Business, Legal, & Technology Resources: Books, eBooks, and More: 2022 - 2023 Books and eBooks

The historic quest to rekindle the human exploration and colonization of space led by two rivals and their vast fortunes, egos, and visions of space as the next entrepreneurial frontier. The Space Barons is the story of a group of billionaire entrepreneurs who are pouring their fortunes into the epic resurrection of the American space program. Nearly a half-century after Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, these Space Barons-most notably Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, along with Richard Branson and Paul Allen-are using Silicon Valley-style innovation to dramatically lower the cost of space travel, and send humans even further than NASA has gone. These entrepreneurs have founded some of the biggest brands in the world-Amazon, Microsoft, Virgin, Tesla, PayPal-and upended industry after industry. Now they are pursuing the biggest disruption of all: space. Based on years of reporting and exclusive interviews with all four billionaires, this authoritative account is a dramatic tale of risk and high adventure, the birth of a new Space Age, fueled by some of the world's richest men as they struggle to end governments' monopoly on the cosmos. The Space Barons is also a story of rivalry-hard-charging startups warring with established contractors, and the personal clashes of the leaders of this new space movement, particularly Musk and Bezos, as they aim for the moon and Mars and beyond.

What do you want to be when you grow up It's a familiar question we're all asked as kids. While seemingly harmless, the question has unintended consequences. It can make you feel like you need to choose one job, one passion, one thing to be about. Guess what You don't. Having a lot of different interests, projects and curiosities doesn't make you a "jack-of-all-trades, master of none." Your endless curiosity doesn't mean you are broken or flaky. What you are is a multipotentialite: someone with many interests and creative pursuits. And that is actually your biggest strength. How to Be Everything helps you channel your diverse passions and skills to work for you. Based on her popular TED talk, "Why some of us don't have one true calling", Emilie Wapnick flips the script on conventional career advice. Instead of suggesting that you specialize, choose a niche or accumulate 10,000 hours of practice in a single area, Wapnick provides a practical framework for building a sustainable life around ALL of your passions. You'll discover: Why your multipotentiality is your biggest strength, especially in today's uncertain job market. How to make a living and structure your work if you have many skills and interests; How to focus on multiple projects and make progress on all of them; How to handle common insecurities such as the fear of not being the best, the guilt associated with losing interest in something you used to love and the challenge of explaining "what you do" to others; Not fitting neatly into a box can be a beautiful thing. How to Be Everything teaches you how to design a life, at any age and stage of your career, that allows you to be fully you, and find the kind of work you'll love.

Amazon - one of the world's most valuable companies - is worth more than Walmart, Netflix, Target, Nike and Costco combined. What are the secrets to its success? How can these insights be applied to other businesses in the e-commerce sector? The retail industry is facing unprecedented challenges. Across all sectors and markets, retailers are shifting their business models and customer engagement strategies to ensure they survive. Amazon offers unique insight into the company's persistent dissatisfaction with the status quo and innovation and how it has fundamentally changed the ways in which we shop. This fully updated second edition explores Amazon's response to the coronavirus pandemic, the convergence of physical and digital retail, e-commerce economics and sustainability, as well as future policy implications. Written by industry-leading retail analysts and with the first edition now translated into more than a dozen languages, Amazon is an invaluable resource for discovering the lessons that can be learned from the company's unprecedented rise to dominance.

Reporting and personal testimonials have exposed racism in every institution in America. But knowing that racism exists isn't nearly enough. Social media posts about #BlackLivesMatter are nice, but how do you push leadership towards real anti-racist action? Diversity and inclusion strategist Yvonne Hutchinson helps tech giants, political leaders, and Fortune 500 companies speak more productively about racism and turn talk into action. In this clear and accessible guide, Hutchinson equips employees with a framework to think about race at work and helps them centre marginalized perspectives.

