My pithy slogan
“Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind.”
— James Russell Lowell
Book:
Author: June 2010: Sebastian Junger joins Hooks Book Events at the Washington premiere of his film RESTREPO
Publisher:
Click here to read about RESTREPO.
Make sure to review Sebastian Junger’s upcoming event schedule!
Book: Change Your Questions, Change Your Life: 10 Powerful Tools for Life and Work
Author: Marilee Adams
Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2009
Private Client Event: August 19th
Questions are at the core of how we listen, behave, think, and relate—as individuals and organizations. Virtually everything we think and do is generated by questions. Questions push us into new territories. The future begins with our thinking, represented by the questions we ask ourselves.
Change Your Questions, Change Your Life shows readers how to consistently choose the questions that can lead them to success, both personally and professionally. This technique, called “QuestionsThinking,” stimulates innovation, accelerate productivity, and create more rewarding relationships.
Change Your Questions, Change Your Life is a personal growth fable that tells how a seasoned executive, Ben Knight, uses QuestionThinking to move into a higher leadership role and how the same methods of change help him and his wife, Grace, enrich their marriage.
Book: The U.S. Congress: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)
Author: Donald A. Ritchie
Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2010
Private Client Event: August 18th
Many scholars believe that the framers of the Constitution intended Congress to be the preeminent branch of government. Indeed, no other legislature in the world approaches its power. Yet most Americans have only a murky idea of how it works.
In The U.S. Congress, Donald A. Ritchie, a congressional historian for more than thirty years, takes readers on a fascinating, behind-the-scenes tour of Capitol Hill—pointing out the key players, explaining their behavior, and translating parliamentary language into plain English. No mere civics lesson, this eye-opening book provides an insider’s perspective on Congress, matched with a professional historian’s analytical insight. After a swift survey of the creation of Congress by the constitutional convention, he begins to unscrew the nuts and pull out the bolts. What is it like to campaign for congress? To attract large donors? To enter either house with no seniority? He answers these questions and more, explaining committee assignments (and committee work), the role of staffers and lobbyists, floor proceedings, parliamentary rules, and coalition building. Ritchie explores the great effort put into constituent service—as representatives and senators respond to requests from groups and individuals—as well as media relations and news coverage. He also explores how the grand concepts we all know from civics class—checks and balances, advise and consent, congressional oversight—work in practice, in an age of strong presidents and a muscular Senate minority (no matter which party is in that position).
In this sparkling addition to Oxford’s Very Short Introduction series, Donald Ritchie moves beyond the cynicism and the platitudes to provide a gem of a portrait of how Congress really works.
Book: The Smart Swarm: How Understanding Flocks, Schools, and Colonies Can Make Us Better at Communicating, Decision Making, and Getting Things Done
Author: Peter Miller
Publisher: Avery, 2010
Private Client Event: August 10th & 11th
What ants, bees, fish, and smart swarms can teach us about communication, organization, and decision-making
The modern world may be obsessed with speed and productivity, but twenty-first-century humans actually have much to learn from the ancient instincts of swarms. A fascinating new take on the concept of collective intelligence and its colorful manifestations in some of our most complex problems, The Smart Swarm introduces a compelling new understanding of the real experts on solving our own complex problems relating to such topics as business, politics, and technology.
Based on extensive globe-trotting research, this lively tour from National Geographic reporter Peter Miller introduces thriving throngs of ant colonies, which have inspired computer programs for streamlining factory processes, telephone networks, and truck routes; termites, used in recent studies for climate-control solutions; schools of fish, on which the U.S. military modeled a team of robots; and many other examples of the wisdom to be gleaned about the behavior of crowds-among critters and corporations alike.
In the tradition of James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds and the innovative works of Malcolm Gladwell, The Smart Swarm is an entertaining yet enlightening look at small-scale phenomena with big implications for us all.
Book: Flight from Monticello: Thomas Jefferson at War
Author: Michael Kranish
Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2010
Private Client Event: August 3rd
“June 4. British horse came to Monticello.” This short and almost casual notation in a memorandum book was scribbled by Thomas Jefferson in the middle of 1781. It reveals the urgency, fear, and dread that Jefferson must certainly have been feeling as he put pen to paper, for only moments earlier British troops invaded Jefferson’s beloved home of Monticello. It was this moment in Jefferson’s long and distinguished life—the moment when he decided to flee Monticello—that would go on to haunt him for all his days. It is also an episode in the Founding Father’s life that has been fairly untouched by historians or at the very least passed over in most biographies. Now this previously little-understood period in Jefferson’s life is brought to life in Michael Kranish’s Flight From Monticello: Thomas Jefferson at War.
Book: Cyber War: The Next Threat to National Security and What to Do About It
Author: Richard A. Clarke
Publisher: Ecco, 2010
Private Client Events: July 29th & 30th
Richard A. Clarke warned America once before about the havoc terrorism would wreak on our national security — and he was right. Now he warns us of another threat, silent but equally dangerous. Cyber War is a powerful book about technology, government, and military strategy; about criminals, spies, soldiers, and hackers. This is the first book about the war of the future — cyber war — and a convincing argument that we may already be in peril of losing it.
Cyber War goes behind the “geek talk” of hackers and computer scientists to explain clearly and convincingly what cyber war is, how cyber weapons work, and how vulnerable we are as a nation and as individuals to the vast and looming web of cyber criminals. From the first cyber crisis meeting in the White House a decade ago to the boardrooms of Silicon Valley and the electrical tunnels under Manhattan, Clarke and coauthor Robert K. Knake trace the rise of the cyber age and profile the unlikely characters and places at the epicenter of the battlefield. They recount the foreign cyber spies who hacked into the office of the Secretary of Defense, the control systems for U.S. electric power grids, and the plans to protect America’s latest fighter aircraft.
Economically and militarily, Clarke and Knake argue, what we’ve already lost in the new millennium’s cyber battles is tantamount to the Soviet and Chinese theft of our nuclear bomb secrets in the 1940s and 1950s. The possibilities of what we stand to lose in an all-out cyber war — our individual and national security among them — are just as chilling. Powerful and convincing, Cyber War begins the critical debate about the next great threat to national security.
Book: Fool's Gold: How the Bold Dream of a Small Tribe at J.P. Morgan Was Corrupted by Wall Street Greed and Unleashed a Catastrophe
Author: Gillian Tett
Publisher: Free Press, 2009
Private Client Event: July 15th & 22nd
From award-winning Financial Times journalist Gillian Tett, who enraged Wall Street leaders with her newsbreaking warnings of a crisis more than a year ahead of the curve, Fool’s Gold tells the astonishing unknown story at the heart of the 2008 meltdown.
Drawing on exclusive access to J.P. Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon and a tightly bonded team of bankers known on Wall Street as the “Morgan Mafia,” as well as in-depth interviews with dozens of other key players, including Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, Tett brings to life in gripping detail how the Morgan team’s bold ideas for a whole new kind of financial alchemy helped to ignite a revolution in banking, and how that revolution escalated wildly out of control.
The deeply reported and lively narrative takes readers behind the scenes, to the inner sanctums of elite finance and to the secretive reaches of what came to be known as the “shadow banking” world. The story begins with the intense Morgan brainstorming session in 1994 beside a pool in Boca Raton, where the team cooked up a dazzling new idea for the exotic financial product known as credit derivatives. That idea would rip around the banking world, catapult Morgan to the top of the turbocharged derivatives trade, and fuel an extraordinary banking boom that seemed to have unleashed banks from ages-old constraints of risk.
But when the Morgan team’s derivatives dream collided with the housing boom, and was perverted — through hubris, delusion, and sheer greed — by titans of banking that included Citigroup, UBS, Deutsche Bank, and the thundering herd at Merrill Lynch — even as J.P. Morgan itself stayed well away from the risky concoctions others were peddling — catastrophe followed. Tett’s access to Dimon and the J.P. Morgan leaders who so skillfully steered their bank away from the wild excesses of others sheds invaluable light not only on the untold story of how they engineered their bank’s escape from carnage but also on how possible it was for the larger banking world, regulators, and rating agencies to have spotted, and heeded, the terrible risks of a meltdown.
A tale of blistering brilliance and willfully blind ambition, Fool’s Gold is both a rare journey deep inside the arcane and wildly competitive world of high finance and a vital contribution to understanding how the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression was perpetrated.
