hammer and James Champy have updated and revised their milestone work for the New Economy they helped to create -- promising to help corporations save hundreds of millions of dollars more, raise their customer satisfaction still higher, and grow ever more nimble in the years to come.

This book offers a radical revision of modern economic theory. Its starting point is the existing body of both micro and macro economics, as developed in such textbooks as Economics by Begg, Fischer and Dornbusch and Positive Economics by Lipsey and Chrystal. Following a similar framework to these books, it adjusts the whole range of theory by introducing some new concepts and other earlier ones that have been much neglected in the economic thought of the past century. These are related especially to the fundamental part played by land, in it proper sense of all natural resources available on the earth, the significance of credit, especially through the banking system, and the crucial impact of the method of taxation. The resulting analysis yields a thoroughly revised version of the contemporary model of a capitalist economy, so that a genuine ‘third way’ is revealed. This is not a mere modification of the present system of absentee ownership confronting a market for labour, with all the attendant evils of unemployment, monopoly and maldistribution of wealth and income. Rather it is a system based upon natural law, exhibiting economic security for all, fair distribution of output and, above all, the opportunity for self-fulfillment through work. The ‘new model’ draws upon the masters of economic thought from Smith and Ricardo to Marshall, Schumpeter and Keynes, by highlighting concepts often omitted from current studies of their works; such as Ricardo’s analysis of scarcity and differential elements of rent, Schumpeter’s view of the role of banking and Keynes’s hints at a labour theory of value. Indeed this far-reaching revision makes bold advances upon the Marshallian theory of the firm and the Keynesian theory of national income determination, thus providing new insights into both micro and macro theory. It remains faithful, however to the tradition of these latter thinkers in explaining matters fully in words, and resorting to mathematics mainly through the use of diagrams intelligible to anyone with an elementary grasp of the subject. Whilst the book strives to avoid value judgements in the interests of social science, it undoubtedly carries strong implications about economic policy. These are bound up with the central notions of free land and free credit, which have been singularly ignored by policy-makers since a few valiant attempts to introduce them in the early twentieth century. Hence the ‘new model’ is offered to both theorists and practitioners of economics, to politicians and public servants, but particularly to those who, like the author, truly seek a new vision of the subject.

In the two and a half years since the first edition appeared (April 2005), events have unfolded as predicted. Then the consensus among forecasters was that the boom in house prices would cool to an annual 2 or 3% rise over the following years. In fact, in keeping with the ‘winner’s curse’ phase of the cycle described by the author, prices rose by more than 10% per annum in Britain. Harrison’s first book, The Power in the Land, predicted the early 1990s recession. Boom Bust, warned that investing in property is not always a safe bet, because the housing market is subject to a sharp downturn at the end of a remarkably regular 18-year cycle. The crash of 2007/8 occurred exactly as predicted. His forecast was based on a careful study of the evidence from property markets in many countries over the last 200 years. Gordon Brown’s claim, last made in his 2007 Budget speech, that ‘we will never return to the old boom and bust’ has been proved false. The reason for the instability, Harrison explains, is not the housing market itself but the land market on which all buildings stand. Land is in fixed supply ‘ as Mark Twain noted: ‘They’re not making any more of it’. Therefore, as the demand for land for new homes and offices rises with population growth and economic expansion, market forces, which normally increase supply to reduce prices, have the reverse effect: prices rise. This encourages speculation, with banks lending more against escalating asset values and reinforcing the upward spiral. Under existing government policies, the only way land prices can be brought back to affordable levels is a slump, undermining the banking system and causing widespread unemployment and repossessions. This is exactly what happened in America with the collapse of the sub-prime mortgage market. The run on Northern Rock showed the UK economy is not immune. The author reveals that the government’s monetary policy only has a marginal impact on land speculation, but as the Bank of England raises interest rates to curb house price inflation, the main victim is the first-time buyer and the productive economy, especially small businesses. The only way to neutralise the boom bust cycle in the housing market is through a reform of taxation, he claims. ‘This book is an important contribution to an overdue debate.’ Martin Ricketts, Chairman of the Academic Advisory Council of the Institute of Economic Affairs and Professor of Economic Organisation, University of Buckingham. Endorsing the thrust of Harrison’s argument, Prof. Ricketts goes on to acknowledge ‘that insufficient attention has been given by policymakers to the rent of land as socially the most efficient source of public revenue’, and that that will ‘have important practical consequences … for the stability of the economic system’. Economic stability is the objective of Gordon Brown and most governments around the world. Harrison explains how this may be achieved.