Events

Booked by HooksBookEvents: Wednesday, September 08, 2010

Book: Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science from Bunk
Author: Massimo Pigliucci
Publisher: University Of Chicago Press, 2010

Private Client Event: September 8th

Recent polls suggest that fewer than 40 percent of Americans believe in Darwin’s theory of evolution, despite it being one of science’s best-established findings. More and more parents are refusing to vaccinate their children for fear it causes autism, though this link can been consistently disproved. And about 40 percent of Americans believe that the threat of global warming is exaggerated, despite near consensus in the scientific community that manmade climate change is real.

Why do people believe bunk? And what causes them to embrace such pseudoscientific beliefs and practices? Noted skeptic Massimo Pigliucci sets out to separate the fact from the fantasy in this entertaining exploration of the nature of science, the borderlands of fringe science, and—borrowing a famous phrase from philosopher Jeremy Bentham—the nonsense on stilts. Presenting case studies on a number of controversial topics, Pigliucci cuts through the ambiguity surrounding science to look more closely at how science is conducted, how it is disseminated, how it is interpreted, and what it means to our society. The result is in many ways a “taxonomy of bunk” that explores the intersection of science and culture at large.

No one—not the public intellectuals in the culture wars between defenders and detractors of science nor the believers of pseudoscience themselves—is spared Pigliucci’s incisive analysis. In the end, Nonsense on Stilts is a timely reminder of the need to maintain a line between expertise and assumption. Broad in scope and implication, it is also ultimately a captivating guide for the intelligent citizen who wishes to make up her own mind while navigating the perilous debates that will affect the future of our planet.

Book: Getting Change Right: How Leaders Transform Organizations from the Inside Out
Author: Seth Kahan
Publisher: Jossey-Bass, 2010

Private Client Events: April 27th (MA), June 6th, 8th, 17th, July 14th, 15th, 23rd, 27th, September 8th, 21st & January 7th

Read Seth Kahan’s blog here!

Change doesn’t flow top-down, bottom-up, or sideways, but inside-out. Real change happens only when people want it to happen; when they feel engaged. Without engagement, you are left with two alternatives: force and failure.

In Getting Change Right, Seth Kahan challenges you to approach change in a whole new way. Based on years of experience with organizations around the world, Kahan presents a new model of leadership communication – one that moves from top-down dictums to the collaborative construction of shared understanding.

Filled with techniques, templates, and guidelines, Getting Change Right is first and foremost a practitioner’s guide to implementing change. Presenting a critical shift from the old mindset of coming up with a good idea, and then pushing it through with mandates, Kahan shows how the way to successful, authentic change is through engagement- the need to connect to people, to listen as much as to share ideas, and to involve as many key people as possible in the realization of their goals. When the right people are having the right conversations and interactions, they act in concert, even when the situations they confront are unpredictable.

This hands-on guide to implementing change offers sample dialogues, questions, assessments, and all-new “Expert Input” from leading change authorities John Kotter, Stephen Denning, and James Wolfensohn, among others.

Getting Change Right goes beyond mere suppositions and hypotheses. It offers business insights and field-tested, practical techniques that you can put to work immediately. This is your guidebook to making change happen in any organization.

Book: Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World
Author: Liaquat Ahamed
Publisher: Penguin, 2009

Private Client Events: May 4th, July 20th, August 12th & September 10th

“A magisterial work…You can’t help thinking about the economic crisis we’re living through now.” —_The New York Times Book Review_

It is commonly believed that the Great Depression that began in 1929 resulted from a confluence of events beyond any one person’s or government’s control. In fact, as Liaquat Ahamed reveals, it was the decisions made by a small number of central bankers that were the primary cause of that economic meltdown, the effects of which set the stage for World War II and reverberated for decades. As yet another period of economic turmoil makes headlines today, Lords of Finance is a potent reminder of the enormous impact that the decisions of central bankers can have, their fallibility, and the terrible human consequences that can result when they are wrong.

Book: More Money Than God: Hedge Funds and the Making of a New Elite
Author: Sebastian Mallaby
Publisher: The Penguin Press HC, 2010

Private Client Events: September 17th & 24th

The first authoritative history of hedge funds-from their rebel beginnings to their role in defining the future of finance.

Based on author Sebastian Mallaby’s unprecedented access to the industry, including three hundred hours of interviews, More Money Than God tells the inside story of hedge funds, from their origins in the 1960s and 1970s to their role in the financial crisis of 2007- 2009.

Wealthy, powerful, and potentially dangerous, hedge fund moguls have become the It Boys of twenty-firstcentury capitalism. Ken Griffin of Citadel started out trading convertible bonds from his dorm room at Harvard. Julian Robertson staffed his hedge fund with college athletes half his age, then he flew them to various retreats in the Rockies and raced them up the mountains. Paul Tudor Jones posed for a magazine photograph next to a killer shark and happily declared that a 1929- style crash would be “total rock-and-roll” for him. Michael Steinhardt was capable of reducing underlings to sobs. “All I want to do is kill myself,” one said. “Can I watch?” Steinhardt responded.

Finance professors have long argued that beating the market is impossible, and yet drawing on insights from physics, economics, and psychology, these titans have cracked the market’s mysteries and gone on to earn fortunes. Their innovation has transformed the world, spawning new markets in exotic financial instruments and rewriting the rules of capitalism.

