LITMIR.BIZ

The ever-present challenge for leaders is how to get more done with less time, money, and stress.The Vitality Imperative answers that challenge and gives leaders a reliable and actionable road map for creating and sustaining a humane and lasting approach to the thorniest challenges and opportunities modern organizations face.The Vitality Imperative will teach:• 7 key promises that connected leaders make to ignite and sustain vitality• Self-evident principles to provoke new thought and action• Engaging examples of these principles in action• Personal and team practices to test the principles and cultivate personal and organizational effectiveness.Based on over 25 years of research and application in Fortune 500 organizations on six continents around the?world, this book describes how connected leadershipTM builds a working culture of energized high performance, characterized by community, contribution, and choice.The Vitality Imperative is about return-on-effort. It’s about leading organizations in ways that produce great results and are deeply satisfying for both employees and shareholders.

Подробнее

The Next 20 Years Will Be Completely Different From The PastCurrent global trends are bleak: weak economic growth, too much debt, declining incomes for the lower 99%, a dangerous addiction to fossil fuels, and ecological destruction – just to name a few. Many of us understandably feel resigned to an eroding standard of living in the years to come. At best.But what if we told you that there are specific, attainable steps you can take today that can limit your vulnerability to these trends and help you be:– Richer- Live with greater purpose- Healthier- More valued by others- Happier- Safer from harmThat’s exactly what Prosper! offers: a blueprint for taking control of and improving your destiny. It outlines practical, actionable investments of your time & resources that will ensure you enjoy greater prosperity in your life, whatever the future may bring.In Prosper!, Martenson and Taggart will explain:– The trends mostly likely to shape your life over the next 20 years- Why developing resilience offers your best chance for thriving, even though society may suffer from the changes these trends may bring- How to build true wealth- What specific actions to take now to secure a prosperous future, no matter what the future holds- How everybody can benefit from this guidance, regardless of age, income or ability How we can best serve the next generation by the actions we take todayProsper! is the highly anticipated follow-up to Martenson’s acclaimed book The Crash Course (Wiley, 2011)

Подробнее

At some point, every single one of us has reached a point of frustration. A situation where we knew that we were having impact that was far less than what we were capable of. Large organizations are filled with smart people who have great ideas. Unfortunately, most of these people find themselves stymied in their ability to bring people to their full potential and ideas to fruitionIt doesn’t have to be that way. In Tap Into Greatness, noted performance coach and educator Sarah Singer-Nourie reveals the key truths of having outsized impact, influence and power. It turns out that most of us aren’t leading. We’re simply managing. We’re getting things done, but we’re not inspiring others to excel beyond what’s expected. Great leaders know better. They know leadership isn’t magic. It’s not just something you’re born with. Leadership is learnable.In this engaging and hands-on book, Singer-Nourie provides tools that have been developed over the last twenty years in her work with leaders and teams in corporate America, Silicon Valley startups, schools and non-profit organizations. The methodology is based on how people actually learn, rather than how most of us were taught in school. It leverages the insights of human motivation and the latest research in neuroscience to give leaders a roadmap for having impact.Readers who put the tools of Tap Into Greatness into practice have immediate and often surprising results. They find themselves able to influence colleagues who were previously unmoved. They’re able to inspire teammates to go above and beyond the call of duty. And they create teams that make better decisions even when the leader isn’t in the room.

Подробнее

<P>Transcending arguments over the definition of fantasy literature, Rhetorics of Fantasy introduces a provocative new system of classification for the genre. Utilizing nearly two hundred examples of modern fantasy, author Farah Mendlesohn uses this system to explore how fiction writers construct their fantastic worlds. Mendlesohn posits four categories of fantasy—portal-quest, immersive, intrusion, and liminal—that arise out of the relationship of the protagonist to the fantasy world. Using these sets, Mendlesohn argues that the author's stylistic decisions are then shaped by the inescapably political demands of the category in which they choose to write. Each chapter covers at least twenty books in detail, ranging from nineteenth-century fantasy and horror to extensive coverage of some of the best books in the contemporary field. Offering a wide-ranging discussion and penetrating comparative analysis, Rhetorics of Fantasy will excite fans and provide a wealth of material for scholarly and classroom discussion.</P><P>Includes discussion of works by over 100 authors, including Lloyd Alexander, Peter Beagle, Marion Zimmer Bradley, John Crowley, Stephen R. Donaldson, Stephen King, C. S. Lewis, Gregory Maguire, Robin McKinley, China Miéville, Suniti Namjoshi, Philip Pullman, J. K. Rowling, Sheri S. Tepper, J. R. R. Tolkien, Tad Williams</P>

