Truth really is stranger than fiction. Who better than the author of the signature bestseller Liar-s Poker to explain how the event we were told was impossible-the free fall of the American economy-finally occurred; how the things that we wanted, like ridiculously easy money and greatly expanded home ownership, were vehicles for that crash; and how shareholder demand for profit forced investment executives to eat the forbidden fruit of toxic derivatives.Michael Lewis-s splendid cast of characters includes villains, a few heroes, and a lot of people who look very, very foolish: high government officials, including the watchdogs; heads of major investment banks (some overlap here with previous category); perhaps even the face in your mirror. In this trenchant, raucous, irresistible narrative, Lewis writes of the goats and of the few who saw what the emperor was wearing, and gives them, most memorably, what they deserve. He proves yet again that he is the finest and funniest chronicler of our times.

The acclaimed labor lawyer and prizewinning author Thomas Geoghegan asks: where are we better off—America or Europe? In an idiosyncratic, entertaining travelogue that plays on public policy, Geoghegan asks what our lives would be like if we lived them as Europeans. Sneaking out of his workaholic American life, he takes five trips where he tries to understand so-called European socialism firsthand. Though he first tries France (which has become a rhetorical stand-in for the continent as a whole in many Americans' minds), he eventually ventures into Germany to see what some call the boring Europe. There he finds the true other—an economic model with more bottom-up worker control than that of any other country in the world—and argues that, while we have to take Germany’s problems seriously, we also have to look seriously at how much it has achieved. Social democracy may let us live nicer lives; it also may be the only way to be globally competitive. This wry, timely book helps us understand why the European model, contrary to popular neoliberal wisdom, may thrive well into the twenty-first century without compromising its citizens' ease of living—and be the best example for the United States to follow.

Germany is more generous than the U.S.:
The average number of paid vacation days in the U.S. is 13, versus Germany’s 35
New mothers in the U.S. get three months of unpaid job-protected leave and only if they work for a company of 50 or more employees, while Germany mandates four months’ paid leave and will pay parents 67% of their salary to stay home for up to 14 months to care for a newborn.
U.S. life expectancy is 50th in the world, compared to Germany’s 32nd.

Business Model Generation is a handbook for visionaries, game changers, and challengers striving to defy outmoded business models and design tomorrow's enterprises. If your organization needs to adapt to harsh new realities, but you don't yet have a strategy that will get you out in front of your competitors, you need Business Model Generation.

Co-created by 470 Business Model Canvas practitioners from 45 countries, the book features a beautiful, highly visual, 4-color design that takes powerful strategic ideas and tools, and makes them easy to implement in your organization. It explains the most common Business Model patterns, based on concepts from leading business thinkers, and helps you reinterpret them for your own context. You will learn how to systematically understand, design, and implement a game-changing business model--or analyze and renovate an old one. Along the way, you'll understand at a much deeper level your customers, distribution channels, partners, revenue streams, costs, and your core value proposition.

Business Model Generation features practical innovation techniques used today by leading consultants and companies worldwide, including 3M, Ericsson, Capgemini, Deloitte, and others. Designed for doers, it is for those ready to abandon outmoded thinking and embrace new models of value creation: for executives, consultants, entrepreneurs, and leaders of all organizations. If you're ready to change the rules, you belong to the business model generation!

The Grateful Dead-rock legends, marketing pioneers

The Grateful Dead broke almost every rule in the music industry book. They encouraged their fans to record shows and trade tapes; they built a mailing list and sold concert tickets directly to fans; and they built their business model on live concerts, not album sales. By cultivating a dedicated, active community, collaborating with their audience to co-create the Deadhead lifestyle, and giving away freemium content, the Dead pioneered many social media and inbound marketing concepts successfully used by businesses across all industries today.

Written by marketing gurus and lifelong Deadheads David Meerman Scott and Brian Halligan, Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead gives you key innovations from the Dead's approach you can apply to your business. Find out how to make your fans equal partners in your journey, lose control to win, create passionate loyalty, and experience the kind of marketing gains that will not fade away!

“By putting the empowerment of people at the center of strategy creation, Predictable Magic is as much a book about values and leadership as it is about design. It can help executives find meaning and value in their work as they create meaning and value for their consumers.”

–Dr. Marshall Goldsmith, world-renowned executive coach; author, The New York Times bestsellers, MOJO and What Got You Here Won’t Get You There

“While every company strives to create products and services that dazzle, few achieve this feat. Prahalad and Sawhney lay out a simple but powerful methodology for turning deep consumer insights into attention-grabbing, expectation-defying designs. If you’re looking to increase the ‘magic quotient’ in the things your company makes and sells, you’ll want to dig into Predictable Magic.”

–Dr. Gary Hamel, Visiting Professor, London Business School; author, The Future of Management and Leading the Revolution

“The natural fusion of psychology and creative disciplines enable a potent capability that will be critically important as we seek to better understand the demands of a diverse global population. Predictable Magic outlines an important framework to capture and define the emotional wants and needs of a user.”

–Ken Musgrave, IDSA, Director, Experience Design, Dell

“Prahalad and Sawhney shine a light on an important piece of the strategic puzzle: how to convert consumer emotions into successful designs. They provide a rigorous approach to guide innovation efforts from strategy creation through execution. This is a must-read for anyone who is trying to create a new product or develop a new business model.”

