Audiobooks Books - Page 6

The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl

Timothy Egan

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Subjects -> History -> Americas -> United States -> 20th Century -> Depression

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 190 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Cautionary tale about the dangers of trifling with nature 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

Timothy Egan has written a first-class book about the Great American Dust Bowl. The story documents how government and business--even with the best of intentions--can facilitate the destruction of an entire region. Using actual stories of hearty survivors who persevered dust storms, drought and depression, Egan accurately recounts historical events with flair and drama. He makes history come alive by managing a rare accomplishment; educating while entertaining the reader.

I had no clue 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

...since I was born in the late 60's yet here in 2008 I wanted to know about the folks that survived during that period of time, how they lived and why it had all happened. Timothy made this real and "touchable" for me. Your heart breaks for these people, it's a very moving tribute. I came away grateful for everything in my life.

Editorial Review:

The dust storms that terrorized America's High Plains in the darkest years of the Depression were like nothing ever seen before or since, and the stories of the people that held on have never been fully told. Pulitzer Prizea "winning New York Times journalist and author Timothy Egan follows a half-dozen families and their communities through the rise and fall of the region, going from sod huts to new framed houses to huddling in basements with the windows sealed by damp sheets in a futile effort to keep the dust out.

Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies

Charlene Li

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 49 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Corporate executives are struggling with a new trend: people using online social technologies (blogs, social networking sites, YouTube, podcasts) to discuss products and companies, write their own news, and find their own deals. This groundswell is global, it s unstoppable, it affects every industry and it s utterly foreign to the powerful companies running things now.

When consumers you ve never met are rating your company s products in public forums with which you have no experience or influence, your company is vulnerable. In Groundswell, Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff of Forrester, Inc. explain how to turn this threat into an opportunity.

Using tools and data straight from Forrester, you ll learn how to:



-Evaluate new social technologies as they emerge

-Determine how different groups of consumers are participating in social technology arenas

-Apply a four-step process for formulating your future strategy

-Build social technologies into your business including monitoring your brand value, talking with the groundswell through marketing and PR campaigns, and energizing your best customers to recruit their peers

Timely and insightful, this book is required reading for executives seeking to protect and strengthen their company s public image.

"Groundswell is jammed with big ideas, useful stories, and quotable stats. This is the new industrial revolution. Are you on board?"

-Seth Godin, author, Meatball Sundae

"This book will rock your world, if social technology hasn't rocked it already. It's a tsunami of unstoppable force. Amazon, Procter & Gamble, Facebook, Google, and Dell are profiting from the crest of the wave. Are you? Li and Bernoff are the apostles of the tsunami. This book will be your bible."

-Scott Cook, Founder and Chairman of the Executive Committee, Intuit

Groundswell provides practical advice on how to stay nimble and flexible in an ever-morphing digital world. Enabling your company to respond to change quickly especially when talking to and supporting your consumers is essential for business success.

-Cathie Black, President, Hearst Magazines

"The first phase of the Internet was about getting everyone connected. In this next phase, which changes the way we work, live, play, and learn, we re starting to realize the value of those connections as well as the new communications and experiences those interactions lead to the human network. Groundswell effectively documents this shift and underscores the opportunities available to all from this major market transition."

-John T. Chambers, Chairman and CEO, Cisco

"Heed the Groundswell! It's critical reading and helped us master the new dynamics of social media."

-Christina Norman, President, MTV

"Groundswell is a comprehensive look at the tidal wave of change engulfing marketers. Nobody should attempt to engage the newly empowered and emboldened consumer without first hearing what Li and Bernoff have to say on the subject."

-Clark Kokich, CEO, Avenue A | Razorfish

"Social technologies and the groundswell impact every business and organization worldwide. Li and Bernoff have written an insightful book that takes a refreshing research-driven approach to helping businesses transform themselves and successfully navigate this new dynamic landscape."

-Steve Rubel, Senior Vice President, Edelman Digital, and columnist for Advertising Age

Jim Cramer's Real Money: Sane Investing in an Insane World

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Subjects -> Business & Investing -> Investing -> Stocks
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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 273 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

THE HOST OF CNBC'S MAD MONEY READS HIS BLOCKBUSTER BESTSELLER!

Delivered in his distinctive turbo-charged style, Jim Cramer's Real Money is every investor's guide to what you really must know to make big money in the stock market. The best-known source of investment advice in America today, Jim Cramer explains how to invest wisely in chaotic times, and he does so in a way that is as much fun as investing is -- or should be, when it's done right.

Speaking with the passion and energy heard in his nationally syndicated radio show, Real Money with Jim Cramer, Cramer reveals both his Ten Commandments of Trading (Commandment #5: Tips are for waiters) and his Twenty-Five Rules of Investing (Rule #4: Look for broken stocks, not broken companies). He tells you how to:

• compare stock prices in a way that you can understand
• spot market tops and bottoms
• know when to sell
• rotate among cyclical stocks to catch the big moves
• and much more.

