Bøger udgivet af Crown

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PEACE PRIZEIn this intimate memoir of survival, a former captive of the Islamic State tells her harrowing and ultimately inspiring story. Nadia Murad was born and raised in Kocho, a small village of farmers and shepherds in northern Iraq. A member of the Yazidi community, she and her brothers and sisters lived a quiet life. Nadia had dreams of becoming a history teacher or opening her own beauty salon. On August 15th, 2014, when Nadia was just twenty-one years old, this life ended. Islamic State militants massacred the people of her village, executing men who refused to convert to Islam and women too old to become sex slaves. Six of Nadia's brothers were killed, and her mother soon after, their bodies swept into mass graves. Nadia was taken to Mosul and forced, along with thousands of other Yazidi girls, into the ISIS slave trade. Nadia would be held captive by several militants and repeatedly raped and beaten. Finally, she managed a narrow escape through the streets of Mosul, finding shelter in the home of a Sunni Muslim family whose eldest son risked his life to smuggle her to safety. Today, Nadia's storyas a witness to the Islamic State's brutality, a survivor of rape, a refugee, a Yazidihas forced the world to pay attention to an ongoing genocide. It is a call to action, a testament to the human will to survive, and a love letter to a lost country, a fragile community, and a family torn apart by war.

From the Academy Award(R)-winning actor, an unconventional memoir filled with raucous stories, outlaw wisdom, and lessons learned the hard way about living with greater satisfaction.I've been in this life for fifty years, been trying to work out its riddle for forty-two, and been keeping diaries of clues to that riddle for the last thirty-five. Notes about successes and failures, joys and sorrows, things that made me marvel, and things that made me laugh out loud. How to be fair.How to have less stress. How to have fun. How to hurt people less.How to get hurt less. How to be a good man. How to have meaning in life.How to be more me.Recently, I worked up the courage to sit down with those diaries. I found stories I experienced, lessons I learned and forgot, poems, prayers, prescriptions, beliefs about what matters, some great photographs, and a whole bunch of bumper stickers. I found a reliable theme, an approach to living that gave me more satisfaction, at the time, and still: If you know how, and when, to deal with life's challenges - how to get relative with the inevitable - you can enjoy a state of success I call 'catching greenlights.'So I took a one-way ticket to the desert and wrote this book: an album, a record, a story of my life so far.This is fifty years of my sights and seens, felts and figured-outs, cools and shamefuls. Graces, truths, and beauties of brutality. Getting away withs, getting caughts, and getting wets while trying to dance between the raindrops.Hopefully, it's medicine that tastes good, a couple of aspirin instead of the infirmary, a spaceship to Mars without needing your pilot's license, going to church without having to be born again, and laughing through the tears.It's a love letter.To life.It's also a guide to catching more greenlights-and to realising that the yellows and reds eventually turn green too.Good luck.

Most startups fail. But many of those failures are preventable. The Lean Startup is a new approach being adopted across the globe, changing the way companies are built and new products are launched. Eric Ries defines a startup asan organization dedicated to creating something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty. This is just as true for one person in a garage or a group of seasoned professionals in a Fortune 500 boardroom. What they have in common is a mission to penetrate that fog of uncertainty to discover a successful path to a sustainable business. The Lean Startup approach fosters companies that are both more capital efficient and that leverage human creativity more effectively. Inspired by lessons from lean manufacturing, it relies on ';validated learning,' rapid scientific experimentation, as well as a number of counter-intuitive practices that shorten product development cycles, measure actual progress without resorting to vanity metrics, and learn what customers really want. It enables a company to shift directions with agility, altering plans inch by inch, minute by minute. Rather than wasting time creating elaborate business plans, The Lean Startup offers entrepreneursin companies of all sizesa way to test their vision continuously, to adapt and adjust before it's too late. Ries provides a scientific approach to creating and managing successful startups in a age when companies need to innovate more than ever.

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES AND WALL STREET JOURNAL BESTSELLERHave you ever felt the urge to declutter your work life?Do you often find yourself stretched too thin?Do you simultaneously feel overworked and underutilized?Are you frequently busy but not productive?Do you feel like your time is constantly being hijacked by other people's agendas?If you answered yes to any of these, the way out is the Way of the Essentialist.The Way of the Essentialist isn't about getting more done in less time. It's about getting only the right things done. It is nota time management strategy, or a productivity technique. It is a systematic discipline for discerning what is absolutely essential, then eliminating everything that is not, so we can make the highest possible contribution towards the things that really matter. By forcing us to apply a more selective criteria for what is Essential, the disciplined pursuit of less empowers us to reclaim control of our own choices about where to spend our precious time and energyinstead of giving others the implicit permission to choose for us.Essentialism is not one more thingit's a whole new way of doing everything. A must-read for any leader, manager, or individual who wants to do less, but better, anddeclutter and organize their owntheir lives, Essentialism is a movement whose time has come.

