Download or read book Thinking Small written by Andrea Hiott and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 2012-01-17 with total page 514 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sometimes achieving big things requires the ability to think small. This simple concept was the driving force that propelled the Volkswagen Beetle to become an avatar of American-style freedom, a household brand, and a global icon. The VW Bug inspired the ad men of Madison Avenue, beguiled Woodstock Nation, and has recently been re-imagined for the hipster generation. And while today it is surely one of the most recognizable cars in the world, few of us know the compelling details of this car’s story. In Thinking Small, journalist and cultural historian Andrea Hiott retraces the improbable journey of this little car that changed the world. Andrea Hiott’s wide-ranging narrative stretches from the factory floors of Weimar Germany to the executive suites of today’s automotive innovators, showing how a succession of artists and engineers shepherded the Beetle to market through periods of privation and war, reconstruction and recovery. Henry Ford’s Model T may have revolutionized the American auto industry, but for years Europe remained a place where only the elite drove cars. That all changed with the advent of the Volkswagen, the product of a Nazi initiative to bring driving to the masses. But Hitler’s concept of “the people’s car” would soon take on new meaning. As Germany rebuilt from the rubble of World War II, a whole generation succumbed to the charms of the world’s most huggable automobile. Indeed, the story of the Volkswagen is a story about people, and Hiott introduces us to the men who believed in it, built it, and sold it: Ferdinand Porsche, the visionary Austrian automobile designer whose futuristic dream of an affordable family vehicle was fatally compromised by his patron Adolf Hitler’s monomaniacal drive toward war; Heinrich Nordhoff, the forward-thinking German industrialist whose management innovations made mass production of the Beetle a reality; and Bill Bernbach, the Jewish American advertising executive whose team of Madison Avenue mavericks dreamed up the legendary ad campaign that transformed the quintessential German compact into an outsize worldwide phenomenon. Thinking Small is the remarkable story of an automobile and an idea. Hatched in an age of darkness, the Beetle emerged into the light of a new era as a symbol of individuality and personal mobility—a triumph not of the will but of the imagination.
Download or read book Go Long written by Dennis Carey and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2018-05-08 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Go Long, authors Dennis Carey, Brian Dumaine, Michael Useem, and Rodney Zemmel take you behind the scenes to witness the business decisions that are enabling leading organizations to outsmart and outlast the competition.
Download or read book The Good Ancestor written by Roman Krznaric and published by The Experiment. This book was released on 2021-08-31 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now in paperback: A call to save ourselves and our planet that gets to the root of the current crisis—society’s extreme short-sightedness
Download or read book Long Term Thinking for a Short Term World written by Jim Brumm and published by . This book was released on 2012-06-01 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jim Brumm's "Long-Term Thinking for a Short-Sighted World" focuses on the problems we face today that share a common, rarely discussed theme: a lack of long-term thinking. The book explores examples-past and present-of humanity pursuing short-term gains at the expense of our long-term well being. Topics include energy, debt, consumerism, agriculture and our skewed perceptions of time. ""In today's world we are grappling at every turn with an increasing energy shortage, food production systems that struggle to feed increasing millions, environmental problems that threaten our survival, a debt crisis that is crippling individuals and governments, and so much more. All of these problems come with their own unique challenges and examined on their own they may seem completely different from each other, but they share one common, rarely discussed hidden thread that runs through the center of each and binds them together: a lack of long-term thinking. We're very bad long-term thinkers."" Jim delivers a message of hope, helping to answer the question, "How can I live my life in a way that brings satisfaction, balance, happiness, and a sense of value? In other words, how can I be part of the solution?" He suggests positive ways to improve our ability to embrace a larger vision of our place in the world. Conversational, provocative, witty and often laugh-aloud funny, "Long-Term Thinking for a Short-Sighted World" will inspire readers who are seeking ways to realign priorities and re-examine what brings true, long-term happiness and sustainability.
Download or read book The Long Game written by Dorie Clark and published by Harvard Business Press. This book was released on 2021-09-21 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Wall Street Journal Bestseller Your personal goals need a long-term strategy. It's no secret that we're pushed to the limit. Today's professionals feel rushed, overwhelmed, and perennially behind. So we keep our heads down, focused on the next thing, and the next, without a moment to breathe. How can we break out of this endless cycle and create the kind of interesting, meaningful lives we all seek? Just as CEOs who optimize for quarterly profits often fail to make the strategic investments necessary for long-term growth, the same is true in our own personal and professional lives. We need to reorient ourselves to see the big picture so we can tap into the power of small changes that, made today, will have an enormous and disproportionate impact on our future success. We need to start playing The Long Game. As top business thinker and Duke University professor Dorie Clark explains, we all know intellectually that lasting success takes persistence and effort. And yet so much of the relentless pressure in our culture pushes us toward doing what's easy, what's guaranteed, or what looks glamorous in the moment. In The Long Game, she argues for a different path. It's about doing small things over time to achieve our goals—and being willing to keep at them, even when they seem pointless, boring, or hard. In The Long Game, Clark shares unique principles and frameworks you can apply to your specific situation, as well as vivid stories from her own career and other professionals' experiences. Everyone is allotted the same twenty-four hours—but with the right strategies, you can leverage those hours in more efficient and powerful ways than you ever imagined. It's never an overnight process, but the long-term payoff is immense: to finally break out of the frenetic day-to-day routine and transform your life and your career.
