Riding the Creative Rollercoaster is a pioneering new work that turns our understanding of leadership and innovation on its head. Innovation is the holy grail of growth and progress. The challenge lies in evoking the creativity and productivity of teams, functions, organizations and even ecosystems of organizations, in order to catalyze new patterns of thought and action. Nick Udall shares his passion for the future of leadership, and defines a critical threshold that leaders, teams and organizations of all kinds now need to cross in order to help shape more purposeful, innovative and sustainable futures. In doing so, he introduces a groundbreaking set of subtle leadership skills that explicitly link innovation and creativity with specific states and qualities of individual and collective consciousness. And he challenges leaders to learn how to leverage difference, play with new and novel intersections, hold creative tension, and work with collective intelligence, in order to help their teams and organizations powerfully embrace the highs and lows of the creative process.
Inspired by the unique practice of 'nowhere', a community of companies that specialise in cocreation the art of creative and collective breakthrough, this is a book of practice. Through a comprehensive introduction and sixteen chapters the book maps out ways of helping individuals and organisations to play a more creative role in society and simultaneously nurture our growth and potential along the way. It contains a collection of questions designed to stimulate and enrich our creative capacity. It describes and points to how we can work with some of the underlying and invisible forces at play within organisations, communities and cultures.
Riding the Creative Rollercoaster is a pioneering new work that turns our understanding of leadership and innovation on its head. Innovation is the holy grail of growth and progress. The challenge lies in evoking the creativity and productivity of teams, functions, organizations and even ecosystems of organizations, in order to catalyze new patterns of thought and action. Nick Udall shares his passion for the future of leadership, and defines a critical threshold that leaders, teams and organizations of all kinds now need to cross in order to help shape more purposeful, innovative and sustainable futures. In doing so, he introduces a groundbreaking set of subtle leadership skills that explicitly link innovation and creativity with specific states and qualities of individual and collective consciousness. And he challenges leaders to learn how to leverage difference, play with new and novel intersections, hold creative tension, and work with collective intelligence, in order to help their teams and organizations powerfully embrace the highs and lows of the creative process.
Nature's Steward chronicles the development of southwest Florida using the modern-day Conservancy of Southwest Florida as the lens through which to examine environmental history. A parallel track exists alongside the Conservancy's story, and that is the evolution of land acquisition practices and comprehensive growth management planning efforts at the state and federal levels. The reader will come to understand the enormous commitment of time and money required to ensure that a beautiful corner of the world be developed in a generally sensible manner. The book is organized chronologically with three separate topics: land acquisition, managing for growth, and water. Each chapter focuses on events ranging from specific developments like Marco Island to broader initiatives such as the Collier County Rural Lands Stewardship Program, allowing the reader to appreciate the number of years spent working through the nuances, twists, turns, setbacks, and triumphs encountered in steering growth into landscapes best suited for development. This book also intends to sound an alarm. While most development has been carefully directed since the 1970s, water has long been overlooked as a finite resource in building out coastal Collier and Lee Counties. Further inland, extraction industries and creeping urban sprawl are responsible for habitat fragmentation that imperils a dozen threatened and endangered birds and mammals including the iconic Florida panther. And, finally, the prevailing paradigm in Tallahassee has pitched forty years of evolved environmental protection and regulation right out the window. This history of the Conservancy of Southwest Florida attempts to extract meaning from the events of the last fifty years and offers a way of looking at the future. It is the story of southwest Florida, home to a unique ecological system, but it also provides lessons for any other place at risk due to human development.