Good Strategy/Bad Strategy clarifies the muddled thinking underlying too many strategies and provides a clear way to create and implement a powerful action-oriented strategy for the real world.Developing and implementing a strategy is the central task of a leader. A good strategy is a specific and coherent response toand approach forovercoming the obstacles to progress. A good strategy works by harnessing and applying power where it will have the greatest effect. Yet, Rumelt shows that there has been a growing and unfortunate tendency to equate Mom-and-apple-pie values, fluffy packages of buzzwords, motivational slogans, and financial goals with ';strategy.' In Good Strategy/Bad Strategy, he debunks these elements of ';bad strategy' and awakens an understanding of the power of a ';good strategy.' He introduces nine sources of powerranging from using leverage to effectively focusing on growththat are eye-opening yet pragmatic tools that can easily be put to work on Monday morning, and uses fascinating examples from business, nonprofit, and military affairs to bring its original and pragmatic ideas to life. The detailed examples range from Apple to General Motors, from the two Iraq wars to Afghanistan, from a small local market to Wal-Mart, from Nvidia to Silicon Graphics, from the Getty Trust to the Los Angeles Unified School District, from Cisco Systems to Paccar, and from Global Crossing to the 200708 financial crisis.Reflecting an astonishing grasp and integration of economics, finance, technology, history, and the brilliance and foibles of the human character, Good Strategy/Bad Strategy stems from Rumelt's decades of digging beyond the superficial to address hard questions with honesty and integrity.

Longlisted for the National Book AwardNew York Times BestsellerA former Wall Street quant sounds an alarm on the mathematical models that pervade modern life and threaten to rip apart our social fabricWe live in the age of the algorithm. Increasingly, the decisions that affect our liveswhere we go to school, whether we get a car loan, how much we pay for health insuranceare being made not by humans, but by mathematical models. In theory, this should lead to greater fairness: Everyone is judged according to the same rules, and bias is eliminated.But as Cathy O'Neil reveals in this urgent and necessary book, the opposite is true. The models being used today are opaque, unregulated, and uncontestable, even when they're wrong. Most troubling, they reinforce discrimination: If a poor student can't get a loan because a lending model deems him too risky (by virtue of his zip code), he's then cut off from the kind of education that could pull him out of poverty, and a vicious spiral ensues. Models are propping up the lucky and punishing the downtrodden, creating a ';toxic cocktail for democracy.' Welcome to the dark side of Big Data.Tracing the arc of a person's life, O'Neil exposes the black box models that shape our future, both as individuals and as a society. These ';weapons of math destruction' score teachers and students, sort resumes, grant (or deny) loans, evaluate workers, target voters, set parole, and monitor our health.O'Neil calls on modelers to take more responsibility for their algorithms and on policy makers to regulate their use. But in the end, it's up to us to become more savvy about the models that govern our lives. This important book empowers us to ask the tough questions, uncover the truth, and demand change. Longlist for National Book Award (Non-Fiction) Goodreads, semi-finalist for the 2016 Goodreads Choice Awards (Science and Technology) Kirkus, Best Books of 2016 New York Times, 100 Notable Books of 2016 (Non-Fiction) The Guardian, Best Books of 2016 WBUR's "e;On Point,"e; Best Books of 2016: Staff Picks Boston Globe, Best Books of 2016, Non-Fiction

NEW YORK TIMESBESTSELLER *;Learn the negotiation model used by Google to train employees worldwide, U.S. Special Ops to promote stability globally (';this stuff saves lives'), and families to forge better relationships.A 20% discount on an item already on sale. A four-year-old willingly brushes his/her teeth and goes to bed. A vacationing couple gets on a flight that has left the gate. $5 million more for a small business; a billion dollars at a big one.Based on thirty years of research among forty thousand people in sixty countries, Wharton Business School Professor and Pulitzer Prize winner Stuart Diamond shows in this unique and revolutionary book howemotional intelligence, perceptions, cultural diversity and collaborationproduce four times as much value as old-school, conflictive, power, leverage and logic.As negotiations underlie every human encounter, this immediately-usable advice works in virtually any situation: kids, jobs, travel, shopping, business, politics, relationships, cultures, partners, competitors.The tools are invisible until you first see them. Then they're always there to solve your problems and meet your goals.