More than just a history, More Money Than God is a window on tomorrow’s financial system. Hedge funds have been left for dead after past financial panics: After the stock market rout of the early 1970s, after the bond market bloodbath of 1994, after the collapse of Long Term Capital Management in 1998, and yet again after the dot-com crash in 2000. Each time, hedge funds have proved to be survivors, and it would be wrong to bet against them now. Banks such as CitiGroup, brokers such as Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, home lenders such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, insurers such as AIG, and money market funds run by giants such as Fidelity-all have failed or been bailed out. But the hedge fund industry has survived the test of 2008 far better than its rivals. The future of finance lies in the history of hedge funds.

Book: The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration
Author: Isabel Wilkerson
Publisher: Random House, 2010

Private Client Event: September 20th

In this epic, beautifully written masterwork, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Isabel Wilkerson chronicles one of the great untold stories of American history: the decades-long migration of black citizens who fled the South for northern and western cities, in search of a better life. From 1915 to 1970, this exodus of almost six million people changed the face of America. Wilkerson compares this epic migration to the migrations of other peoples in history. She interviewed more than a thousand people, and gained access to new data and official records, to write this definitive and vividly dramatic account of how these American journeys unfolded, altering our cities, our country, and ourselves.

With stunning historical detail, Wilkerson tells this story through the lives of three unique individuals: Ida Mae Gladney, who in 1937 left sharecropping and prejudice in Mississippi for Chicago, where she achieved quiet blue-collar success and, in old age, voted for Barack Obama when he ran for an Illinois Senate seat; sharp and quick-tempered George Starling, who in 1945 fled Florida for Harlem, where he endangered his job fighting for civil rights, saw his family fall, and finally found peace in God; and Robert Foster, who left Louisiana in 1953 to pursue a medical career, the personal physician to Ray Charles as part of a glitteringly successful medical career, which allowed him to purchase a grand home where he often threw exuberant parties.

Wilkerson brilliantly captures their first treacherous and exhausting cross-country trips by car and train and their new lives in colonies that grew into ghettos, as well as how they changed these cities with southern food, faith, and culture and improved them with discipline, drive, and hard work. Both a riveting microcosm and a major assessment, The Warmth of Other Suns is a bold, remarkable, and riveting work, a superb account of an “unrecognized immigration” within our own land. Through the breadth of its narrative, the beauty of the writing, the depth of its research, and the fullness of the people and lives portrayed herein, this book is destined to become a classic.

Book: If We Can Put a Man on the Moon: Getting Big Things Done in Government
Author: William D. Eggers and John O'Leary
Publisher: Harvard Business School Press, 2009

Private Client Events: August 5th, 12th & September 28th

#5 on The Washington Post’s Non-Fiction Best Seller List

#2 on the Politics Best Seller List

The American people are frustrated with their government-dismayed by a series of high-profile failures (Iraq, Katrina, the financial meltdown) that seems to just keep getting longer. Yet our nation has a proud history of great achievements: victory in World War II, our national highway system, welfare reform, the moon landing.

We need more successes like these to reclaim government’s legacy of competence. In If We Can Put a Man on the Moon, William Eggers and John O’Leary explain how to do it. The key? Understand-and avoid-the common pitfalls that trip up public-sector leaders during the journey from idea to results.

The authors identify pitfalls including:
-The Partial Map Trap: Fumbling handoffs throughout project execution
-The Tolstoy Syndrome: Seeing only the possibilities you want to see
-Design-Free Design: Designing policies for passage through the legislature, not for implementation
-The Overconfidence Trap: Creating unrealistic budgets and timelines
-The Complacency Trap: Failing to recognize that a program needs change

At a time of unprecedented challenges, this book, with its abundant examples and hands-on advice, is the essential guide to making our government work better. A must-read for every public official, this book will be of interest to anyone who cares about the future of democracy.

Book: The War Lovers: Roosevelt, Lodge, Hearst, and the Rush to Empire, 1898
Author: Evan Thomas
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company, 2010

Private Client Event: September 30th

On February 15th, 1898, the American ship USS Maine mysteriously exploded in the Havana Harbor. News of the blast quickly reached U.S. shores, where it was met by some not with alarm but great enthusiasm.

A powerful group of war lovers agitated that the United States exert its muscle across the seas. Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge were influential politicians dismayed by the “closing” of the Western frontier. William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal falsely heralded that Spain’s “secret infernal machine” had destroyed the battleship as Hearst himself saw great potential in whipping Americans into a frenzy. The Maine would provide the excuse they’d been waiting for.

On the other side were Roosevelt’s former teacher, philosopher William James, and his friend and political ally, Thomas Reed, the powerful Speaker of the House. Both foresaw a disaster. At stake was not only sending troops to Cuba and the Philippines, Spain’s sprawling colony on the other side of the world-but the friendships between these men.

Now, bestselling historian Evan Thomas brings us the full story of this monumental turning point in American history. Epic in scope and revelatory in detail, The War Lovers takes us from Boston mansions to the halls of Congress to the beaches of Cuba and the jungles of the Philippines. It is landmark work with an unforgettable cast of characters-and provocative relevance to today.

Book: The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care
Author: T.R. Reid
Publisher: Penguin, 2010

Private Client Event: October 1st

Bestselling author T. R. Reid guides a whirlwind tour of successful health care systems worldwide, revealing possible paths toward U.S. reform.

In The Healing of America, New York Times bestselling author T. R. Reid shows how all the other industrialized democracies have achieved something the United States can’t seem to do: provide health care for everybody at a reasonable cost.

In his global quest to find a possible prescription, Reid visits wealthy, free market, industrialized democracies like our own-including France, Germany, Japan, the U.K., and Canada-where he finds inspiration in example. Reid shares evidence from doctors, government officials, health care experts, and patients the world over, finding that foreign health care systems give everybody quality care at an affordable cost. And that dreaded monster “socialized medicine” turns out to be a myth. Many developed countries provide universal coverage with private doctors, private hospitals, and private insurance.