A rallying cry to bring government back under the control of the people . . . Their argument is impassioned and accessible." --Library Journal American democracy has become coin operated. Special interest groups increasingly control every level of government. The necessity of raising huge sums of campaign cash has completely changed the character of politics and policy making, determining what elected representatives stand for and how their time is spent. The marriage of great wealth and intense political influence has rendered our country unable to address our most pressing problems, from runaway government spending to climate change to the wealth gap. It also defines our daily lives: from the cars we drive to the air we breathe to the debt we owe. In this powerful work of reportage, Wendell Potter and Nick Penniman, two vigilant watchdogs, expose legalized corruption and link it to the kitchen-table issues citizens face every day. Inciting our outrage, the authors then inspire us by introducing us to an army of reformers laying the groundwork for change, ready to be called into action. The battle plan for reform presented is practical, realistic, and concrete. No one--except some lobbyists and major political donors--likes business as usual, and this book aims to help forge a new army of reformers who are compelled by a patriotic duty to fight for a better democracy. An impassioned, infuriating, yet ultimately hopeful call to arms, Nation on the Take lays bare the reach of moneyed interests and charts a way forward, toward the recovery of America's original promise.
The new full colour Rough Guide to California is the definitive guide to the most alluring state in the US. It's full of insider tips on how to unearth the best that the Golden State has to offer: authentic Mexican food in San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego; countless hiking trails and ski areas in the towering Sierra Nevada range; road trips on Historic Route 66 and the stunning Pacific Coast Highway; tastings in the best California wineries and camping in the pristine state and national parks. Smartly designed with stunning photography and packed with some of the most easy-to-use maps you'll find in any guidebook, the Rough Guide to California contains fun and adventurous itineraries, savvy lists of hotspots and heaps of recommendations and detailed practical information to help you take advantage of everything this nearly 900-mile-long state has to offer. Whatever your budget, this guide will help you explore California's bounty of natural and cultural wonders, find top-notch places to eat and sleep and make the most of every minute of your holiday. Make the most of your time with The Rough Guide to California. Now available in ePub format.
A redistricting crisis is now upon us. This surprising, compelling book tells the history of how we got to this moment—from the Founding Fathers to today’s high-tech manipulation of election districts—and shows us as well how to protect our most sacred, hard-fought principle of one person, one vote. Here is THE book on gerrymandering for citizens, politicians, journalists, activists, and voters. “Seabrook’s lucid account of the origins and evolution of gerrymandering—the deliberate and partisan doctoring of district borders for electoral advantage—makes a potentially dry, wonky subject accessible and engaging for a broad audience.” —The New York Times Gerrymandering is the manipulation of election districts for partisan and political gain. Instead of voters picking the politicians they want, politicians pick the voters they need to get the election results they’re after. Surprisingly, gerrymandering has been around since before our nation’s founding. And with technology, those drawing the redistricting lines have, now more than ever, been able to microtarget their electoral manipulations with unprecedented levels of precision. Nick Seabrook, an authority on constitutional and election law and an expert on gerrymandering (pronounced with a hard G!), has written an illuminating, urgently needed book on how our elections have been rigged through redistricting, beginning with the Founding Fathers, Abraham Lincoln, the Civil War, and Reconstruction, and extending to the twentieth century’s gerrymandering battles at the Supreme Court and today’s high-tech manipulations of election districts. Seabrook writes of Patrick Henry, who used redistricting to settle an old score with political foe and fellow Founding Father James Madison (almost preventing the Bill of Rights from happening). He writes of Massachusetts governor Elbridge Gerry, and corrects the mistaken notion of the derivation of the term “gerrymander.” He writes of Abraham Lincoln and how his desire to preserve the Union led him to manipulate the admission of new states in order to maintain his majority in the Senate. And we come to understand the place of the Supreme Court in its fierce battles regarding gerrymandering throughout the twentieth century. First was Felix Frankfurter, who fought for decades to prevent the judiciary from involving itself in disputes concerning the drawing of districts. Then came the Warren Court and its series of civil rights cases culminating in the landmark decision (Reynolds v. Sims), written by Chief Justice Earl Warren, which says that state legislatures, unlike the United States Congress, must have representation in both houses based on districts containing equal populations—with redistricting as needed following each census. The result has been ever-increasing, hard-fought wrangling between the two political parties after each census. Seabrook explores the rise of the most partisan gerrymanders in American history, put into place by the Republican Party after the 2010 census, and how the battle has shifted to the states via REDMAP—the GOP’s successful strategy of the last decade to control state governments and rig the results of state legislative and congressional elections.