Not a data expert? Here's an engaging and entertaining guide to interpreting and drawing insights from any chart, graph, or other data visualization you'll encounter.   You're a business professional, not a data scientist. How do you make heads or tails of the data visualizations that come across your desk--let alone make critical business decisions based on the information they're designed to convey?  In The Big Picture, top data visualization consultant Steve Wexler provides the tools for developing the graphical literacy you need to understand the data visualizations that are flooding your inbox--and put that data to use. Packed with the best four-color examples created in Excel, Tableau, Power BI, and Qlik, among others, this one-stop resource empowers you to extract the most important information from data visualizations quickly and accurately, act on key insights, solve problems, and make the right decisions for your organization every time.  

Income inequality, which is the income gap between rich and poor, has widened steadily for the past fifty years in the United States. This gap affects women, immigrants, and racial and ethnic minorities most, and it can create problems that ripple through many aspects of our lives for generations to come. Why does income inequality exist, how does it affect our society, and how can we address it? The wide-ranging viewpoints in this volume explore these questions and provide important explanations and context for this complicated issue.

Garbage in Popular Culture is the first book to explicitly link media discourse, consumer culture and the cultural politics of garbage in contemporary global society. It makes an original contribution to the areas of consumer culture studies, visual culture, media and communications, and cultural theory through a critical analysis of the ways in which waste and garbage are visually communicated in the public realm. Mehita Iqani examines three key themes evident in the global representation of garbage: questions of agency and activism, cultures of hedonism and luxury, and anxieties about devastation and its affect. Each theme is explored through a number of case studies, including zero-waste recycling campaigns communicated on Instagram, to fine art made with waste, popular entertainment festivals, tropical beach tourism, and films about oil spills and plastic waste in oceans. Iqani argues that we need a new vocabulary to think about what it means to be human in this new age of consumption-produced waste, and reflects on what rubbish allows us to learn about our relationship with the natural world.

A radically new, and easily learned, way to outstrategize your rivals. "The wise win before they fight, while the ignorant fight to win." So wrote Zhuge Liang, the great Chinese military strategist. He was referring to battlefield tactics, but the same can be said about any strategic situation. Even seemingly certain defeat can be turned into victory--whether in battle, business, or life--by those with the strategic vision to recognize how to "change the game" to their own advantage. The aim of David McAdams's Game-Changer is nothing less than to empower you with this wisdom--not just to win in every strategic situation (or "game") you face but to change those games and the ecosystems in which they reside to transform your life and our lives together for the better. Game-Changer develops six basic ways to change games--commitment, regulation, cartelization, retaliation, trust, and relationships--enlivened by countless colorful characters and unforgettable examples from the worlds of business, medicine, finance, military history, crime, sports, and more. The book then digs into several real-world strategic challenges, such as how to keep prices low on the Internet, how to restore the public's lost trust in for-charity telemarketers, and even how to save mankind from looming and seemingly unstoppable drug-resistant disease. In each case, McAdams uses the game-theory approach developed in the book to identify the strategic crux of the problem and then leverages that "game-awareness" to brainstorm ways to change the game to solve or at least mitigate the underlying problem. So get ready for a fascinating journey. You'll emerge a deeper strategic thinker, poised to change and win all the games you play. In doing so, you can also make the world a better place. "Just one Game-Changer [is] enough to seed and transform an entire organization into a more productive, happier, and altogether better place," McAdams writes. Just imagine what we can do together.

Igniting the $100 billion Indigenous economy It is time. It is time to increase the visibility, role, and responsibility of the emerging modern Indigenous economy and the people involved. This is the foundation for economic reconciliation. This is Indigenomics. Indigenomics lays out the tenets of the emerging Indigenous economy, built around relationships, multigenerational stewardship of resources, and care for all. Highlights include: The ongoing power shift and rise of the modern Indigenous economy Voices of leading Indigenous business leaders The unfolding story in the law courts that is testing Canada's relationship with Indigenous peoples Exposure of the false media narrative of Indigenous dependency A new narrative, rooted in the reality on the ground, that Indigenous peoples are economic powerhouses On the ground examples of the emerging Indigenous economy. Indigenomics calls for a new model of development, one that advances Indigenous self-determination, collective well-being, and reconciliation. This is vital reading for business leaders and entrepreneurs, Indigenous organizations and nations, governments and policymakers, and economists.