In addition to long-established systems, Reid also studies countries that have carried out major health care reform. The first question facing these countries-and the United States, for that matter-is an ethical issue: Is health care a human right? Most countries have already answered with a resolute yes, leaving the United States in the murky moral backwater with nations we typically think of as far less just than our own.

The Healing of America lays bare the moral question at the heart of our troubled system, dissecting the misleading rhetoric surrounding the health care debate. Reid sees problems elsewhere, too: He finds poorly paid doctors in Japan, endless lines in Canada, mistreated patients in Britain, spartan facilities in France. Still, all the other rich countries operate at a lower cost, produce better health statistics, and cover everybody. In the end, The Healing of America is a good news book: It finds models around the world that Americans can borrow to guarantee health care for everybody who needs it.

Book: The Leader's Guide to Radical Management: Reinventing the Workplace for the 21st Century
Author: Stephen Denning
Publisher: Jossey-Bass, 2010

Private Client Events: August 16th, October 2nd, 6th & January 7th

A radical new management model for twenty-first century leaders

Organizations today face a crisis. The crisis is of long standing and its signs are widespread. Most proposals for improving management address one element of the crisis at the expense of the others. The principles described by award-winning author Stephen Denning simultaneously inspire high productivity, continuous innovation, deep job satisfaction and client delight. Denning puts forward a fundamentally different approach to management, with seven inter-locking principles of continuous innovation: focusing the entire organization on delighting clients; working in self-organizing teams; operating in client-driven iterations; delivering value to clients with each iteration; fostering radical transparency; nurturing continuous self-improvement and communicating interactively. In sum, the principles comprise a new mental model of management.

Book: Louis D. Brandeis: A Life
Author: Melvin I. Urofsky
Publisher: Pantheon, 2009

Private Client Event: October 5th

The first full-scale biography in twenty-five years of one of the most important and distinguished justices to sit on the Supreme Court–a book that reveals Louis D. Brandeis the reformer, lawyer, and jurist, and Brandeis the man, in all of his complexity, passion, and wit.

Louis Dembitz Brandeis had at least four “careers.” As a lawyer in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, he pioneered how modern law is practiced. He, and others, developed the modern law firm, in which specialists manage different areas of the law. He was the author of the right to privacy; led the way in creating the role of the lawyer as counselor; and pioneered the idea of pro bono publico work by attorneys. As late as 1916, when Brandeis was nominated to the Supreme Court, the idea of pro bono service still struck many old-time attorneys as somewhat radical.

Between 1895 and 1916, when Woodrow Wilson named Brandeis to the Supreme Court, he ranked as one of the nation’s leading progressive reformers. Brandeis invented savings bank life insurance in Massachusetts (he considered it his most important contribution to the public weal) and was a driving force in the development of the Federal Reserve Act, the Clayton Antitrust Act, and the law establishing the Federal Trade Commission.

Brandeis as an economist and moralist warned in 1914 that banking and stock brokering must be separate, and twenty years later, during the New Deal, his recommendation was finally enacted into law (the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933) but was undone by Ronald Reagan, which led to the savings-and-loan crisis in the 1980s and the world financial collapse of 2008.

We see Brandeis, who came from a family of reformers and intellectuals who fled Europe and settled in Louisville. Brandeis the young man coming of age, who presented himself at Harvard Law School and convinced the school to admit him even though he was underage. Brandeis the lawyer and reformer, who in 1908 agreed to defend an Oregon law establishing maximum hours for women workers, and in so doing created an entirely new form of appellate brief that had only a few pages of legal citation and consisted mostly of factual references.

Urofsky writes how Brandeis witnessed and suffered from the anti-Semitism rampant in the early twentieth century and, though not an observant Jew, with the outbreak of the Great War in 1914, became at age fifty-eight head of the American Zionist movement. During the next seven years, Brandeis transformed it from a marginal activity into a powerful force in American Jewish affairs.

We see the brutal six-month confirmation battle after Wilson named the fifty-nine-year-old Brandeis to the court in 1916; the bitter fight between progressives and conservative leaders of the bar, finance, and manufacturing, who, while never directly attacking him as a Jew, described Brandeis as “a striver,” “self-advertiser,” “a disturbing element in any gentleman’s club.” Even the president of Harvard, A. Lawrence Lowell, signed a petition accusing Brandeis of lacking “judicial temperament.” And we see, finally, how, during his twenty-three years on the court, this giant of a man and an intellect developed the modern jurisprudence of free speech, the doctrine of a constitutionally protected right to privacy, and suggested what became known as the doctrine of incorporation, by which the Bill of Rights came to apply to the states.

Brandeis took his seat when the old classical jurisprudence still held sway, and he tried to teach both his colleagues and the public– especially the law schools–that the law had to change to keep up with the economy and society. Brandeis often said, “My faith in time is great.” Eventually the Supreme Court adopted every one of his dissents as the correct constitutional interpretation.

A huge and galvanizing biography, a revelation of one man’s effect on American society and jurisprudence, and the electrifying story of his time.

Book: MacroWikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World
Author: Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams
Publisher: Portfolio Hardcover, 2010

Private Client Event: October 5th in NY

In their 2007 bestseller Wikinomics, Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams taught the world how mass collaboration was changing the way businesses communicate, compete, and succeed in the new global marketplace. But much has changed in three years, and the principles of wikinomics are now more powerful than ever.

