Archives par étiquette : Levine Greenberg Rostan

POSSIBLE de William Ury

According to the Pew Research Center, in the US alone, the share of Americans who say having conversations with those they disagree with politically is “stressful and frustrating” has increased dramatically in recent years. POSSIBLE is for all of us who feel that frustration and seek to uncover new possibilities for the challenges in which we find ourselves. It offers a way out of the seemingly impossible, no-win conflicts of our time, a creative and collaborative method that can transform even our toughest conflicts.

POSSIBLE:
Transforming Our Toughest Conflicts
by William Ury
‎ HarperBusiness, Fall 2024
(via Levine Greenberg Rostan)

According to the Pew Research Center, in the US alone, the share of Americans who say having conversations with those they disagree with politically is “stressful and frustrating” has increased dramatically in recent years. As individuals, we are finding it increasingly hard to engage in civil discourse to negotiate our struggles and conflicts. We are stuck in difficult, intractable challenges and conflicts – with the characteristic fear and anger, entrenched positions, and destructive fighting – in all aspects of our lives.
POSSIBLE is for all of us who feel that frustration and seek to uncover new possibilities for the challenges in which we find ourselves. Based on four and a half decades of real-life experiences grappling with the world’s toughest conflicts — from wildcat strikes to family feuds, boardroom battles to civil wars – William Ury, co-author of Getting to YES, the world’s all-time bestselling book on negotiation, offers a way out of the seemingly impossible, no-win conflicts of our time, a creative and collaborative method that can transform even our toughest conflicts.
In POSSIBLE, Ury invites readers to become possibilists. Possibilists aren’t optimists or pessimists, but rather believers in our human potential to transform our conflicts and relationships. Possibilists see, create, and act on new possibilities to deal with our deepest differences. They are willing to engage any conflict, no matter how heated, in order to explore possible openings. In their minds, conflict isn’t bad. In fact, it is natural and even necessary.
Transforming a conflict is not the same as resolving it, which may be impossible right now and sometimes not even desirable. We don’t always need to agree. A possibilist aims to change the conflict’s fundamental form from destructive fighting into creative negotiation and constructive coexistence so that we can begin to open up new possibilities for mutual satisfaction. Then, over time, conflicts can be more easily resolved or just remain creative tensions.
Ury’s triple-win method works even if the other side at first does not go along. Just as it takes two to tango, it takes two to fight. And it only takes one to stop. It is your choice. There is a switch, and you can decide to pull it whenever you like. This book will show you how.

William Ury, cofounder of Harvard’s Program on Negotiation, is one of the world’s best-known and most influential experts on negotiation. He has served as a mediator in boardroom battles, labor conflicts, and civil wars around the world. Ury is the coauthor of Getting to Yes, the bestselling negotiation book in the world, and seven other books, including the New York Times bestsellers Getting Past No and The Power of a Positive No. An avid hiker, he lives with his family in Colorado.

QUANTUM PHYSICS MADE ME DO IT de Jeremie Harris

An exploration of cutting-edge physics and the implications that the scientific theory has for who we are and how our society should be structured.

QUANTUM PHYSICS MADE ME DO IT
by Jeremie Harris
Penguin Canada, May 2022
(via Levine Greenberg Rostan)

The discovery of quantum mechanics has paved the way to just about every important innovation in the last half century. It has led us to the technology that powers microwaves, iPhones, and self-driving cars and is about to trigger a computing revolution that will either spell the end of the human species or propel us to heights we’ve never imagined.
Without question, quantum mechanics is the single most successful scientific theory in human history. And, contrary to popular belief, it is also one of the simplest — you don’t need to know math, have fancy degrees or be buried in a mountain of student loans to understand it.
But there’s another reason that quantum mechanics is so important: it is really the only way we can understand ourselves and each other. For the last hundred years or so, physicists have been feverishly debating what quantum theory has to say about you: what you’re made of, whether you have free will, what will happen to you when you die, and much more. Are human beings immortal? Are apples conscious? Do our legal systems make assumptions about free will that are just plain wrong?
QUANTUM PHYSICS MADE ME DO IT is an amusing, irreverent exploration of our most successful scientific theory and the implications it has for who we are and how our society should be structured. In a disarming and amusing tone, it presents the reader with intuitive, battle-tested and high-school friendly explanations of these otherwise intimidating topics. It illustrates these concepts with “kets” – the glorified doodles used by physicists themselves as explanatory tools – to painlessly break down deep questions that are hotly debated to this day within the quantum physics community, and which have implications for human self-perception, law, and social structure.

