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Kleptopia How Dirty Money Is Conqueri...
"A must-read for anyone wanting to better understand what has already happened here in America and what lies ahead if Trump is reelected in November…. A magisterial account of the money and violence behind the world’s most powerful dictatorships.” –Washington Post
In this shocking, meticulously reported work of narrative nonfiction, an award-winning investigative journalist exposes "capitalism’s monster”—global kleptocracy—and reveals how it is corrupting the world around us.
They are everywhere, the thieves and their people. Masters of secrecy. Until now we have detected their presence only by what they leave behind. A body in a burned-out Audi. Workers riddled with bullets in the Kazakh Desert. A rigged election in Zimbabwe. A British banker silenced and humiliated for trying to expose the truth about the City of London.
They have amassed more money than most countries. But what they are really stealing is power.
In this real-life thriller packed with jaw-dropping revelations, award-winning investigative journalist Tom Burgis weaves together four stories that reveal a terrifying global web of corruption: the troublemaker from Basingstoke who stumbles on the secrets of a Swiss bank, the ex-Soviet billionaire constructing a private empire, the righteous Canadian lawyer with a mysterious client, and the Brooklyn crook protected by the CIA.
Glimpses of this shadowy world have emerged over the years. In Kleptopia, Burgis connects the dots. He follows the dirty money that is flooding the global economy, emboldening dictators, and poisoning democracies. From the Kremlin to Beijing, Harare to Riyadh, Paris to the White House, the trail shows something even more sinister: the thieves are uniting. And the human cost will be great.
Contagious by Jonah Berger
Brief Summary
Contagious: Why Things Catch On.
What makes things popular? Why do people talk about certain products and ideas more than others? Why are some stories and rumors more infectious? And what makes online content go viral?
If you said advertising, think again. People don't listen to advertisements, they listen to their peers. But why do people talk about certain products and ideas more than others? Why are some stories and rumors more infectious? And what makes online content go viral?
Wharton marketing professor Jonah Berger has spent the last decade answering these questions. He's studied why New York Times articles make the paper's own Most E-mailed List, why products get word of mouth, and how social influence shapes everything from the cars we buy to the clothes we wear to the names we give our children. In this book, Berger reveals the secret science behind word-of-mouth and social transmission. Discover how six basic principles drive all sorts of things to become contagious, from consumer products and policy initiatives to workplace rumors and YouTube videos.
Contagious combines groundbreaking research with powerful stories. Learn how a luxury steakhouse found popularity through the lowly cheese-steak, why anti-drug commercials might have actually increased drug use, and why more than 200 million consumers shared a video about one of the seemingly most boring products there is: a blender. If you've wondered why certain stories get shared, e-mails get forwarded, or videos go viral, Contagious explains why, and shows how to leverage these concepts to craft contagious content. This book provides a set of specific, actionable techniques for helping information spread - for designing messages, advertisements, and information that people will share. Whether you're a manager at a big company, a small business owner trying to boost awareness, a politician running for office, or a health official trying to get the word out, Contagious will show you how to make your product or idea catch on.
ISBN:9781451686579
Author:Jonah Berger
The Laws of Human Nature by Robert Gr...
From the #1 New York Times-bestselling author of The 48 Laws of Power comes the definitive new book on decoding the behavior of the people around you.
Robert Greene is a master guide for millions of readers, distilling ancient wisdom and philosophy into essential texts for seekers of power, understanding and mastery. Now he turns to the most important subject of all - understanding people's drives and motivations, even when they are unconscious of them themselves.
We are social animals. Our very lives depend on our relationships with people.
Knowing why people do what they do is the most important tool we can possess, without which our other talents can only take us so far. Drawing from the ideas and examples of Pericles, Queen Elizabeth I, Martin Luther King Jr, and many others, Greene teaches us how to detach ourselves from our own emotions and master self-control, how to develop the empathy that leads to insight, how to look behind people's masks, and how to resist conformity to develop your singular sense of purpose. Whether at work, in relationships, or in shaping the world around you, The Laws of Human Nature offers brilliant tactics for success, self-improvement, and self-defense.
Extreme Economies by Richard Davies
Brief Summary
To understand how humans react and adapt to economic change we need to study people who live in harsh environments. From war zones, natural disasters and failed states, to aging societies and the challenges of technological advancement, every life in this book has been hit by a seismic shock, violently broken or changed in some way.
