International Business

What would be the "right" price for your loved one - and can you avoid putting others at risk by paying it? What prevents criminals from maltreating hostages? How do you (safely) pay a ransom? Kidnap: Inside the Ransom Business uncovers how a group of insurers at Lloyd's of London have solved these thorny problems for their customers. Based on interviews with industry insiders (from both sides), as well as hostage stakeholders, it uncovers an intricate and powerful private governance system ordering transactions between the legal and the criminal economies.

The way most white-collar crime works is by manipulating institutional psychology. That means creating something that looks as much as possible like a normal set of transactions. The drama comes later, when it all unwinds. Financial crime seems horribly complicated, but there are only so many ways you can con someone out of what’s theirs.

This powerful, unsettling book gives us a rare glimpse behind the closed doors of global financial institutions by the winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Economics. When it was first published, this national best-seller quickly became a touchstone in the globalization debate. Renowned economist and Nobel Prize winner Joseph E. Stiglitz had a ringside seat for most of the major economic events of the last decade, including stints as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers and chief economist at the World Bank.

The concept of prosecuting war criminals is not unique to the modern world. Individuals who breached the "rules of war" were tried in ancient Greece, and probably earlier. However, those early prosecutions were hardly examples of fair and impartial international justice. Underpinning the prosecutions, however, was a notion that, even in war, there are certain rules which must be obeyed.

What do Disney, Bollywood, and "the Batkid" teach us about how to create celebrity experiences for our audiences? How can a vending machine inspire world peace? Can being "imperfect" make your business more marketable? Can a selfie improve one's confidence? When can addiction be a good thing?

For almost 30 years, conflict resolution practitioners, faculty, and students have depended on The Mediation Process as the all-inclusive guide to the discipline. The most comprehensive book written on mediation, this reference is perfect for new and experienced conflict managers working in any area of dispute resolution - family, community, employment, business, environmental, public policy multicultural, or international. This is the expert's guide, and the Fourth Edition has been expanded and revised to keep pace with developments in the field.

Jim Rogers, whose entertaining accounts of his travels around the world - studying the markets from Russia to Singapore from the ground up - has enthralled investors and Wall Street aficionados for two decades. In his engaging memoir Street Smarts, Rogers offers pithy commentary from a lifetime of adventure, from his early years growing up a naïve kid in Demopolis, Alabama, to his fledgling career on Wall Street, to his cofounding the wildly successful Quantum Fund [omit George Soros], Rogers always had a restless curiosity to experience and understand the world around him.

An inspiring personal story of redemption, second chances, and the transformative power within us all, from the founder and CEO of the nonprofit charity: water. In the tradition of such best-selling books as Shoe Dog and Mountains Beyond Mountains, Thirst is a riveting account of how to build a better charity, a better business, a better life - and a gritty tale that proves it’s never too late to make a change.

You may already know this, but in case you didn't, here are some facts about why freight brokerage business is growing and why it is so lucrative to get in to: since 2012, freight brokerage industry has been seeing a steady 6-12% growth every year; the ongoing economic recovery is bringing an increase in demand for trucking service; and more!

The global freight forwarding market has been seeing a steady growth of around 5 percent for the last four years. New trade deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), Trans-Atlantic Partnership (TAP), and many others are bringing the whole world into one marketplace. This is an industry that, in my opinion, is still in its infancy. With TPP, TAP, and many other global trade agreements, the need for such services will grow higher every year.

The world is changing fast. Political risk - the probability that a political action could significantly impact a company's business - is affecting more businesses in more ways than ever before. A generation ago, political risk mostly involved a handful of industries dealing with governments in a few frontier markets. Today, political risk stems from a widening array of actors, including Twitter users, local officials, activists, terrorists, hackers, and more. In today's globalized world, there are no "safe" bets.

This is a quick reference guide. Once you’ve identified why your deal is stuck you can jump right to that chapter for solutions. This book is for book for all those entrepreneurs, business leaders and sales professionals that want to close those bloated pipelines and prevent deals from getting stuck in the first place. This book will teach you how to unstick deals, shorten your sales cycle and prevent deals from sticking to begin with.

Economists insist that recovery is at hand, yet unemployment remains high, real estate values continue to sink, and governments stagger under record deficits. The End of Growth proposes a startling diagnosis: humanity has reached a fundamental turning point in its economic history. The expansionary trajectory of industrial civilization is colliding with non-negotiable natural limits.

Imagine for a moment that you are about to take a foreign vacation to an exotic destination. You have saved your entire life to travel there. It is a destination with almost unlimited choices of how to spend your time and you know you will not have enough time to explore every opportunity. You are fairly certain that you will never get to take a second trip to this destination; this will be your one opportunity.

With over $500 million a year in sales, the Bassett Furniture Company was once the world's biggest wood furniture manufacturer. But beginning in the 1980s, the Bassett company suffered from an influx of cheap Chinese furniture as the first waves of Asian competition hit, and ultimately was forced to send its production offshore to Asia. Only one man fought back. That man is John Bassett III, a descendant of the Bassetts who is now chairman of Vaughan-Bassett Furniture Co, which employs more than 700 Virginians and has sales of over $90 million.

The research is definitive and sobering: rich people who win the lottery stay rich. That's their normal state. Middle-class people who win the lottery soon end up back in the middle class, because that's their normal state. And those who are broke and win the lottery quickly return to being broke. The amount of money you have (or don't have) reflects who you are. If you think broke, you'll always come back to being broke. And if you think wealthy, you'll always return to wealth.

The more you study the world's top salespeople in any industry, the more you realize that their success is a result of who they are more than merely what they do. Thus, logic would have it that if you want to take your sales to the next level, you must first figure out how to take yourself to the next level (because it happens only in that order). That's exactly what this book will help you do, faster than you ever realized is possible.

America is the first country in history to fund the rise of its rivals. We need to stop now, before it’s too late.

The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919) was one of the most important documents to come out of World War I – specifically the period of the Armistice and the subsequent settlement negotiations. And, a century on, it remains of particular relevance to our times – an uncompromising and forthright analysis of how international diplomacy can be suffused by personalities, prejudices, personal ambition and outright, uncontrolled feelings of revenge.

In The Secret History of the American Empire, Perkins zeroes in on hot spots around the world and, drawing on interviews with other hit men, jackals, reporters, and activists, examines the current geopolitical crisis. Instability is the norm; it's clear that the world we've created is dangerous and no longer sustainable. How did we get here? Who's responsible? What good have we done and at what cost? And what can we do to change things for the next generations?