I have been a ghostwriter for over thirty years, publishing more than a hundred books under other people’s names, as well as those under my own name. It has allowed me to live a hundred different and varied lives and it is a profession I like to encourage all writers to consider. Several of my own novels have featured ghostwriters as central characters, including Secrets of the Italian Gardener and What Lies Around Us.
Ginny Carter is another very experienced ghostwriter and in this book, she explains exactly why it is good for business people to write books in order to promote themselves, their companies, and their products. Since most successful business people do not have the time to write the books themselves, her eloquent arguments will inevitably lead them to hiring ghostwriters such as Ginny – and myself.
If you're a coach, consultant, or speaker who makes a living from your expertise, this is for you. It's the guide you need to help you plan, write, and promote the book that elevates your authority, increases your visibility, and gets more clients saying 'yes'. Because creating such a book is a challenge. Where do you start? How do you keep going until the end? And what do you do when you've finished? Don't let your book stay in your head - allow it to come to life and make a positive difference…
I love explainer books, especially regarding infrastructure, because the world isn’t the way it is naturally; it was designed, and it’s important to know how parking really does explain the world (even more so than soccer, I should say). And once you do, you can’t unsee how we’ve given over the world to cars instead of people, how parking lots dominate our environment, and how this will become a huge problem as climate change turns them into either lakes or heat generators.
The book also puts paid to the idea of governments privatizing public infrastructure for short-term financial gain. It will also help you understand why you feel conflicted when your town turns its main drag into a pedestrian plaza, which you hate when trying to find a space but love once you get out of your car.
Named one of the best books of the year by The New Yorker and The New Republic
“Consistently entertaining and often downright funny.”—The New Yorker
“Wry and revelatory.” —The New York Times
"A romp, packed with tales of anger, violence, theft, lust, greed, political chicanery and transportation policy gone wrong . . . highly entertaining."—The Los Angeles Times
An entertaining, enlightening, and utterly original investigation into one of the most quietly influential forces in modern American life—the humble parking spot
Parking, quite literally, has a death grip on America: each year a shocking number…
I was a suburban kid in Knoxville, Tennessee and Dayton, Ohio and didn’t see much wrong with my neighborhood. As someone who then grew up to write and teach about the history of cities and city planning, I’ve long been struck by the mismatch between high-brow scorn for “suburbia” and the everyday experience of people who live in suburban communities. This short book is an effort to show how the world became suburban and what that meant to people in the different corners of the world—and maybe to put in a plug for my suburban Meadow Hills and College Hill neighborhoods.
Is a picture worth a thousand words? Urbanist Dolores Hayden sure thinks so, providing a cheeky, even snarky, guide to the worst aspects of the contemporary suburban landscape.
Brightly lit aerial photographs (many are from the American Southwest) show big box interchanges, lollipop subdivisions, tower farms for the electronic world, and all the other ways in which sprawl chews up the American land. Leaf through the pages, then you get to choose: Do you weep or do you scream in outrage?
A Field Guide to Sprawl was selected by the urban web site Planetizen for its list of "Top Ten Books in Urban Studies" and by Discover magazine for its list of "Top 20 Books in Science." Features on the book appeared in The New York Times and the Boston Globe.
Duck, ruburb, tower farm, big box, and pig-in-a-python are among the dozens of zany terms invented by real estate developers and designers today to characterize land-use practices and the physical elements of sprawl. Sprawl in the environment, based on the metaphor of a person spread out, is hard to define.…
I have spent most of my adult life using entrepreneurial business practices and principles to redesign and transform nonprofits. From my very first nonprofit organizational acceleration, I was hooked. The wealth one receives from helping other people is so much richer and more satisfying than money–altruism is truly life's greatest pleasure. You know the movie The Sixth Sense where the little kid sees dead people everywhere? I am the same way, except everywhere I look, I see uncaptured opportunities for social impact. I live and breathe social impact strategy, governance, financing, evaluation, and change management. Because by fixing problems in those areas, organizations are able to do more to make the world a better place.
Planning is easy, but execution is hard. Nonprofit leaders can gain a clear, practical understanding of how to measure and execute an organization's progress toward social impact goals with the clear, simple, and compelling four disciplines of execution.