People living in these odd and marginal places are ignored by number crunching economists and political pollsters alike. Science suggests this is a mistake. This book tells the personal stories of humans living in extreme situations, and of the financial infrastructure they create. Here, economies are not concerned with the familiar stock market crashes, housing crises, or banking scandals of the financial pages.
In his quest for a purer view of how economies succeed and fail, Richard Davies takes the reader off the beaten path to places where part of the economy has been repressed, removed, destroyed or turbocharged. By travelling to each of them and discovering what life is really like, Extreme Economies tells small stories that shed light on today’s biggest economic questions, with vital lessons for our future.
The Founders Mentality by Chris Zook ...
Brief Summary
The Founder’s Mentality: How to Overcome the Predictable Crises of Growth.
Three Principles for Managing—and Avoiding—the Problems of Growth
Why is profitable growth so hard to achieve and sustain? Most executives manage their companies as if the solution to that problem lies in the external environment: find an attractive market, formulate the right strategy, win new customers.
But when Bain & Company’s Chris Zook and James Allen, authors of the bestselling Profit from the Core, researched this question, they found that when companies fail to achieve their growth targets, 90 percent of the time the root causes are internal, not external—increasing distance from the front lines, loss of accountability, proliferating processes and bureaucracy, to name only a few. What’s more, companies experience a set of predictable internal crises, at predictable stages, as they grow. Even for healthy companies, these crises, if not managed properly, stifle the ability to grow further—and can actively lead to decline.
The key insight from Zook and Allen’s research is that managing these choke points requires a "founder’s mentality”—behaviors typically embodied by a bold, ambitious founder—to restore speed, focus, and connection to customers:
• An insurgent’s clear mission and purpose
• An unambiguous owner mindset
• A relentless obsession with the front line
Based on the authors’ decade-long study of companies in more than forty countries, The Founder’s Mentality demonstrates the strong relationship between these three traits in companies of all kinds—not just start-ups—and their ability to sustain performance. Through rich analysis and inspiring examples, this book shows how any leader—not only a founder—can instill and leverage a founder’s mentality throughout their organization and find lasting, profitable growth.
ISBN:9781633691162
Author:Chris Zook and James Allen
Friction by Roger Dooley
Brief Summary
Annually, $4.6 trillion of merchandise is left in abandoned e-commerce shopping carts.
Every year, the U.S. economy loses $3 trillion dollars in productivity due to excess bureaucracy.
Red tape and over-complicated licenses have contributed to China's GDP exceeding India's by $82 trillion over the span of just three decades.
If you're a business leader, these statistics should give you nightmares. According to science-based marketing and business expert Roger Dooley, they illustrate the real and growing threat of "friction," which he defines as the unnecessary expenditure of time, effort, or money in performing a task.
In today's high-speed, customer-empowered world, the levels of swiftness and efficiency of business transactions will determine ultimate success or failure. In this groundbreaking guide, Dooley helps you spot the inevitable points of friction in your organization, and he provides the tools and insight you need to eliminate them. By truly understanding the impact friction can have, you'll be able to establish positive habits and eliminate negative ones--all with the end result of building a company that's the envy of your industry. Friction takes you step-by-step through the process of:
Empowering frank conversations
Guiding individual and team behaviors
Getting ahead of friction
Optimizing the customer experience
Building a frictionless corporate culture
Combining scientific research with real-life examples of leaders who have conquered business friction, Dooley teaches you how to identify roadblocks, alter them for the benefit of both business and customer, and create positive, lasting change.
If you're in a leadership position, now is the time to declare war on friction--before your competitors do. Stamp out ridiculous rules, pointless procedures, and meaningless meetings. Become a relentless advocate for the customer and for minimizing customer effort. Lubricate every point of friction and make your company run like a well-oiled machine.
Friction provides the know-how you need to lead your company to industry dominance
ISBN:9781260135695
Author:Roger Dooley
Capital and Ideology by Thomas Piketty
The epic successor to one of the most important books of the century: at once a retelling of global history, a scathing critique of contemporary politics, and a bold proposal for a new and fairer economic system.
Thomas Piketty's bestselling Capital in the Twenty-First Century galvanized global debate about inequality.
In this audacious follow-up, Piketty challenges us to revolutionize how we think about politics, ideology, and history. He exposes the ideas that have sustained inequality for the past millennium, reveals why the shallow politics of right and left are failing us today, and outlines the structure of a fairer economic system.
Our economy, Piketty observes, is not a natural fact. Markets, profits, and capital are all historical constructs that depend on choices. Piketty explores the material and ideological interactions of conflicting social groups that have given us slavery, serfdom, colonialism, communism, and hypercapitalism, shaping the lives of billions.