Подробнее

<P>In her wry and riveting new collection, Marianne Boruch discovers things often taken for granted and holds them up to deceptively casual light, questioning them both mercilessly and mercifully. Employing a masterly range of tone and form, Boruch makes a sometimes strange but always revealing investigation of world and self, history and memory, resistance and release. Here a woman levitates behind a door as her daughter badly bangs out Mozart. Here God is caught before the moment of creation, before knowledge, before «the invention/ of the question too, the way all/ at heart are rhetorical, each leaf/ suddenly wedded to its shade.» It's here raucous boys on their bikes are told—through telepathy—don't go to this war. Here, that a Dutch still life is returned to the small chaos of its making. And Eve, in «stained fascination,» stares down the snake of the lost garden. The lyric impulse in these deeply interior poems stops time, even as the world, indifferent to its mystery, keeps happening.</P><P>Praise for Marianne Boruch:<BR>"Her poems are complex rather than simple rooms … they bring the world's strangeness, and their own, home to whatever reader is open to old mysteries, both in dreams and in the waking life they illuminate."—Philip Booth, The Georgia Review</P><P>"Marianne Boruch's (work) has the wonderful, commanding power of true attention: She sees and considers with intensity. Her poems often give fresh examples of how rare and thrilling it can be to notice."—Robert Pinsky, Book World, The Washington Post</P><P>"Every detail of image and syntax shines with multiplicity."—Donald Revell, The Ohio Review</P>

Подробнее

<P><B>Winner of the SFSU Poetry Center Book Award (2010)</B></P><P>One of the most notable members of the New York School—and its best-known woman—Barbara Guest began writing poetry in the 1950s in company that included John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Frank O'Hara, and James Schuyler. And from the beginning, her practice placed her at the vanguard of American writing. Guest's poetry, saturated in the visual arts, extended the formal experiments of modernism, and played the abstract qualities of language against its sensuousness and materiality. Now, for the first time, all of her published poems have been brought together in one volume, offering readers and scholars unprecedented access to Guest's remarkable visionary work. This Collected Poems moves from her early New York School years through her more abstract later work, including some final poems never before published. Switching effortlessly from the real to the dreamlike, the observed to the imagined, this is poetry both gentle and piercing—seemingly simple, but truly and beautifully dislocating.</P>

Подробнее

<P>A landmark in the study of music and culture, this acclaimed volume documents the remarkable scope of amateur music-making in the English town of Milton Keynes. It presents in vivid detail the contrasting yet overlapping worlds of classical orchestras, church choirs, brass bands, amateur operatic societies, and amateur bands playing jazz, rock, folk, and country. Notable for its contribution to wider theoretical debates and its influential challenge to long-held assumptions about music and how to study it, the book focuses on the practices rather than the texts or theory of music, rejecting the idea that only selected musical traditions, «great names,» or professional musicians are worth studying. This opens the door to the invisible work put in by thousands of local people of diverse backgrounds, and how the pathways creatively trodden by amateur musicians have something to tell us about both urban living and what it is to be human. Now with a new preface by the author, this long-awaited reissue of The Hidden Musicians will bring its insights and innovations to a new generation of students and scholars.</P>

Подробнее

<P>Rachel Zucker's third book of poems is a darkly comic collection that looks unsparingly at the difficulties and compromises of married life. Formally innovative and blazingly direct, The Bad Wife Handbook cross-examines marriage, motherhood, monogamy, and writing itself. Rachel Zucker's upending of grammatical and syntactic expectations lends these poems an urgent richness and aesthetic complexity that mirrors the puzzles of real life. Candid, subversive, and genuinely moving, The Bad Wife Handbook is an important portrait of contemporary marriage and the writing life, of emotional connection and disconnection, of togetherness and aloneness.</P>

Подробнее

<P>Castaways on a barren island in the South Seas, Karl and Pieter Kip are rescued by the brig James Cook. After helping to quell an onboard mutiny, however, they suddenly find themselves accused and convicted of the captain's murder. In this story, one of his last Voyages Extraordinaires, Verne interweaves an exciting exploration of the South Pacific with a tale of judicial error reminiscent of the infamous Dreyfus Affair. This Wesleyan edition brings together the first English translation with one of the first detailed critical analyses of the novel, and features all the illustrations from the original 1902 publication.</P>

Подробнее

<P>How does a Middle Eastern community create a modern image through its expression of heritage and authenticity? In Among the Jasmine Trees: Music and Modernity in Contemporary Syria, Jonathan H. Shannon investigates expressions of authenticity in Syria's musical culture, which is particularly known for embracing and preserving the Arab musical tradition, and which has seldom been researched in depth by Western scholars. Music plays a key role in the process of self-imaging by virtue of its ability to convey feeling and emotion, and Shannon explores a variety of performance genres, Sufi rituals, song lyrics, melodic modes, and aesthetic criteria. Shannon shows that although the music may evoke the old, the traditional, and the local, these are re-envisioned as signifiers of the modern national profile. A valuable contribution to the study of music and identity and to the ethnomusicology of the modern Middle East, Among the Jasmine Trees details this music and its reception for the first time, offering an original theoretical framework for understanding contemporary Arab culture, music, and society.</P>

Подробнее