Book: Hamilton's Blessing: The Extraordinary Life and Times of Our National Debt: Revised Edition
Author: John Steele Gordon
Publisher: Walker & Company, 2010
Private Client Event: July 21st
Our national debt is now so high that most of us have stopped thinking about it, because the prospect of bringing it under control is unimaginable. We consider it a national liability and fear our children will be forced to pay for our current excesses. John Steele Gordon is a welcome antidote. In 1997, his book, Hamilton’s Blessing, offered a “biography” of the debt, making it very much a human drama while explaining the myriad, mostly positive, ways it has influenced America’s history since Alexander Hamilton first proposed the virtues of a national debt in 1792.
However, the 12 years since the book’s initial publication have been perhaps the most dramatic in the debt’s history, since it has more than doubled and continues on an ever-upward spiral. Now, more than ever, we need John Steele Gordon’s wisdom, his revised and expanded edition of Hamilton’s Blessing will put this historic expansion in perspective, allowing us to better participate in debate and discussion.
Bringing a remarkable national institution to life, Gordon offers, in the process, an original view of American history, and insight into both well- and lesser-known figures who have influenced and charted our voyage, from Hamilton to Jay Cooke to John Maynard Keynes to the present. The national debt helped rescue the Union during the Civil War and raise the nation out of the Depression, thus offering hope it may serve a similar purpose in the decades to come.
Book: Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools for Your Organization's Toughest Challenges
Author: Andrew McAfee
Publisher: Harvard Business School Press, 2009
Private Client Event: July 19th
“Web 2.0” is the portion of the Internet that’s interactively produced by many people; it includes Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, and prediction markets. In just a few years, Web 2.0 communities have demonstrated astonishing levels of innovation, knowledge accumulation, collaboration, and collective intelligence.
Now, leading organizations are bringing the Web’s novel tools and philosophies inside, creating Enterprise 2.0. In this book, Andrew McAfee shows how they’re doing this, and why it’s benefiting them. Enterprise 2.0 makes clear that the new technologies are good for much more than just socializing-when properly applied, they help businesses solve pressing problems, capture dispersed and fast-changing knowledge, highlight and leverage expertise, generate and refine ideas, and harness the wisdom of crowds.
Most organizations, however, don’t find it easy or natural to use these new tools initially. And executives see many possible pitfalls associated with them. Enterprise 2.0 explores these concerns, and shows how business leaders can overcome them.
McAfee brings together case studies and examples with key concepts from economics, sociology, computer science, consumer psychology, and management studies and presents them all in a clear, accessible, and entertaining style. Enterprise 2.0 is a must-have resource for all C-suite executives seeking to make technology decisions that are simultaneously powerful, popular, and pragmatic.
Book: What's Next? Follow Your Passion and Find Your Dream Job
Author: Kerry Hannon
Publisher: Chronicle Books, 2010
PUBLIC EVENT FEATURING KERRY HANNON
Date: Monday, June 14, 2010
Time: 5:00 pm-7:00 pm
Location: Bardeo Wine Bar
3309 Connecticut Avenue, NW, Washington, DC 20008
Click here to RSVP/Send email to aj@cosynergy.com
Private Client Event: July 13th
Filled with inspiring stories from real people who have changed careers mid-life, What’s Next? is an exciting roadmap for anyone looking to make their next job their dream job. From a former mortgage banker who’s back in the classroom to a tough cop turned Nashville music agent, these in-depth testimonials offer encouragement and advice and prove that it’s possible to pursue your passion. Authored by Kerry Hannon, a celebrated journalist and leading authority on careers and personal finance, What’s Next? offers those seeking a more fulfilling path the tools to get started and the inspiration to do it now.
Book: WAR
Author: Sebastian Junger
Publisher: Twelve, 2010
Private Client Event: July 13th
In his breakout bestseller, The Perfect Storm, Sebastian Junger created “a wild ride that brilliantly captures the awesome power of the raging sea and the often futile attempts of humans to withstand it” (Los Angeles Times Book Review). Now, Junger turns his brilliant and empathetic eye to the reality of combat—the fear, the honor, and the trust among men in an extreme situation whose survival depends on their absolute commitment to one another. His on-the-ground account follows a single platoon through a 15-month tour of duty in the most dangerous outpost in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley. Through the experiences of these young men at war, he shows what it means to fight, to serve, and to face down mortal danger on a daily basis.
Book: Landmark: The Inside Story of America's New Health Care Law and What It Means for Us All
Author: Ceci Connolly
Publisher: PublicAffairs, 2010
Private Client Event: July 13th
The Washington Post’s must-read guide to the health care overhaul.
What now? Despite the rancorous, divisive, year-long debate in Washington, many Americans still don’t understand what the historic overhaul of the health care system will—or won’t—mean. In Landmark, the national reporting staff of The Washington Post pierces through the confusion, examining the new law’s likely impact on us all: our families, doctors, hospitals, health care providers, insurers, and other parts of a health care system that has grown to occupy one-sixth of the U.S. economy.
Landmark’s behind-the-scenes narrative reveals how just how close the law came to defeat, as well as the compromises and deals that President Obama and his Democratic majority in Congress made in achieving what has eluded their predecessors for the past seventy-five years: A legislative package that expands and transforms American health care coverage.
Landmark is an invaluable resource for anyone eager to understand the changes coming our way.
Book: The Good Soldiers
Author: David Finkel
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009
Private Client Event: June 16th
It was the last-chance moment of the war. In January 2007, President George W. Bush announced a new strategy for Iraq. He called it the surge. “Many listening tonight will ask why this effort will succeed when previous operations to secure Baghdad did not. Well, here are the differences,” he told a skeptical nation. Among those listening were the young, optimistic army infantry soldiers of the 2-16, the battalion nicknamed the Rangers. About to head to a vicious area of Baghdad, they decided the difference would be them.
Fifteen months later, the soldiers returned home forever changed. Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporter David Finkel was with them in Bagdad, and almost every grueling step of the way.
What was the true story of the surge? And was it really a success? Those are the questions he grapples with in his remarkable report from the front lines. Combining the action of Mark Bowden’s Black Hawk Down with the literary brio of Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, The Good Soldiers is an unforgettable work of reportage. And in telling the story of these good soldiers, the heroes and the ruined, David Finkel has also produced an eternal tale—not just of the Iraq War, but of all wars, for all time.
Book: King of the Lobby: The Life and Times of Sam Ward, Man-About-Washington in the Gilded Age
Author: Kathryn Allamong Jacob
Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009
Private Client Event: June 16th
King of the Lobby tells the story of how one man harnessed delicious food, fine wine, and good conversation to the task of becoming the most influential lobbyist of the Gilded Age.
Sam Ward was a colorful character. Scion of an old and honorable family, best friend of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and charming man-about-Washington, Ward held his own in an era crowded with larger-than-life personalities. Living by the motto that the shortest route between a pending bill and a congressman’s “aye” was through his stomach, Ward elegantly entertained political elites in return for their votes.
At a time when waves of scandal washed over Washington, the popular press railed against the wickedness of the lobby, and self-righteous politicians predicted that special interests would cause the downfall of democratic government, Sam Ward still reigned supreme. By the early 1870s, he had earned the title “King of the Lobby” and jokingly referred to himself as “Rex Vestiari.” Ward cultivated a style of lobbying that survives today in the form of expensive golf outings, extravagant dinners, and luxurious vacations.
Kathryn Allamong Jacob’s engaging account shows how the “king” earned his crown through cookery and conversation and how this son of wealth and privilege helped to create a questionable profession in a city that then, as now, rested on power and influence.
Book: Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action
Author: Simon Sinek
Publisher: Portfolio Hardcover, 2009
Private Client Event: June 15th
Why do you do what you do?
Why are some people and organizations more innovative, more influential, and moer profitable than others? Why do some command greater loyalty from customers and employees alike? Even among the successful, why are so few able to repeat their success over and over?
People like Martin Luther King Jr., Steve Jobs, and the Wright Brothers might have little in common, but they all started with why. It was their natural ability to start with why that enabled them to inspire those around them and to achieve remarkable things.
In studying the leaders who’ve had the greatest influence in the world, Simon Sinek discovered that they all think, act, and communicate in the exact same way — and it’s the complete opposite of what everyone else does. Sinek calls this powerful idea The Golden Circle, and it provides a framework upon which organizations can be built, movements can be lead, and people can be inspired. And it all starts with WHY.