He concludes that the great driver of human progress over the centuries has been the struggle for equality and education and not, as often argued, the assertion of property rights or the pursuit of stability. The new era of extreme inequality that has derailed that progress since the 1980s, he shows, is partly a reaction against communism, but it is also the fruit of ignorance, intellectual specialization, and our drift toward the dead-end politics of identity.
Once we understand this, we can begin to envision a more balanced approach to economics and politics. Piketty argues for a new "participatory" socialism, a system founded on an ideology of equality, social property, education, and the sharing of knowledge and power. Capital and Ideology is destined to be one of the indispensable books of our time, a work that will not only help us understand the world, but that will change it.
The Harvard Business Review Entrepren...
Brief Summary
The Harvard Business Review Entrepreneur's Handbook: Everything You Need to Launch and Grow Your New Business.
The one primer you need to develop your entrepreneurial skills.
Whether you're imagining your new business to be the next big thing in Silicon Valley, a pivotal B2B provider, or an anchor in your local community, the HBR Entrepreneur's Handbook is your essential resource for getting your company off the ground.
Starting an independent new business is rife with both opportunity and risk. And as an entrepreneur, you're the one in charge: your actions can make or break your business. You need to know the tried-and-true fundamentals--from writing a business plan to getting your first loan. You also need to know the latest thinking on how to create an irresistible pitch deck, mitigate risk through experimentation, and develop unique opportunities through business model innovation.
The HBR Entrepreneur's Handbook addresses these challenges and more with practical advice and wisdom from Harvard Business Review's archive. Keep this comprehensive guide with you throughout your startup's life--and increase your business's odds for success.
In the HBR Entrepreneur's Handbook you'll find:
Step-by-step guidance through the entrepreneurial process
Concise explanations of the latest research and thinking on entrepreneurship from Harvard Business Review contributors such as Marc Andreessen and Reid Hoffman
Time-honed best practices
Stories of real companies, from Airbnb to eBay
You'll learn:
Which skills and characteristics make for the best entrepreneurs
How to gauge potential opportunities
The basics of business models and competitive strategy
How to test your assumptions--before you build a whole business
How to select the right legal structure for your company
How to navigate funding options, from venture capital and angel investors to accelerators and crowdfunding
How to develop sales and marketing programs for your venture
What entrepreneurial leaders must do to build culture and set direction as the business keeps growing
HBR Handbooks provide ambitious professionals with the frameworks, advice, and tools they need to excel in their careers. With step-by-step guidance, time-honed best practices, real-life stories, and concise explanations of research published in Harvard Business Review, each comprehensive volume helps you to stand out from the pack--whatever your role.
ISBN:9781633693685
Author:Harvard Business Review
Conscious Capitalism Field Guide
Brief Summary
Conscious Capitalism Field Guide: Tools for Transforming Your Organization.
Build conscious leadership into your business.
You subscribe to the basic idea that business can do more than make money, but you're not sure how to act on that conviction or how to share it with the rest of your organization. The Conscious Capitalism Field Guide--the authoritative follow-up to the bestselling book Conscious Capitalism, by John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods Market, and leadership expert Raj Sisodia--gives you the tools for sharing and implementing the principles of higher purpose and conscious business throughout your organization.
This practical guide provides hands-on materials--the same tools used in companies such as Whole Foods Market, Southwest Airlines, Life is Good, The Container Store, Barry-Wehmiller, Zappos, and many others--that you can use on your own, with your team, or with others throughout your organization to build conscious leadership and practices into your business. Organized according to the four core principles (higher purpose, stakeholder orientation, conscious leadership, and conscious culture) of Conscious Capitalism, the book provides exercises, worksheets, checklists, and instructions--for use both individually and with teams--as well as advice, examples, and real-life stories to help you apply these ideas and make them come alive in your organization. You and your team will:
write a purpose statement
learn how to create win-win-win relationships with all your stakeholders
create a "culture playbook" for your company
develop a leadership checklist for your organization
build a personal leadership development plan
set priorities for the coming year and beyond
ISBN:9781633691711
Author:Raj Sisodia, Timothy Henry and Thomas Eckschmidt
Act Like a Leader Think Like a Leader...
