Spice up a night out (or in) with hundreds of classics and 100% new drinking games and bar bets. Big Bad-Ass Book of Bar Tricks and Drinking Games is a handy, illustrated guide to 100 bar bets involving flying bottle caps, disappearing coins, animated cocktail napkins, and much more. Following the bar bets are 100 drinking games that keep the party going, with intriguing names such as Flip ‘n’ Strip, Snake Eyes, Shipwreck, and Death by Doubles. Easy-to-follow instructions—complete with illustrations—guarantee readers will be prepared to impress while having a great time.
The adoption of the 2030 UN Sustainable Development Goals was a landmark for the global community and our global sustainability. Now, one year after the initiation of the goals’, it is time to really start thinking about implementing and realizing the new global agenda. And it already obvious that traditional thinking will not suffice. To reach the new global goals by 2030, there is a pressing need to think creatively and innovatively. The annual investment gap amounts to US $2.5 trillion and the shortcoming of sufficient funding requires smart solutions, leverage of private sector capital and inclusion of civil society in new ways. The idea behind this book is to allow some of the world’s most renowned thought-leaders to provide their perspectives on how we collectively reach the global goals. From an artist and a Michelin-chef to a bank president and a Nobel Peace Prize winner, this book presents innovative, bold, and credible solutions to the challenges we face as humanity. Contributors include: Julia Gillard: Australia’s 27th Prime Minister between 2010 and 2013 Nandan Nilekani & Varad Pande: Nandan Nilekani is Chairman of the Unique Identification Authority of India. Varad Pande is Partner and Co-Lead of Financial Inclusion at Dalberg. Dan Barber: Chef of Blue Hill, a restaurant in Manhattan’s West Village. Ashish J. Thakkar & James I. Mwangi: Ashish J. Thakkar founded his first business in 1996 at the age of 15. James I. Mwangi is Executive Director of the Dalberg Group. Angel Gurría: Secretary-General of the OECD since June 2006. Fabiola Gianotti: The first female Director-General of CERN. Mogens Lykketoft: President of the UN General Assembly’s 70th session, running from September 2015 to September 2016 Jamie Drummond: Co-founder of ONE, a global pressure group which fights against the injustice of extreme poverty. Jacqueline Novogratz: Founded and directed the Philanthropy Workshop and the Next Generation Leadership programs at the Rockefeller Foundation. Kailash Satyarthi: Nobel Peace Laureate and founder of Kailash Satyarthi Children’s Foundation Luis Alberto Moreno: President of Inter-American Development Bank and served as Colombia’s Ambassador to the United States for seven years. Annie Leonard & Daniel Mittler: Annie Leonard is the Executive Director of Greenpeace USA. Daniel Mittler is the Political Director of Greenpeace International. James Mwangi: World-renowned for his contribution to financial inclusion in his role as the Group Managing Director and CEO of Equity Bank. Craig Silverstein & Mary Obelnicki: Founders of Echidna Giving, which works to get more girls into better schools. Danielle Nierenberg: President of Food Tank and an expert on sustainable agriculture and food issues. Amina J. Mohammed:A central player in the Sustainable Development Goals process, serving as the Special Adviser to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. Olafur Eliasson: Icelandic artist working with a wide range of media, including installation, painting, sculpture, photography, and film. Henrik Skovby: Founder and executive chairman of Dalberg Group. Stig Tackmann: Head of Dalberg’s Big Bet Initiative and is leading a number of media initiatives focusing on international affairs and global development.