It is simply terrific for putting strategy into practice. You will learn the key concepts from 4DX. We found reading it like getting a new set of glasses that brings the world of management into focus and allows us to see a pathway to success.
Fully revised and updated, the definitive guide for leaders on how to create lasting organisational change.
Do you remember the last major initiative you watched die in your organisation? Did it go down with a loud crash? Or was it slowly and quietly suffocated by other competing priorities? By the time it finally disappeared, it's quite likely noone even noticed.
Almost every company struggles with making change happen. The 4 Disciplines of Execution: Revised and Updated is meant to help you reach the goals you've always dreamed of with a simple, repeatable, and proven formula. In this updated edition of…
My intellectual journey has focused on three related passions: understanding how firms create value and the link to their stock market valuations, systems thinking, and knowledge building. This has led to the Madden Center for Value Creation at Florida Atlantic University that promotes the key value creation principles that are the foundation for a prosperous society. Prosperity is more widely shared through a society rooted in dynamism with enthusiastic support for experimentation, knowledge building, and innovation by firms. The Madden Center offers a Certificate in Value Creation online course that packages a learning experience to upgrade the knowledge, skills, and resources you need to create value.
I believe systems thinking is a prerequisite to developing innovative solutions to complex problems.
Lean thinking positions the firm as a system comprised of value streams that incrementally produce the final products delivered to customers. Lean thinkers say that all activities spent that do not add value in the eyes of customers are waste. So, purge all waste everywhere.
The intellectual leader of this approach to value creation is Jim Womack. He is the master of Gemba Walks—verify the purpose of the value stream, then go to where the work is done, and generate ideas for purging waste. The power of this type of fundamental observation is illustrated in the diverse stories Womack tells of his Gemba Walks over many years.
The life of lean is experiments. All authority for any sensei flows from experiments on the gemba [the place where work takes place], not from dogmatic interpretations of sacred texts or the few degrees of separation from the founders of the movement. In short, lean is not a religion but a daily practice of conducting experiments and accumulating knowledge." So writes Jim Womack, who over the past 30 years has developed a method of going to visit the gemba at countless companies and keenly observing how people work together to create value. Over the past decade, he has shared his…
I am economist who first started exploring retirement planning for my own personal situation. I became so captivated by the topic that I changed fields and was selected as the Professor of Retirement Income at the American College of Financial Services. I am a past curriculum director for the Retirement Management Analyst designation and past program director for the Retirement Income Certified Professional designation. More recently, I am the co-creator of the Retirement Income Style Awareness and co-host of the Retire with Style podcast. I enjoy learning and teaching about all topics related to retirement.
Harold Evensky and Deanna Katz bring together a collection of experts to explore many different facets of retirement income planning.
This book was ahead of its time in exploring retirement income as a distinct field of financial planning, and it laid important foundations in place. Readers can learn from leading experts about understanding sequence-of-return risk, spending from investments, using annuities, and much more.
Clients nearing retirement have some significant challenges to face. And so do their advisers. They can expect to live far longer after they retire. And the problems they expect their advisers to solve are far more complex. The traditional sources of retirement income may be shriveling, but boomers don't intend to downsize their plans. Instead, they're redefining what it means to be retired―as well as what they require of financial advisers. Planners who aren't prepared will be left behind. Those who are will step up to some lucrative and challenging work.
I’m a writer who is drawn to entrepreneurs, especially those with creative businesses; they inspire me. I launched a freelance writing business in 2014, but I’ve always wanted to work for a magazine. One day, it finally occurred to me to combine my interests and start a magazine about creative entrepreneurs! I have interviewed over 100 creative entrepreneurs for my magazine. I created this list because I think it can help others interested in starting a creative business.
Writing a business plan is a daunting task, no matter if you’re left or right-brain dominant. I needed a tool to kickstart the process.
Since I’m in a creative field, I decided to check out this book. I liked how the exercises in this book made writing a business plan more interesting and, dare I say, fun. The book helped me uncover my unique strengths, and I drew from them to write my business plan.
Do you dream of making a living doing what you love but find the process of creating a viable business plan like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole? Jennifer Lee knows what it’s like to make the entrepreneurial leap and how to do it successfully. The key is using, rather than stifling, imagination and intuition. Lee’s illustrated, colorful worksheets and step-by-step instructions are playful yet practical, transforming drudgery into joy. They’ll enable you to define your vision and nail down plans for funding, marketing, networking, and long-term strategy.