Drawing on information that Cramer himself has used to make millions on Wall Street, Jim Cramer's Real Money is filled with insider advice that really works.

Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 233 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

The book that shows how to get the job done and deliver results . . . whether you’re running an entire company or in your first management job

Larry Bossidy is one of the world’s most acclaimed CEOs, a man with few peers who has a track record for delivering results. Ram Charan is a legendary advisor to senior executives and boards of directors, a man with unparalleled insight into why some companies are successful and others are not. Together they’ve pooled their knowledge and experience into the one book on how to close the gap between results promised and results delivered that people in business need today.

After a long, stellar career with General Electric, Larry Bossidy transformed AlliedSignal into one of the world’s most admired companies and was named CEO of the year in 1998 by Chief Executive magazine. Accomplishments such as 31 consecutive quarters of earnings-per-share growth of 13 percent or more didn’t just happen; they resulted from the consistent practice of the discipline of execution: understanding how to link together people, strategy, and operations, the three core processes of every business.

Leading these processes is the real job of running a business, not formulating a “vision” and leaving the work of carrying it out to others. Bossidy and Charan show the importance of being deeply and passionately engaged in an organization and why robust dialogues about people, strategy, and operations result in a business based on intellectual honesty and realism.

The leader’s most important job—selecting and appraising people—is one that should never be delegated. As a CEO, Larry Bossidy personally makes the calls to check references for key hires. Why? With the right people in the right jobs, there’s a leadership gene pool that conceives and selects strategies that can be executed. People then work together to create a strategy building block by building block, a strategy in sync with the realities of the marketplace, the economy, and the competition. Once the right people and strategy are in place, they are then linked to an operating process that results in the implementation of specific programs and actions and that assigns accountability. This kind of effective operating process goes way beyond the typical budget exercise that looks into a rearview mirror to set its goals. It puts reality behind the numbers and is where the rubber meets the road.

Putting an execution culture in place is hard, but losing it is easy. In July 2001 Larry Bossidy was asked by the board of directors of Honeywell International (it had merged with AlliedSignal) to return and get the company back on track. He’s been putting the ideas he writes about in Execution to work in real time.


From the Hardcover edition.

Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant

W. Chan Kim, Renee Mauborgne

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 14 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Decent concept, but too long & poor delivery 2 out of 5 stars.
5 of 6 people found this review helpful.

I think the blue ocean concept is valid, but the best way to communicate it is in an HBR article or wikipedia. It's just not revolutionary enough to warrant reading such a long book in 2008. There's little I learned from this book that is not already well summarized on wikipedia, or the same author's Value Innovation article in HBR (1997). Additionally, I think the value innovation concept is touched on sufficiently well in modern b-school texts. (ie. Strategic Market Management by David Aaker)

However, the primary reason I'm giving this a low 2-star rating is the delivery. If I was writing this review attached to the book itself, I'd give it 3-4 stars for the content... but I'm writing this review attached to the CD edition. The reader has a monotone voice and he mispronounces so many words that the delivery interfered with my ability to extract value from the content. Every time he mis-pronounced a word it set me back a few seconds to think about what he tried to say rather than digesting the meaning of what he said.

Examples:
Crux was pronounced like crooks
Paradigm was pronounced pair-a-deem
Unveil was pronounced un-veal

These are admittedly little errors, but as other reviewers have pointed out, there are so many of them that it gets really annoying and interferes with the learning process.

In summary, I recommend you read the HBR value innovation article & wikipedia on this concept. The concept in the book is now >10 years old and it's time to be retired. If the author wants to continue reaping personal value from this concept he should 1. Release an edition relevant for 2008 & beyond, and 2. Get someone else to read it for the audio version.

Editorial Review:

Written by the business world's new gurus, "Blue Ocean Strategy" continues to challenge everything you thought you knew about competing in today's crowded market place. Based on a study of 150 strategic moves spanning more than a hundred years and thirty industries, authors W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne argue that lasting success comes from creating 'blue oceans': untapped new market spaces ripe from growth. And the business world has caught on - companies around the world are skipping the bloody red oceans of rivals and creating their very own blue oceans. With over one million copies sold world wide, "Blue Ocean Strategy" is quickly reaching "must read" status among smart business readers. Have you caught the wave?

The Art of Seduction

Robert Greene, Joost Elffers

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 234 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

I am a victim. This is a dangerous book. Everybody should read it. 4 out of 5 stars.
10 of 11 people found this review helpful.

I am a self-confident, self-motivated, self-directed individual who pretty much knows exactly what to do and when to do things to get the preferred results. I am a smiling, friendly and mostly a charismatic person. At least that's how I used to be before I met this girl in my Freshman composition class.