Any organization can explain what it does; some can explain how they do it; but very few can clearly articulate why. WHY is not money or profit— those are always results. WHY does your organization exist? WHY does it do the things it does? WHY do customers really buy from one company or another? WHY are people loyal to some leaders, but not others?
Starting with WHY works in big business and small business, in the nonprofit world and in politics. Those who start with WHY never manipulate, they inspire. And the people who follow them don’t do so because they have to; they follow because they want to.
Drawing on a wide range of real-life stories, Sinek weaves together a clear vision of what it truly takes to lead and inspire. This book is for anyone who wants to inspire others or who wants to find someone to inspire them.
Book: The Betrayal of American Prosperity: Free Market Delusions, America's Decline, and How We Must Compete in the Post-Dollar Era
Author: Clyde Prestowitz
Publisher: Free Press, 2010
Private Client Event: June 14th
Consider This Shocking Fact: while China’s number one export to the United States is $46 billion of computer equipment, the number one export from the U.S. to China is waste—$7.6 billion of waste paper and scrap metal.
Bestselling author Clyde Prestowitz reveals the astonishing extent of the erosion of the fundamental pillars of American economic might—beginning well before the 2008 financial crisis—and the great challenge we face for the future in competing with the economic juggernaut of China and the other fast-rising economies. As the arresting facts he introduces show, the U.S. is rapidly losing the basis of its wealth and power, as well as its freedom of action and independence. If we do not make dramatic changes quickly, we will confront a painful permanent slide in our standard of living; the dollar will no longer be the world’s currency; our military strength will be whittled away; and we will be increasingly subject to the will of China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and various malcontents.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. As Prestowitz shows in a masterful account of how we’ve come to this fateful juncture, we have inflicted our economic decline on ourselves—we abandoned the extraordinary approach to growth that drove the country’s remarkable rise to superpower status from the early days of the republic up through World War II. For most of our history, we supported our home industries, protected our market against unfair trade, made the world’s finest products—leading the way in technological innovation—and we were strong savers. But in the post-WWII era, we reversed course as our leadership embraced a set of simplistically attractive but disastrously false ideas—that consumption rather than production should drive our economy; that free trade is always a win-win; that all globalization is good; that the market is always right and government regulation or intervention in the economy always causes more harm than good; and that it didn’t matter that our factories were fleeing overseas because we were moving to the “higher ground” of services. In a devastating account, Prestowitz shows just how flawed this orthodoxy is and how it has gutted the American economy. The 2008 financial crisis was only its most blatant and recent consequence.
It is time to abandon these false doctrines and to get back to the American way of growth that brought us to world leadership; Prestowitz presents a deeply researched and powerful set of highly practical steps that we can begin implementing immediately to reverse course and restore our economic leadership and excellence.
The Betrayal of American Prosperity is vital reading for all Americans concerned about the future of the economy and of our power in the coming era.
Book: Chasing Science at Sea: Racing Hurricanes, Stalking Sharks, and Living Undersea with Ocean Experts
Author: Ellen Prager
Publisher: University Of Chicago Press, 2010
Private Client Event: June 10th
To the average office-dweller, marine scientists seem to have the good life: cruising at sea for weeks at a time, swimming in warm coastal waters, living in tropical paradises. But ocean scientists who go to sea will tell you that it is no vacation. Creature comforts are few and the obstacles seemingly insurmountable, yet an abundance of wonder and discovery still awaits those who take to the ocean. Chasing Science at Sea immerses readers in the world of those who regularly go to sea—aquanauts living underwater, marine biologists seeking unseen life in the deep ocean, and the tall-ship captains at the helm, among others—and tells the fascinating tale of what life—and science—is like at the mercy of Mother Nature.
With passion and wit, well-known marine scientist Ellen Prager shares her stories as well as those of her colleagues, revealing that in the field ingenuity and a good sense of humor are as essential as water, sunblock, and GPS. Serendipity is invaluable, and while collecting data is the goal, sometimes just getting back to shore means success. But despite the physical hardship and emotional duress that come with the work, optimism and adventure prompt a particularly hardy species of scientist to return again and again to the sea.
Filled with firsthand accounts of the challenges and triumphs of dealing with the extreme forces of nature and the unpredictable world of the ocean, Chasing Science at Sea is a unique glimpse below the water line at what it is like and why it is important to study, explore, and spend time in one of our planet’s most fascinating and foreign environments.
Book: Daring Young Men: The Heroism and Triumph of The Berlin Airlift-June 1948-May 1949
Author: Richard Reeves
Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2010
Private Client Event: June 10th
In the early hours of June 26, 1948, phones began ringing across America, waking up the airmen of World War II—pilots, navigators, and mechanics—who were finally beginning normal lives with new houses, new jobs, new wives, and new babies. Some were given just forty-eight hours to report to local military bases. The president, Harry S. Truman, was recalling them to active duty to try to save the desperate people of the western sectors of Berlin, the enemy capital many of them had bombed to rubble only three years before.
Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin had ordered a blockade of the city, isolating the people of West Berlin, using hundreds of thousands of Red Army soldiers to close off all land and water access to the city. He was gambling that he could drive out the small detachments of American, British, and French occupation troops, because their only option was to stay and watch Berliners starve—or retaliate by starting World War III. The situation was impossible, Truman was told by his national security advisers, including the Joint Chiefs of Staff. His answer: “We stay in Berlin. Period.” That was when the phones started ringing and local police began banging on doors to deliver telegrams to the vets.
Drawing on service records and hundreds of interviews in the United States, Germany, and Great Britain, Reeves tells the stories of these civilian airmen, the successors to Stephen Ambrose’s “Citizen Soldiers,” ordinary Americans again called to extraordinary tasks. They did the impossible, living in barns and muddy tents, flying over Soviet-occupied territory day and night, trying to stay awake, making it up as they went along and ignoring Russian fighters and occasional anti-aircraft fire trying to drive them to hostile ground.
The Berlin Airlift changed the world. It ended when Stalin backed down and lifted the blockade, but only after the bravery and sense of duty of those young heroes had bought the Allies enough time to create a new West Germany and sign the mutual defense agreement that created NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
And then they went home again. Some of them forgot where they had parked their cars after they got the call.
Book: Mastering the VC Game: A Venture Capital Insider Reveals How to Get from Start-up to IPO on Your Terms
Author: Jeffrey Bussgang
Publisher: Portfolio Hardcover, 2010
Private Client Event: June 10th in MA
Entrepreneurs who dream of building the next Amazon, Facebook, or Google have the opportunity to take advantage of one of the most powerful economic engines the world has ever known: venture capital. To do that, you need to woo, impress, and persuade venture capitalists to back your endeavor. That task alone is a challenge. But finding and choosing the right investor can be harder still. Even if you manage to get backing, you want your VC to be a partner, not some dictator who will undermine your vision and take control of your life’s work.
Jeffrey Bussgang is one of a very few people who have played on both sides of this high-stakes game. By his early thirties, he had helped build two successful start-ups-one went public, the other was acquired. Now he uses his experience and unique perspective on “the other side” as a venture capitalist helping entrepreneurs bring their dreams to fruition.
In the book, Bussgang offers high-level insights, colorful stories, and practical advice gathered from his own experience as well as from interviews with dozens of the most successful players on both sides of the game, including Twitter’s Jack Dorsey and LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman. He reveals how to get noticed, perfect a pitch, and negotiate a partnership that works for everyone.
An insider’s guide to the secrets of the world venture capital, Mastering the VC Game will prove invaluable for entrepreneurs seeking capital and successful partnerships.
Book: The Great Brain Race: How Global Universities Are Reshaping the World
Author: Ben Wildavsky
Publisher: Princeton University Press, 2010
Private Client Event: June 8th in MA
In The Great Brain Race, former U.S. News & World Report education editor Ben Wildavsky presents the first popular account of how international competition for the brightest minds is transforming the world of higher education—and why this revolution should be welcomed, not feared. Every year, nearly three million international students study outside of their home countries, a 40 percent increase since 1999. Newly created or expanded universities in China, India, and Saudi Arabia are competing with the likes of Harvard and Oxford for faculty, students, and research preeminence. Satellite campuses of Western universities are springing up from Abu Dhabi and Singapore to South Africa. Wildavsky shows that as international universities strive to become world-class, the new global education marketplace is providing more opportunities to more people than ever before.