"Rajiv J. Shah, president of the Rockefeller Foundation and former administrator of President Barack Obama's United States Agency for International Development, shares a dynamic new model for creating large scale change, inspired by his own involvements with some of the largest humanitarian projects of our time"--
A Wall Street Journal bestseller, now in paperback. Poker champion turned decision strategist Annie Duke teaches you how to get comfortable with uncertainty and make better decisions. Even the best decision doesn't yield the best outcome every time. There's always an element of luck that you can't control, and there's always information hidden from view. So the key to long-term success (and avoiding worrying yourself to death) is to think in bets: How sure am I? What are the possible ways things could turn out? What decision has the highest odds of success? Did I land in the unlucky 10% on the strategy that works 90% of the time? Or is my success attributable to dumb luck rather than great decision making? Annie Duke, a former World Series of Poker champion turned consultant, draws on examples from business, sports, politics, and (of course) poker to share tools anyone can use to embrace uncertainty and make better decisions. For most people, it's difficult to say "I'm not sure" in a world that values and, even, rewards the appearance of certainty. But professional poker players are comfortable with the fact that great decisions don't always lead to great outcomes, and bad decisions don't always lead to bad outcomes. By shifting your thinking from a need for certainty to a goal of accurately assessing what you know and what you don't, you'll be less vulnerable to reactive emotions, knee-jerk biases, and destructive habits in your decision making. You'll become more confident, calm, compassionate, and successful in the long run.
“An enthusiastic, example-rich argument for innovating in a particular way—by deliberately experimenting and taking small exploratory steps in novel directions. Light, bright, and packed with tidy anecdotes” (The Wall Street Journal). What do Apple CEO Steve Jobs, comedian Chris Rock, prize-winning architect Frank Gehry, and the story developers at Pixar films all have in common? Bestselling author Peter Sims found that rather than start with a big idea or plan a whole project in advance, they make a methodical series of little bets, learning critical information from lots of little failures and from small but significant wins. Reporting on a fascinating range of research, from the psychology of creative blocks to the influential field of design thinking, Sims offers engaging and illuminating accounts of breakthrough innovators at work, and a whole new way of thinking about how to navigate uncertain situations and unleash our untapped creative powers.
This book highlights the historic inflection point we are in, both in terms of philanthropy in general, and specifically in financing the solutions to our largest and most urgent social and environmental problems. It covers the two movements that have recently had a dramatic influence on capitalism. First, wealthy millennials have been pressuring their bankers to invest their family portfolios in companies with high social and environmental impact (ESG ratings), triggering a wave where the wealth management industry, and now all public companies, are significantly adapting to the increasing demand for good. Second, The Giving Pledge triggered another wave, changing what success and the accumulation of wealth means. It has even begun to redefine the goal of capitalism as more than 200 billionaires have pledged to give half or more of their wealth away. This book also focuses on the bottleneck problem that The Giving Pledge has created, as it is very hard to give hundreds of billions away with measurable impact to nonprofits lacking detailed long-term plans to scale. Nonprofits have never had the luxury of having all the resources to invest in the planning, management training and systems needed to rapidly expand. Thus taking in very large gifts is very difficult, and almost impossible to justify. Large philanthropy can always be used for traditional capital campaigns and to fund endowments, yet The Giving Pledge signers are often looking for large visible impact beyond these traditional avenues. The result is a bottleneck which has grown as more billionaires pledge their funds away while their wealth continues to skyrocket and giving rates stay very small. Finally, this book covers the emergence of large giving vehicles, modelled after the private equity industry. They have sophisticated third-party managers focused on deploying funds and supporting management teams. It also covers the scaling of nonprofits in a significant way (“Big Bets”) as well as investing large philanthropy through for-profits as Program Related Investments (PRI) at scale. This book is of interest specifically to nonprofit and foundation leaders, as well as wealth managers, estate attorneys and other philanthropic advisors. It is also of interest to investors and corporate CEOs as they begin to access these large pools for philanthropic capital to increase their impact. This book is focused on providing those with the ability to make large philanthropic investments a path to scale their impact and increase their fulfillment and that of their family. It provides a step-by-step guide of how these approaches, especially PRI at scale, can actually solve the social and environmental challenges that have been seemingly hopeless.