Brief Summary
You aspire to lead with greater impact. The problem is you’re busy executing on today’s demands. You know you have to carve out time from your day job to build your leadership skills, but it’s easy to let immediate problems and old mind-sets get in the way. Herminia Ibarra—an expert on professional leadership and development and a renowned professor at INSEAD, a leading international business school—shows how managers and executives at all levels can step up to leadership by making small but crucial changes in their jobs, their networks, and themselves. In Act Like a Leader, Think Like a Leader, she offers advice to help you:
Redefine your job in order to make more strategic contributions
Diversify your network so that you connect to, and learn from, a bigger range of stakeholders
Become more playful with your self-concept, allowing your familiar—and possibly outdated—leadership style to evolve
Ibarra turns the usual "think first and then act” philosophy on its head by arguing that doing these three things will help you learn through action and will increase what she calls your outsight—the valuable external perspective you gain from direct experiences and experimentation. As opposed to insight, outsight will then help change the way you think as a leader: about what kind of work is important; how you should invest your time; why and which relationships matter in informing and supporting your leadership; and, ultimately, who you want to become.
Packed with self-assessments and practical advice to help define your most pressing leadership challenges, this book will help you devise a plan of action to become a better leader and move your career to the next level. It’s time to learn by doing.
ISBN:9781422184127
Author:Herminia Ibarra
Six Simple Rules by Peter Tollman and...
Brief Summary
Six Simple Rules: How to Manage Complexity without Getting Complicated.
New tools for managing complexity
Does your organization manage complexity by making things more complicated? If so, you are not alone.
According to The Boston Consulting Group’s fascinating Complexity Index, business complexity has increased sixfold during the past sixty years. And, all the while, organizational complicatedness—that is, the number of structures, processes, committees, decision-making forums, and systems—has increased by a whopping factor of thirty-five. In their attempt to respond to the increasingly complex performance requirements they face, company leaders have created an organizational labyrinth that makes it more and more difficult to improve productivity and to pursue innovation. It also disengages and demotivates the workforce.
Clearly it’s time for leaders to stop trying to manage complexity with their traditional tools and instead better leverage employees' intelligence. This book shows you how and explains the implications for designing and leading organizations.
The way to manage complexity, the authors argue, is neither with the hard solutions of another era nor with the soft solutions—such as team building and feel-good "people initiatives”—that often follow in their wake. Based on social sciences (notably economics, game theory, and organizational sociology) and The Boston Consulting Group’s work with more than five hundred companies in more than forty countries and in various industries, authors Yves Morieux and Peter Tollman recommend six simple rules to manage complexity without getting complicated.
Showing why the rules work and how to put them into practice, Morieux and Tollman give managers a much-needed tool to reinvigorate people in the face of seemingly endless complexity. Included are detailed examples from companies that have achieved a multiplicative effect on performance by using them.
It’s time to manage complexity better. Employ these six simple rules to foster autonomy and cooperation and to effectively handle business complexity. As a result, you will improve productivity, innovate more, reengage your workforce, and seize opportunities to create competitive advantage.
ISBN:9781422190555
Author:Peter Tollman and Yves Morieux
Dear CEO 50 Personal Letters from the...
Brief Summary
This collection of specially-commissioned letters offers clear, calming and concise advice from across the spectrum of current leadership thinking. Written by respected business thinkers around the world, these 50 letters provide guidance, wisdom and personal insight into the particular challenges facing the business world today and anyone in a senior position.
Contributors include high-profile names such as Tom Peters, who stresses the importance of focussing on the people within an organization; Liz Mellon, who writes to her CEO about gender equality in the workplace; Chris Zook, explaining how a change of mentality can lead to exponential growth; and Linda Brimm, who discusses managing global cosmopolitans and a modern workforce.
Dear CEO also features a foreword by Zhang Ruimin, Chairman and CEO of Haier Group.
ISBN:9781472950680
Author:Thinkers50
Goldman Sachs The Culture of Success ...
Brief Summary
Former Goldman Sachs Vice President Lisa Endlich draws on an insider’s knowledge to bring to life this unique company and the most stunning accomplishments in modern American finance.
The history, mystique, and remarkable success of Goldman Sachs, the world’s premier investment bank, are examined in unprecedented depth in this fascinating and authoritative study.
The firm’s spectacular ascent is traced in the context of its tenacious grip on its core values. Endlich shows how close client contact, teamwork, focus on long-term profitability rather than short-term opportunism, and the ability to recruit consistently some of the most talented people on Wall Street helped the firm generate a phenomenal $3 billion in pretax profits in 1997. And she describes in detail the monumental events of 1998 that shook Goldman Sachs and the financial world.