Drawing on extensive reporting in China, India, the United States, Europe, and the Middle East, Wildavsky chronicles the unprecedented international mobility of students and faculty, the rapid spread of branch campuses, the growth of for-profit universities, and the remarkable international expansion of college rankings. Some university and government officials see the rise of worldwide academic competition as a threat, going so far as to limit student mobility or thwart cross-border university expansion. But Wildavsky argues that this scholarly marketplace is creating a new global meritocracy, one in which the spread of knowledge benefits everyone—both educationally and economically.
Book: Bargaining with the Devil: When to Negotiate, When to Fight
Author: Robert Mnookin
Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2010
Private Client Events: April 21st in MA & June 7th in DC
One of the country’s most eminent practitioners of the art and science of negotiation offers practical advice for the most challenging conflicts — when you are facing an adversary you don’t trust, who may harm you, or who you may even feel is evil.
The head of Harvard’s famed Program on Negotiation, Robert Mnookin provides tools for confronting devils of all kinds — in business, politics, and family life. Bargaining with the Devil guides the reader on how to make wise decisions about whether to negotiate or fight. Mnookin explains what it means to make a “wise decision” and identifies the emotional, strategic, and political traps to avoid.
Drawing from a remarkable range of real-life stories, Mnookin offers his thoughtful guidance in disputes of all sorts where the temptation is to demonize:
The CEO of a small high-tech company learns that his joint-venture partner, a big foreign corporation, has been secretly cheating him under a license agreement; IBM discovers that Fujitsu, its largest competitor, has copied its software; the San Francisco Symphony is torn apart by poisoned labor-management relations; divorcing spouses, each feeling wounded and betrayed, disagree about custody and support; three siblings are in conflict about what to do with a jointly inherited vacation property.
Mnookin also examines decisions made in conflicts with evil regimes, where lives and liberty were at stake. He analyzes Winston Churchill’s fateful choice in May 1940 — Britain’s darkest hour — to reject negotiations with Adolf Hitler and to carry on the fight. He compares Nelson Mandela’s decision to initiate negotiations with the South Africa apartheid government that had imprisoned him for life with the imprisoned Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky’s decision not to negotiate with the KGB for his freedom. And Mnookin evaluates with sensitivity the Hungarian Jew Rudolf Kasztner’s still controversial decision to negotiate with Adolf Eichmann in the hope of saving lives.
This lively, informative, indispensable book identifies the tools one needs to make wise decisions about life’s most challenging conflicts.
Book: A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future
Author: Daniel H. Pink
Publisher: Riverhead Trade, 2006
Private Client Event: May 23rd
The paperback edition of Daniel H. Pink’s groundbreaking book, A Whole New Mind.
Described by reviewers as “an audacious and powerful work,” “a profound read,” “right on the money,” and “a miracle,” the book reveals the six abilities individuals must master in an outsourced and automated world. Several publications named A Whole New Mind one of the best business books of 2005. It is now being translated into 12 languages — and will appear across Europe and Asia in 2006.
For this updated and expanded edition, Pink has added dozens of new tools, tips, and exercises to help individuals and organizations sharpen their right-brain capacities. Find out why Thomas L. Friedman, author of the mega-bestseller The World is Flat, calls A Whole New Mind his “favorite business book.”
Book: Apocalypse Never: Forging the Path to a Nuclear Weapon-Free World
Author: Tad Daley
Publisher: Rutgers University Press, 2010
PUBLIC EVENT FEATURING TAD DALEY
Date: Thursday, May 20, 2010
Location: Washington Plaza Hotel
10 Thomas Circle, NW, Washington, DC 20005
Apocalypse Never illuminates why we must abolish nuclear weapons, how we can, and what the world will look like after we do. The twenty-first century has ushered in a world at the atomic edge. The pop culture days of Dr. Strangelove have been replaced by the all-too-real single day of 24. Tad Daley has written a book for the general reader about this most crucial of contemporary challenges.
Apocalypse Never maintains that the abolition of nuclear weapons is both essential and achievable, and reveals in fine detail what we need to do—both governments and movements—to make it a reality. Daley insists that while global climate change poses the single greatest long-term peril to the human race, the nuclear challenge in its many incarnation—nuclear terror, nuclear accident, a nuclear crisis spinning out of control—poses the single most immediate peril.
Book: The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt
Author: T.J. Stiles
Publisher: Knopf, 2009
Private Client Event: May 17th
WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD
A gripping, groundbreaking biography of the combative man whose genius and force of will created modern capitalism.
Founder of a dynasty, builder of the original Grand Central, creator of an impossibly vast fortune, Cornelius “Commodore” Vanderbilt is an American icon. Humbly born on Staten Island during George Washington’s presidency, he rose from boatman to builder of the nation’s largest fleet of steamships to lord of a railroad empire. Lincoln consulted him on steamship strategy during the Civil War; Jay Gould was first his uneasy ally and then sworn enemy; and Victoria Woodhull, the first woman to run for president of the United States, was his spiritual counselor. We see Vanderbilt help to launch the transportation revolution, propel the Gold Rush, reshape Manhattan, and invent the modern corporation—in fact, as T. J. Stiles elegantly argues, Vanderbilt did more than perhaps any other individual to create the economic world we live in today.
In The First Tycoon, Stiles offers the first complete, authoritative biography of this titan, and the first comprehensive account of the Commodore’s personal life. It is a sweeping, fast-moving epic, and a complex portrait of the great man. Vanderbilt, Stiles shows, embraced the philosophy of the Jacksonian Democrats and withstood attacks by his conservative enemies for being too competitive. He was a visionary who pioneered business models. He was an unschooled fistfighter who came to command the respect of New York’s social elite. And he was a father who struggled with a gambling-addicted son, a husband who was loving yet abusive, and, finally, an old man who was obsessed with contacting the dead.
The First Tycoon is the exhilarating story of a man and a nation maturing together: the powerful account of a man whose life was as epic and complex as American history itself.
Book: This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly
Author: Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff
Publisher: Princeton University Press, 2009
Private Client Event: May 17th
Throughout history, rich and poor countries alike have been lending, borrowing, crashing—and recovering—their way through an extraordinary range of financial crises. Each time, the experts have chimed, “this time is different”—claiming that the old rules of valuation no longer apply and that the new situation bears little similarity to past disasters. This book proves that premise wrong. Covering sixty-six countries across five continents, This Time Is Different presents a comprehensive look at the varieties of financial crises, and guides us through eight astonishing centuries of government defaults, banking panics, and inflationary spikes—from medieval currency debasements to today’s subprime catastrophe. Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, leading economists whose work has been influential in the policy debate concerning the current financial crisis, provocatively argue that financial combustions are universal rites of passage for emerging and established market nations. The authors draw important lessons from history to show us how much—or how little—we have learned.
Using clear, sharp analysis and comprehensive data, Reinhart and Rogoff document that financial fallouts occur in clusters and strike with surprisingly consistent frequency, duration, and ferocity. They examine the patterns of currency crashes, high and hyperinflation, and government defaults on international and domestic debts—as well as the cycles in housing and equity prices, capital flows, unemployment, and government revenues around these crises. While countries do weather their financial storms, Reinhart and Rogoff prove that short memories make it all too easy for crises to recur.
An important book that will affect policy discussions for a long time to come, This Time Is Different exposes centuries of financial missteps.
Book: Building Social Business: The New Kind of Capitalism That Serves Humanity's Most Pressing Needs
Author: Muhammad Yunus
Publisher: PublicAffairs, 2010
Click here to see Dr. Muhammad Yunus on C-Span
Click here to see Dr. Muhammad Yunus on msnbc’s Morning Joe show
Click here to read about Dr. Muhammad Yunus in the New York Times
Date: Friday, May 14, 2010
Time: 8:30 am-10:30 am
Location: Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center/Atrium Ballroom
1300 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW, Washington, DC 20004
A portion of the event proceeds will be donated to FONKOZE (www.fonkoze.org/special fundraising events), Haiti’s Alternative Bank for the Organized Poor.
Muhammad Yunus, the practical visionary who pioneered microcredit and, with his Grameen Bank, won the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize, has developed a visionary new dimension for capitalism which he calls “social business.” By harnessing the energy of profit-making to the objective of fulfilling human needs, social business creates self-supporting, viable commercial enterprises that generate economic growth even as they produce goods and services that make the world a better place.
