The Book of Doing and Being: Rediscovering Creativity in Life, Love, and Work by Barnet Bain

With clarity, humor, and insight, award-winning filmmaker Barnet Bain guides readers to unlock the raw power of the creative self. Sharing creativity principles and practices at the leading edge, The Book of Doing and Being offers a life-altering map for stepping beyond what we already know and into a dimension of imagination from which innovation is born.

Known for his inspiring movies and documentaries, as well as his popular creativity workshops, Barnet Bain makes available his teachings for the first time in book form. Discover how will and action come together with imagination and feeling to form the very foundation of creativity by working with this treasury of more than forty transformative exercises. Each one is designed to spark new creative connections by challenging our usual ways of thinking, feeling, and perceiving.

These lessons, tools, and techniques serve to unlock great reservoirs of creativity in every individual, whether it’s jumpstarting or completing a project, launching a new business, creating a work of art, experiencing more fulfilling relationships, or making other dreams come true. Bain’s motivational guidance includes: rewiring your brain to unleash ultra-creativity; finding freedom from self-criticism, perfectionism, and other obstructions to productivity and creative expression; harnessing the two forces of creativity: inspiration and action; discovering your emotions as the doorway to creative aliveness and ingenuity; and heeding the call of your Real Work, regardless of age, education, or experience.

Step by step, you will make the discovery of a lifetime: how to stop being ruled by your past and start consciously creating your present and future. You will be surprised and energized—by your next creative impulse, the next idea that excites you, the next experience that moves you—and you will live a creative life.

Paperback, 224 pages

Published July 7th 2015 by

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Leadership BS: Fixing Workplaces and Careers One Truth at a Time by Jeffrey Pfeffer

Too many leadership failures. Too many career derailments. Too many toxic workplaces filled with disengaged, distrustful employees. Jeffrey Pfeffer, a professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and the author of Power, offers an incisive dissection of the multibillion-dollar leadership industry and presents ways to fix its many problems.

In Leadership BS, Jeffrey Pfeffer pulls back the curtain, showing how leadership really works and why so many leadership development efforts fail. In this forthright and persuasive critique, Pfeffer argues that much of the oft-repeated wisdom about leadership is based more on hope than reality, on wishes rather than data, on beliefs instead of science. In an age when transparency is considered a virtue, Pfeffer makes the case that strategic misrepresentation isn't as harmful as you think, that breached agreements are a part of business, that immodesty is frequently a path to success, and that relying on the magnanimity of your boss is a bad bet.

Using research findings from social psychology, sociology, and sociobiology, and filled with practical, actionable advice, Leadership BS encourages readers to finally stop accepting sugar-laced but toxic potions as cures and to understand the realities of organizations and human behavior.

To make real change, Pfeffer argues, we need to get beyond the half-truths and self-serving stories that are so prominent in the mythology of leadership. In calling BS on so much conventional wisdom, Leadership BSoffers both a provocative, scientific examination of how leadership actually works—and how it doesn't—and a prescription for leaders future and present. 

Hardcover, 260 pages

Published September 15th 2015 

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Never Enough: Donald Trump and the Pursuit of Success by Michael D'Antonio

In the summer of 2015, as he vaulted to the lead among the many GOP candidates for president, Donald Trump was the only one dogged by questions about his true intentions. This most famous American businessman had played the role of provocateur so often that pundits, reporters, and voters struggled to believe that he was a serious contender. Trump stirred so much controversy that his candidacy puzzled anyone who applied ordinary political logic to the race. But as Michael D'Antonio shows in Never Enough, Trump has rarely been ordinary in his pursuit of success and his trademark method is based on a logic that begins with his firm belief that he is a singular and superior human being.

As revealed in this landmark biography, Donald Trump is a man whose appetite for wealth, attention, power, and conquest is practically insatiable. Declaring that he is still the person he was as a rascally little boy, Trump confesses that he avoids reflecting on himself "because I might not like what I see" and he believes "most people aren't worthy of respect."

A product of the media age and the Me Generation that emerged in the 1970s, Trump was a Broadway showman before he became a developer. Mentored by the scoundrel attorney Roy Cohn, Trump was a regular on the New York club scene and won press attention as a dashing young mogul before he had built his first major project. He leveraged his father's enormous fortune and political connections to get his business off the ground, and soon developed a larger-than-life persona. In time, and through many setbacks, he made himself into a living symbol of extravagance and achievement.

Drawing upon extensive and exclusive interviews with Trump and many of his family members, including all his adult children, D'Antonio presents the full story of a truly American icon, from his beginnings as a businessman to his stormy romantic life and his pursuit of power in its many forms. For all those who wonder: Just who is Donald Trump?, Never Enough supplies the answer. He is a promoter, builder, performer and politician who pursues success with a drive that borders on obsession and yet, has given him, almost everything he ever wanted. 

Hardcover, 400 pages

Published September 22nd 2015

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Other People's Money: The Real Business of Finance by John Kay

The finance sector of Western economies is too large and attracts too many of the smartest college graduates. Financialization over the past three decades has created a structure that lacks resilience and supports absurd volumes of trading. The finance sector devotes too little attention to the search for new investment opportunities and the stewardship of existing ones, and far too much to secondary-market dealing in existing assets. Regulation has contributed more to the problems than the solutions.

