Showing results by narrator "Walter Dixon" in All Categories

Since Alexis de Tocqueville, restlessness has been accepted as a signature American trait. Our willingness to move, take risks, and adapt to change have produced a dynamic economy and a tradition of innovation from Ben Franklin to Steve Jobs. The problem, according to legendary blogger, economist, and best-selling author Tyler Cowen, is that Americans today have broken from this tradition - we're working harder than ever to avoid change.

Second only to China in the magnitude of its economic miracle and second to none in its potential to shape the new century, India is fast undergoing one of the most momentous transformations the world has ever seen. In this dazzlingly panoramic book, Patrick French chronicles that epic change, telling human stories to explain a larger national narrative. Melding on-the-ground reports with a deep knowledge of history, French exposes the cultural foundations of India’s political, economic and social complexities.

Sometime between 1610 and 1611, William Shakespeare wrote The Tempest. The idea for the play came from the real-life shipwreck in 1609 of the Sea Venture, which was caught in a hurricane and grounded on the coast of Bermuda during a voyage to resupply England's troubled colony at Jamestown, in present-day Virginia. A lesser known passenger was Stephen Hopkins. During the 10 months the Sea Venture passengers were marooned on Bermuda, Hopkins was charged with trying to incite a mutiny and condemned to die, only to have his sentence commuted moments before it was to be carried out.

Is America a source of pride, as Americans have long held, or shame, as Progressives allege? Beneath an innocent exterior, are our lives complicit in a national project of theft, expropriation, oppression, and murder? Or is America still the hope of the world? New York Times best-selling author Dinesh D'Souza says these questions are no mere academic exercise.

Strong leaders at all levels within an organization are a requisite for business success. Yet the leadership pipeline—the internal architecture for growing leaders—is often broken or non-existent. This updated edition of the best-selling The Leadership Pipeline has been revised to help address the challenges of today’s business environment. Anchored in experience, it offers a tested model for planning leadership succession and development that has proven to get results.

What are we going to do with those 20 or 30 years we didn’t expect? Due to unfounded fears of unhappiness and regret, many intelligent, otherwise rational people, even into their 40s and 50s, are so convinced that old age is a time of misery that they simply deny any other outcome and refuse to plan their own destiny. This optimistic and highly informative guide to smart aging will detail for listeners the steps they need to take to ensure that long life becomes synonymous with good life.

Earth evolves. From first atom to molecule, mineral to magma, granite crust to single cell to verdant living landscape, ours is a planet constantly in flux. In this radical new approach to Earth’s biography, senior Carnegie Institution researcher and national best-selling author Robert M. Hazen reveals how the co-evolution of the geosphere and biosphere - of rocks and living matter - has shaped our planet into the only one of its kind in the Solar System, if not the entire cosmos.

By explaining how the human brain works and outing its most irrational processes, this book provides the thinking tools that will help you make better decisions, ask the right questions (at the right time), know what to look for when evaluating information, and understand how your own brain subconsciously clouds your judgment. Think you're too smart to be easily misled? Harrison summarizes scientific research showing how easily even intelligent and well-educated people can be fooled.

Family Inc. is not just a personal finance book; it is a "how to" guide for achieving financial security. By borrowing time tested principles used in business and applying them to family financial planning, Family Inc. provides a powerful framework for navigating all of life's big financial decisions. You will learn how to think strategically as the Family Chief Financial Officer; how to make investments in education and yourself to benefit your career; how to manage your hard-earned money to make it work for you; and much more.

Our future is written by hopes, fears, dreams, expectations, and decisions made about life. In the same way, organizations have futures written by history, circumstances, culture, aspirations, successes, and failures. These already-written futures determine and shape the level of performance that's possible for individuals and organizations. Authors Steve Zaffron and Dave Logan crack the code on rewriting the future for people and organizations, elevating performance to unprecedented levels.

An industry-specific guide to the applications of advanced analytics and AI to the banking industry.

Acclaimed historian Edward Gray offers the first comprehensive narrative of the America's defining border. Formalized in 1767, the Mason-Dixon Line resolved a generations-old dispute that began with the establishment of Pennsylvania in 1681. In 1780, Pennsylvania's Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery inaugurated the next phase in the Line's history. Proslavery and antislavery sentiments had long coexisted in the Maryland-Pennsylvania borderlands, but now African Americans faced a boundary between distinct legal regimes.

Coinage - it is one of the most successful and consistent technologies ever invented. Nothing else we still use in everyday life has a history quite like it. Look around at all the things that would bewilder a Greek, Roman, or Renaissance ancestor; then, dig into your purse or pocket for that one artifact that they would immediately recognize. Historian Frank L. Holt takes us on a journey through the history of numismatics, the study of coins - one of the oldest and most important contributions to the arts and humanities.

Unorthodox success principles from a billionaire entrepreneur and philanthropist.

Eli Broad's embrace of "unreasonable thinking" has helped him build two Fortune 500 companies, amass personal billions, and use his wealth to create a new approach to philanthropy. He has helped to fund scientific research institutes, K-12 education reform, and some of the world's greatest contemporary art museums. By contrast, "reasonable" people come up with all the reasons something new and different can't be done, because, after all, no one else has done it that way.

In Once Upon an Algorithm, Martin Erwig explains computation as something that takes place beyond electronic computers, and computer science as the study of systematic problem solving. Erwig points out that many daily activities involve problem solving. Getting up in the morning, for example: You get up, take a shower, get dressed, eat breakfast. This simple daily routine solves a recurring problem through a series of well-defined steps. In computer science, such a routine is called an algorithm.

An homage to society's innovators and maintainers, Wicked Problems offers a refreshing vision for listeners of all backgrounds to build a better future and demonstrates how engineering is a cultural choice-one that requires us to restlessly find ways to transform society, but perhaps more critically, to care for the creations that already exist.

In The Masters of Private Equity and Venture Capital, the pioneers of the industry share the investing and management wisdom they have gained by investing in and transforming their portfolio companies. Based on original interviews conducted by the authors, this book is filled with colorful stories on the subjects that most matter to the high-level investor, such as selecting and working with management, pioneering new markets, adding value through operational improvements, applying private equity principles to non-profits, and much more.

America began, we are often told, with the Founding Fathers, the men who waged a revolution and created a unique place called the United States. We may acknowledge the early Jamestown and Puritan colonists and mourn the dispossession of Native Americans, but we rarely grapple with the complexity of the nation’s pre-revolutionary past. In this pathbreaking revision, Daniel Richter shows that the United States has a much deeper history than is apparent - that far from beginning with a clean slate, it is a nation with multiple pasts.

More than 20 years ago, Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton introduced the balanced scorecard, a revolutionary performance measurement system that allowed organizations to quantify intangible assets such as people, information, and customer relationships. Then, in The Strategy-Focused Organization, Kaplan and Norton showed how organizations achieved breakthrough performance with a management system that put the balanced scorecard into action.

Scrum—an organizing approach that exposes work progress and quality—is used all over the place in software development, but it's not just for coders. Scrum For Dummies shows you how scrum can improve performance regardless of your industry or project. You can even use scrum to get tangible results in your personal projects—prepare for retirement, organize travel, and much more. Plan goals, releases, and sprints for all aspects of business and life. With Dummies, you'll learn how to work flexibility and collaboration into anything you're doing.