In this book, Yunus shows how social business has gone from being a theory to an inspiring practice, adopted by leading corporations, entrepreneurs, and social activists across Asia, South America, Europe and the US. He demonstrates how social business transforms lives; offers practical guidance for those who want to create social businesses of their own; explains how public and corporate policies must adapt to make room for the social business model; and shows why social business holds the potential to redeem the failed promise of free-market enterprise.
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Book: The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn
Author: Nathaniel Philbrick
Publisher: Viking Adult, 2010
Private Client Event: May 14th
Click here to listen as NATHANIEL PHILBRICK discusses his book!
The bestselling author of Mayflower sheds new light on one of the iconic stories of the American West
Little Bighorn and Custer are names synonymous in the American imagination with unmatched bravery and spectacular defeat. Mythologized as Custer’s Last Stand, the June 1876 battle has been equated with other famous last stands, from the Spartans’ defeat at Thermopylae to Davy Crockett at the Alamo.
In his tightly structured narrative, Nathaniel Philbrick brilliantly sketches the two larger-than-life antagonists: Sitting Bull, whose charisma and political savvy earned him the position of leader of the Plains Indians, and George Armstrong Custer, one of the Union’s greatest cavalry officers and a man with a reputation for fearless and often reckless courage. Philbrick reminds readers that the Battle of the Little Bighorn was also, even in victory, the last stand for the Sioux and Cheyenne Indian nations. Increasingly outraged by the government’s Indian policies, the Plains tribes allied themselves and held their ground in southern Montana. Within a few years of Little Bighorn, however, all the major tribal leaders would be confined to Indian reservations.
Throughout, Philbrick beautifully evokes the history and geography of the Great Plains with his characteristic grace and sense of drama. The Last Stand is a mesmerizing account of the archetypal story of the American West, one that continues to haunt our collective imagination.
Book: Crisis Economics: A Crash Course in the Future of Finance
Author: Nouriel Roubini and Stephen Mihm
Publisher: The Penguin Press HC
Date: Thursday, May 13, 2010
Time: 7:00 pm
Location: Sixth & I Historic Synagogue
600 I Street, NW, Washington, DC 20001
Event hosted by Politics and Prose Bookstore
This myth shattering book reveals the methods Nouriel Roubini used to foretell the current crisis before other economists saw it coming and shows how those methods can help us make sense of the present and prepare for the future.
Renowned economist Nouriel Roubini electrified his profession and the larger financial community by predicting the current crisis well in advance of anyone else. Unlike most in his profession who treat economic disasters as freakish once-ina-lifetime events without clear cause, Roubini, after decades of careful research around the world, realized that they were both probable and predictable. Armed with an unconventional blend of historical analysis and global economics, Roubini has forced politicians, policy makers, investors, and market watchers to face a long-neglected truth: financial systems are inherently fragile and prone to collapse.
Book: Maestro: A Surprising Story About Leading by Listening
Author: Roger Nierenberg
Publisher: Portfolio Hardcover, 2009
Private Client Event: May 13th
A conductor reveals powerful leadership lessons by explaining the inner workings of a symphony orchestra
Roger Nierenberg, a veteran conductor, is the creator of The Music Paradigm, a unique program that invites people to sit INSIDE a professional symphony orchestra as the musicians and conductor solve problems together.
He captures that experience in Maestro: A Surprising Story about Leading by Listening, a parable about a rising executive tough challenges. The narrator befriends an orchestra conductor and is inspired to think about leadership and communication in an entirely new way.
For instance:
• A maestro doesn’t micromanage, but encourages others to develop their own solutions. There’s a big difference between conducting and trying to play all the instruments.
• A maestro helps people feel ownership of the whole piece, not just their individual parts.
• A maestro leads by listening. When people sense genuine open-mindedness, they offer more of their talent. If not, they get defensive and hold back their best ideas.
Truly great leaders, whether conductors striving for perfect harmony or CEOs reaching for excellence, act with a vision of their organization at its best.
Book: Tocqueville's Discovery of America
Author: Leo Damrosch
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010
Private Client Event: May 11th
Alexis de Tocqueville is more quoted than read; commentators across the political spectrum invoke him as an oracle who defined America and its democracy for all times. But in fact his masterpiece, Democracy in America, was the product of a young man’s open-minded experience of America at a time of rapid change. In Tocqueville’s Discovery of America, the prizewinning biographer Leo Damrosch retraces Tocqueville’s nine-month journey through the young nation in 1831–1832, illuminating how his enduring ideas were born of imaginative interchange with America and Americans, and painting a vivid picture of Jacksonian America.
Damrosch shows that Tocqueville found much to admire in the dynamism of American society and in its egalitarian ideals. But he was offended by the ethos of grasping materialism and was convinced that the institution of slavery was bound to give rise to a tragic civil war.
Drawing on documents and letters that have never before appeared in English, as well as on a wide range of scholarship, Tocqueville’s Discovery of America brings the man, his ideas, and his world to startling life.
Book: Women Lead the Way: Your Guide to Stepping Up to Leadership and Changing the World
Author: Linda Tarr-Whelan
Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2009
Private Client Events: April 21st & May 6th
This is the story of how and why women’s full participation in leadership matters is still seemingly a well-kept secret. To have the future we all want, women must play a more robust role in setting priorities and allocating resources. “Women Lead the Way” presents argument, research, and tactical guidance to help readers wedge the door open and bring more women through and up.
The evidence from around the world validates the findings of the United Nations General Assembly in 1995, which set a baseline of at least 30 per cent women at the table as a prerequisite for genuine partnership and lasting, positive change in the international arena. We see the same phenomena in the business world. More women as corporate officers and members of boards of directors results in stronger financial performance. At 30 per cent representation, we see concrete, positive outcomes for everyone not just women including increased shareholder value, more flexible management approaches, a broader definition of success, and better bottom lines. More women at the table means more progress for all of us.
This book helps readers get started on a win-win women-led strategy to bring about the leadership balance we all need. You will learn how to do away with cultural baggage that boxes us in, gain a clear understanding of how and why Women Lead the Way, and receive practical, road-tested tactics to help you and other women step up and into leadership.
‘Linda has produced the first seriously practical guide to stepping up to leadership. Her clear, concise, down to earth approach challenges us all to keep moving forward and leading the way. Any woman [or man] reading this book can be left in no doubt of what needs doing and more importantly, how to do it. A must read’ – Rt Hon Baroness Catherine Ashton, EU Trade Commissioner [the first woman British Commissioner and first woman Trade Commissioner]. ‘Straightforward, empathetic and balanced, this compelling guide tells the stories that women positively engaged in changing the world will recognise. Though American in background, the messages are international and well researched. From the time of Hypatia of Alexandria through to the present day, women like Linda Tarr-Whelan do make a difference. Let’s listen’ – Dr Melissa Hardie, Director, The Hypatia Trust Honorary Fellow, Exeter University.
Book: The 10 Laws of Enduring Success
Author: Maria Bartiromo and Catherine Whitman
Publisher: Crown Business, 2010
PUBLIC EVENT FEATURING MARIA BARTIROMO
Date: Friday, April 30, 2010
Time: 11:30 am-1:30 pm
Location: The Liaison Capitol Hill
415 New Jersey Avenue, NW, Washington DC 20001
Event hosted by Greater Washington Board of Trade
The times have changed. We need a fresh understanding of the meaning of success.
What do Condoleezza Rice, Joe Torre, Bill Gates, Goldie Hawn, Mary Hart, Garry Kasparov, and Jack Welch have in common?
All have talked at length with Maria Bartiromo about business, the world and their surprising, inspiring and uncommon ideas about the meaning of success. Their stories, those of an extraordinary range of other people from all walks of life, and Maria Bartiromo’s personal insights are the foundation of The 10 Laws of Enduring Success. It is the guide for the extraordinary times we are living through.
During bullish, optimistic periods, people seem to ride an upward wave with ease and confidence. The tangible evidence is right there for all to see—in their jobs, bank accounts, homes, families, and the admiration of their peers. But it is a fact of life that success, once earned, is not necessarily there to stay. If ever there was a cautionary tale about the fleeting nature of success, it is the events of recent years.
But a funny thing happened. Faced with gut-wrenching realities, many people have started to re-evaluate the meaning of success in less superficial and impermanent ways. They’re asking themselves hard questions that have
long been ignored: about what’s really important to them, and where the bedrock of their personal achievement lies.