It makes the world go round, but money can truly be an enigma. DK's visual approach breaks new ground. In graphics, charts, and diagrams. How Money Works, demystifies processes and answers the hundreds of financial questions we all have. Money facilitates the billions of transactions that take place every day across the globe. Using 'need to know' boxes, step-by-step diagrams, and other eye-catching visuals. How Money Works, shows you how this is possible. It explains economic theories, how governments raise and control money, what goes on in the stock exchange, how analysts predict where shares are heading, and many other issues. It busts jargon, explaining terms such as quantitative easing, cash flow, bonds, superannuation, and the open market. Our forefathers may have used simple bartering to exchange goods and services, but today we depend on complicated financial instruments for pensions, life assurance, mortgages, and more. How Money Works explains how these work, as well as how to avoid on-line fraud and where to invest. With information on the latest forms of funding and currencies such as Bitcoin, this comprehensive book will fast track you to financial literacy and getting the most from your hard-won cash.

Following the catastrophic events of the 2008 global financial crisis, an anonymous hacker released Bitcoin to claw back power from commercial and central banks. It quickly garnered an enthusiastic following who sought to forge a stable and democratic global economy - a world free fromhierarchy and control. In their eyes, Bitcoin's underlying architecture, blockchain, hailed the dawn of decentralisation.Money Code Space shatters these emancipatory claims. In their place, Jack Parkin constructs a new framework for revealing the geographies of power that lie behind blockchain networks. Drawing on first-hand experience in cryptocurrency communities and start-up companies from Silicon Valley to London,Parkin untangles the complex web of culture, politics, and economics that truly drive decentralisation.

An engaging guide through the cacophony of competing perspectives and models of leadership, the new edition includes an expanded discussion of contemporary topics like followership, gender, ethics, authenticity, and leadership and the arts, set against the backdrop of the global financial crisis. Conceived by Chris Grey as an antidote to conventional textbooks, each book in the 'Very Short, Fairly Interesting and Reasonably Cheap' series takes a core area of the curriculum and turns it on its head by providing a critical and sophisticated overview of the key issues and debates in an informal, conversational and often humorous way. Suitable for students of leadership, professionals working in organizations and anyone curious about the workings of leadership.

The influential New York Times bestselling authors--the "apostles of appreciation" Chester Elton and Adrian Gostick--provide managers and executives with easy ways to add more gratitude to the everyday work environment to help bolster moral, efficiency, and profitability. Workers want and need to know their work is appreciated. Showing gratitude to employees is the easiest, fastest, most inexpensive way to boost performance. New research shows that gratitude boosts employee engagement, reduces turnover, and leads team members to express more gratitude to one another--strengthening team bonds. Studies have also shown that gratitude is beneficial for those expressing it and is one of the most powerful variables in predicting a person's overall well-being--above money, health, and optimism. The WD-40 Company knows this firsthand. When the leadership gave thousands of managers training in expressing gratitude to their employees, the company saw record increases in revenue. Despite these benefits, few executives effectively utilize this simple tool. In fact, new research reveals "people are less likely to express gratitude at work than anyplace else." What accounts for the staggering chasm between awareness of gratitude's benefits and the failure of so many leaders to do it--or do it well Adrian Gostick and Chester Elton call this the gratitude gap. In this invaluable guide, they identify the widespread and pernicious myths about managing others that cause leaders to withhold thanks. Gostick and Elton also introduce eight simple ways managers can show employees they are valued. They supplement their insights and advice with stories of how many of today's most successful leaders--such as Alan Mulally of Ford and Hubert Joly of Best Buy--successfully incorporated gratitude into their leadership styles. Showing gratitude isn't just about being nice, it's about being smart--really smart--and it's a skill that everyone can easily learn.

In an increasingly globalized world, offshore manufacturing is often favored over domestic manufacturing for its ability to meet greater demands for goods that can be manufactured at lower costs, ultimately saving both companies and consumers money. However, a number of concerns also arise when examining offshoring's impact on a domestic and international scale. Some argue that offshoring results in the exploitation of workers from lower-income countries, while others express concern over the potential loss of domestic jobs that can result from it. This volume examines the benefits and drawbacks of domestic and offshore manufacturing through numerous points of contention.