In The $100 Startup, Chris Guillebeau shows you how to lead of life of adventure, meaning and purpose and earn a good living. Still in his early thirties, Chris is on the verge of completing a tour of every country on earth he's already visited more than 175 nations and yet he's never held a ';real job' or earned a regular paycheck. Rather, he has a special genius for turning ideas into income, and he uses what he earns both to support his life of adventure and to give back. There are many others like Chris those who've found ways to opt out of traditional employment and create the time and income to pursue what they find meaningful. Sometimes, achieving that perfect blend of passion and income doesn't depend on shelving what you currently do. You can start small with your venture, committing little time or money, and wait to take the real plunge when you're sure it's successful. In preparing to write this book, Chris identified 1,500 individuals who have built businesses earning $50,000 or more from a modest investment (in many cases, $100 or less), and from that group he's chosen to focus on the 50 most intriguing case studies. In nearly all cases, people with no special skills discovered aspects of their personal passions that could be monetized, and were able to restructure their lives in ways that gave them greater freedom and fulfillment. Here, finally, distilled into one easy-to-use guide, are the most valuable lessons from those who've learned how to turn what they do into a gateway to self-fulfillment. It's all about finding the intersection between your ';expertise' even if you don't consider it such -- and what other people will pay for. You don't need an MBA, a business plan or even employees. All you need is a product or service that springs from what you love to do anyway, people willing to pay, and a way to get paid. Not content to talk in generalities, Chris tells you exactly how many dollars his group of unexpected entrepreneurs required to get their projects up and running; what these individuals did in the first weeks and months to generate significant cash; some of the key mistakes they made along the way, and the crucial insights that made the business stick. Among Chris's key principles: if you're good at one thing, you're probably good at something else; never teach a man to fish sell him the fish instead; and in the battle between planning and action, action wins. In ancient times, people who were dissatisfied with their lives dreamed of finding magic lamps, buried treasure, or streets paved with gold. Today, we know that it's up to us to change our lives. And the best part is, if we change our own life, we can help others change theirs. This remarkable book will start you on your way.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER *;';Comprehensive, enlightening, and terrifyingly timely.'TheNew York Times Book Review (Editors' Choice)WINNER OF THE GOLDSMITH BOOK PRIZE *; SHORTLISTED FOR THE LIONEL GELBER PRIZE *; NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Washington Post *; Time *; Foreign Affairs *; WBUR *; PasteDonald Trump's presidency has raised a question that many of us never thought we'd be asking: Is our democracy in danger? Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt have spent more than twenty years studying the breakdown of democracies in Europe and Latin America, and they believe the answer is yes. Democracy no longer ends with a bangin a revolution or military coupbut with a whimper: the slow, steady weakening of critical institutions, such as the judiciary and the press, and the gradual erosion of long-standing political norms. The good news is that there are several exit ramps on the road to authoritarianism. The bad news is that, by electing Trump, we have already passed the first one. Drawing on decades of research and a wide range of historical and global examples, from 1930s Europe to contemporary Hungary, Turkey, and Venezuela, to the American South during Jim Crow, Levitsky and Ziblatt show how democracies dieand how ours can be saved.Praise for How Democracies Die';What we desperately need is a sober, dispassionate look at the current state of affairs. Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, two of the most respected scholars in the field of democracy studies, offer just that.'TheWashington Post';Where Levitsky and Ziblatt make their mark is in weaving together political science and historical analysis of both domestic and international democratic crises; in doing so, they expand the conversation beyond Trump and before him, to other countries and to the deep structure of American democracy and politics.'Ezra Klein,Vox';If you only read one book for the rest of the year, readHow Democracies Die. . . .This is not a book for just Democrats or Republicans. It is a book for all Americans. It is nonpartisan. It is fact based. It is deeply rooted in history. . . . The best commentary on our politics, no contest.'Michael Morrell, former Acting Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (via Twitter)';A smart and deeply informed book about the ways in which democracy is being undermined in dozens of countries around the world, and in ways that are perfectly legal.'Fareed Zakaria,CNN

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER *; NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE ECONOMIST';The most important book on decision making since Daniel Kahneman'sThinking, Fast and Slow.'Jason Zweig,TheWall Street Journal Everyone would benefit from seeing further into the future, whether buying stocks, crafting policy, launching a new product, or simply planning the week's meals. Unfortunately, people tend to be terrible forecasters. As Wharton professor Philip Tetlock showed in a landmark 2005 study, even experts' predictions are only slightly better than chance. However, an important and underreported conclusion of that study was that some experts do have real foresight, and Tetlock has spent the past decade trying to figure out why. What makes some people so good? And can this talent be taught? In Superforecasting, Tetlock and coauthor Dan Gardner offer a masterwork on prediction, drawing on decades of research and the results of a massive, government-funded forecasting tournament. The Good Judgment Project involves tens of thousands of ordinary peopleincluding a Brooklyn filmmaker, a retired pipe installer, and a former ballroom dancerwho set out to forecast global events. Some of the volunteers have turned out to be astonishingly good. They've beaten other benchmarks, competitors, and prediction markets. They've even beaten the collective judgment of intelligence analysts with access to classified information. They are "e;superforecasters."e; In this groundbreaking and accessible book, Tetlock and Gardner show us how we can learn from this elite group. Weaving together stories of forecasting successes (the raid on Osama bin Laden's compound) and failures (the Bay of Pigs) and interviews with a range of high-level decision makers, from David Petraeus to Robert Rubin, they show that good forecasting doesn't require powerful computers or arcane methods. It involves gathering evidence from a variety of sources, thinking probabilistically, working in teams, keeping score, and being willing to admit error and change course. Superforecasting offers the first demonstrably effective way to improve our ability to predict the futurewhether in business, finance, politics, international affairs, or daily lifeand is destined to become a modern classic.