This is a rare and revealing look inside a great institution—the last private partnership on Wall Street—and inside the financial world at its highest levels.
ISBN:9780684869681
Author:Lisa Endlich
Inside Apple by Adam Lashinsky
Brief Summary
Inside Apple: The Secrets Behind the Past and Future Success of Steve Jobs's Iconic Brand
In INSIDE APPLE, Adam Lashinsky provides readers with an insight on leadership and innovation. He introduces Apple business concepts like the 'DRI' (Apple's practice of assigning a Directly Responsible Individual to every task) and the Top 100 (an annual event where that year's top 100 up-and-coming executives were surreptitiously transported to a secret retreat with company founder Steve Jobs).
Based on numerous interviews, the book reveals exclusive new information about how Apple innovates, deals with its suppliers, and is handling the transition into the Post Jobs Era. While INSIDE APPLE provides a detailed investigation into the unique company, its lessons about leadership, product design and marketing are universal. INSIDE APPLE will appeal to anyone hoping to bring some of the Apple magic to their own company, career, or creative endeavour.
ISBN:9781848547445
Author:Adam Lashinsky
Unholy Trinity The IMF World Bank and...
Brief Summary
Who really runs the global economy? Who benefits most from it?
The answer is a triad of 'governance institutions' - The IMF, the World Bank and the WTO. Globalization massively increased the power of these institutions and they drastically affected the livelihoods of peoples across the world. Yet they operate undemocratically and aggressively promote a particular kind of neoliberal capitalism. Under the 'Washington Consensus' they proposed, poverty was to be ended by increasing inequality.
This new edition of Unholy Trinity, completely updated and revised, argues that neoliberal global capitalism has now entered a period of crisis so severe that governance will become impossible. Huge incomes for a small number of super-rich people produced an unstable global economy, rife with speculation and structurally prone to crises. The IMF is in disgrace, the WTO can hardly meet anymore and the World Bank survives as a global philanthropist. Is this the end for the Unholy Trinity?
ISBN:9781848132528
Author:Richard Peet
Brands on a Mission by Myriam Sidibe ...
Brief Summary
Brands on a Mission explores the importance of creating a performance culture that is built on driving impact through purpose, and the type of talent required to drive these transformational changes within companies – from CEO to brand developers.
Using evidence from interviews and stories from over 100 CEOs, thought leaders and brand managers, the book presents an emergent model that organisations can follow to build purpose into their growth strategy – and shows how to bridge the gap between Brand Say and Brand Do. Readers will learn from the real experts in the field: how Paul Polman, former CEO of Unilever, built purpose into the DNA of his company; what keeps Alan Jope (new CEO, Unilever) and Emmanuel Faber (CEO, Danone) awake at night; and how brand developers from Durex, Dove, Discovery and LIXIL have made choices and the reasons behind them. In this book you will learn how a soap brand Lifebuoy taught one billion people about hygiene, how a beer is tackling gender-based violence, and how a toothpaste is tackling school absenteeism amongst many others. Renowned experts like Peter Piot (Director, London School of Health and Tropical Medicine), Michael Porter (Professor, Harvard School of Business), Jane Nelson (Director, Corporate Responsibility Initiative, Harvard Kennedy School) and Susie Orbach (leading feminist and formerly professor, London School of Economics) also share examples, data and their everyday experiences of helping corporates create a culture of purpose. And leading NGOs and UN experts like Lawrence Haddad (Executive Director, GAIN) and Natalia Kanem (Executive Director of UNFPA) will recount how the public and private sector have worked together to create an accelerated path to reaching the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030.
The book provides a clear pathway of how to take brands through the journey of developing impactful social missions and driving business growth, and is an essential guide for both managers and students alike.
ISBN:9780367428334
Author:Myriam Sidibe
Leading Without Authority by Keith Fe...
Brief Summary
Leading Without Authority: How the New Power of Co-Elevation Can Break Down Silos, Transform Teams, and Reinvent Collaboration.
In times of stress, we have a choice: we can retreat further into our isolated silos, or we can commit to "going higher together.”
When external pressures are mounting, and employees are working from far-flung locations across the globe, says bestselling author Keith Ferrazzi, we can no longer afford to waste time navigating the complex chains of command or bureaucratic bottlenecks present in most companies. But when we choose the bold new methodology of co-elevation as our operating model, we unlock the potential to boost productivity, deepen commitment and engagement, and create a level of trust, mutual accountability, and purpose that exceeds what could have been accomplished under the status quo.