As Maria Bartiromo watched the financial drama from her front-row seat at the New York Stock Exchange, she began to re-assess the meaning of success—not just as one-off achievements, but as a durable, lifelong pursuit. Is there, she wondered, a definition of success that you can have permanently—in spite of the turmoil in your life, your job, or your bank account? This question is more important than ever, given the unpredictability of the current economy.
—What are the intangibles that can’t be measured or counted?
—What are the qualities that aren’t reflected in your title or on your business card?
—And more practically, how can you remain successful even when the worst things happen to you?
—Is it possible to build success from failure? It’s lonely at the bottom of the heap, when your BlackBerry stops buzzing, and the world moves on without you.
Everyone wants to be close to success, and to have success. But what is success? How do you get it, and how do you keep it? As Maria interviewed some of the most successful people in the world, she felt the need to answer these questions: what makes these success stories tick? How did they achieve such leadership and power and how can one hold onto it, once you get it. What are the barriers to success and what is the bedrock to enduring success?
Book: Highest Duty: My Search for What Really Matters
Author: Chesley B. Sullenberger
Publisher: William Morrow, 2009
Private Client Event: April 29th
On January 15, 2009, the world witnessed one of the most remarkable emergency landings in aviation history when Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger skillfully glided US Airways Flight 1549 onto the surface of the Hudson River, saving the lives of all 155 aboard. His cool actions not only averted tragedy but made him a hero and an inspiration worldwide. To Sullenberger, a calm, steady pilot with forty years of flying experience who is also a safety consulting expert, the landing was not a miracle but rather the result of years of practice and training-wisdom he gained in the cockpit of U.S. Air Force jets and in his Texas boyhood.
Born to a World War II veteran and dentist father and an elementary school teacher mother, Sully fell in love with planes early. He learned to fly as an eager 16-year-old from a crop duster, an older neighbor in north Texas, who took off and landed his fragile plane on the grass field behind his house. While Sully′s father encouraged his interest in flying, he also imparted stern advice he′d learned from his Navy service during World War II: a commander is responsible for everyone in his care-and those words have shaped Sully′s life and work and continue to guide him today.
Highest Duty reveals the important lessons Sully learned through childhood, in his military service, and in his work as a commercial airline pilot. At heart, it is a story of hope and preparedness-that life′s challenges can be met if we′re ready for them-reminding us that, even in these days filled with war, tragedy, and economic uncertainty, there are values still worth fighting for.
A few weeks after the crash, Sully discovered that he′d lost a library book about professional ethics, Just Culture: Balancing Safety and Accountability, in the downed plane′s cargo hold. When he called the library to notify them, they waived the usual fees. Mayor Michael Bloomberg replaced the book when he gave Sully the Key to the City in a New York ceremony.
Book: In Fed We Trust: Ben Bernanke's War on the Great Panic
Author: David Wessel
Publisher: Crown Business, 2009
Private Client Event: April 29th
That was Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke’s vow as the worst financial panic in more than fifty years gripped the world and he struggled to avoid the once unthinkable: a repeat of the Great Depression. Brilliant but temperamentally cautious, Bernanke researched and wrote about the causes of the Depression during his career as an academic. Then when thrust into a role as one of the most important people in the world, he was compelled to boldness by circumstances he never anticipated.
The president of the United States can respond instantly to a missile attack with America’s military might, but he cannot respond to a financial crisis with real money unless Congress acts. The Fed chairman can. Bernanke did. Under his leadership the Fed spearheaded the biggest government intervention in more than half a century and effectively became the fourth branch of government, with no direct accountability to the nation’s voters.
Believing that the economic catastrophe of the 1930s was largely the fault of a sluggish and wrongheaded Federal Reserve, Bernanke was determined not to repeat that epic mistake. In this penetrating look inside the most powerful economic institution in the world, David Wessel illuminates its opaque and undemocratic inner workings, while revealing how the Bernanke Fed led the desperate effort to prevent the world’s financial engine from grinding to a halt.
In piecing together the fullest, most authoritative, and alarming picture yet of this decisive moment in our nation’s history, In Fed We Trust answers the most critical questions. Among them:
• What did Bernanke and his team at the Fed know–and what took them by surprise? Which of their actions stretched–or even ripped through–the Fed’s legal authority? Which chilling numbers and indicators made them feel they had no choice?
• What were they thinking at pivotal moments during the race to sell Bear Stearns, the unsuccessful quest to save Lehman Brothers, and the virtual nationalization of AIG, Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac? What were they saying to one another when, as Bernanke put it to Wessel: “We came very close to Depression 2.0”?
• How well did Bernanke, former treasury secretary Hank Paulson, and then New York Fed president Tim Geithner perform under intense pressure?
• How did the crisis prompt a reappraisal of the once-impregnable reputation of Alan Greenspan?
In Fed We Trust is a breathtaking and singularly perceptive look at a historic episode in American and global economic history.
Book: Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life
Author: Winifred Gallagher
Publisher: The Penguin Press HC, 2009
Private Client Event: April 28th
Winifred Gallagher revolutionizes our understanding of attention and the creation of the interested life
In Rapt, acclaimed behavioral science writer Winifred Gallagher makes the radical argument that the quality of your life largely depends on what you choose to pay attention to and how you choose to do it. Gallagher grapples with provocative questions—Can we train our focus? What’s different about the way creative people pay attention? Why do we often zero in on the wrong factors when making big decisions, like where to move?—driving us to reconsider what we think we know about attention.
Gallagher looks beyond sound bites on our proliferating BlackBerries and the increased incidence of ADD in children to the discoveries of neuroscience and psychology and the wisdom of home truths, profoundly altering and expanding the contemporary conversation on attention and its power. Science’s major contribution to the study of attention has been the discovery that its basic mechanism is an either/or process of selection. That we focus may be a biological necessity— research now proves we can process only a little information at a time, or about 173 billion bits over an average life—but the good news is that we have much more control over our focus than we think, which gives us a remarkable yet underappreciated capacity to influence our experience. As suggested by the expression “pay attention,” this cognitive currency is a finite resource that we must learn to spend wisely.
In Rapt, Gallagher introduces us to a diverse cast of characters—artists and ranchers, birders and scientists—who have learned to do just that and whose stories are profound lessons in the art of living the interested life. No matter what your quotient of wealth, looks, brains, or fame, increasing your satisfaction means focusing more on what really interests you and less on what doesn’t. In asserting its groundbreaking thesis—the wise investment of your attention is the single most important thing you can do to improve your well-being—Rapt yields fresh insights into the nature of reality and what it means to be fully alive.
Book: Mawson: Life and Death in Antarctica
Author: Tim Jarvis
Publisher: The Miegunyah Press, 2008
Private Client Event: April 27th
This is an extraordinary account of explorer Tim Jarvis’ attempt to retrace Sir Douglas Mawson’s infamous polar journey of 1912-13. Battling extreme isolation, and close to starvation, Jarvis aims to complete the journey across the south pole in the forty-seven days that it took Mawson. He does it using exactly the same equipment, clothing and food rations available one hundred years ago. Racing against terrifying blizzards and headwinds, Jarvis struggles to overcome equipment failure, physical deprivation and his own self-doubt. This book is the story of an incredible journey and the limits of human endurance to undertake it.
To this day, no-one has successfully completed Shackleton’s ‘double’. In 2011, Tim Jarvis will head up a team that will attempt the journey under the patronage of The Hon. Alexandra Shackleton granddaughter and closest living relative of Sir Ernest. Dubbed “The Shackleton Epic”, the expedition will set sail from Elephant Island in a replica of the James Caird and will use only 1916 technology, food and equipment.
“The expedition is in honour of Shackleton’s legacy. It demonstrates how a group of people from different nations are able to put their differences aside to work towards the achievement of a goal against seemingly insurmountable odds, a message that resonates powerfully in our modern world.” – Tim Jarvis
For more information, please visit www.timjarvis.org
Book: Beyond Fundamentalism: Confronting Religious Extremism in the Age of Globalization
Author: Reza Aslan
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2010
Private Client Event: April 27th
Though it is the fastest-growing religion in the world, Islam remains shrouded in ignorance and fear for much of the West. In No god but God, Reza Aslan, an internationally acclaimed scholar of religions, explains this faith in all its beauty and complexity.