In this new age of networked intelligence, businesses and communities are bypassing crumbling institutions. We are altering the way our financial institutions and governments operate; how we educate our children; and how the healthcare, newspaper, and energy industries serve their customers.

In every corner of the globe, businesses, organizations, and individuals alike are using mass collaboration to revolutionize not only the way we work, but how we live, learn, create, and care for each other. You’ll meet innovators such as:
• An Iraq veteran whose start-up car company is “staffed” by over 45,000 competing designers and supplied by microfactories around the country
• A “micro-lending” community where 570,000 individuals help fund new ventures—from Azerbaijan to Ukraine
• An online community for people with life-altering diseases that’s also a large scale research project

Once again backed by original research, Tapscott and Williams provide vivid, new examples of organizations that are successfully embracing the principles of wikinomics.

Book: Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation
Author: Steven Johnson
Publisher: Riverhead Hardcover, 2010

Private Client Events: October 5th & 6th

One of our most innovative, popular thinkers takes on-in exhilarating style-one of our key questions: Where do good ideas come from?

With Where Good Ideas Come From, Steven Johnson pairs the insight of his bestselling Everything Bad Is Good for You and the dazzling erudition of The Ghost Map and The Invention of Air to address an urgent and universal question: What sparks the flash of brilliance? How does groundbreaking innovation happen? Answering in his infectious, culturally omnivorous style, using his fluency in fields from neurobiology to popular culture, Johnson provides the complete, exciting, and encouraging story of how we generate the ideas that push our careers, our lives, our society, and our culture forward.

Beginning with Charles Darwin’s first encounter with the teeming ecosystem of the coral reef and drawing connections to the intellectual hyperproductivity of modern megacities and to the instant success of YouTube, Johnson shows us that the question we need to ask is, What kind of environment fosters the development of good ideas? His answers are never less than revelatory, convincing, and inspiring as Johnson identifies the seven key principles to the genesis of such ideas, and traces them across time and disciplines.

Most exhilarating is Johnson’s conclusion that with today’s tools and environment, radical innovation is extraordinarily accessible to those who know how to cultivate it. Where Good Ideas Come From is essential reading for anyone who wants to know how to come up with tomorrow’s great ideas.

Book: The Weather of the Future: Heat Waves, Extreme Storms, and Other Scenes from a Climate-Changed Planet
Author: Dr. Heidi Cullen
Publisher: Harper, 2010

Private Client Event: October 12th

Droughts. Floods.
Climate refugees.
Global warming isn’t just about polar bears anymore.

Let’s assume we do nothing about climate change. Imagine that we just continue to emit carbon at our current levels or even exceed those levels. How would our weather change? What would our forecast be? Welcome to The Weather of the Future.

In this groundbreaking work, Dr. Heidi Cullen, one of the world’s foremost climatologists and environmental journalists, puts a vivid face on climate change, offering a new way of seeing this phenomenon not just as an event set to happen in the distant future but as something happening right now in our own backyards. Arguing that we must connect the weather of today with the climate change of tomorrow, Cullen combines the latest research from scientists on the ground with state-of-the-art climate-model projections to create climate-change scenarios for seven of the most at-risk locations around the world.

From the Central Valley of California, where coming droughts will jeopardize the entire state’s water supply, to Greenland, where warmer temperatures will give access to mineral wealth buried beneath ice sheets for millennia, Cullen illustrates how, if left unabated, climate change will transform every corner of the world by midcentury. What emerges is a mosaic of changing weather patterns that collectively spell out the range of risks posed by global warming—whether it’s New York City, whose infrastructure is extremely vulnerable to even a relatively weak category 3 hurricane, or Bangladesh, a country so low-lying that millions of people could become climate refugees due to rising sea levels.

Provocative and convincing, The Weather of the Future makes climate change local, showing how no two regions of the country or the world will be affected in quite the same way, and demonstrating that melting ice is just the beginning.

Book: Supreme Power: Franklin Roosevelt vs. the Supreme Court
Author: Jeff Shesol
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010

Private Client Events: July 27th & October 12th

In the years before World War II, Franklin Roosevelt’s fiercest, most unyielding opponent was neither a foreign power nor “fear itself.” It was the U.S. Supreme Court.

Beginning in 1935, in a series of devastating decisions, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority left much of FDR’s agenda in ruins. The pillars of the New Deal fell in short succession. It was not just the New Deal, but democracy itself, that stood on trial. In February 1937, Roosevelt struck back with an audacious plan to expand the Court to fifteen justices—and to “pack” the new seats with liberals who shared his belief in a “living” Constitution.

The ensuing fight was a firestorm that engulfed the White House, the Court, Congress, and the nation. The final verdict was a shock. It dealt FDR the biggest setback of his political life, split the Democratic party, and set the stage for a future era of Republican dominance. Yet the battle also transformed America’s political and constitutional landscape, hastening the nation’s march into the modern world.

This brilliant work of history unfolds like a thriller, with vivid characters and unexpected twists. Providing new evidence and fresh insight, Jeff Shesol shows why understanding the Court fight is essential to understanding the presidency, personality, and legacy of FDR—and to understanding America at a crossroads in its history.

Book: What Technology Wants
Author: Kevin Kelly
Publisher: Viking Adult, 2010

Private Client Event: October 19th

A refreshing view of technology as a living force in the world.