Download or read book The Optimist s Telescope written by Bina Venkataraman and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2020-08-25 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Named a Best Book of 2019 by NPR “How might we mitigate losses caused by shortsightedness? Bina Venkataraman, a former climate adviser to the Obama administration, brings a storyteller’s eye to this question. . . . She is also deeply informed about the relevant science.” —The New York Times Book Review A trailblazing exploration of how we can plan better for the future: our own, our families’, and our society’s. Instant gratification is the norm today—in our lives, our culture, our economy, and our politics. Many of us have forgotten (if we ever learned) how to make smart decisions for the long run. Whether it comes to our finances, our health, our communities, or our planet, it’s easy to avoid thinking ahead. The consequences of this immediacy are stark: Deadly outbreaks spread because leaders failed to act on early warning signs. Companies that fail to invest stagnate and fall behind. Hurricanes and wildfires turn deadly for communities that could have taken more precaution. Today more than ever, all of us need to know how we can make better long-term decisions in our lives, businesses, and society. Bina Venkataraman sees the way forward. A journalist and former adviser in the Obama White House, she helped communities and businesses prepare for climate change, and she learned firsthand why people don’t think ahead—and what can be done to change that. In The Optimist’s Telescope, she draws from stories she has reported around the world and new research in biology, psychology, and economics to explain how we can make decisions that benefit us over time. With examples from ancient Pompeii to modern-day Fukushima, she dispels the myth that human nature is impossibly reckless and highlights the surprising practices each of us can adopt in our own lives—and the ones we must fight for as a society. The result is a book brimming with the ideas and insights all of us need in order to forge a better future.
Download or read book The Good Ancestor A Radical Prescription for Long Term Thinking written by Roman Krznaric and published by The Experiment, LLC. This book was released on 2021-08-31 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From leading philosopher Roman Krznaric, an urgent call to save ourselves and our planet by getting to the root of the current crisis—society’s extreme short-sightedness As heard on NPR’s TED Radio Hour When Jonas Salk developed the polio vaccine, he refused to patent it—forgoing profit so that more lives could be saved. His radical generosity to future generations should inspire us, but leading philosopher Roman Krznaric sees the opposite happening: Our short-term, exploitative mindsets have “colonized the future,” leaving an inexcusable chasm between the haves and have-nots—and mounting existential threats—that have brought our species to the precipice of disaster. Yet Krznaric sees reason to hope. The urgent struggle for intergenerational justice calls for hugely ambitious solutions, from rewiring our growth-at-all-costs economy to giving voters of future generations a voice in our democracies. But at the heart of all these changes is one we can enact within ourselves: We must trade shortsightedness for long-term thinking. In The Good Ancestor, Krznaric reveals six practical ways we can retrain our brains to think of the long view and to shift our allegiance from this generation to all humanity—to save our planet and our future.
Download or read book Sustainability and the Art of Long Term Thinking written by Bernd Klauer and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-09-01 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dealing with time is intimately linked to sustainability, because sustainability, at its core, involves long-term ethical claims. To live up to them, decision and policy-making has to consider long-term development of society, economy, and nature. However, dealing with time and such long-term development is a notoriously difficult subject, both in science and, in particular, in practical decision and policy making. Rooted in philosophical and scientific reasoning, this book explores how the concept of time can be incorporated into effective practical action. The book describes a system and uses case studies to help sustainability practitioners and researchers consider the long-term consequences of our actions in a methodical way. The system integrates scientific and practical knowledge about time and temporal developments to help break down the sometimes overwhelming complexity of sustainability issues. Combining theoretical conceptual thinking and practical applications, this book will be of great interest to students and researchers of sustainability science, environmental sciences, sustainable development, environmental economics, political sciences and practical philosophy.