Beginning with a vivid account of the social and religious milieu in which the Prophet Muhammad forged his message, Aslan paints a portrait of the first Muslim community as a radical experiment in religious pluralism and social egalitarianism. He demonstrates how, after the Prophet’s death, his successors attempted to interpret his message for future generations–an overwhelming task that fractured the Muslim community into competing sects.
Finally, Aslan examines how, in the shadow of European colonialism, Muslims developed conflicting strategies to reconcile traditional Islamic values with the realities of the modern world, thus launching what Aslan terms the Islamic Reformation. Timely and persuasive, No god but God is an elegantly written account of a magnificent yet misunderstood faith.
Book: Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming the Obstacles Between Vision and Reality
Author: Scott Belsky
Publisher: Portfolio Hardcover, 2010
Private Client Events: April 26th & 27th
How the world’s leading innovators push their ideas to fruition, time and time again.
Edison famously said that genius is 1 percent inspiration, 99 percent perspiration. Ideas for new businesses, solutions to the world’s problems, and artistic breakthroughs are common, but great execution is rare.
According to Scott Belsky, the capacity to make ideas happen can be strengthened by anyone willing to build their organizational habits and harness the forces of community. That’s why he founded Behance, a company that helps creative people and teams across industries develop these skills.
Belsky has spent six years studying the habits of especially productive creative people and teams-the ones who make their ideas happen time and time again. After interviewing hundreds of successful creatives, he has compiled their most powerful-and often counterintuitive-practices, such as:
• Generate ideas in moderation and act without conviction
• Reduce all projects to just three primary components
• Encourage fighting within your team
• Seek competition and share ideas liberally
In an increasingly flexible and entrepreneurial environment, creative minds have the opportunity (and responsibility) to solve and change industries-but they can only do that if they overcome the obstacles. While many of us obsess about discovering great new ideas, Belsky shows why it’s better to develop the capacity to make ideas happen-a capacity that endures over time.
Book: Saving Henry: A Mother's Journey
Author: Laurie Strongin
Publisher: Hyperion, 2010
Private Client Events: March 2nd, 4th, 9th, 11th, 13th, 14th, 18th, April 7th & 25th
Click here for Laurie’s appearance on Good Morning America
“A heartbreaking story, exquisitely told . . . Laurie Strongin’s integrity, humanity, and wisdom are an inspiration to the rest of us.”
—David Shenk, author of The Forgetting
Saving Henry is the eye-opening and inspiring story of how far a family will go to save the life of their child. Laurie Strongin’s son Henry was born with a heart condition that was operable, but which proved to be a precursor for a rare, almost-always fatal illness: Fanconi anemia. Deciding to pursue every avenue that might provide a cure, Laurie and her husband signed on for a brand new procedure that combined in vitro fertilization with genetic testing to produce a baby without the disease, who could be a stem cell donor for Henry. As Laurie puts it: “I believe in love and science, nothing more and nothing less.”
Laurie and her husband endured nine failed courses of the procedure before giving up. But Saving Henry is also about hope. It is the story of Henry, the feisty little boy who loved Batman, Cal Ripken Jr., and root beer-flavored anesthesia, and who captivated everyone with his spunk and positive attitude. When the nurses came to take blood samples, Henry brandished his toy sword and said, “Bring it on!” When he lost his hair after a chemo treatment, he declared, “Hey, I look like Michael Jordan!”
Laurie became a fervent advocate for stem cell research, working with policymakers and the scientific community to bring attention to Henry’s case and to the groundbreaking research that could save many lives. Henry’s courage and bravery inspired nurses, doctors, friends, and family. Saving Henry is the story of one family’s search for a cure, and the long-lasting scientific impact their amazing little boy has had.
Book: Big Green Purse
Author: Diane MacEachern
Publisher: Avery, 2008
Private Client Event: April 23rd
Protecting our environment is one of the biggest issues facing our planet today. But how do we solve a problem that can seem overwhelming-even hopeless? As Diane MacEachern argues in Big Green Purse, the best way to fight the industries that pollute the planet, thereby changing the marketplace forever, is to mobilize the most powerful consumer force in the world-women.
MacEachern’s message is simple but revolutionary. If women harness the “power of their purse” and intentionally shift their spending money to commodities that have the greatest environmental benefit, they can create a cleaner, greener world. Spirited and informative, this book:
- targets twenty commodities-cars, cosmetics, coffee, food, paper products, appliances, cleansers, and more-where women’s dollars can make a dramatic difference; – provides easy-to-follow guidelines and lists so women can choose the greenest option regardless of what they’re buying, along with recommended companies they should support; – encourages women to spend wisely by explaining what’s worth the premium price some green products cost, what’s not, and when they shouldn’t spend money at all; and – differentiates between products that are actually “green” and those that are simply marketed as “ecofriendly.”
Whether readers want to start with small changes or are ready to devote the majority of their budget to green products, MacEachern offers concrete and immediate ways that women can take action and make a difference. Empowering and enlightening, Big Green Purse will become the “green shopping bible” for women everywhere who are asking, “What can I do?”
Book: Green Recovery: Get Lean, Get Smart, and Emerge from the Downturn on Top
Author: Andrew Winston
Publisher: Harvard Business School Press, 2009
When the economy turns rough, many companies sideline their green business initiatives. That’s a big mistake. In “Green Recovery”, Andrew Winston shows that no company can afford to wait for the downturn to ease before going green. Green initiatives ratchet up your company’s resource efficiency, creativity, and employee motivation. They save energy, waste, and money, preserving precious capital-and give precise focus to your innovation efforts and strategic priorities. Part manifesto and part how-to guide, this concise and engaging book provides a road map for using green initiatives to deliver short-term gains and position your company for long-term strategic growth. “Green Recovery” is your guide to establishing your competitive positioning in difficult times and emerging even stronger into a vastly changed economy.
Book: Happiness at Work: A Top B-School Professor Shows How to be Resilient, Motivated, and Successful--No Matter What
Author: Srikumar Rao
Publisher: McGraw-Hill, 2010
Private Client Event: April 15th
In these tough times, there are few people who are completely happy with the current conditions. From business executives to the everyday Joe or Jane, everyone seems to be going through a rough economic and personal crunch. But acclaimed business school Professor Srikumar Rao says that we can learn to create joy no matter what else may be going on around us.
Rao shows you that it isn’t the negative thing that happens to you that causes your unhappiness, it’s how you see it. Happiness at Work is a thought-provoking new title that moves the mind away from negativity and forces you to resist labeling situations as “bad”, but rather seeing them as neutral.
The Happiness Choice provides:
*Surprising ways of looking at change and problem-solving *Exercises that shift one’s perspective
Learn the vital wisdom necessary to achieving a joyful, successful life as you define it through greater resilience and a strong inner core. Get it now with The Happiness Choice.
Book: Too Big to Save? How to Fix the U.S. Financial System
Author: Robert Pozen
Publisher: Wiley, 2009
Private Client Event: April 14th
Industry luminary Robert Pozen offers his insights on the future of U.S. finance.
The recent credit crisis and the resulting bailout program are unprecedented events in the financial industry. While it’s important to understand what got us here, it’s even more important to consider how we should get out. While there is little question that immediate action was required to stabilize the situation, it is now time to look for a long-term plan to reform the United States financial industry.
That is where Bob Pozen comes in. Perhaps more than anyone in the industry, Pozen commands the respect and attention of the public and private sector. In this timely guide, he outlines his vision for the new financial future and provides useful advice along the way. To Pozen, there are four high-priority problems that must be addressed, and this book puts them in perspective:
-Analyzes alternative models for government stakes in banks
-Recommends a new board structure for large financial institutions
-Examines the importance of broader Fed jurisdiction over systemic risks
-Proposes a way to revive the securitization of loans
With Too Big to Save, you’ll learn the likely future of the finance industry and understand why changes have to be made.
Book: Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?
Author: Seth Godin
Publisher: Portfolio Hardcover, 2010
Private Client Event: April 13th
Seth Godin, author of the #1 bestselling LINCHPIN is doing a rare engagement with us via satellite. He’ll be talking about what it means to be a Linchpin and why the shifts in our economy demand it.
Seth is witty, wise and provocative, and we’re certain our guests will walk away with a new understanding of the huge opportunities that exist their teams going forward. It’s not going to be easy but it is going to be big.
For more information, please contact Perry at perry@hooksbookevents.com
“The only way to get what you’re worth is to stand out, to exert emotional labor, to be seen as indispensable, and to produce interactions that organizations and people care deeply about.”