Learn social media marketing in plain English -- Step by Step. Includes information about social media marketing, content marketing, email marketing, and sections on Tik Tok, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and Pinterest.

Recommended by Tim Kwock.

WINNER: Independent Press Award 2021 - Marketing & Public Relations categoryWINNER: NYC Big Book Award 2020 - Sales and Marketing categoryWINNER: The Stevie Awards 2020 - 'Book of the Year' Silver award, Women in Business categoryWritten by the award-winning storyteller Miri Rodriguez at Microsoft, this actionable guide goes beyond content strategy and, instead, demonstrates how to leverage brand storytelling in the marketing mix to strengthen brand engagement and achieve long-term growth, with advice from brands like Expedia, Coca Cola, McDonalds, Adobe and Google. Despite understanding essential storytelling techniques, brands continue to explain how their product or service can help the customer, rather than showcasing how the customer's life has changed as a result of them. Brand Storytelling gets back to the heart of brand loyalty, consumer behaviour and engagement as a business strategy: using storytelling to trigger the emotions that humans are driven by. It provides a step by step guide to assess, dismantle, and rebuild a brand story, shifting the brand from a 'hero' to 'sidekick' mentality, and positioning the customer as a key influencer to motivate the audience.Simplifying where to begin, how to benchmark success and ensure a consistent brand voice throughout every department, this book clearly shows how readers can align an emotive connection with the customer's personal values, experiences and aspirations, and how that will enable brand leaders, employees and influencers to celebrate and strengthen brand engagement for the long-term, rather than simply trying to win it.Clarifying why machine-learning, AI and automation only tell one side of the story, this book will inspire you with cutting edge interviews and case studies from leading brands like Expedia, Coca Cola, McDonalds, Adobe and Google, to tap into authentic brand loyalty and human connection.

The fun and easy way to get down to business with statistics Stymied by statistics? No fear? this friendly guide offers clear, practical explanations of statistical ideas, techniques, formulas, and calculations, with lots of examples that show you how these concepts apply to your everyday life. Statistics For Dummies shows you how to interpret and critique graphs and charts, determine the odds with probability, guesstimate with confidence using confidence intervals, set up and carry out a hypothesis test, compute statistical formulas, and more. Tracks to a typical first semester statistics course Updated examples resonate with today's students Explanations mirror teaching methods and classroom protocol Packed with practical advice and real-world problems, Statistics For Dummies gives you everything you need to analyze and interpret data for improved classroom or on-the-job performance.

Addresses how tech empowers community organizing and protest movements to combat the systems of capitalism and data exploitation that helped drive tech's own rise to ubiquity. The battle over who is really in control when it comes to our smartphones will determine whether they will tether us ever more tightly to processes of commodification and oppression, or serve as a liberatory tool to resist corporate monopoly and increasingly authoritarian governments--and build a better future. The author shows us how smartphones have emerged as a key site of struggle between consumers and corporations. Smartphones have appeared everywhere seemingly overnight- since the first iPhone released in 2007, the number of smartphone users has skyrocketed to over two billion. Smartphones have allowed users to connect worldwide in a way that was previously impossible, created communities across continents, and provided platforms for global justice movements. However, the price of connection is paid in something incredibly lucrative- data. Users are more vulnerable than ever before to have their private data mined without their knowledge or consent. The Smartphone Society identifies the lasting ripple effects of this technology, unveiling the social, political, economic, and ecological relationships embedded in these pocket-sized computers that we take everywhere we go. In this New Gilded Age of inequality and precarity, smartphones both reflect and reconfigure deep divides rooted in existing antagonisms of race, gender, and class. At the same time, an unprecedented surveillance state has emerged that uses our smartphones to digitally monitor, harass, and even kill. Network effects and aggressive efforts to control the digital marketplace have turned platform companies such as Google, Facebook, and Amazon into modern-day monopolies. This has dire consequences for privacy, equality and democracy.