Product Description: Great teams don't just happen. How often have you sat in team meetings complaining to yourself, "Why does it take forever for this group to make a simple decision? What are we even trying to achieve?" As a team leader, you have the power to improve things...read more

Product Description: Are your working relationships working against you?To achieve your goals and get ahead, you need to rally people behind you and your ideas. But how do you do that when you lack formal authority or when you have a boss who gets in your way or when you're juggling others' needs at the expense of your own?You can do it by managing up, down, and across the organization...read more

Are you suffering from work-related stress?Feeling overwhelmed, exhausted, and short-tempered at work—and at home? Then you may have too much stress in your life. Stress is a serious problem that impacts not only your mental and physical health, but also your loved ones and your organization. So what can you do to address it?The HBR Guide to Managing Stress at Work will help you find a sustainable solution. It will help you reach the goal of getting on an even keel—and staying there. You’ll learn how to:• Harness stress so it spurs, not hinders, productivity• Create realistic and manageable routines• Aim for progress, not perfection• Make the case for a flexible schedule• Ease the physical tension of spending too much time at your computer • Renew yourself physically, mentally, and emotionally

Find the right person to help supercharge your career.Whether you’re eyeing a specific leadership role, hoping to advance your skills, or simply looking to broaden your professional network, you need to find someone who can help. Wait for a senior manager to come looking for you―and you’ll probably be waiting forever.Instead, you need to find the mentoring that will help you achieve your goals. Managed correctly, mentoring is a powerful and efficient tool for moving up.The HBR Guide to Getting the Mentoring You Need will help you get it right. You’ll learn how to:• Find new ways to stand out in your organization• Set clear and realistic development goals• Identify and build relationships with influential sponsors• Give back and bring value to mentors and senior advisers• Evaluate your progress in reaching your professional goals

Product Description: Help your employees help themselves.As a manager in today’s business world, you can’t just tell your direct reports what to do: You need to help them make their own decisions, enable them to solve tough problems, and actively develop their skills on the job...read more

Product Description: Don't let your fear of finance get in the way of your success.Can you prepare a breakeven analysis? Do you know the difference between an income statement and a balance sheet? Or understand why a business that's profitable can still go belly-up? Has your grasp of your company's numbers helped—or hurt—your career?Whether you're new to finance or you just need a refresher, this go-to guide will give you the tools and confidence you need to master the fundamentals, as all good managers must...read more

Product Description: Meet your goals―on time and on budget.How do you rein in the scope of your project when you've got a group of demanding stakeholders breathing down your neck? And map out a schedule everyone can stick to? And motivate team members who have competing demands on their time and attention?Whether you're managing your first project or just tired of improvising, this guide will give you the tools and confidence you need to define smart goals, meet them, and capture lessons learned so future projects go even more smoothly...read more

Product Description: Is your workload slowing you—and your career—down?Your inbox is overflowing. You're paralyzed because you have too much to do but don't know where to start. Your to-do list never seems to get any shorter. You leave work exhausted but have little to show for it...read more

Product Description: His life's work and ambition fulfilled, Francis Brimm believes the only metamorphosis left him is a slow, affable decline toward death. So he returns to the town of his youth and to his sister, Muriel, whose life has been as uneventful as Francis's has been exciting...read more

Product Description: Markos is an officer on a ship sent from Earth to investigate probe reports of intelligent extraterrestrial life. Markos is killed by the commander of this mission, and is then resurrected in an alien body by a race of aliens who need him to stop an interstellar war...read more

You have to talk with a colleague about a fraught situation, but you're worried that they'll yell or blame you or shut down. You fear your emotions could block you from a resolution. But you can communicate in a way that's constructive - not combative.Difficult Conversations walks you through:• Uncovering the root cause of friction• Maintaining a positive mind-set• Untangling the problem together• Agreeing on a way forwardAbout HBR's 20-Minute Manager Series: Don't have much time? Get up to speed fast on the most essential business skills with HBR's 20-Minute Manager series. Whether you need a crash course or a brief refresher, each book in the series is a concise, practical primer that will help you brush up on a key management topic.Advice you can quickly listen to and apply, for ambitious professionals and aspiring executives - from the most trusted source in business.

