Literature: 2019 Business Books

Transitions: Making Sense Of Life's Changes

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004ZY23TS?ref=dbs_p2d_P_R_popup_yes_pony_T1

Whether you choose it or it is thrust upon you, change brings both opportunities and turmoil. Since Transitions was first published, this supportive guide has helped hundreds of thousands of readers cope with these issues by providing an elegantly simple yet profoundly insightful roadmap of the transition process. With the understanding born of both personal and professional experience, William Bridges takes readers step by step through the three stages of any transition: The Ending, The Neutral Zone, and, eventually, The New Beginning. Bridges explains how each stage can be understood and embraced, leading to meaningful and productive movement into a hopeful future. With a new introduction highlighting how the advice in the book continues to apply and is perhaps even more relevant today, and a new chapter devoted to change in the workplace, Transitions will remain the essential guide for coping with the one constant in life: change.

Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success

https://www.amazon.com/Give-Take-Helping-Others-Success/dp/0143124986/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1416626167&sr=1-1&keywords=give+%26+take+by+adam+grant

For generations, we have focused on the individual drivers of success: passion, hard work, talent, and luck. But in today’s dramatically reconfigured world, success is increasingly dependent on how we interact with others. In Give and Take, Adam Grant, an award-winning researcher and Wharton’s highest-rated professor, examines the surprising forces that shape why some people rise to the top of the success ladder while others sink to the bottom. Praised by social scientists, business theorists, and corporate leaders, Give and Take opens up an approach to work, interactions, and productivity that is nothing short of revolutionary.

Confidence: How Winning Streaks and Losing Streaks Begin and End

https://www.amazon.com/Confidence-Winning-Streaks-Losing-Begin/dp/1400052912

Is success simply a matter of money and talent? Or is there another reason why some people and organizations always land on their feet, while others, equally talented, stumble again and again?

There’s a fundamental principle at work–confidence–that makes the difference between winning and losing in any competition, be it a high school basketball game or a high-stakes business situation. In Confidence, Harvard Business School professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter shows why organizations of all types may be brimming with talent but not be winners. Based on her extraordinary investigation of success and failure in companies such as Continental Airlines and Verizon and sports teams such as the New England Patriots and Philadelphia Eagles, as well as the arenas of education, health care, and politics, Kanter explores a new theory and practice of success and provides people in leadership positions with a prescriptive program for maintaining a winning streak or turning around a downward spiral.

Packed with brilliant, practical ideas, Confidence provides fresh thinking about success in all facets of life—from the factors that can make or break corporations and governments to the keys for successful relationships in the workplace or at home.



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Literature: Retribution of Tears

Retribution of Tears

First Published: 25 MAY 2011 / Last Edited: 12 DEC 2019

Her soulful violet eyes blurred with tears as she stood on the edge of the seawall and gazed outwards at the turbulent waves below. Cupped in her two small hands were the broken jagged shards of a crystal ball. In the next second, with her mind already set, she knew that everything would change. She imagined herself plunging into the dark turquoise sea below her, forever erasing all traces of the broken shards of her and her memories. Yet, even in what she thought would be most likely the last moments of her life, she secretly longed for someone to save her.

As swift as a silent arrow, a memory flashed by in her mind of her inhumanity a moment ago. She hesitantly shifted her gaze from the waves to the shards in her hand one last time. Scarcely several dozen heartbeats ago, these shards piercing into her soft flesh didn’t exist. Her former lover was alive and well. He looked too well, she had thought. At this very spot, she had accused him of betraying her trust.

He had mocked her and said that she deserved it for believing him. He said that he has slept with other women all during the relationship. His barbed words jabbed relentlessly into her fragile heart and he did not appear to care. She realized that he had thought she was the type of girl who lacked a sense of self-worth who could be easily deceived into falling “in love” with a charming guy. In truth, she feared being in love with anyone since she feared what would happen.

She had fallen into his trap of lies so easily and revealed to him everything about her. She thought that opening her heart would lead to a buildup of further trust but it had the opposite effect. Before she opened up, anyone could see that between the two of them, she had more potential – writing incessantly and publishing her works in well-known journals. On his side, since he quit school, he has worked at a coffee shop as a barista for the last year and didn’t have the faintest inkling of where he was going in life. He seemed fine with his situation and she wasn’t going to push him to change.

After she revealed her secret to him though, he started to distance himself from her. He didn’t reveal his heart and she could only guess that perhaps he thought she was delusional and insane. She had told him to never make her cry since looking at her eyes when she was crying could transform him into glass. He had laughed at it and became quiet when she kept insisting that it was true. She thought that meant he believed her but now she knew that wasn’t the case.

His schedule suddenly seemed busier. They saw each other infrequently and he cancelled on several dates. The final straw was seeing him kiss a girl in front of his apartment. This was the unlucky encounter from trying to surprise him with a visit. The two didn’t noticed her and she had hurriedly departed before they saw her. Later, she called him to ask him who that girl was.

That was a week ago though it felt like a lifetime. They had agreed to meet at this spot today. A year ago this was the place of their first date. She came thinking that he wanted to meet her here to apologize and ask for her forgiveness. Instead, he came to mock her openly. She had tried to not cry but the tears still pooled out. Once they did, she couldn’t stop herself and could only watch helplessly as his body turned into glass. Her retribution of tears was swift and deadly. He could barely shout before he was completely gone. The shore wind was strong and blew his glass form over the seawall where it shattered against the rocks below. The only remnant was his eyes that flew like tiny pearls from his head to land miraculously in her open hands.

She steadied herself for an end to this life. He was a cheater but she was a killer. Now seemed like the perfect poetic end. She took out a mirror and gazed at her reflection held within, the last visages in her vision herself at her worst. There was barely a moment of regret before she toppled over, the second glass statue to fall into the waves that day.

Literature: Books on Utopia

Utopia?

This Perfect Day
https://www.amazon.com/This-Perfect-Day-Ira-Levin/dp/160598129X

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/139390.This_Perfect_Day

Considered one of the great dystopian novels―alongside Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World―Ira Levin's frightening glimpse into the future continues to fascinate readers even forty years after publication.

The story is set in a seemingly perfect global society. Uniformity is the defining feature; there is only one language and all ethnic groups have been eugenically merged into one race called “The Family.“ The world is ruled by a central computer called UniComp that has been programmed to keep every single human on the surface of the earth in check. People are continually drugged by means of regular injections so that they can never realize their potential as human beings, but will remain satisfied and cooperative. They are told where to live, when to eat, whom to marry, when to reproduce. even the basic facts of nature are subject to the UniComp's will―men do not grow facial hair, women do not develop breasts, and it only rains at night.

With a vision as frightening as any in the history of the science fiction genre, This Perfect Day is one of Ira Levin`s most haunting novels.