Business & Economics

Avoid the speed trap! Discover how changemakers can find lasting solutions to urgent social problems through a proven 5-step process for listening thoughtfully, building broad support, and exploring unconventional options.

Society celebrates leaders who promise fast, easy solutions to the world’s problems—but quick fixes are just mirages that fade, leaving us with the same broken systems. The truth is, effective social change happens through slow, intentional actions. The author, a globally acclaimed social entrepreneur, offers a 5-step process for taking the slow lane to change—the lane that gets you to the right place faster:

– Listening—Listen to build trust, which can change hearts and minds and allow for something new to emerge.
– Holding the urgency—Accept that even in moments of crisis you can move only at the speed of trust instead of rushing into action.
– Sharing the agency—Create an inclusive environment where everyone can lead.
– Healing democracy—Build bridges that allow marginalized people to participate.
– Maintaining curiosity—Be inspired by nontraditional sources.

Using dozens of examples—prison reform in England, urban development in Venezuela, healthcare in the Navajo Nation, early childhood education in New York, and many more—The Slow Lane shows how, by following the principles taught in this book, readers can create lasting change.

Now is the best time in history for entrepreneurship. More than ever, the world needs new businesses and it’s cheaper than ever to create them.

And, let’s be frank: most day jobs suck. People spend too much time doing too much work for too little money—and they know it. They want out.

But, if the barriers to starting a business are getting lower and lower, why is it SO HARD TO DO for SO MANY PEOPLE? Why are there so many wantrepreneurs playing at business on social media and so few entrepreneurs actually running them?

Ask yourself:

Do you want to work for yourself, or start a side-hustle, but it all feels too risky and unpredictable?
Have you spent time or money on things like websites and logos, but still have no customers?
Are you brainstorming endlessly and waiting for the perfect idea to strike?

All those Frequent Excuses are solvable. The plan is simple—so simple it can be completed in a single weekend, but so powerful that Kagan has used it to build seven businesses now worth more than $1 million:

Find your Creator’s Courage to overcome your fear and have fun!
Use the “Million Dollar Weekend” Process to get customers EXCITED to give you money.
Automate your business so it can grow while you sleep.

By Monday, you’ll have a market-tested, scalable business idea and you’ll be a entrepreneur on the path to seven figures. Million Dollar Weekend is the path to creating your dream life and attaining financial freedom. LFG.

There are moments when we achieve peak performance: An athlete plays a perfect game; a business has a quarter with once-in-a-lifetime profits. But these moments are often elusive, and for every amazing day, we may have a hundred ordinary and even unsatisfying days. Fulfillment doesn’t come from isolated peak experiences, but rather from many consistent good days. So how do we sustain performance, while avoiding burnout and maintaining balance?

In Optimal, Daniel Goleman and Cary Cherniss reveal how emotional intelligence can help us have a great day, any day. They explain how to set a realistic, attainable goal of feeling satisfied that you’ve had a productive day — to consistently work at your ‘optimal’ level. Based on research of how hundreds of people build the inner architecture of having a good day, they sketch what an optimal state feels like, and show how emotional intelligence holds the key to our best performance.

Optimal is the culmination of decades of scientific discoveries bearing on emotional intelligence. Enhanced emotional intelligence pays off in improved engagement, productivity, and more satisfying days. In this book, you’ll find the keys to competence in emotional intelligence, and practical methods for applying this skill set more readily. It will equip you to become a highly effective leader and enable you to build an organizational culture that empowers workers to sustain high performance.

John Kapoor had already amassed a small fortune in pharmaceuticals when he founded Insys Therapeutics. It was the early 2000s, a boom time for painkillers, and he developed a novel formulation of fentanyl, the most potent opioid on the market.

Kapoor, a brilliant immigrant scientist with relentless business instincts, was eager to make the most of his innovation. He gathered around him an ambitious group of young lieutenants. His head of sales—an unstable and unmanageable leader, but a genius of persuasion—built a team willing to pull every lever to close a sale, going so far as to recruit an exotic dancer ready to scrape her way up. They zeroed in on the eccentric and suspect doctors receptive to their methods. Employees at headquarters did their part by deceiving insurance companies. The drug was a niche product, approved only for cancer patients in dire condition, but the company’s leadership pushed it more widely, and together they turned Insys into a Wall Street sensation.

But several insiders reached their breaking point and blew the whistle. They sparked a sprawling investigation that would lead to a dramatic courtroom battle, breaking new ground in the government’s fight to hold the drug industry accountable in the spread of addictive opioids.

In Pain Hustlers, National Magazine Award–finalist Evan Hughes lays bare the pharma playbook. He draws on unprecedented access to insiders of the Insys saga, from top executives to foot soldiers, from the patients and staff of far-flung clinics to the Boston investigators who treated the case as a drug-trafficking conspiracy, flipping cooperators and closing in on the key players.

With colorful characters and true suspense, Pain Hustlers offers a bracing look not just at Insys, but at how opioids are sold at the point they first enter the national bloodstream—in the doctor’s office.

The fiber-optic cables that weave the World Wide Web, the copper veins of our electric grids, the silicon chips and lithium batteries that power our phones and cars: though it can feel like we now live in a weightless world of information—what Ed Conway calls “the ethereal world”—our twenty-first-century lives are still very much rooted in the material.

In fact, we dug more stuff out of the earth in 2017 than in all of human history before 1950. For every ton of fossil fuels, we extract six tons of other materials, from sand to stone to wood to metal. And in Material World, Conway embarks on an epic journey across continents, cultures, and epochs to reveal the underpinnings of modern life on Earth—traveling from the sweltering depths of the deepest mine in Europe to spotless silicon chip factories in Taiwan to the eerie green pools where lithium originates.

Material World is a celebration of the humans and the human networks, the miraculous processes and the little-known companies, that combine to turn raw materials into things of wonder. This is the story of human civilization from an entirely new perspective: the ground up.