Showing results by narrator "Steven Menasche" in All Categories

Information is power. It drives commerce, protects nations, and forms the backbone of systems that range from health care to high finance. Yet despite the avalanche of data available in today's information age, neither institutions nor individuals get the information they truly need to make well-informed decisions. Faulty information and sub-optimal decision-making create an imbalance of power that is exaggerated as governments and corporations amass enormous databases on each of us.

With a razor wit, Nicholas Carr cuts through Silicon Valley's unsettlingly cheery vision of the technological future to ask a hard question: Have we been seduced by a lie? Gathering a decade's worth of posts from his blog, Rough Type, as well as his seminal essays, Utopia Is Creepy offers an alternative history of the digital age, chronicling its roller-coaster crazes and crashes, its blind triumphs, and its unintended consequences.

Negotiation is the middle ground between capitulation and stonewalling, a back and forth between two parties trying to reach agreement. If a price or other term is nonnegotiable, there is no give and take, just "take it or leave it". You may think you are negotiating, but if the other side isn't playing, you aren't either. Regardless of the industry, situation, or product, the two most common mistakes negotiators make are: 1. They give ground too easily, and 2. They get nothing in return.

We celebrate thinking outside the box, but why is there a box in the first place? That box hinders your natural ability to live the blissful life of your dreams. In Find Your Bliss, best-selling and award-winning author J. P. Hansen draws from his successful life-coaching business to provide insight that empowers you to recognize your limitations - then break free of them.

Basic principles always have a way of seeming simple, yet they can no more be oversimplified than can the law of gravity or the listing of chemical elements be oversimplified. What is needed in our complex society of millions of products sold by millions of business units to over 100 million traders through billions of transactions each year is to get back to simple economic principles. These are working tools for solving problems that seem more complex than they really are.

When philosophy professor Adam Briggle moved to Denton, Texas, he had never heard of fracking. Only five years later, he would successfully lead a citizens' initiative to ban hydraulic fracturing in Denton - the first Texas town to challenge the oil and gas industry. On his journey to learn about fracking and its effects, he leaped from the ivory tower into the fray. In beautifully narrated chapters, Briggle brings us to town hall debates and neighborhood meetings where citizens wrestle with issues few fully understand.

When it comes to getting a job, the smallest thing can trip you up. For 30 years Dr. Paul Powers has asked thousands of successful job hunters a few basic but important questions.

Play is an essential, necessary, and natural human activity, and it's for adults and companies, too. Funny Business will show you how adults and companies can recapture and use this powerful tool to foster innovation, increase their competitive advantage, and create a vibrant and satisfying workplace. It delves into the concepts of play and what makes it so powerful in children's development' and dispels the myths and beliefs that have made play a dirty word.

From bargains in the Big Apple to the bustling bazaars of Istanbul, from in-store to interactive and online to mobile, neuromarketing pioneer Dr. David Lewis goes behind the scenes of the "persuasion industry" to reveal the powerful tools, techniques, technologies, and psychologies seeking to stimulate us all to buy more - often without us consciously realizing it.

In our daily lives, it really seems as though we have free will, that what we do from moment to moment is determined by conscious decisions that we freely make. You get up from the couch, you go for a walk, you eat chocolate ice cream. It seems that we're in control of actions like these; if we are then we have free will. But in recent years, some have argued that free will is an illusion. The neuroscientist (and best-selling author) Sam Harris and the late Harvard psychologist Daniel Wegner, for example, claim that certain scientific findings disprove free will.

Beautiful, sad Ellen Beniger; her younger brother, Tom, a scholar unhappily moonlighting as a TV writer; the athletic amorist Guy Cinturon; and tough little Eddie Bissle, ex-infantryman and Ellen's secret lover, struggle to come to grips with the limits of their futures and the scars of their pasts as they enter middle age. Will the physical, emotional, and spiritual violations they have endured remain with them forever? Or can they be healed?

From imagination to materialism, the provocative stories in Body Parts cover the bases. Can brains survive without bodies? Will the love modem result in romance or homicide? Should a loose tongue reveal its secrets? Would a guru who brings bliss be killed by the government?

Becoming a successful entrepreneur takes energy and drive. Less than 20% make it beyond the first three years. Achieving the next level, the status of business titan - the upper echelon of leadership - takes an unrelenting commitment to turn an idea into a plan, a plan into a startup venture, and a venture into a successful business. The chances of getting to the top are slim at best, relying on a particular set of skills and attributes.

Musician Marty Lambert’s life is already falling apart when he receives the phone call that changes everything. His brother, Perry, has killed himself in New York, and Marty - with his marriage on the rocks and his record company sliding into insolvency - decides to leave San Francisco to investigate exactly what went wrong. His trip sends him headlong into the life his only brother left behind - his pleasures and disappointments, his friends, his lovely girlfriend, Jane - and finally, to the home they shared growing up in Virginia.

The growth engine of the global economy is no longer through mega-production and huge conglomerates, but rather through the proliferation of smaller enterprises. In America alone, tens of thousands of businesses crop up each year. Unfortunately, few will succeed, though not due to a lack of ingenuity, initiative, or even capital. Why, then?

Big bugs, cloned cats, and feral star-children play leading roles in the seven stories that make up Fast’s unconventional and thought-provoking collection. The Edge of Tomorrow is a significant foray into science fiction by one of the 20th century’s most prolific novelists. In looking beyond our universe, Fast reveals much about the America of his time - where the Cold War and a nascent civil rights movement stoked unconscious fears and desires.

When he first arrived in the town of Lister, no one knew anything about him except that he didn't speak... that he was probably a deaf mute. No one knew what to call him, so they called him Shannon. He bought supplies and ventured into a secluded valley and made enough money to take care of himself by selling pelts in town.Then one day Shannon came upon a horse that had been abused and was near death....

The people who orbit around Renn Ivins, an actor of Harrison Ford-like stature - his girlfriends, his children, his ex-wives, those on the periphery - long to experience the glow of his fame. Anna and Will are Renn's grown children, struggling to be authentic versions of themselves in a world where they are seen as less important extensions of their father. They are both drawn to and repelled by the man who overshadows every part of them.

In The End of the Dream, venerated science-fiction author Philip Wylie trains his sights on the ultimate catastrophe - the destruction of the world through human beings’ unheeding and willful poisoning of the atmosphere, the land, the seas and rivers, and finally of the human race itself. The End of the Dream describes a horrific future when toxic chemicals, mutated creatures, and noxious gases all contribute to the eventual death of the human race and of the Earth itself....

Charlie Blakeman is living in New York, on Washington Square, struggling to write his second novel and floundering, when his college love, Sophie Wilder, returns to his life. Sophie, too, is struggling, though Charlie isn’t sure why. They’ve spoken only rarely since falling out a decade before. Now Sophie begins to tell Charlie the story of her life since then, particularly the days she spent taking care of a dying man with his own terrible past and the difficult decision he presented her with.