“Jeremie Harris has the uncanny ability to make the most esoteric, theoretical science not just understandable — but incredibly engaging. I am fairly certain that nobody else could have explained quantum physics to me in a way that gave me a solid and deep understanding of the processes at work — enough that I could turn around and teach them to someone else. And like the best professors, Harris is compulsively captivating, funny, and engrossing. This isn’t a lecture; it’s entertainment that feeds the brain.” — Jodi Picoult, #1 NYT bestselling author of The Book Of Two Ways

Jeremie Harris received a Master’s in Physics from the University of Toronto in 2013. His academic research in quantum mechanics has been featured in many of the top peer-reviewed journals in physics including Nature Physics, Physical Review Letters and Optica. For his research, he was awarded the Vanier Scholarship, Canada’s most prestigious graduate research award, equivalent to the Rhodes or Fulbright scholarships in the UK and US. In 2016, after completing most of a PhD studying the foundations of quantum mechanics, Jeremie founded an artificial intelligence startup which eventually became SharpestMinds, a mentorship program for aspiring machine learning and AI specialists. With over 500 alumni and $15 million in new salaries created, it’s the world’s first profitable income share program, and they’ve gone on to raise funds from top Silicon Valley investors. Jeremie hosts the official podcast of Towards Data Science, a Medium publication with over 20 million monthly views, focused on AI, machine learning and the future of humanity. He is 30 years old.

AMERICAN MERMAID de Julia Langbein

The Pisces by way of Emily St. John Mandel or Karen Russell meets The Snow Child and The Need, AMERICAN MERMAID is by turns both a comic and fabulously insightful tale of two female characters in search of truth, love and self-acceptance as they move between worlds without giving up their voices.

AMERICAN MERMAID
by Julia Langbein
‎ Doubleday, Spring 2023
(via Levine Greenberg Rostan)

Penelope Schleeman, a consistently broke Connecticut high school teacher, is as surprised as anyone when her sensitive debut novel, American Mermaid—the story of a wheelchair-bound scientist named Sylvia who discovers that her withered legs are the vestiges of a powerful tail—becomes a bestseller. Penelope soon finds herself lured to LA by promises of easy money to co-write the American Mermaid screenplay for a major studio with a pair of male hacks. As the studio pressures Penelope to change American Mermaid from the story of a fierce, androgynous eco-warrior to a teen sex object in a clam bra, strange things start to happen. Threats appear in the screenplay draft; siren calls lure people into danger. When Penelope’s screenwriting partners try to kill Sylvia off entirely in a bitterly false but cinematic end, matters off the page escalate. Is Penelope losing her mind, or has her mermaid come to life, enacting revenge for Hollywood’s violations?

Julia Langbein (BA, Columbia University, 2003; PhD, University of Chicago, 2013) held a postdoctoral fellowship in Art History at Oxford University from 2014-2018 and is currently a research fellow at Trinity College Dublin, where she is writing a book about how generational conflict and changing ideas of old age have shaped modern art. Her monograph, Laugh Lines: Caricaturing Painting in Nineteenth-Century France, which brings to light a brilliant subculture of comic criticism and argues for its importance in the development of modernist painting, will be published in March 2022 by Bloomsbury Visual Art and has received outstanding advance praise from senior scholars (“impeccably researched,” “engaging,” “essential”). Langbein, a sketch and standup comedian for many years, was the author of the viral comedy blog The Bruni Digest (2003-2007), which reviewed New York Times critic Frank Bruni’s restaurant reviews every week. She has since written about food, art and travel for Gourmet, Eater, Salon, Frieze and other publications.