Ever wondered where the sayings we commonly use originate from? Sometimes the things we say, if we really think about it, make absolutely no logical sense. Why on earth has a cat got my tongue? Why does a wall have ears? And why the heck are my ears burning? Why would I possibly want to break a leg? If you think you know the answers, you might be close but have no cigar and if you don’t want to wake up on the wrong side of the bed or even worse, wait until you kick the bucket then you may want to step up to the plate and read on. Now I certainly don’t want to read the Riot Act on you and I think by hook or by crook if you read this book you’ll be happy as Larry and as pleased as Punch. I don’t want to be a clever clogs but by and large I think you’ll have a field day with what you’ll discover, if you catch my drift?
Based on classified documents and interviews, argues that American acts of violence against millions of Vietnamese civilians during the Vietnam War were a pervasive and systematic part of the war.
For millennia, the passing seasons and their rhythms have marked our progress through the year. But what do they mean to us now that we lead increasingly atomized and urban lives and our weather becomes ever more unpredictable or extreme? Will it matter if we no longer hear, even notice, the first cuckoo call of spring or rejoice in the mellow fruits of harvest festival? How much will we lose if we can no longer find either refuge or reassurance in the greater natural—and meteorological—scheme of things? Nick Groom's splendidly rich and encyclopedic book is an unabashed celebration of the English seasons and the trove of strange folklore and often stranger fact they have accumulated over the centuries. Each season and its particular history are given their full due, and these chapters are interwoven with others on the calendar and how the year and months have come to be measured, on important dates and festivals such as Easter, May Day and, of course, Christmas, on that defining first cuckoo call, on national attitudes to weather, our seasonal relationship with the land and horticulture and much more. The author expresses the hope that his book will not prove an elegy: only time will tell.
This book offers an in-depth examination of America’s nuclear weapons policy since the end of the Cold War. Exploring nuclear forces structure, arms control, regional planning and the weapons production complex, the volume identifies competing sets of ideas about nuclear weapons and domestic political constraints on major shifts in policy. It provides a detailed analysis of the complex evolution of policy, the factors affecting policy formulation, competing understandings of the role of nuclear weapons in US national security discourse, and the likely future direction of policy. The book argues that US policy has not proceeded in a linear, rational and internally consistent direction, and that it entered a second post-Cold War phase under President George W. Bush. However, domestic political processes and lack of political and military interest in America’s nuclear forces have constrained major shifts in nuclear weapons policy. This book will be of much interest to students of US foreign policy, nuclear proliferation, strategic studies and IR in general.
From his home in remote Eskimo Village, Nick Jans leads us into a vast, magical world: Alaska's Brooks Range. Drawn from fourteen years of arctic experience, The Last Light Breaking offers a rare perspective on America's last great wilderness and its people--the Inupiat Natives, an ancient culture on the cusp of change. Making a poignant connection between the world he describes and the world of the Inupiat once knew, Nick Jans invokes with stunning power, the life of the Eskimos in the harsh arctic and the mystical aura of the wilderness of the far North. With the eye of an outdoorsman and the heart of a poet, Jans weaves together these 23 essays with strands of native American narrative, making vivid a place where wolves and grizzlies still roam free, hunters follow the caribou, and old women cast their nets in the dust as they have for countless generations. But looming on the horizon is the world of roads and modern technology; the future has already arrived in the form of stop signs, computers, and satellite dishes. Jans creates unforgettable images of a proud people facing an uncertain future, and of his own journey through this haunting timeless landscape.