This provocative book introduces a brand-new view of technology. It suggests that technology as a whole is not a jumble of wires and metal but a living, evolving organism that has its own unconscious needs and tendencies. Kevin Kelly looks out through the eyes of this global technological system to discover “what it wants.” He uses vivid examples from the past to trace technology’s long course and then follows a dozen trajectories of technology into the near future to project where technology is headed. This new theory of technology offers three practical lessons: By listening to what technology wants we can better prepare ourselves and our children for the inevitable technologies to come. By adopting the principles of pro-action and engagement, we can steer technologies into their best roles. And by aligning ourselves with the long-term imperatives of this near-living system, we can capture its full gifts. Written in intelligent and accessible language, this is a fascinating, innovative, and optimistic look at how humanity and technology join to produce increasing opportunities in the world and how technology can give our lives greater meaning.

Book: The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War
Author: Nicholas Thompson
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co., 2009

Private Client Event: October 26th

A brilliant and revealing biography of the two most important Americans during the Cold War era—written by the grandson of one of them

Only two Americans held positions of great influence throughout the Cold War; ironically, they were the chief advocates for the opposing strategies for winning—and surviving—that harrowing conflict. Both men came to power during World War II, reached their professional peaks during the Cold War’s most frightening moments, and fought epic political battles that spanned decades. Yet despite their very different views, Paul Nitze and George Kennan dined together, attended the weddings of each other’s children, and remained good friends all their lives.

In this masterly double biography, Nicholas Thompson brings Nitze and Kennan to vivid life. Nitze—the hawk—was a consummate insider who believed that the best way to avoid a nuclear clash was to prepare to win one. More than any other American, he was responsible for the arms race. Kennan—the dove—was a diplomat turned academic whose famous “X article” persuasively argued that we should contain the Soviet Union while waiting for it to collapse from within. For forty years, he exercised more influence on foreign affairs than any other private citizen.

As he weaves a fascinating narrative that follows these two rivals and friends from the beginning of the Cold War to its end, Thompson accomplishes something remarkable: he tells the story of our nation during the most dangerous half century in history.

Book: The Powers to Lead
Author: Joseph Nye Jr.
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA, 2010

Private Client Events: October 25th, 26th & November 9th

With The Powers to Lead, Joseph S. Nye Jr. offers a sweeping look at the nature of leadership in today’s world, in an illuminating blend of history, business case studies, psychological research, and more. As he observes, many now believe that the more authoritarian and coercive forms of leadership—the “hard power” approaches of earlier military-industrial eras—have been largely supplanted in postindustrial societies by “soft power” approaches that seek to attract, inspire, and persuade rather than dictate.

Nye argues, however, that the most effective leaders are actually those who combine hard and soft power skills in proportions that vary with different situations. He calls this “smart power.” Drawing examples from the careers of leaders as disparate as Gandhi, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Lee Iacocca, and—in a new preface—Barack Obama, Nye uses the concept of smart power to shed light on such topics as leadership types and skills, the needs and demands of followers, and the nature of good and bad leadership in terms of both ethics and effectiveness. In one particularly instructive chapter, he looks in depth at “contextual intelligence”—the ability to understand changing environments, capitalize on trends, and use the flow of events to implement strategies.

Thoroughly grounded in the real world, rich in both analysis and anecdote, The Powers to Lead is sure to become a modern classic, a concise and lucid work applicable to every field, from small businesses to nations on the world stage.

Book: Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us
Author: Daniel H. Pink
Publisher: Riverhead Hardcover, 2009

Private Client Events: February 16th, 17th, 18th, March 3rd, 30th, May 25th & November 1st

Noblis Vice President and Chief Technology Officer Dr. H. Gilbert Miller interviews Daniel H. Pink

Forget everything you thought you knew about how to motivate people—at work, at school, at home. It’s wrong. As Daniel H. Pink explains in his new and paradigm-shattering book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, the secret to high performance and satisfaction in today’s world is the deeply human need to direct our own lives, to learn and create new things, and to do better by ourselves and our world.

Drawing on four decades of scientific research on human motivation, Pink exposes the mismatch between what science knows and what business does—and how that affects every aspect of our lives. He demonstrates that while the old-fashioned carrot-and-stick approach worked successfully in the 20th century, it’s precisely the wrong way to motivate people for today’s challenges. In Drive, he reveals the three elements of true motivation:

*Autonomy- the desire to direct our own lives *Mastery- the urge to get better and better at something that matters *Purpose- the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves

Along the way, he takes us to companies that are enlisting new approaches to motivation and introduces us to the scientists and entrepreneurs who are pointing a bold way forward.

Drive is bursting with big ideas— the rare book that will change how you think and transform how you live.

Book: Wounded Knee: Party Politics and the Road to an American Massacre
Author: Heather Cox Richardson
Publisher: Basic Books, 2010

Private Client Event: November 2nd

On December 29, 1890, American troops opened fire with howitzers on hundreds of unarmed Lakota Sioux men, women, and children near Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota, killing nearly 300 Sioux. As acclaimed historian Heather Cox Richardson shows in Wounded Knee, the massacre grew out of a set of political forces all too familiar to us today: fierce partisanship, heated political rhetoric, and an irresponsible, profit-driven media.

Richardson tells a dramatically new story about the Wounded Knee massacre, revealing that its origins lay not in the West but in the corridors of political power back East. Politicians in Washington, Democrat and Republican alike, sought to set the stage for mass murder by exploiting an age-old political tool—fear.

Assiduously researched and beautifully written, Wounded Knee will be the definitive account of an epochal American tragedy.