Why? What is finance for? John Kay, with wide practical and academic experience in the world of finance, understands the operation of the financial sector better than most. He believes in good banks and effective asset managers, but good banks and effective asset managers are not what he sees.

In a dazzling and revelatory tour of the financial world as it has emerged from the wreckage of the 2008 crisis, Kay does not flinch in his criticism: we do need some of the things that Citigroup and Goldman Sachs do, but we do not need Citigroup and Goldman to do them. And many of the things done by Citigroup and Goldman do not need to be done at all. The finance sector needs to be reminded of its primary purpose: to manage other people’s money for the benefit of businesses and households. It is an aberration when the some of the finest mathematical and scientific minds are tasked with devising algorithms for the sole purpose of exploiting the weakness of other algorithms for computerized trading in securities. To travel further down that road leads to ruin.

Hardcover, 352 pages

Published September 22nd 2015 

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Lean Out: The Struggle for Gender Equality in Tech and Start-Up Culture by Elissa Shevinsky

Why aren’t the great, qualified women already in tech being hired or promoted?
Should people who don’t fit in seek to join an institution that is actively hostile to them?
Does the tech industry deserve women leaders?

The split between the stated ideals of the corporate elite and the reality of working life for women in the tech industry—whether in large public tech companies or VC-backed start-ups, in anonymous gaming forums, or in Silicon Valley or Alley—seems designed to crush women’s spirits. Corporate manifestos by women who already fit in (or who are able to convincingly fake it) aren’t helping. There is a high cost for the generation of young women and transgender people currently navigating the harsh realities of the tech industry, who gave themselves to their careers only to be ignored, harassed and disrespected.

Not everyone can be a CEO; not everyone is able to embrace a workplace culture that diminishes the contributions of women and ignores real complaints. The very culture of high tech, where foosball tables and endless supplies of beer are de facto perks, but maternity leave and breast-feeding stations are controversial, is designed to appeal to young men.Lean Out collects 25 stories from the modern tech industry, from people who fought GamerGate and from women and transgender artists who have made their own games, from women who have started their own companies and who have worked for some of the most successful corporations in America, from LGBTQ women, from women of color, from transgender people and people who do not ascribe to a gender. All are fed up with the glacial pace of change in America’s tech industry.

Included are essays by Anna Anthropy, Leigh Alexander, Lauren Bacon, Katherine Cross, Dom DeGuzman, Fakegrimlock, Krys Freeman, Gesche Haas, Ash Huang, Jenni Lee, Katy Levinson, Leanne Pittsford, Brook Shelly, Elissa Shevinsky, and Squinky. Edited and selected by entrepreneur and tech veteran Elissa Shevinsky, Lean Out sees a possible way forward that uses tech and creative disengagement to jettison 20th century corporate culture: “I’ve figured out a way to create safe space for myself in tech,” writes Shevinsky. “I’ve left Silicon Valley, and now work remotely from home. I adore everyone on my team, because I hired them myself.”

Paperback, First, 248 pages

Published September 3rd 2015

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The Silo Effect: The Peril of Expertise and the Promise of Breaking Down Barriers by Gillian Tett

From award-winning columnist and journalist Gillian Tett comes a brilliant examination of how our tendency to create functional departments—silos—hinders our work…and how some people and organizations can break those silos down to unleash innovation.

One of the characteristics of industrial age enterprises is that they are organized around functional departments. This organizational structure results in both limited information and restricted thinking. The Silo Effectasks these basic questions: why do humans working in modern institutions collectively act in ways that sometimes seem stupid? Why do normally clever people fail to see risks and opportunities that later seem blindingly obvious? Why, as psychologist Daniel Kahneman put it, are we sometimes so “blind to our own blindness”?

Gillian Tett, journalist and senior editor for the Financial Times, answers these questions by plumbing her background as an anthropologist and her experience reporting on the financial crisis in 2008. In The Silo Effect, she shares eight different tales of the silo syndrome, spanning Bloomberg’s City Hall in New York, the Bank of England in London, Cleveland Clinic hospital in Ohio, UBS bank in Switzerland, Facebook in San Francisco, Sony in Tokyo, the BlueMountain hedge fund, and the Chicago police. Some of these narratives illustrate how foolishly people can behave when they are mastered by silos. Others, however, show how institutions and individuals can master their silos instead. These are stories of failure andsuccess.

From ideas about how to organize office spaces and lead teams of people with disparate expertise, Tett lays bare the silo effect and explains how people organize themselves, interact with each other, and imagine the world can take hold of an organization and lead from institutional blindness to 20/20 vision.

Hardcover, 304 pages

Published September 1st 2015 

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The Magic of Thinking Big by David J Shwartz

This large print edition is cleanly formatted for easy reading. 16 point Garamond, 1.25 spacing. For decades millions of people have learned the secrets of success through David J. Shwartz's The Magic of Thinking Big. Achieve financial advancement, work promotions, a positive outlook on life, fulfilling relationships, and lasting happiness. Aim high, and think BIG, and you will not only reach but surpass your goals, you will be a happier, bigger person with a bigger life.

Paperback, 348 pages

Published September 17th 2015

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