As a wealth advisor for over 37 years, I find many people reach retirement lacking clarity and confidence. Traditional financial advice often focuses on things that are unknowable, uncontrollable, and frankly don’t matter that much. While sound technical investment, estate, and tax planning are critical, the soul’s need for meaning and purpose are as important as sound financial plans. The path to true financial peace may be simpler than you think. These books can help you focus on the fewer, more critical things so that you can thrive in retirement and free yourself from financial media which is not in business to support your vision of a meaningful life.
If you could only read one book on retirement planning (other than mine of course!), this is the one I’d recommend.
It covers a wide range of financial planning and investment topics: life-planning, goal-setting, investment strategy, financial stress-testing, spend-down strategies, tax-management, social security, Medicare, annuities, insurance, reverse mortgages, estate planning, elder abuse, and more
However, while comprehensive, it also does not get too “deep” in the weeds and is filled with wise counsel.
This is your one-stop, definitive resource as you prepare for a secure and comfortable retirement.
Investment and personal finance experts Larry Swedroe and Kevin Grogan present uniquely comprehensive coverage of every important aspect you need to think about as you approach retirement, including:
Social Security, Medicare, investment planning strategy, portfolio maintenance, preparing your heirs, retirement issues faced by women, the threat of elder financial abuse, going beyond financials to think about your happiness, and much more.
These topics are explained with the help of specialists in each subject. And everything is based on the…
I’m not a clinician, but friends often ask for my advice when they get sick or need help caring for a loved one. I’ve spent nearly 25 years mapping the terrain created by innovative patients, survivors, and caregivers, the rebels of medical care. I’m also a caregiver to elders. Along the way, I’ve collected books to loan when someone facing a health challenge asks me, “What do I do now?” Each of these five books was written for when you find yourself in the healthcare maze and need to borrow courage, sharpen your senses, and navigate as best you can.
My mom and I are competing to see who can give away more copies of this book; we love it that much. Both of us have been bedside caregivers for dying relatives and have seen firsthand how beautiful that process can be if people are prepared.
I love how the book is designed with nice, large print, lovely illustrations, and little snacks of insight sprinkled throughout in boxes and “fast facts.” This book is the essential What to Expect When You’re Expecting–but for death.
“A gentle, knowledgeable guide to a fate we all share” (The Washington Post): the first and only all-encompassing action plan for the end of life.
“There is nothing wrong with you for dying,” hospice physician B.J. Miller and journalist and caregiver Shoshana Berger write in A Beginner’s Guide to the End. “Our ultimate purpose here isn’t so much to help you die as it is to free up as much life as possible until you do.”
Theirs is a clear-eyed and big-hearted action plan for approaching the end of life, written to help readers feel more in control of an…
Alison and Walter have come into architecture on different paths, Alison with a biology/chemistry background (yes, one can become an architect with an accredited, first professional degree in architecture) and Walter through architectural engineering. We both believe that the union of science, aesthetics, energy, comfort, and health make buildings work! We enjoy creating simplified design processes for students to use in their work, so that they can gain confidence in the first steps of design. Equally, we feel it important to clearly understand what is to be created and how to confirm that what was intended actually results in the built environment.
For much of the history of architecture material availability has been a key design concern.
More recently (say the past 50 years) operational energy has become a concern (both socially via codes and individually via cost). We are now in transition to a design landscape where carbon emissions are replacing energy consumption as the currency of concern.
Life Cycle Assessment does an excellent job of bringing the issue of carbon to the forefront and explaining how designers and owners rationally account for the carbon damage inflicted by their buildings. An easy read but not at all simpleminded.
Life Cycle Assessment addresses the dynamic and dialectic of building and ecology, presenting the key theories and techniques surrounding the use of life cycle assessment data and methods.
Architects and construction professionals must assume greater responsibility in helping building owners to understand the implications of making material, manufacturing, and assemblage decisions and therefore design to accommodate more ecological building. Life Cycle Assessment is a guide for architects, engineers, and builders, presenting the principles and art of performing life cycle impact assessments of materials and whole buildings, including the need to define meaningful goals and objectives and critically evaluate analysis assumptions.…