–Dr. Vijay Govindarajan, Professor, Tuck School of Business; Chief Innovation Consultant, GE; author, Ten Rules for Strategic Innovators

“Prahalad and Sawhney have written an unusually useful book. It is one of the rare sources that go beyond giving us another definition of innovation. With concrete examples linked to practical principles, they show us how to do it.”

–Patrick Whitney, Steelcase / Robert C. Pew Professor and Dean, Institute of Design, Illinois Institute of Technology

As more and more students prepare to take the GMAT, Kaplan is there with a ground-breaking prep program unlike any other. With the latest uses in technology and advanced Internet tools to maximize scores, Kaplan GMAT 2011 Premier with CD-ROM is an invaluable guide that provides proven score-raising strategies and essential practice needed to succeed. Offering exclusive free access to an interactive online companion, this unique guide enables one to achieve a top score by utilizing:

• Live Online Seminar: A state-of-the-art online classroom in real time, complete with audio, video, instant chat, whiteboards, and screen sharing
• Fast Fact Videos in which Kaplan’s top instructors review the most important concepts from each chapter
• Diagnostic quiz to target areas for score improvement
• Practice quizzes
• Customizable study plan and progress report

This comprehensive preparation program also provides:

• Valuable insider advice from our top instructors 
• 5 full-length practice tests plus hundreds of additional practice questions
• Answers fully explained in detail

A black swan is a highly improbable event with three principal characteristics: It is unpredictable; it carries a massive impact; and, after the fact, we concoct an explanation that makes it appear less random, and more predictable, than it was. The astonishing success of Google was a black swan; so was 9/11. For Nassim Nicholas Taleb, black swans underlie almost everything about our world, from the rise of religions to events in our own personal lives.

Why do we not acknowledge the phenomenon of black swans until after they occur? Part of the answer, according to Taleb, is that humans are hardwired to learn specifics when they should be focused on generalities. We concentrate on things we already know and time and time again fail to take into consideration what we don’t know. We are, therefore, unable to truly estimate opportunities, too vulnerable to the impulse to simplify, narrate, and categorize, and not open enough to rewarding those who can imagine the “impossible.”

For years, Taleb has studied how we fool ourselves into thinking we know more than we actually do. We restrict our thinking to the irrelevant and inconsequential, while large events continue to surprise us and shape our world. Now, in this revelatory book, Taleb explains everything we know about what we don’t know. He offers surprisingly simple tricks for dealing with black swans and benefiting from them.

Elegant, startling, and universal in its applications The Black Swan will change the way you look at the world. Taleb is a vastly entertaining writer, with wit, irreverence, and unusual stories to tell. He has a polymathic command of subjects ranging from cognitive science to business to probability theory. The Black Swan is a landmark book–itself a black swan.


*2nd Edition, With a new essay: On Robustness and Fragility


From the Hardcover edition.

Power Principles for Success is a compilation of the thoughts of over 30 of America's PremierExperts. This book is loaded with practical, proven success principles you can use immediately to move ahead faster and achieve a life of greatness.

• Pay brand-new employees $2,000 to quit
• Make customer service the responsibility of the entire company-not just a department
• Focus on company culture as the #1 priority
• Apply research from the science of happiness to running a business
• Help employees grow-both personally and professionally
• Seek to change the world
• Oh, and make money too . . .

What Liar's Poker was to the 1980s, The Zeroes is to the first decade of the new century: an insider's memoir of a gilded era when Wall Street went insane-and took the rest of us down with it.

Randall Lane never set out to become a Wall Street power broker. But during the decade he calls the Zeroes, he started a small magazine company that put him near the white-hot center of the biggest boom in history. Almost by accident, a man who drove a beat-up Subaru and lived in a rented walk-up became the go-to guy for big shots with nine-figure incomes.

Lane's saga began with a simple idea: a glossy magazine exclusively for and about traders, which would treat them like rock stars and entice them to splurge on luxury goods. Trader Monthly was an instant hit around the world. Wall Streeters loved the spotlight, and advertisers like Gulfstream, Maybach, and Bulgari loved the marketing opportunity.

To accelerate the buzz, Lane's staff threw parties featuring celebrities, premium steaks, cigars, and top-shelf vodka. Nothing was too expensive or too outrageous. Private jets in Napa Valley. Casino nights in London. And $1,000-a- seat boxing matches in New York, where traders from Goldman Sachs and Bear Stearns pounded each other in front of tuxedoed throngs.

Before long, Wall Street's rich and powerful trusted Lane as a fellow insider-the guy who could turn an anonymous trader into a cover model and media darling. And the rest of the world sought him out as a way to tap into Wall Street's riches. As he emptied his bank account to help keep his little company afloat, he became a nexus for the absurd. Traders who turned 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina into multimillion-dollar windfalls. John McCain closing out the craps tables during an all-night gambling binge. Pop artist Peter Max hustling hundreds of thousands of dollars by selling traders paint-by-numbers portraits. Al Gore, John Travolta, Moby. Corrupt Caribbean rulers, the mobsters from Goodfellas, the pope. And a retired baseball star turned market guru named Lenny Dykstra, whose rise and fall was a great metaphor for the decade. All played roles in Lane's increasingly surreal world.

When the crash of 2008 hit, Lane's company and life savings were destroyed along with the high-flying traders and dealmakers his magazines exalted. But Lane walked away with something more lasting: an incredible true story, told by a skilled writer and reporter who sat squarely in the middle of one of the critical periods in modern financial and cultural history. People will turn to The Zeroes for many years to come, to find out what the era was really like.