This book is a call to action. If you need to know what it takes to break through to a new layer of oxygen in an organization that has been flying high in the past, you will find this both an inspiring and practical approach. Nothing will swoop down to remove your challenges, but the framework explained in this book carves a clear path toward transforming an organization, as opposed to sinking into decline. This framework is grouped around three simple steps: What's the story? Who's on board? Getting things done. "Defying Doom recounts and explores genuine nightmares - lived, survived and avoided - in different corporate scenarios. These stories inspire executives not only to overcome but also to emerge stronger from certain situations despite uncertain and shifting environments. Quinn offers us a vivid and humane reading, full of tangible solutions for the 21st century executive."
"All disasters are in some sense man-made." Setting the annus horribilis of 2020 in historical perspective, Niall Ferguson explains why we are getting worse, not better, at handling disasters. Disasters are inherently hard to predict. Pandemics, like earthquakes, wildfires, financial crises. and wars, are not normally distributed; there is no cycle of history to help us anticipate the next catastrophe. But when disaster strikes, we ought to be better prepared than the Romans were when Vesuvius erupted, or medieval Italians when the Black Death struck. We have science on our side, after all. Yet in 2020 the responses of many developed countries, including the United States, to a new virus from China were badly bungled. Why? Why did only a few Asian countries learn the right lessons from SARS and MERS? While populist leaders certainly performed poorly in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, Niall Ferguson argues that more profound pathologies were at work--pathologies already visible in our responses to earlier disasters. In books going back nearly twenty years, including Colossus, The Great Degeneration, and The Square and the Tower, Ferguson has studied the foibles of modern America, from imperial hubris to bureaucratic sclerosis and online fragmentation. Drawing from multiple disciplines, including economics, cliodynamics, and network science, Doom offers not just a history but a general theory of disasters, showing why our ever more bureaucratic and complex systems are getting worse at handling them. Doom is the lesson of history that this country--indeed the West as a whole--urgently needs to learn, if we want to handle the next crisis better, and to avoid the ultimate doom of irreversible decline.
The idea of the ‘Bangladesh paradox’ describes the unexpected social progress that Bangladesh has made in recent decades that has been both pro-poor and gender equitable. This began at a time when the country was characterised by extreme levels of poverty, poor quality governance, an oppressive patriarchy and rising Islamic orthodoxy. This ‘paradox’ has evoked a great deal of interest within the international development community because Bangladesh had been dubbed an ‘international basket case’ at the time of its independence in 1971, seemingly trapped in a development impasse. Previous attempts to explain this paradox have generally taken a top-down approach, focusing on the role of leading institutional actors – donors, government, NGOs and the private sector. In Renegotiating Patriarchy: Gender, Agency and the Bangladesh Paradox, Naila Kabeer starts with the rationale that policy actions taken at the top are unlikely to materialise into actual changes if they are not acted on by the mass of ordinary women and men. But what led these women and men to act? And why did they act in ways that modified some of the more oppressive aspects of patriarchy in the country? That is what this book sets out to investigate. It describes the history of the Bengal delta, and the forces that gave rise to the kind of society that Bangladesh was at the time of its independence. It considers the policy and politics that characterised post-independence Bangladesh and how these contributed to the progress captured in the idea of the Bangladesh paradox. But the key argument of the book is that much of this progress reflected the agency exercised by ordinary, often very poor, women in the course of their everyday lives. Their agency helped to translate institutional actions into concrete changes on the ground. To explore why and how this happened, the book draws on a rich body of ethnographic, qualitative and quantitative research on social change in Bangladesh – including studies by the author herself. The book is therefore about how norms and practices can change in progressive ways despite unpropitious circumstances as a result of the efforts of poor women in Bangladesh to renegotiate what had been described as one of the most non-negotiable patriarchies in the world.
A “breezily entertaining” look at the comic couple who hobnobbed with Dorothy Parker, S. J. Perelman, Bennett Cerf, and other luminaries of their day (The New York Times Book Review). Nathanael West—author, screenwriter, playwright—was famous for two masterpieces: Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust, which remains one the most penetrating novels ever written about Hollywood. He was also one of the most gifted and original writers of his generation, a scathing satirist whose insight into the brutalities of modern life proved prophetic. Eileen McKenney—accidental muse, literary heroine—grew up corn-fed in the Midwest and moved to Manhattan’s Greenwich Village when she was twenty-one. The inspiration for her sister Ruth’s stories in the New Yorker under the banner of “My Sister Eileen,” she became an overnight celebrity, and her star eventually crossed with that of the man she would impulsively marry. Together, Nathanael and Eileen had entrée into a social circle that included F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dashiell Hammett, Katharine White, and many of the literary, theatrical, and film luminaries of the era. But their carefree, offbeat Broadway-to-Hollywood love story would flame out almost as soon as it began. Now, with “a great marriage of scholarship and gossip” (Minneapolis Star-Tribune), this biography restores West and McKenney to their rightful place in the popular imagination, offering “a shrewd portrait of two people who in their different ways were noteworthy participants in American culture during one of its liveliest periods” (Los Angeles Times). “Opens a window onto the lives of writers in 1930s America as they struggled with anxieties, pretensions, temptations and myths that confound our culture to this day.” —Salon.com “The first to fully chronicle and entwine these careening lives, Meade forges an engrossing, madcap, and tragic American story of ambition, reinvention, and risk.” —Booklist, starred review
A book introduces new thoughts, but it cannot make them speedily understood. It is the task of the sturdypioneer to hew the tall oak and to cut the rough granite. Future ages must declare what the pioneer has accomplished.