Download or read book Deep Time Reckoning written by Vincent Ialenti and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2020-09-22 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A guide to long-term thinking: how to envision the far future of Earth. We live on a planet careening toward environmental collapse that will be largely brought about by our own actions. And yet we struggle to grasp the scale of the crisis, barely able to imagine the effects of climate change just ten years from now, let alone the multi-millennial timescales of Earth's past and future life span. In this book, Vincent Ialenti offers a guide for envisioning the planet's far future—to become, as he terms it, more skilled deep time reckoners. The challenge, he says, is to learn to inhabit a longer now. Ialenti takes on two overlapping crises: the Anthropocene, our current moment of human-caused environmental transformation; and the deflation of expertise—today's popular mockery and institutional erosion of expert authority. The second crisis, he argues, is worsening the effects of the first. Hearing out scientific experts who study a wider time span than a Facebook timeline is key to tackling our planet's emergency. Astrophysicists, geologists, historians, evolutionary biologists, climatologists, archaeologists, and others can teach us the art of long-termism. For a case study in long-term thinking, Ialenti turns to Finland's nuclear waste repository “Safety Case” experts. These scientists forecast far future glaciations, climate changes, earthquakes, and more, over the coming tens of thousands—or even hundreds of thousands or millions—of years. They are not pop culture “futurists” but data-driven, disciplined technical experts, using the power of patterns to construct detailed scenarios and quantitative models of the far future. This is the kind of time literacy we need if we are to survive the Anthropocene.
Download or read book The Great Mental Models Volume 1 written by Shane Parrish and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2024-10-15 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discover the essential thinking tools you’ve been missing with The Great Mental Models series by Shane Parrish, New York Times bestselling author and the mind behind the acclaimed Farnam Street blog and “The Knowledge Project” podcast. This first book in the series is your guide to learning the crucial thinking tools nobody ever taught you. Time and time again, great thinkers such as Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett have credited their success to mental models–representations of how something works that can scale onto other fields. Mastering a small number of mental models enables you to rapidly grasp new information, identify patterns others miss, and avoid the common mistakes that hold people back. The Great Mental Models: Volume 1, General Thinking Concepts shows you how making a few tiny changes in the way you think can deliver big results. Drawing on examples from history, business, art, and science, this book details nine of the most versatile, all-purpose mental models you can use right away to improve your decision making and productivity. This book will teach you how to: Avoid blind spots when looking at problems. Find non-obvious solutions. Anticipate and achieve desired outcomes. Play to your strengths, avoid your weaknesses, … and more. The Great Mental Models series demystifies once elusive concepts and illuminates rich knowledge that traditional education overlooks. This series is the most comprehensive and accessible guide on using mental models to better understand our world, solve problems, and gain an advantage.
Download or read book Life Forms in the Thinking of the Long Eighteenth Century written by Keith Michael Baker and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2016-01-01 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Life Forms in the Thinking of the Long Eighteenth Century is a unique reappraisal of Enlightenment thought on nature, biology, and the organic world.
Download or read book Thinking Fast and Slow written by Daniel Kahneman and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2011-10-25 with total page 511 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: *Major New York Times Bestseller *More than 2.6 million copies sold *One of The New York Times Book Review's ten best books of the year *Selected by The Wall Street Journal as one of the best nonfiction books of the year *Presidential Medal of Freedom Recipient *Daniel Kahneman's work with Amos Tversky is the subject of Michael Lewis's best-selling The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds In his mega bestseller, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman, world-famous psychologist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, takes us on a groundbreaking tour of the mind and explains the two systems that drive the way we think. System 1 is fast, intuitive, and emotional; System 2 is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. The impact of overconfidence on corporate strategies, the difficulties of predicting what will make us happy in the future, the profound effect of cognitive biases on everything from playing the stock market to planning our next vacation—each of these can be understood only by knowing how the two systems shape our judgments and decisions. Engaging the reader in a lively conversation about how we think, Kahneman reveals where we can and cannot trust our intuitions and how we can tap into the benefits of slow thinking. He offers practical and enlightening insights into how choices are made in both our business and our personal lives—and how we can use different techniques to guard against the mental glitches that often get us into trouble. Topping bestseller lists for almost ten years, Thinking, Fast and Slow is a contemporary classic, an essential book that has changed the lives of millions of readers.