THE VICIOUS CIRCLE de Katherine St. John

For fans of We Were Never Here and Nine Perfect Strangers, a twisty, escapist suspense about a woman who inherits a multimillion-dollar estate and travels to a mysterious wellness commune in the Mexican jungle where she discovers dark, and potentially violent, secrets.

THE VICIOUS CIRCLE
by Katherine St. John
‎ William Morrow, Fall/Winter 2022
(via Levine Greenberg Rostan)

On a river deep in the Mexican jungle stands the colossal villa Xanadu, a retreat center that’s home to The Mandala, an ardent spiritual group devoted to self-help guru Paul Bentzen and his enigmatic wife Kali. But when, mysteriously, Paul suddenly dies, his entire estate—including Xanadu—is left to his estranged niece Sveta, a former model living in New York City.
Shocked and confused, Sveta travels to Mexico to pay her respects. At first, the retreat center seems like a secluded paradise with its tumbling gardens, beautiful people, transcendent vibe, and mesmerizing de-facto leader Kali. But soon the mystical façade wears thin, revealing a group of brainwashed members drunk on false promises of an impossible utopia and a disturbing, dangerous belief system—and leader—guiding them.
As the sinister forces surrounding Sveta become apparent, she realizes, too late, she can’t escape. Frantic and terrified, she discovers her only hope for survival is to put her confidence in the very person she trusts the least.

Katherine St. John is a native of Mississippi, graduate of the University of Southern California, and author of the critically acclaimed novels The Lion’s Den and The Siren.

COMPASSIONATE LEADERSHIP de Rasmus Hougaard & Jaqueline Carter

Leadership is hard. How can you balance compassion for your people with effectiveness in getting the job done?

COMPASSIONATE LEADERSHIP:
How to do Hard Things in a Human Way
by Rasmus Hougaard & Jaqueline Carter
Harvard Business Review Press, December 2021
(via Levine Greenberg Rostan)

A global pandemic, economic volatility, natural disasters, civil and political unrest. From New York to Barcelona to Hong Kong, it can feel as if the world as we know it is coming apart. Through it all, our human spirit is being tested. Now more than ever, it’s imperative for leaders to demonstrate compassion. But in hard times like these, leaders need to make hard decisions—deliver negative feedback, make difficult choices that disappoint people, and in some cases lay people off. How do you do the hard things that come with the responsibility of leadership while remaining a good human being and bringing out the best in others? Most people think we have to make a binary choice between being a good human being and being a tough, effective leader. But this is a false dichotomy. Being human and doing what needs to be done are not mutually exclusive. In truth, doing hard things and making difficult decisions is often the most compassionate thing to do.
As founder and CEO of Potential Project, Rasmus Hougaard and his longtime coauthor, Jacqueline Carter, show in this powerful, practical book, you must always balance caring for your people with leadership wisdom and effectiveness. Using data from thousands of leaders, employees, and companies in nearly a hundred countries, the authors find that when leaders bring the right balance of compassion and wisdom to the job, they foster much higher levels of employee engagement, performance, loyalty, and well-being in their people.
With rich examples from Netflix, IKEA, Unilever, and many other global companies, as well as practical tools and advice for leaders and managers at any level, COMPASSIONATE LEADERSHIP is your indispensable guide to doing the hard work of leadership in a human way.

Rasmus Hougaard is the founder and CEO of leadership development and consulting firm Potential Project. He is a sought-after keynote speaker and coach of C-suite executives at top global companies. In 2019 he was shortlisted for the Thinkers50 Leadership Award, recognizing « thinkers who shed powerful and original new light onto this perennial and still vital subject. » He writes for Harvard Business Review, Forbes, and Business Insider and is the coauthor, with Jacqueline Carter, of The Mind of the Leader: How to Lead Yourself, Your People, and Your Organization for Extraordinary Results.
Jacqueline Carter is a partner and North American Director for Potential Project. She has over twenty years of experience helping leaders and organizations manage change and achieve results. She is a regular contributor to Harvard Business Review, Forbes, and Leader to Leader. She is the coauthor, with Rasmus Hougaard, of The Mind of the Leader.