A riveting inside look at the lucrative world of professional high-stakes sports betting by a journalist who lived a secret life as a key operative in the world's most successful sports gambling ring. When journalist Michael Konik landed an interview with Rick "Big Daddy" Matthews, the largest bet he'd placed on a sporting event was $200. Konik, an expert blackjack and poker player, was no stranger to Vegas. But Matthews was in a different league: the man was rumored to be the world's smartest sports bettor, the mastermind behind "the Brain Trust," a shadowy group of gamblers known for their expertise in beating the Vegas line. Konik had heard the word on the street -- that Matthews was a snake, a conniver who would do anything to gain an edge. But he was also brilliant, cunning, and charming. And when he asked Konik if he'd like to "make a little money" during the football season, the writer found himself seduced . . . So began Michael Konik's wild ride as an operative of the elite Brain Trust. In The Smart Money, Konik takes readers behind the veil of secrecy shrouding the most successful sports betting operation in America, bypassing the myths and the rumors, going all the way to its innermost sanctum. He reveals how they -- and he -- got rich by beating the Vegas lines and, ultimately, the multimillion-dollar offshore betting circuit. He details the excesses and the betrayals, the horse-trading and the paranoia, that are the perks and perils of a lifestyle in which staking inordinate sums of money on the outcome of a single event -- sometimes as much as $1 million on a football game -- is a normal part of doing business.
Our most revered business icons of the last few decades are the bold risktakers, such as Richard Branson, Elon Musk, and Steve Jobs. Yet in today's stock market-driven economy, companies are playing it safe, with too many leaders focused on short-term gains, rather than value creation. The result is a static business culture that generates forgettable results—even as the world demands big solutions. So how do we get back in the risk-taking game? In The Risk Factor, Deborah Perry Piscione takes the most comprehensive look at this crucial, undervalued leadership behavior, and outlines how companies must support risk-taking across the enterprise. Exploring the heroes of risk, including entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and technologists, and the role risk-taking and failure tolerance play in their success, she makes a compelling case not only for big, flashy mergers or acquisitions, but also for unorthodox choices in everything from leadership to corporate social responsibility. Drawing on case studies from a wide range of now-famous giants (Netflix, Salesforce) and successful start-ups (Tesla, NetApp), she distills lessons for both new entrepreneurs and established companies whose longtime risk aversion has cost them more than they realize.
Wager that you can show everyone something they have never seen and that after they have seen it, no one will ever see it again. Wager that someone cannot push a quarter through a dime-sized hole in a business card without tearing the paper. Bet that a spectator will not be able to catch a falling dollar bill that is held between their outstretched fingers. A professional magician shares tricks that will amaze and confound viewers — and maybe even win a couple of bucks in a friendly bar bet. More than 60 illustrated feats range from balancing a dime on the edge of a dollar bill to rolling a cue ball under a stick placed across a pool table. These quick tricks are easy to learn and can be performed with such everyday items as coins, pencils, and matchsticks.
Right now, Congress, the Fed, and the Treasury are all gambling with your future and your money. And it's contagious. Economies around the globe are suffering from the biggest multitrillion-dollar bets ever wagered on big governments and miraculous financial interventions in pretend "free markets." One man saw it all coming and told his readers well in advance of today's crisis. Bill Bonner reports on the true health and well-being of the world's largest economy to over half a million readers each day in The Daily Reckoning. His newsletter is to the mainstream financial press what the Gnostic Gospels are to the King James Bible. Back in 2000, Bill Bonner sounded like a prophet crying in the wilderness. While everyone scrambled to purchase shares of the latest and hottest dot-com, Bill announced his Trade of the Decade: Sell dollars, buy gold. Back in 2000, you could get an ounce for around $264. Today, you could pay as much as $1,400 for that same ounce. Finally, some of Bonner's best pronouncements, predictions, and profitable analysis are collected in one place. Dice Have No Memory gather's Bonner's richest insights from August 1999 through November 2010 to form a chronological narrative of economics in America. Here's a fraction of what you'll find inside: *Gold says "I Told You So" *Three out of Four Economists Are Wrong *Imperial Overstretch Marks *Why Debt Does Matter *Economic Zombies Shuffle Towards Bankruptcy Bonner's Dice Have No Memory offers elegies for economists, tips for investors, tirades against wasteful warfare past and present, and practical guides to modern finance with graceful prose, well-earned intelligence, and riotous irreverence. Bill Bonner's common sense genius rips the window dressing off modern finance - a world normally populated by misguided do-gooders, corrupt politicians, and big bankers empowered by dubious "mathematical" truths. The investing game is rigged, just like Monte Carlo. Instead of giving you magic formulas, this archcontrarian teaches you how to think clearly. And Dice Have No Memory gives today's investor the next moves he should make...before it's too late.