Download or read book Long Way Down written by Jason Reynolds and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2017-10-24 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “An intense snapshot of the chain reaction caused by pulling a trigger.” —Booklist (starred review) “Astonishing.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “A tour de force.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) A Newbery Honor Book A Coretta Scott King Honor Book A Printz Honor Book A Time Best YA Book of All Time (2021) A Los Angeles Times Book Prize Winner for Young Adult Literature Longlisted for the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature Winner of the Walter Dean Myers Award An Edgar Award Winner for Best Young Adult Fiction Parents’ Choice Gold Award Winner An Entertainment Weekly Best YA Book of 2017 A Vulture Best YA Book of 2017 A Buzzfeed Best YA Book of 2017 An ode to Put the Damn Guns Down, this is New York Times bestselling author Jason Reynolds’s electrifying novel that takes place in sixty potent seconds—the time it takes a kid to decide whether or not he’s going to murder the guy who killed his brother. A cannon. A strap. A piece. A biscuit. A burner. A heater. A chopper. A gat. A hammer A tool for RULE Or, you can call it a gun. That’s what fifteen-year-old Will has shoved in the back waistband of his jeans. See, his brother Shawn was just murdered. And Will knows the rules. No crying. No snitching. Revenge. That’s where Will’s now heading, with that gun shoved in the back waistband of his jeans, the gun that was his brother’s gun. He gets on the elevator, seventh floor, stoked. He knows who he’s after. Or does he? As the elevator stops on the sixth floor, on comes Buck. Buck, Will finds out, is who gave Shawn the gun before Will took the gun. Buck tells Will to check that the gun is even loaded. And that’s when Will sees that one bullet is missing. And the only one who could have fired Shawn’s gun was Shawn. Huh. Will didn’t know that Shawn had ever actually USED his gun. Bigger huh. BUCK IS DEAD. But Buck’s in the elevator? Just as Will’s trying to think this through, the door to the next floor opens. A teenage girl gets on, waves away the smoke from Dead Buck’s cigarette. Will doesn’t know her, but she knew him. Knew. When they were eight. And stray bullets had cut through the playground, and Will had tried to cover her, but she was hit anyway, and so what she wants to know, on that fifth floor elevator stop, is, what if Will, Will with the gun shoved in the back waistband of his jeans, MISSES. And so it goes, the whole long way down, as the elevator stops on each floor, and at each stop someone connected to his brother gets on to give Will a piece to a bigger story than the one he thinks he knows. A story that might never know an END…if Will gets off that elevator. Told in short, fierce staccato narrative verse, Long Way Down is a fast and furious, dazzlingly brilliant look at teenage gun violence, as could only be told by Jason Reynolds.
Download or read book The Psychology of Thinking about the Future written by Gabriele Oettingen and published by Guilford Publications. This book was released on 2018-03-08 with total page 569 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why do people spend so much time thinking about the future, imagining scenarios that may never occur, and making (often unrealistic) predictions ? This volume brings together leading researchers from multiple psychological subdisciplines to explore the central role of future-thinking in human behavior across the lifespan. It presents cutting-edge work on the mechanisms involved in visualizing, predicting, and planning for the future. Implications are explored for such important domains as well-being and mental health, academic and job performance, ethical decision making, and financial behavior. Throughout, chapters highlight effective self-regulation strategies that help people pursue and realize their short- and long-term goals. ÿ
Download or read book Your Brain at Work written by David Rock and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-10-06 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Your Brain at Work, David Rock takes readers inside the heads—literally—of a modern two-career couple as they mentally process their workday to reveal how we can better organize, prioritize, remember, and process our daily lives. Rock, the author of Quiet Leadership and Personal Best, shows how it’s possible for this couple, and thus the reader, not only to survive in today’s overwhelming work environment but succeed in it—and still feel energized and accomplished at the end of the day.
Download or read book The Power Surge written by Michael Levi and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2014-10 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Looks at the clash between gas/oil proponents and supports of alternative energies and offers a plan for the future that combines the best of both worlds.
Download or read book Sand Talk written by Tyson Yunkaporta and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2020-05-12 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A paradigm-shifting book in the vein of Sapiens that brings a crucial Indigenous perspective to historical and cultural issues of history, education, money, power, and sustainability—and offers a new template for living. As an indigenous person, Tyson Yunkaporta looks at global systems from a unique perspective, one tied to the natural and spiritual world. In considering how contemporary life diverges from the pattern of creation, he raises important questions. How does this affect us? How can we do things differently? In this thoughtful, culturally rich, mind-expanding book, he provides answers. Yunkaporta’s writing process begins with images. Honoring indigenous traditions, he makes carvings of what he wants to say, channeling his thoughts through symbols and diagrams rather than words. He yarns with people, looking for ways to connect images and stories with place and relationship to create a coherent world view, and he uses sand talk, the Aboriginal custom of drawing images on the ground to convey knowledge. In Sand Talk, he provides a new model for our everyday lives. Rich in ideas and inspiration, it explains how lines and symbols and shapes can help us make sense of the world. It’s about how we learn and how we remember. It’s about talking to everyone and listening carefully. It’s about finding different ways to look at things. Most of all it’s about a very special way of thinking, of learning to see from a native perspective, one that is spiritually and physically tied to the earth around us, and how it can save our world. Sand Talk include 22 black-and-white illustrations that add depth to the text.