She was very attractive and I fell in love with her. She exercised the seduction techniques mentioned in this book (such as stirring interest indirectly, creting triangles, getting close to me and giving the impression of like-mindedness etc) to make that happen and it came to a point where I was fantasizing her with me in her life. She was all that I was thinking of. I was losing grip over my life. I somehow became dependent of her. She then started coquetting and withdrawing herself. I gradually started losing my self-esteem and I was no more that charismatic person with self-confidence and self-esteem. I was doing things that she thought would ultimately would lead to our mutual pleasure...but it only made both of us empty.

Finally, one day she drove me to a isolated forest...and I thought she was going to have us do something pleasurable (finally). She just asked me to step out of the car and handed some papers and got in her car and left me there stranded. I was devastated. I started reading the papers. It was titled "The Seduction of ". It started with a character map of me...everything that she had observed about me, my weaknesses, what gave me my self-confidence etc. Then there were list of steps, almost like a manual, that described how she seduced me step-by-step. Then there were extracts from personal journal entries that described how, initially when we'd first met, she admired my quality of self-confidence and how much she wanted to have control over someone like me...primarily because of her own lack of it...and how over time she got bored of playing me like an instrument and how predictable I became etc. She didn't enjoy me anymore. So, she decided to dump me in the middle of the forest with this fact sheet. I was lying on the ground there crying my lungs out to death with limbs too weak to move. I completely lost my self-esteem and was at a point where I wanted her to accept me as her slave and was honoured by that thought. I couldn't even look up at people's faces anymore. This is the worst form of exploitation there exists. It almost feels like being eaten alive by insects from the inside and not being able to do anything about it.

Few days after this devastation, I googled and found this book. I read it and it revealed to me how someone as intellectually incompetent as herself could do something as vicious as this. It made me feel a lot better to know how exactly the worst thing ever to happen in my life happened. Now I feel that everybody should read this book...just to avoid being exploited in this way, if not for anything else.

Cautionary notes:-

As for those of you who were inspired by the cinematic quality of what happened to me and are motivated to use the techniques mentioned in the book to drain admirable qualities off someone for self-gratification, I have to warn you by letting you know why she even had to dump me like that. She, after reading the book, had to condition herself against expressing any genuine emotions and had to perfect the impression of genuineness of her made up emotions. She conceded in one of her later personal journal entries that she was in a sort of psychological trap. She started having trouble doing even simple things such as expressing genuine awe or even anger. She always felt the need to go by the rules. It made her less of a real human being and more of an imitation of an admirable human being. When I recently contacted her, she said she needs professional help because she is very confused in discerning emotions that come from within and those that are just made up. Shes messed up.

As for the testimonials of these admirable people (who practice the art of seduction) thrown around in Greenes book, I have to inform you that those people are genuine human beings with natural seductive mannerisms. The most dangerous aspect of this book is Greenes portrayal of them as people who calculated their behavior and that ability to calculate behavior as being admirable. It inspires people to look at themselves and their naturally arising feelings with belittling eyes and to try to become these admirable people with admirable statistics. It also inspires them to lower the value for their genuine emotions. In my erudite opinion, focusing on your behavior and trying to adjust it using the feedback it receives from outside rather than using ones judgment from within leads to termination of personal growth. If youre so desperate to have a reputable history of conquests when youre older as to compromise on investment in your personal growth and true exploration of human relations, then go ahead and seduce people into falling in love with you for all the wrong reasonsand become an imitation. Remember that unforeseen pleasures are often the most gratifying.

Editorial Review:

Robert Greene's previous bestseller, The 48 Laws of Power, distilled 3,000 years of scheming into a guide People praised as "beguiling... literate... fascinating" and Kirkus denounced as "an anti-Book of Virtues."

In Art of Seduction, Greene returns with a new instruction book on the most subtle, elusive, and effective form of power—because seduction isn't really about sex. It's about manipulating other people's greatest weakness: their desire for pleasure.

Synthesizing the work of thinkers including Freud, Diderot, Nietzsche, and Einstein, reporting the enticing strategies of characters throughout history, The Art of Seduction is a comprehensive guide to getting what we want—any way we can.

Confessions of an Economic Hit Man

John Perkins

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 644 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Universally Read 5 out of 5 stars.
3 of 3 people found this review helpful.

You know what the funny thing is about this book?
I doubt that theres very many world leaders or intellectuals who havent either read this book or had a summary of it presented to them.
You can disbelieve the facts presented or disbelieve the conclusions but there is a reason this book is so widely looked at.
The reason is the things he says are both shocking and believable. This is no half baked illuminati conspiracy hes talking about. Its feasible.