Book: Blind Descent: The Quest to Discover the Deepest Place on Earth
Author: James M. Tabor
Publisher: Random House, 2010

Private Client Events: November 3rd & 4th

The deepest cave on earth was a prize that had remained unclaimed for centuries, long after every other ultimate discovery had been made: both poles by 1912, Everest in 1958, the Challenger Deep in 1961. In 1969 we even walked on the moon. And yet as late as 2000, the earth’s deepest cave—the supercave—remained undiscovered. This is the story of the men and women who risked everything to find it, earning their place in history beside the likes of Peary, Amundsen, Hillary, and Armstrong.

In 2004, two great scientist-explorers are attempting to find the bottom of the world. Bold, heroic American Bill Stone is committed to the vast Cheve Cave, located in southern Mexico and deadly even by supercave standards. On the other side of the globe, legendary Ukrainian explorer Alexander Klimchouk—Stone’s polar opposite in temperament and style, but every bit his equal in scientific expertise, physical bravery, and sheer determination—has targeted Krubera, a freezing nightmare of a supercave in the Republic of Georgia, where underground dangers are compounded by the horrors of separatist war in this former Soviet republic.

Blind Descent explores both the brightest and darkest aspects of the timeless human urge to discover—to be first. It is also a thrilling epic about a pursuit that makes even extreme mountaineering and ocean exploration pale by comparison. These supercavers spent months in multiple camps almost two vertical miles deep and many more miles from their caves’ exits. They had to contend with thousand-foot drops, deadly flooded tunnels, raging whitewater rivers, monstrous waterfalls, mile-long belly crawls, and much more. Perhaps even worse were the psychological horrors produced by weeks plunged into absolute, perpetual darkness, beyond all hope of rescue, including a particularly insidious derangement called The Rapture.

James M. Tabor was granted unprecedented access to logs, journals, photographs, and video footage of these expeditions, as well as many hours of personal interviews with surviving participants. Blind Descent is an unforgettable addition to the classic literature of discovery and adventure. It is also a testament to human survival and endurance—and to two extraordinary men whose relentless pursuit of greatness led them to heights of triumph and depths of tragedy neither could have imagined.

Book: When Janey Comes Marching Home: Portraits of Women Combat Veterans
Author: Laura Browder and Sascha Pflaeging (Photographer)
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press, 2010

Private Client Event: November 4th

While women are officially barred from combat in the American armed services, in the current war, where there are no front lines, the ban on combat is virtually meaningless. More than in any previous conflict in our history, American women are engaging with the enemy, suffering injuries, and even sacrificing their lives in the line of duty.

When Janey Comes Marching Home juxtaposes forty-eight self-posed photographs by Sascha Pflaeging with oral histories collected by Laura Browder to provide a dramatic portrait of women at war. Women from all five branches of the military share their stories here—stories that are by turns moving, comic, thought-provoking, and profound. Seeing their faces in stunning color photographic portraits and reading what they have to say about loss, comradeship, conflict, and hard choices will change the ways we think about women and war.

Serving in a combat zone is an all-encompassing experience that is transformative, life-defining, and difficult to leave behind. By coming face-to-face with women veterans, we who are outside that world can begin to get a sense of how the long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have their lives and how their stories may ripple out and influence the experiences of all American women.

The book accompanies a photography exhibit of the same name opening May 1, 2010, at the Women in Military Service to America Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery, and continuing to travel around the country through 2011.

Book: Perfectly Imperfect: A Life in Progress
Author: Lee Woodruff
Publisher: Random House, 2009

Private Client Events: April 22nd, November 4th & 5th

“You can tell a woman’s whole life story from the possessions in her jewelry box. Like reading a palm, you can trace the points where her life has intersected with memorable events, people, places, and loves. You can speculate on the essence of her personality, all from what she has accumulated in that box.”—from Perfectly Imperfect

In her acclaimed first book, In an Instant, Lee Woodruff, along with her husband, ABC News anchor Bob Woodruff, wrote eloquently and honestly about the struggles they faced together as Bob recovered from a traumatic brain injury sustained in Iraq. Now, with the same candor and clarity, Lee Woodruff chronicles her life as wife, mother, daughter, sister, and friend.

Woodruff’s deeply personal and, at times, uproariously funny stories highlight such universal topics as family, marriage, friends, and how life never seems to go as planned. On raising teenagers: “Now with a boy and girl on the precipice of serious adolescence, the bathroom door is sealed tighter than a government nuclear testing ground.” On her changing body: “Over the last ten years my own knees had begun to form those dreaded smiley faces, sagging underneath.” How she copes with tragedy: “Swimming surrounds me in the velvet wet of a bluish green world where I can dive deep down and sob with no trace.” Even her sense of style: “I’ve always been more Leave It to Beaver than Sex in the City.”

In a voice that is fresh, irreverently funny, and irresistible, Lee Woodruff traces the quiet moments and memorable events that have shaped her life in progress. Perfectly Imperfect is the testimonial of a woman who embraces the chaos of her surroundings, discovers the splendor of life’s flaws, and accepts that perfection is as impossible to achieve as a spotless kitchen floor.

Book: The Journal Keeper: A Memoir
Author: Phyllis Theroux
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2010

Private Client Event: November 6th

Essayist Phyllis Theroux has long captivated readers with her pitch-perfect rendering of the inner lives of American women. The Journal Keeper is a memoir of six years in her life.

A natural storyteller, Theroux slips her arm companionably into yours, like an old friend going for a stroll. But Theroux’s stride is long, her eye sharp, and she swings easily between subjects that occupy us all: love, loneliness, growing old, financial worries, spiritual growth, and watching her remarkable mother prepare for death.