In bestsellers such as Purple Cow and Tribes, Seth Godin taught readers how to make remarkable products and spread powerful ideas. But this book is different. It’s about you – your choices, your future, and your potential to make a huge difference in whatever field you choose.
There used to be two teams in every workplace: management and labor. Now there’s a third team, the linchpins. These people invent, lead (regardless of title), connect others, make things happen, and create order out of chaos. They figure out what to do when there’s no rule book. They delight and challenge their customers and peers. They love their work, pour their best selves into it, and turn each day into a kind of art.
Linchpins are the essential building blocks of great organizations. Like the small piece of hardware that keeps a wheel from falling off its axle, they may not be famous but they’re indispensable. And in today’s world, they get the best jobs and the most freedom.
Book: Saving Savannah: The City and the Civil War (Vintage Civil War Library)
Author: Jacqueline Jones
Publisher: Vintage, 2009
Private Client Event: April 9th
In this masterful portrait of life in Savannah before, during, and after the Civil War, prize-winning historian Jacqueline Jones transports readers to the balmy, raucous streets of that fabled Southern port city. Here is a subtle and rich social history that weaves together stories of the everyday lives of blacks and whites, rich and poor, men and women from all walks of life confronting the transformations that would alter their city forever. Deeply researched and vividly written, Saving Savannah is an invaluable contribution to our understanding of the Civil War years.
Book: How Enemies Become Friends: The Sources of Stable Peace
Author: Charles A. Kupchan
Publisher: Princeton University Press, 2010
Private Client Event: April 7th
Is the world destined to suffer endless cycles of conflict and war? Can rival nations become partners and establish a lasting and stable peace? How Enemies Become Friends provides a bold and innovative account of how nations escape geopolitical competition and replace hostility with friendship. Through compelling analysis and rich historical examples that span the globe and range from the thirteenth century through the present, foreign policy expert Charles Kupchan explores how adversaries can transform enmity into amity—and he exposes prevalent myths about the causes of peace.
Kupchan contends that diplomatic engagement with rivals, far from being appeasement, is critical to rapprochement between adversaries. Diplomacy, not economic interdependence, is the currency of peace; concessions and strategic accommodation promote the mutual trust needed to build an international society. The nature of regimes matters much less than commonly thought: countries, including the United States, should deal with other states based on their foreign policy behavior rather than on whether they are democracies. Kupchan demonstrates that similar social orders and similar ethnicities, races, or religions help nations achieve stable peace. He considers many historical successes and failures, including the onset of friendship between the United States and Great Britain in the early twentieth century, the Concert of Europe, which preserved peace after 1815 but collapsed following revolutions in 1848, and the remarkably close partnership of the Soviet Union and China in the 1950s, which descended into open rivalry by the 1960s.
In a world where conflict among nations seems inescapable, How Enemies Become Friends offers critical insights for building lasting peace.
Book: How Capitalism Will Save Us: Why Free People and Free Markets Are the Best Answer in Today's Economy
Author: Steve Forbes and Elizabeth Ames
Publisher: Crown Business, 2009
Private Client Event: April 7th
Has capitalism failed?
Is it fundamentally greedy and immoral, enabling the rich to get richer? Are free markets Darwinian places where the most ruthless crush smaller competitors, where vital products and services are priced beyond the ability of many people to afford them?
Capitalism is the world’s greatest economic success story. It is the most effective way to provide for the needs of people and foster the democratic and moral values of a free society. Yet the worst recession in decades has widely—and understandably—shaken people’s faith in our system. Even before the current crisis, capitalism received a “bad rap” from a culture ambivalent about free markets and wealth creation. This crisis of confidence is preventing a full recognition of how we got into the mess we’re in today—and why capitalism continues to be the best route to prosperity.
How Capitalism Will Save Us transcends labels such as “conservative” and “liberal” by showing how the economy really works. When free people in free markets have energy to solve problems and meet the needs and wants of others, they turn scarcity into abundance and develop the innovations that are the foremost drivers of economic growth. The freedom of democratic capitalism is, for example, what enabled Henry Ford to take a plaything of the rich—the car—and transform it into something affordable to working people.
In the capitalist system, economic growth doesn’t mean more of the same—grinding out a few more widgets every year. It’s about change to increase overall wealth and give more people the chance for a better life.
Book: The Department of Mad Scientists: How DARPA Is Remaking Our World, from the Internet to Artificial Limbs
Author: Michael Belfiore
Publisher: Smithsonian, 2009
Private Client Event: April 6th
The first-ever inside look at DARPA—the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency—the maverick and controversial group whose futuristic work has had amazing civilian and military applications, from the Internet to GPS to driverless cars
America’s greatest idea factory isn’t Bell Labs, Silicon Valley, or MIT’s Media Lab. It’s the secretive, Pentagon-led agency known as DARPA. Founded by Eisenhower in response to Sputnik and the Soviet space program, DARPA mixes military officers with sneaker-wearing scientists, seeking paradigm-shifting ideas in varied fields—from energy, robotics, and rockets to peopleless operating rooms, driverless cars, and planes that can fly halfway around the world in just hours. DARPA gave birth to the Internet, GPS, and mind-controlled robotic arms. Its geniuses define future technology for the military and the rest of us.
Michael Belfiore was given unprecedented access to write this first-ever popular account of DARPA. Visiting research sites across the country, he watched scientists in action and talked to the creative, fearlessly ambitious visionaries working for and with DARPA. Much of DARPA’s work is classified, and this book is full of material that has barely been reported in the general media. In fact, DARPA estimates that only 2 percent of Americans know much of anything about the agency. This fascinating read demonstrates that DARPA isn’t so much frightening as it is inspiring—it is our future.
Book: Mrs. Adams in Winter: A Journey in the Last Days of Napoleon
Author: Michael O'Brien
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010
Private Client Event: April 6th
Early in 1815, Louisa Catherine Adams and her young son left St. Petersburg in a heavy Russian carriage and set out on a difficult journey to meet her husband, John Quincy Adams, in Paris. She traveled through the snows of eastern Europe, down the Baltic coast to Prussia, across the battlefields of Germany, and into a France then experiencing the tumultuous events of Napoleon’s return from Elba. Along the way, she learned what the long years of Napoleon’s wars had done to Europe, what her old friends in the royal court in Berlin had experienced during the French occupation, how it felt to have her life threatened by reckless soldiers, and how to manage fear.
The journey was a metaphor for a life spent crossing borders: born in London in 1775, she had grown up partly in France, and in 1797 had married into the most famous of American political dynasties and become the daughter-in-law of John and Abigail Adams.
The prizewinning historian Michael O’Brien reconstructs for the first time Louisa Adams’s extraordinary passage. An evocative history of the experience of travel in the days of carriages and kings, Mrs. Adams in Winter offers a moving portrait of a lady, her difficult marriage, and her conflicted sense of what it meant to be a woman caught between worlds.
Book: The Business of Happiness: 6 Secrets to Extraordinary Success in Life and Work
Author: Ted Leonsis
Publisher: Regnery Press, 2010
Private Client Events: April 1st
When the plane he was on prepared for a crash landing, Ted Leonsis asked himself the crucial question, If today is my last day on earth—will I die happy?. . . and realized the answer was no. Despite having achieved massive business success—he was a self-made multi-millionaire at the age of twenty-seven—he realized he would die unfulfilled. He told God that if he survived, he would turn his life around, give back more than he took, and pursue happiness. After walking off that plane, he got to work.
In The Business of Happiness, Ted Leonsis, owner of the Washington Capitals and former group president and vice chairman of AOL, shares the six secrets of happiness he discovered since that fateful plane ride. Treating happiness as a goal like any other, he made a list of what he thought would make him happy, and made a plan to achieve his goals. Along the way he discovered an incredible truth—business or financial success doesn’t bring happiness, but happiness can bring you business and financial success.
Through research studies, personal stories, and anecdotal evidence from celebrities, famous athletes, and influential businessmen, Ted reveals the six secrets to achieving true happiness—and how they make success almost inevitable. Showing people exactly how they can apply the six secrets to their work, at home, and in their personal lives, Leonsis also reveals how some of the most successful and happy people today—Bono, Michael Jordan, Steve Case—have put these secrets into practice for themselves.
Dynamic, inspiring, and unique, The Business of Happiness proves that anyone can be more successful and happier, including you.