Product Description: When Vonlee "Nicole" Titlow and her aunt, Billie Jean Rogers, came home from a night of gambling in a casino near Detroit, they told police they found Billie's husband unconscious on the floor of the Rogers' mansion. Just another of his alcoholic benders, they assumed...read more

Product Description: Sit back and join the ride with this collection of edge-of-your-seat climbing stories by Mark Twight, aka Dr. Doom. "Somewhere out there somebody understands these words and knows they matter. They were written in blood, learned by heart...read more

Product Description: A collection of 13 stunning stories by one of the most celebrated American writers of the 20th century A follow-up to his 1970 science fiction collection, The General Zapped an Angel, Fast's book of 13 new science fiction stories is brisk and engrossing...read more

Product Description: No part of the country was more contested during the American Revolution than the Hudson River. In 1776, King George III sent the largest amphibious force ever assembled to seize Manhattan and use it as a base from which to push up the Hudson River Valley for a rendezvous at Albany with an impressive army driving down from Canada...read more

Product Description: People do bad things. They misspeak, mislead, and misbehave. They lie, cheat, steal, and kill. Often, afterward, they apologize. But what makes a successful apology? Why does Joe Biden's 2007 apology for referring to Barack Obama as "articulate and bright" succeed, whereas Mel Gibson's 2006 apology for his anti-Semitic tirade fails? Naturally, the effectiveness of an apology depends on the language used, as well as the conditions under which we offer our regrets...read more

When Andrew Offutt died, his son, Chris, inherited a desk, a rifle, and eighteen hundred pounds of pornographic fiction. Andrew had been considered the "king of twentieth-century smut," with a writing career that began as a strategy to pay for his son's orthodontic needs and soon took on a life of its own, peaking during the 1970s when the commercial popularity of the erotic novel reached its height. With his dutiful wife serving as typist, Andrew wrote from their home in the Kentucky hills, locked away in an office no one dared intrude upon. Here he wrote more than four hundred pornographic novels. The more he wrote, the more intense his ambition became and the more difficult it was for his children to be part of his world. Over the long summer of 2013, Chris returned to his hometown to help his widowed mother move out of his childhood home. As he began to examine his father's manuscripts, memorabilia, journals, and letters, he realized he finally had an opportunity to gain insight into the difficult, mercurial, sometimes cruel man he'd loved and feared in equal measure. Only in his father's absence could he truly make sense of the man and his legacy.Contains mature themes.

Product Description: In this landmark medical narrative, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists Mark Johnson and Kathleen Gallagher chronicle the story of Nic Volker, the Wisconsin boy at the center of a daring breakthrough in medicine-a complete gene sequencing to discover the cure for an otherwise undiagnosable illness...read more

From thriving Motor City to the largest municipal bankruptcy in American history, Detroit has become the nation's cautionary tale. But what led to the fateful day of the filing, and how did the city survive this crisis? Journalist Nathan Bomey delivers the inside story of Detroit's decline and the people who fought to save it against impossible odds: governor Rick Snyder, a self-proclaimed nerd; emergency manager Kevyn Orr, a lawyer with singular dedication; judge Steven Rhodes, the city's conscience; and retirees who fought to ensure that Detroit kept its promises. In a tightly reported narrative, Bomey reveals the tricky path to the Grand Bargain that would determine the fate of pensioners, city services, and the world-class Detroit Institute of Arts, which faced the threat of liquidation. Detroit Resurrected offers a sweeping account of financial ruin, backroom intrigue, and political rebirth in the struggle to reinvent one of America's great cities.

Barliona: a virtual world jam-packed with monsters, battles-and, predictably, players. Millions of them come to Barliona, looking forward to the things they can't get in real life: elves and magic, dragons and princesses, and unforgettable combat. The game has become so popular that players now choose to spend months online without returning home. In Barliona, anything goes: You can assault fellow players, level up, become a mythical hero, a wizard, or a legendary thief. The only rule that attempted to regulate the game demanded that no player be allowed to feel actual pain. But there's an exception to every rule. For a certain bunch of players, Barliona has become their personal hell. They are criminals sent to Barliona to serve their time. They aren't in it for the dragons' gold or the abundant loot. All they want is to survive the virtual inferno. They face the ultimate survival quest.