Theroux began to keep a journal when she was in distress. It saved her life by helping her to see circumstances more clearly. With nuggets of wisdom, The Journal Keeper is a rich feast from a writing life—with a surprising romantic twist. But it was not until Theroux sat down to edit her journals for publication did she realize, in her words, “that a hand much larger and more knowing than my own was guiding my life and pen across the page.” She makes a good case for this being true for us all.

Book: The Purpose Linked Organization: How Passionate Leaders Inspire Winning Teams and Great Results
Author: Alaina Love, SPHR and Marc Cugnon
Publisher: McGraw-Hill, 2009

Private Client Events: November 8th & 18th

Meet the indispensable people who can bring your organization to that crucial next level. How many can you recognize? And where do you fit in?

The Builder: Creating a strong sense of urgency to deliver results, they’re the driving force of a growing business
The Connector: Born communicators, adept at negotiation and relationship-building
The Conceiver: These “intellectual acrobats” think outside the box, imagine new possibilities, and contribute to innovation
The Altruist: On the lookout to raise your organization’s profile while benefiting the world at large

Leadership development experts Alaina Love and Marc Cugnon have identified ten such “Passion Profile Archetypes,” and in The Purpose Linked Organization, you’ll learn the strengths, vulnerabilities, and proper care and feeding of them all.

Authors Love and Cugnon offer easily implementable ways to channel the power of each individual’s passions in a positive, purposeful direction. You’ll understand how to link skills, values, and passions to performance—and how doing so will bring the results your organization can’t afford to be without.

Just as important, you’ll be able to confidently assess your own purpose and passions so thatyour own organizational role will be as engaging, fulfilling, and productive as possible. Most employees spend more than 84,000 hours of their lives at work. When that time is personally meaningful, great things can happen, which will enrich your organization, the customers it serves, and even society as a whole.

Book: You Say More Than You Think: Use the New Body Language to Get What You Want!, the 7-day Plan
Author: Janine Driver
Publisher: Crown Archetype, 2010

Private Client Event: November 10th

Now You’re Talking!
Do you want to be bulletproof at work, secure in your relationship, and content in your own skin? If so, it’s more important than ever to be aware of what your body is saying to the outside world. Unfortunately, most of what you’ve heard from other body language experts is wrong, and, as a result, your actions may be hurting, not helping, you.

With sass and a keen eye, media favorite Janine Driver teaches you the skills she used every day to stay alive during her fifteen years as a body-language expert at the ATF. Janine’s 7-day plan and her 7-second solutions teach you dozens of body language fixes to turn any interpersonal situation to your advantage. She reveals methods here that other experts refuse to share with the public, and she debunks major myths other experts swear are fact:

Giving more eye contact is key when you’re trying to impress someone. Not necessarily true. It’s actually more important where you point your belly button. This small body shift communicates true interest more powerfully than constant eye contact.

The “steeple” hand gesture will give you the upper hand during negotiations and business meetings. Wrong. Driver has seen this overbearing gesture backfire more often than not. Instead, she suggests two new steeples that give you power without making you seem overly aggressive: the Basketball Steeple and the A-OK Two-Fingered Steeple.

Happy people command power and attention by smiling just before they meet new people. Studies have shown that people who do this are viewed as Beta Leaders. Alpha leaders smile once they shake your hand and hear your name.

At a time when every advantage counts—and first impressions matter more than ever—this is the book to help you really get your message across.

Book: Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition
Author: Daniel Okrent
Publisher: Scribner, 2010

Private Client Event: November 15th

A brilliant, authoritative, and fascinating history of America’s most puzzling era, the years 1920 to 1933, when the U.S. Constitution was amended to restrict one of America’s favorite pastimes: drinking alcoholic beverages.

From its start, America has been awash in drink. The sailing vessel that brought John Winthrop to the shores of the New World in 1630 carried more beer than water. By the 1820s, liquor flowed so plentifully it was cheaper than tea. That Americans would ever agree to relinquish their booze was as improbable as it was astonishing.

Yet we did, and Last Call is Daniel Okrent’s dazzling explanation of why we did it, what life under Prohibition was like, and how such an unprecedented degree of government interference in the private lives of Americans changed the country forever.

Writing with both wit and historical acuity, Okrent reveals how Prohibition marked a confluence of diverse forces: the growing political power of the women’s suffrage movement, which allied itself with the antiliquor campaign; the fear of small-town, native-stock Protestants that they were losing control of their country to the immigrants of the large cities; the anti-German sentiment stoked by World War I; and a variety of other unlikely factors, ranging from the rise of the automobile to the advent of the income tax.

Through it all, Americans kept drinking, going to remarkably creative lengths to smuggle, sell, conceal, and convivially (and sometimes fatally) imbibe their favorite intoxicants. Last Call is peopled with vivid characters of an astonishing variety: Susan B. Anthony and Billy Sunday, William Jennings Bryan and bootlegger Sam Bronfman, Pierre S. du Pont and H. L. Mencken, Meyer Lansky and the incredible—if long-forgotten—federal official Mabel Walker Willebrandt, who throughout the twenties was the most powerful woman in the country. (Perhaps most surprising of all is Okrent’s account of Joseph P. Kennedy’s legendary, and long-misunderstood, role in the liquor business.)

It’s a book rich with stories from nearly all parts of the country. Okrent’s narrative runs through smoky Manhattan speakeasies, where relations between the sexes were changed forever; California vineyards busily producing “sacramental” wine; New England fishing communities that gave up fishing for the more lucrative rum-running business; and in Washington, the halls of Congress itself, where politicians who had voted for Prohibition drank openly and without apology.

