Political Career

An innovation expert illuminates why your power to make a difference is no longer bound by your status. In The Power of Onlyness, Nilofer Merchant, one of the world's top-ranked business thinkers, reveals that we have now reached an unprecedented moment of opportunity for your ideas to "make a dent" on the world.

In Childhood Under Siege, Joel Bakan reveals the callous and widespread exploitation of children by profit-seeking corporations and society's failure to protect them. The creator of the award-winning film and internationally best-selling book The Corporation, Bakan shows how corporations pump billions of dollars into rendering parents and governments powerless to shield children from a relentless commercial assault designed solely to exploit their unique needs and vulnerabilities.

We live in a period of leadership in crisis. At home, and across the globe, we sense that unqualified and irresponsible individuals are being elevated to positions of power, strong men and autocrats are consolidating their hold on governance, and the people are losing faith in the prospect of a better future. How have we arrived at this point? And how can we correct our course? For the past decade, Moshik Temkin has challenged his students at Harvard University and around the world to grapple with the nature of leadership. Now, Temkin refashions the classroom for a wider audience.

From the former secretary of defense and author of the acclaimed #1 best-selling memoir Duty, a characteristically direct, informed, and urgent assessment of why big institutions are failing us and how smart, committed leadership can effect real improvement regardless of scale.

Morgan Simon is an investment professional who works at the nexus of social finance and social justice. In Real Impact, she teaches us how to get it right, leveraging the world's resources to truly transform the economy. Over the past 17 years, Simon has influenced over $150 billion from endowments, families, and foundations. In Real Impact, Simon shares her experience as both investor and activist to offer clear strategies for investors, community leaders, and entrepreneurs alike. Real Impact is essential listening for anyone seeking real change in the world.

Niccolò Machiavelli famously wrote, "There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things." That's what this book is about - innovation far more audacious than a new way to find a restaurant or a smart phone you can wear on your wrist. Harvard professor Amy Edmondson and journalist Susan Salter Reynolds explore how to bring into being systems that transform human experience and make the world more livable and sustainable.

You would have to live under a rock not to know who Alan Greenspan is. But that's probably about as much as you know. Leave it to investigative reporter Bob Woodward to uncover the story of Greenspan and the power he wields as head of the Federal Reserve.

The author of the acclaimed New York Times best seller The Next 100 Years now focuses his geopolitical forecasting acumen on the next decade and the imminent events and challenges that will test America and the world, specifically addressing the skills that will be required by the decade’s leaders. The next 10 years will be a time of massive transition. In The Next Decade, George Friedman offers listeners a pro­vocative and endlessly fascinating prognosis for the immedi­ate future.

This work draws on four cases of bad leadership—two in political leadership, two in business leadership—to show how it goes from bad to worse. Kellerman finds that bad leadership and bad followership go through four phases of development: 1) Onward and Upward; 2) Followers Join In; 3) Leaders Start In; and 4) Bad to Worse. These findings correctly suggest that the book, in addition to being of theoretical interest, is of practical import.

When a company's workers are literally dying on the job, and its business model relies on preying on local businesses and even their own companies, and its CEO is the richest person in the world while its workers make minimum wage with impossible quotas...wouldn't you want to resist? Danny Caine, owner of Raven Book Store in Lawrence, Kansas, compiled this zine about his commitment to fighting Amazon. Includes: the open letter he wrote to Jeff Bezos, examples of successful social media activism, links to other resources, and some sobering words about boycotting.

Travis Ridout and Michael Franz examine how political advertisements function in various kinds of campaigns and how voters are influenced by them. The authors particularly study where ads are placed, asserting that television advertising will still be relevant despite the growth of advertising on the Internet.

What does it mean to negotiate like a CEO? How important are offer letters and employment agreements? How can you protect yourself and your family if the worst happens? These are all questions that Jotham Stein addresses in Negotiate Like a CEO, with the goal of equipping you with the tools you’ll need to safeguard you and your family in business and employment.

From inside the walls of Enron, a lone whistleblower attempted to avert the course of events leading to the largest bankruptcy in American history. On August 16, 2001, Sherron Watkins wrote an anonymous letter to Enron's Chairman, Ken Lay, laying out problems with Enron's use of partnerships to hide debt. She warned of a possible scandal that could topple the company if investors and the news media learned of the operations. Then, she revealed her identity and confronted Lay directly.

The 25th Secretary of Defense takes listeners behind the scenes to reveal the inner workings of the Pentagon, its vital mission, and what it takes to lead it. The Pentagon is the headquarters of the single largest institution in America: the Department of Defense. The DOD employs millions of Americans. It owns and operates more real estate and spends more money than any other entity. It manages the world’s largest and most complex information network and performs more R&D than Apple, Google, and Microsoft combined.

When They Go Low, We Go High explores the most notable speeches in history, analyzing the rhetorical tricks to uncover how the right speech at the right time can profoundly shape the world. Traveling across continents and centuries, political speechwriter Philip Collins reveals what Thomas Jefferson owes to Cicero and Pericles, who really gave the Gettysburg Address, and what Elizabeth I shares with Winston Churchill.

Be noisy. Natalie Savage grew up hearing these words from her father, who admired Walter Cronkite so much he named the family dog after him. Natalie - who spent her 20s missing out on life’s benchmarks - finally sees her efforts pay off when she’s assigned to cover the White House for her network. The problem? The position is only temporary, a test to see if she has what it takes. She has always relied on her grit, her principles and her news sense to gain success. But now her competition is a frat boy who got his big break by eating raw animal parts on a reality show.

On January 21, 2017, millions of protestors took part in the Women's March, and many of them created a "sea of pink" when they wore knitted pink "pussyhats" in record numbers. The pussyhat swiftly found its place on the cover of Time and The New Yorker, and it ultimately came to symbolize resistance culture. Creator of the Pussyhat Project, Krista Suh, took an idea and built a worldwide movement and symbol in just two months. But like so many women, Krista spent years letting her fears stop her from learning to live by her own rules.

Here is a treasure in the history of the procapitalist novel, the story of an upstart Wall Street speculator financier, Henry Galt. He is a shadowy figure who stays out of the limelight as much as possible until he unleashes a plan that has been years in the making: he uses his extraordinary entrepreneurial talent to acquire control of a failing railroad.

US Senator Ron Wyden is widely praised for coming up with sensible-sounding ideas no one else had thought of and making the counter-intuitive political alliances that prove helpful in passing bills. In It Takes Chutzpah, he offers a progressive leader’s manifesto for being a courageous warrior during turbulent times. It is an inspirational guide to get important things accomplished with a combination of strong allies, persistence, and attention—that is, chutzpah.

Bestselling author Peter Block is a true visionary: author of the classic Flawless Consulting, his work is about empowerment, stewardship, chosen accountability, and reconciliation of community. In The Empowered Manager, he returns his eye toward management to renew our efforts to create a shift in the traditional hierarchy. Twenty years after the original book, Block talks of why it is so difficult to both open the door to empowerment and more importantly, have people walk through it.