Showing results by narrator "Erik Synnestvedt" in All Categories

Summer, 1966: For 13-year-old Gus LeGarde, summertime always means Loon Harbor, his grandparents' idyllic fishing resort on Great Pond. The season is a grand tradition of swimming, boating, and new adventures with his best friends, twins Siegfried and Elsbeth. But this summer, everything changes when a new lodge down the shore threatens the resort - and triggers a chain of events that will transform Gus and his friends forever.

With phones ringing off the hook, constantly changing to-do lists, and increasingly complicated schedules, having a good memory has become more important than ever. Drawing on the latest research from cognitive experts and psychologists, 30 Days to a More Powerful Memory provides hands-on, practical strategies and exercises that anyone, young or old, can use to sharpen their memory - fast!

Corporate executives struggle to harness the power of social technologies. Twitter, Facebook, blogs, YouTube are where customers discuss products and companies, write their own news, and find their own deals but how do you integrate these activities into your broader marketing efforts? It's an unstoppable groundswell that affects every industry - yet it's still utterly foreign to most 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.

Summer 1964: Beatlemania hits the States, and the world mourns the loss of JFK. For 11-year-old Gus LeGarde, the powerful events that rocked the nation serve as a backdrop for the most challenging summer of his life.

A New Era in Banking: The Landscape After the Battle identifies the main drivers of change at the heart of this wholesale transformation of the financial services industry. It examines the complex challenge for financial institutions to de-risk business models, reconnect with customers, and approach stakeholder value creation.

Critically acclaimed author Clyde Prestowitz reveals the shocking extent of the deterioration of American economic strength that has put the United States on the brink of irreversibly losing our supremacy on the world stage and our prosperity at home. While the financial crisis has been a devastating blow, he shows that the wreckage of our economic might started much earlier.

Feeling uninspired? If you’re a creative professional - or just someone who’d like to be more creative in your work and daily life - look no further than Designers Don’t Have Influences. Creative director, writer, advocate, and design cheerleader Austin Howe’s elegant, incisive, and amusing essays are sure to appeal to a wide spectrum of readers. Howe chronicles the lives, philosophies, and work processes of leaders in disparate fields from art to spirituality and even ice hockey, many of whom have never before been profiled in print.

Is Social Security really going bust, and what does that mean to me? If I hire an immigrant, am I hurting a native-born worker? How much can presidents really affect economic outcomes? Why does the stock market go up when employment declines? What's a "living wage?" Why do I feel so squeezed? If you'd like to know the answers to these questions, premier economist Jared Bernstein is here to help.

While some semblance of stability has returned to the financial markets, the economies on which these markets must ultimately depend remain structurally weak, and the path toward sustained growth will be difficult. In order to set the economy on a sounder path, we need to understand the sources of instability that caused the failure of the financial system, rethink established ideas, and challenge the intellectual and moral authority of the institutions that control the world's capital.

When young Gus LeGarde befriends a cranky old hermit in the woods who speaks to an Oneida Indian spirit named Penaki, he wonders if the man is nuts. But when Penni rattles tin cups, draws on dusty mirrors, and flips book pages, pestering them to find evidence to avenge her past and free her from earthly bondage, things change.

Tony Little is the definition of the American dream. He’s a fitness icon, and the quintessential example of a self-made entrepreneur. But he didn’t start out that way. In There’s Always a Way, Tony relates his incredible rags-to-riches story—from a promising career in bodybuilding that ended with a car accident, a painful recovery, and years of self-pity, to an incredible new start as a self- made fitness icon, infomercial and TV shopping pioneer, and multi-millionaire.

A veteran book reviewer, Yanofsky has spent a lifetime immersed in literature (not to mention old movies and old jokes), which he calls shtick. This account of a year in the life of a family describes a father’s struggle to enter his son’s world, the world of autism, using the materials he knows best: self-help books, feel-good memoirs, literary classics from the Bible to Dr. Seuss, old movies, and, yes, shtick. Funny, wrenching, and unfailingly candid, Bad Animals is both an exploration of a baffling condition and a quirky love story told by a gifted writer.

Front-line employees who deal directly with customers are the face of any organization. Not only do they have the most impact on how a brand is perceived, but they are also the most valuable source of insight into what customers want and how to give it to them. Unfortunately, as management experts Chris DeRose and Noel M. Tichy explain, most organizations don't know how to evaluate the risk of giving employees more autonomy. Tichy and DeRose offer powerful examples of front-line leadership.

Does your work life "balance" feel anything but? Most people will probably tell you that you need to be more strict about separating your office and home lives, and WHATEVER YOU DO, DON'T TAKE THE OFFICE HOME WITH YOU! To this, husband-and-wife authors Caitlin and Andrew Friedman say: Think again! In Family Inc., they share how they were able to use the organizational strategies they'd relied on in their professional lives to bring the joy - and yes, the sanity - back into their home.

Today when the competition, technology, and the economy are evolving faster than ever before, organizations and the people like us who work in them need a proven approach to help us adapt - and succeed. The key, according to Paul B. Brown, is to think like an entrepreneur, no matter what your position or industry. What works for the most successful entrepreneurs will work for us, Brown argues, whether we want to stay employed working for someone else or are thinking of going off on our own.

We have all experienced it: the jolt of an insight arriving like a thunderclap, the metaphorical light bulb over your head as you drive to work, take a shower, or unload the dishwasher. These all-too-elusive "aha moments" come sporadically and without warning. But what if insights could be accessed more reliably in everyday life? Charles Kiefer and Malcolm Constable have the tools to make this possibility a reality.

Most of us graduate high school with a basic understanding of history, math, science, and literature, but when it comes to personal finance - arguably the topic that we use most in our daily lives - we feel lost or overwhelmed. No longer! Cast aside your fear of FICO scores and your confusion about credit cards, because Scott Gamm, founder of HelpSaveMyDollars.com and student at NYU Stern School of Business is here to help.

Today, business moves at the speed of thought. The web enables a perpetual cycle of interaction and feedback, and every status update or tweet that mentions your company or brand either helps or hurts you reputation in real-time. Customers expect a level of attentiveness and responsiveness that most companies can’t live up to. Can you?

Most companies talk about excellence, but what does excellence really mean? What specific attitudes and practices lead to excellence? Drawing on years of study and decades of experience, authors Harry Paul, John Britt, and Ed Jent have zeroed in on five core qualities of excellence. In this entertaining and enlightening book, they tell how to give and be your best in each of these five critical dimensions and foster excellence in your organization and in your life.

Most organizations realize that to succeed in today’s turbulent world, they need to perform as an integrated whole to tap into innovations and good ideas. Yet many still find it difficult to capture the collective intelligence of their employees and customers. Companies don’t know what they know—but they need to learn soon.