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Congratulations, new leader! You’ve joined the ranks during an exceptionally complicated time.

Our current workplace climate is fraught with political divisions, economic disparities, and ever-shifting social dynamics. Leaders are managing remote teams across larger geographic distances and facing new roadblocks to onboarding, giving performance feedback, and nurturing healthy relationships.

Leadership Two Words at a Time speaks directly to the plight of the new leader and is divided into three parts: Leading Yourself, Leading People, and Leading Work. Rather than overintellectualize the practice, Bill Treasurer breaks up the concept into essential and understandable learning nuggets—summed up by two-word headers—that provide the practical guidance and support that leaders often don’t get. The result is time-tested wisdom that new leaders can grasp immediately and implement easily—and, with a little practice, master completely. Consider it a personal leadership playbook.

This book gives you the basic building blocks to gain both competence and confidence, take on greater responsibility, and learn what it takes to be and stay a leader.

Across the world, HSBC likes to sell itself as ‘the world’s local bank’, the friendly face of corporate and personal finance. And yet, a decade ago, the same bank was hit with a record US fine of $1.9 billion for facilitating money laundering for ‘drug kingpins and rogue nations’. In pursuit of their goal of becoming the biggest bank in the world, between 2003 to 2010, HSBC allowed El Chapo and the Sinaloa cartel, one of the most notorious and murderous criminal organizations in the world, to turn its ill-gotten money into clean dollars and thereby grow one of the deadliest drugs empires the world has ever seen.

How did a bank, which boasts ‘we’re committed to helping protect the world’s financial system on which millions of people depend, by only doing business with customers who meet our high standards of transparency’ come to facilitate Mexico’s richest drug baron? And how did a bank that had been named ‘one of the best-run organizations in the world’ become so entwined with one of the most barbaric groups of gangsters on the planet?

Too Big to Jail is an extraordinary story brilliantly told by writer, commentator, and former editor of The Independent, Chris Blackhurst, that starts in Hong Kong and ranges across London, Washington, the Cayman Islands and Mexico, where HSBC saw the opportunity to become the largest bank in the world, and El Chapo seized the chance to fuel his murderous empire by laundering his drug proceeds through the bank. It brings together an extraordinary cast of politicians, bankers, drug dealers, FBI officers and whistle-blowers, and asks what price does greed have? Whose job is it to police global finance? And why did not a single person go to prison for facilitating the murderous expansion of a global drug empire?

The world’s most powerful CEOs never saw it coming. In 2018, after a decade-long bull market, the CEO of American Airlines declared, “I don’t think we’re ever going to lose money again.” The U.S. entered March 2020 riding an eleven-year economic high, with unemployment at record lows, the Dow Jones flirting with 30,000, and the good times certain to continue. By the end of the month, ten million people were out of work, iconic firms were begging for bailouts, and countless small businesses were in freefall. Slick consulting teams and country-club connections were suddenly of little use: CEOs were fumbling in the dark, tossing out long-term strategy and making decisions on the fly that, they hoped, might just save them.

In Crash Landing, Liz Hoffman shows how the pandemic set the economy on fire—but if you look closely, the tinder was already there. After 2008, corporate leaders had embraced cheap debt and growth at all costs. Wages went stagnant. Millions were pushed into the gig economy. Companies crammed workers into offices, and airlines did the same with planes. Wall Street cheered on this relentless march toward efficiency, overlooking its collateral damage.

Based on access to an astonishing array of business titans, Crash Landing is Liz Hoffman’s account of the most remarkable year in modern economic history. She takes readers into the beating heart of the twenty-first-century economy, revealing how the pandemic exposed its pressure points. Bankruptcies decimate retail. Banking and pharma rivals team up. Bleeding cash, airlines like Delta weigh safety against survival. An untested White House fumbles for the 2008 playbook. There’s Goldman Sachs’s David Solomon blindsided by a virus in the middle of a high-stakes reinvention; American Airlines’s Doug Parker, shuttling between K Street and the White House, determined to secure a multi-billion-dollar bailout; and Ford’s Jim Hackett, gambling on the switch from cars to ventilators.

In Crash Landing, Hoffman probes the pandemic’s implications for the future of work, corporate leadership, and capitalism itself, asking: Will this remarkable time give rise to newfound resilience, or become just another costly mistake to be forgotten?