Dont buy the negative reviews -you will at MINIMUM be entertained in the extreme. Who would have guessed that James Bond actually looks alot more like John Doe, and doesnt carry a gun. He doesnt have to.

A damn good read.

Editorial Review:

John Perkins was an economic hit man. His job was to convince countries that are strategically important to the United States—from Indonesia to Panama—to accept enormous loans for infrastructure development and to make sure that the lucrative projects were contracted to U.S. corporations, such as Halliburton and Bechtel. Saddled with huge debts, these countries came under the control of the U.S. government, World Bank, and other U.S.-dominated aid agencies that acted like loan sharks, dictating repayment terms and bullying foreign governments into submission.

This extraordinary true story exposes international intrigue, corruption, and little-known government and corporate activities that have dire consequences for American democracy and the world.

The One Minute Manager

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 166 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Management musts! 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

The One Minute Manager is an oldie and a goodie. It's been a fun book to watch over the years as new generations of managers entering the workforce are exposed to it. I recently bought a copy for a new manager that reports to me, and bought the Amazon recommended title Squawk!: How to Stop Making Noise and Start Getting Results along with it.

It turns out Squawk! is a new book that's also for managers, and let's just say I read it while my subordinate was reading The One Minute Manager. I guess you can teach an old dog new tricks. Both are great books and they're short enough that I suggest following Amazon's recommendation and getting them together at a discount.

Editorial Review:

The world's foremost producer of personal development and motivational audio programs now offers the most important minute of your career.

With more than two million hardcover copies in print, The One Minute Manager ranks as one of the most successful management books ever published. Now, you can listen and learn the strategies of one-minute management to save time and increase your productivity whether it be in your business, your home or even managing your children.

You will learn to use the three easy-to-master management techniques that have already changed the lives of millions:

One Minute Goal Setting
One Minute Praisings
and
One Minute Reprimands

Deceptively simple, and measurably effective, the secrets of one-minute management will help you boost profits, productivity and purpose immediately.

QBQ! The Question Behind the Question: Practicing Personal Accountability in Work and in Life

John G. Miller

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 184 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Teaching you to ask what you can do for your company... 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

I read this book for the first time a little over a year ago. At the time, I tried to soak in the message, but since I thought it didn't really apply to me, I think it went in one ear and out the other, so to speak.

Fast forward to today. This book is required reading for my work, and I read it a little more closely this time around. As it turns out, this little book is jam-packed with morsels of good advice. It's all about using a JFK-esque philosophy: ask not what your company can do you for you but what you can do for your company. You can insert almost any words you'd like to replace "company": team, client, etc. The whole point of the book is encouraging people to take a moment to think before placing blame. Instead, look in the mirror first and see if YOU can resolve the issue instead of passing the buck as we are so wont to do in this society.

Editorial Review:

Who Moved My Cheese? showed readers how to adapt to change. Fish! helped raise flagging morale. QBQ! The Question Behind the Question addresses the most important issue in business and society today: personal accountability. In today's business culture, the lack of personal accountability is a problem that has resulted in an epidemic of blame, complaining and procrastination. Company goals are achieved through individuals asking themselves how they can contribute and make a difference, not through paying lip service to teamwork. Using succinct, light-hearted stories, Miller offers a practical and inspirational method for putting personal accountability into daily action that can bring incredible results: problems get solved, internal barriers come down, service improves, teamwork grows and people adapt to change more quickly.

Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School

John Medina

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 44 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Most of us have no idea what's really going on inside our heads. Yet brain scientists have uncovered details every business leader, parent, and teacher should know--such as the brain's need for physical activity to work at its best.

How do we learn? What exactly do sleep and stress do to our brains? Why is multi-tasking a myth? Why is it so easy to forget--and so important to repeat new information? Is it true that men and women have different brains?

In Brain Rules, molecular biologist Dr. John Medina shares his lifelong interest in how the brain sciences might influence the way we teach our children and the way we work. In each chapter, he describes a brain rule--what scientists know for sure about how our brains work--and then offers transformative ideas for our daily lives.

Medina's fascinating stories and sense of humor breathe life into brain science. You'll learn why Michael Jordan was no good at baseball. You'll peer over a surgeon's shoulder as he finds, to his surprise, that we have a Jennifer Aniston neuron. You'll meet a boy who has an amazing memory for music but can't tie his own shoes.

You will discover how:

- Every brain is wired differently
- Exercise improves cognition
- We are designed to never stop learning and exploring
- Memories are volatile
- Sleep is powerfully linked with the ability to learn
- Vision trumps all of the other senses
- Stress changes the way we learn

In the end, you'll understand how your brain really works--and how to get the most out of it.

About the DVD The Brain Rules DVD, included with this book, is a lively tour of the 12 brain rules. You will experience firsthand Medina's rare gift for making science fun, accessible, and relevant. The DVD will take your understanding of the book to the next level.