And you don’t need any formal authority to do it. You simply have to marshal a commitment to a shared mission and care about the success and development of others as much as you care about your own. Regardless of your title, position, or where or how you work, the ability to lead without authority is an essential workplace competency.
Here, Ferrazzi draws on over a decade of research and over thirty years helping CEOs and senior leaders drive innovation and build high-performing teams to show how we can all turn our colleagues and partners into teammates and truly reboot the way we work together.
ISBN:9780525575665
Author:Keith Ferrazzi
The Longevity Economy by Joseph F Cou...
Brief Summary
The Longevity Economy: Unlocking the World's Fastest-Growing, Most Misunderstood Market.
Oldness: a social construct at odds with reality that constrains how we live after middle age and stifles business thinking on how to best serve a group of consumers, workers, and innovators that is growing larger and wealthier with every passing day.
Over the past two decades, Joseph F. Coughlin has been busting myths about aging with groundbreaking multidisciplinary research into what older people actually want--not what conventional wisdom suggests they need. In The Longevity Economy, Coughlin provides the framing and insight business leaders need to serve the growing older market: a vast, diverse group of consumers representing every possible level of health and wealth, worth about $8 trillion in the United States alone and climbing.
Coughlin provides deep insight into a population that consistently defies expectations: people who, through their continued personal and professional ambition, desire for experience, and quest for self-actualization, are building a striking, unheralded vision of longer life that very few in business fully understand. His focus on women--they outnumber men, control household spending and finances, and are leading the charge toward tomorrow's creative new narrative of later life--is especially illuminating.
Coughlin pinpoints the gap between myth and reality and then shows businesses how to bridge it. As the demographics of global aging transform and accelerate, it is now critical to build a new understanding of the shifting physiological, cognitive, social, family, and psychological realities of the longevity economy.
ISBN:9781610396639
Author:Joseph F Coughli
The Passion Economy by Adam Davidson
Brief Summary
The Passion Economy: The New Rules for Thriving in the Twenty-First Century.
The brilliant creator of NPR's Planet Money podcast and award-winning New Yorker staff writer explains our current economy: laying out its internal logic and revealing the transformative hope it offers for millions of people to thrive as they never have before.
Contrary to what you may have heard, the middle class is not dying and robots are not stealing our jobs. In fact, writes Adam Davidson--one of our leading public voices on economic issues-- the twenty-first-century economic paradigm offers new ways of making money, fresh paths toward professional fulfillment, and unprecedented opportunities for curious, ambitious individuals to combine the things they love with their careers.
Drawing on the stories of average people doing exactly this--a dissatisfied accountant overturning his industry, a zealous father creating a better chocolate bar for his children, a family of craftsmen meeting the technological needs of Amish farmers--as well as the latest academic research, Davidson demonstrates how the twentieth-century economy of scale has given way in this century to an economy of passion.
He makes clear, too, that though the adjustment has brought measures of dislocation, confusion, and even panic, these are most often the result of a lack of understanding. In The Passion Economy, he delineates the ground rules of the new economy, and armed with these, we begin to see how we can succeed in it according to its own terms--intimacy, insight, attention, automation, and, of course, passion. An indispensable road map and a refreshingly optimistic take on our economic future.
ISBN:9780385353526
Author:Adam Davidson
Upstream How to Solve Problems Before...
So often in life, we get stuck in a cycle of response. We put out fires. We deal with emergencies. We stay downstream, handling one problem after another, but we never make our way upstream to fix the systems that caused the problems.
Cops chase robbers, doctors treat patients with chronic illnesses, and call-center reps address customer complaints. But many crimes, chronic illnesses, and customer complaints are preventable. So why do our efforts skew so heavily toward reaction rather than prevention?
Upstream probes the psychological forces that push us downstream—including "problem blindness,” which can leave us oblivious to serious problems in our midst. And Heath introduces us to the thinkers who have overcome these obstacles and scored massive victories by switching to an upstream mindset. One online travel website prevented twenty million customer service calls every year by making some simple tweaks to its booking system.
A major urban school district cut its dropout rate in half after it figured out that it could predict which students would drop out—as early as the ninth grade. A European nation almost eliminated teenage alcohol and drug abuse by deliberately changing the nation’s culture. And one EMS system accelerated the emergency-response time of its ambulances by using data to predict where 911 calls would emerge—and forward-deploying its ambulances to stand by in those areas.
Upstream delivers practical solutions for preventing problems rather than reacting to them. How many problems in our lives and in society are we tolerating simply because we’ve forgotten that we can fix them?