IT had rained in torrents all the way down from Schenectady, so when Jack Duane glimpsed the lights of what looked to be a big house through the trees, he braked his battered, convertible sedan to a stop at the side of the road. Mud lay along the fenders and running boards; mud and water had spumed up and freckled Duane’s face and hat. He pulled off the latter—it was soggy—and slapped it on the seat beside him, leaning out and squinting through the darkness and falling water. He was on the last lap of a two weeks’ journey from San Francisco, his objective being New York City. There he hoped to wangle a job as foreign correspondent from an old crony, J. J. Molloy, now editor of the New York Globe. Adventurer, journalist, globetrotter, Duane was of the type that is always on the move. “It’s a place, anyway, Moses,” he said to the large black man beside him, his servitor and bodyguard, who had accompanied him everywhere for the past three years. “Somebody lives there; they ought to have some gas.” “Yasah,” said Moses, staring past Duane’s shoulder, “it’s a funny-looking place, suh.” Duane agreed. Considering that they were seventy miles from New York, in the foothills of the Catskills, with woods all around them and the rain pouring down, the thing they saw through the trees, some three hundred yards from the country road, was indeed peculiar. It looked more like a couple of Pullman cars coupled together and lighted, than like a farmer’s dwelling. “Fenced in, too,” said Duane, pointing to the high steel fence that bordered the road, separating them from the object of their vision. “And look there—” A fitful flash of lightning in the east, illuminating the distant treetops, showed up the towering steel and network of a high-voltage electric line’s tower. The roving journalist muttered something to express his puzzlement, and got out of the car. Moses followed him. “Well,” said Duane presently, when they had stared a moment longer, “whatever it is, I’m barging in. We’ve got to have some gas or we’ll never make New York tonight.” MOSES agreed. The two men started across the road—the big Negro hatless and wearing a slicker—the reporter in a belted trench coat, his brown felt hat pulled out of shape on his head. “It’s a big thing,” Duane said as he and Moses halted at the fence and peered through. Distantly, he could see now that the mysterious structure in the woods was at least a hundred yards long, flat-topped and black as coal except from narrow shafts of light that came from its windows. “And look at the light coming out of the roof.” That was, indeed, the most peculiar feature of this place they had discovered. From a section of the roof near the center, as though through a skylight, a great white light came out, illuminating the slanting rain and the bending trees.
New York Times bestselling author Nick Seluk returns with a charming, hilarious, and inspirational book of comics in which his popular Heart and Brain characters fight through the world's gloom and uncertainty and march toward a brighter, more hopeful future. This book of inspirational and hilarious comics directly addresses the mental health challenges we’ve been through collectively as a species, with specific illustrations and new content that help people feel understood, seen, and encouraged. Delivered with a humorous but sensitive touch, Onward to Good Things contains short graphic novel elements in three sections to tie together the themes and comics in one continuing short story that will help propel the author's millions of fans—and brand-new readers—toward a brighter and more laugh-filled future.
Fascinating, bizarre, and educational true-life medical stories retold in cartoon form by the creator of the bestselling Heart and Brain book series. Mysterious illnesses. Freakish injuries. X-rays revealing something weird that got stuck in your foot. These strange but true stories are among the 24 medical tales retold in hilarious fashion by New York Times bestselling author/illustrator Nick Seluk. Featuring fascinating stories submitted by people all over the world, How I Broke Up with My Colon is an educational and highly entertaining tour through the bizarre workings of the human body.
Forged in the Dustbowl of the 1930s, in an America crippled by the Great World Recession, this humble man found solace in song, and soon those songs became the voice of the People – men and women who had seen their lives deracinated and destroyed by the vicissitudes of global economic forces beyond their control. Guthrie’s influence lives on, a touchstone for Bob Dylan, The Clash and the protest singers of the Occupy movement today. With a delighted eye, and an ear for a tune, Nick Hayes’s follow-up to the critically acclaimed Rime of the Modern Mariner brings a legend to life with a generous spirit and crackling moral force its subject would have been proud of.
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