Last Call is capacious, meticulous, and thrillingly told. It stands as the most complete history of Prohibition ever written and confirms Daniel Okrent’s rank as a major American writer.

Book: Giving Voice to Values: How to Speak Your Mind When You Know What's Right
Author: Mary C. Gentile, Ph.D.
Publisher: Yale University Press, 2010

Private Client Event: November 23rd

How can you effectively stand up for your values when pressured by your boss, customers, or shareholders to do the opposite?

Babson College business educator and consultant Mary Gentile draws on actual business experiences as well as social science research to challenge the assumptions about business ethics at companies and business schools. She gives business leaders, managers, and students the tools not just to recognize what is right, but also to ensure that the right things happen. The book is inspired by a program Gentile launched at the Aspen Institute with Yale School of Management, and now housed at Babson College, with pilot programs in over one hundred schools and organizations, including INSEAD and MIT Sloan School of Management.

She explains why past attempts at preparing business leaders to act ethically too often failed, arguing that the issue isn’t distinguishing what is right or wrong, but knowing how to act on your values despite opposing pressure. Through research-based advice, practical exercises, and scripts for handling a wide range of ethical dilemmas, Gentile empowers business leaders with the skills to voice and act on their values, and align their professional path with their principles. Giving Voice to Values is an engaging, innovative, and useful guide that is essential reading for anyone in business.

Book: Staying Power: Six Enduring Principles for Managing Strategy and Innovation in an Uncertain World
Author: Michael A. Cusumano
Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2010

Private Client Event: December 7th

Business news tends to focus on the travails of a handful of giants: Apple’s iPad, the Toyota recall, the controversy over Google’s book-digitization program. Whatever the day’s headlines, though, most of these firms have been there before—up and down, written off and overpraised—yet they endured and triumphed. What is their secret? What is it that has lifted them to preeminence and allowed them to come out of each crisis stronger than before?

In Staying Power, Michael A. Cusumano provides the answers. A bestselling business author and leading scholar, Cusumano has spent a quarter of a century studying the world’s most successful companies—many of them from the inside, by serving as an advisor to more than one hundred firms. He identifies six critical principles that have driven the success of today’s foremost companies, including Google, Intel, Apple, JVC, Toyota, and Microsoft. He argues that companies today must develop distinctive organizational capabilities, not just business strategies; focus on platforms and services, not just products; pull information from the market, responding to real-time changes in demand and competitive conditions, and not just push products out; achieve economies of scope, not just scale, by creating efficiencies across all a firm’s activities; and acquire flexibility, in addition to efficiency, to quickly adapt to a volatile marketplace. Drawing on real-life examples, he illustrates how the best companies put these principles into practice, identifying precisely how these ideas have lead to concrete success time after time.

Business books, the author notes, often promote short-lived fads in management thinking. But Staying Power is different. Written by a bestselling international expert, this book focuses on lasting success, analyzing the fundamental elements common to the leading competitors in the world today.

Book: Comeback America: Turning the Country Around and Restoring Fiscal Responsibility
Author: David M. Walker
Publisher: Random House, 2010

Private Client Events: April 19th & December 9th in CA

He’s one of America’s most capable, canny, candid, and independent financial experts. Now David M. Walker sounds a call to action. Comeback America is a tough-minded, innovative, inspiring guide to help us avoid the approaching economic abyss and put the country back on track again.

As comptroller general of the United States and head of the Government Accountability Office (GAO)—“the nation’s top auditor“—Walker warned Congress and the administration as the federal surplus became a giant deficit under George W. Bush. As president and CEO of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, he now works full-time to raise public awareness regarding mounting debt burdens being imposed on future generations. Comeback America is his crucial manifesto, a way for President Obama to end out-of-control government spending and reform our tax, retirement, health care, defense, and other systems—before it’s too late.

Walker believes that by 2030, absent significant reforms to current government programs and policies, federal taxes could double from current levels, meaning less money and poorer education for kids—which will hurt families along with our nation’s economic strength and position in the world. If our foreign creditors—such as China—decide to buy fewer of our Treasury bonds, interest rates will rise and cars and homes will become less affordable.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. Comeback America shows how we can return to our founding principles of fiscal responsibility and stewardship for future generations. The book includes bold ideas to control spending, save Social Security, dramatically alter Medicare, and simplify the tax code—all taking into account the Obama Administration’s current efforts, which receive never-before-published assessments both complimentary and critical.

Nonpartisan, nonideological, and filled with a love of the country its esteemed author has spent his life serving, Comeback America is a book for anyone interested in America’s economic future—in other words, a book everyone should read.

Book: How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming
Author: Mike Brown
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau, 2010

Private Client Events: January 6th & 7th

An engaging and dramatic account of the most tumultuous year in modern astronomy by the astronomer who inadvertently caused it. A memoir by the adorably geeky scientist who, in his effort to discover the tenth planet, ended up demoting everyone’s favorite planet, Pluto, to a firestorm of public outrage.

Until a few years ago, we were all taught that there were nine planets. Then in 2005, astronomer Mike Brown made the discovery of a lifetime: the tenth planet, Eris, which was 27% more massive than Pluto. But instead of simply adding one more planet to our solar system, his discovery ignited a flash-fire of controversy that riled the usually sedate world of astronomy and launched Brown into the public eye, culminating with the demotion of Pluto. Filled with both humor and drama, this book is Mike Brown’s fascinating and fun first-person account of that tumultuous year, which both introduces readers to complex scientific concepts and inspires us to think more deeply about our place in the cosmos.

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