TIME-PROVEN TECHNIQUES FOR REDUCING RISK AND IMPROVING PERFORMANCE IN MISSION-CRITICAL BUSINESS ACTIVITIES Proven in high-stakes, high-risk environments–from defense to healthcare For business functions ranging from marketing to HR, R&D to M&A Indispensable for all executives, entrepreneurs, strategists, and product managers This guide brings together simple, risk-free, and low-cost ways to break cycles of business failure and underperformance. These techniques aren’t new or trendy: they’ve repeatedly proven themselves in mission-critical disciplines ranging from manufacturing to space exploration, with lives and billions of dollars on the line. They work. And they’ll work for you, too. First, you’ll learn how to use well-proven Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA) techniques to anticipate potential failure points before you introduce products, implement strategy, or launch marketing campaigns. Next, utilizing Root Cause Analysis (RCA), you’ll learn to uncover the root cause of business problems, so you can solve them once and for all. Third, you’ll discover how to use an Early Warning System (EWS) to identify “driver” variables in your business, gaining timely and actionable insights without complex predictive modeling. Whatever your role in decision-making, leadership, strategy, or product management, Breaking Failure will help you mitigate risk more effectively, achieve better results–and move forward in your career When lives are on the line, when billions of dollars are at risk, failure is not an option. That’s why industries such as aerospace, chemical engineering, and healthcare have pioneered world-class methods for identifying, anticipating, and mitigating failure. In Breaking Failure, Alexander D. Edsel helps you adapt these proven techniques to the realities of your business. You’ll discover how to plan more effectively for contingencies, and how to uncover and address the root causes of poor performance in business functions ranging from marketing to hiring. Equally valuable, you’ll learn how to systematically improve your situational awareness, so you can uncover problems before they damage relationships, brand reputation, or business performance. Adapted to be 100% practical and actionable, these techniques will help companies of all sizes, in all markets. As you move towards greater speed and agility, they will become even more indispensable. A practical, systematic approach to “Breaking Failure” in your company Use Problem Framing to overcome the human bias towards thoughtless action Use Failure Mode & Effect Analysis (FMEA) to anticipate problems, prioritize risks,and plan corrective actions Use Root Cause Analysis (RCA) to identify true causes of failure in any process, product, or project Use an Early Warning System (EWS) to quickly recognize signs of underperformance Use Pre-Planned Exit Strategies and Exit Triggers to end failure and underperformance issues you can’t fix

As leaders, we fail more times than we'd like to admit. However, failure doesn't define who you are as a person--unless you let it.In this profound book, author Lloyd Brown shares his 10 Rules of Business along with painfully personal stories that give insight into the real-life application of those rules, as well as the real-world consequences of breaking them. A 30-year veteran of the oil and gas industry and former CEO and founder of Smart Chemical Services, Lloyd shares his failures and regrets, trusting you to take the lessons that he learned-the hard way-and apply them in your own life. Before you get burned.

In Failure by Design, the Economic Policy Institute’s Josh Bivens takes a step back from the acclaimed State of Working America series, building on its wealth of data to relate a compelling narrative of the U.S. economy’s struggle to emerge from the Great Recession of 2008. Bivens explains the causes and impact on working Americans of the most catastrophic economic policy failure since the 1920s. As outlined clearly here, economic growth since the late 1970s has been slow and inequitably distributed, largely as a result of poor policy choices. These choices only got worse in the 2000s, leading to an anemic economic expansion. What growth we did see in the economy was fueled by staggering increases in private-sector debt and a housing bubble that artificially inflated wealth by trillions of dollars. As had been predicted, the bursting of the housing bubble had disastrous consequences for the broader economy, spurring a financial crisis and a rise in joblessness that dwarfed those resulting from any recession since the Great Depression. The fallout from the Great Recession makes it near certain that there will be yet another lost decade of income growth for typical families, whose incomes had not been boosted by the previous decade’s sluggish and localized economic expansion. In its broad narrative of how the economy has failed to deliver for most Americans over much of the past three decades, Failure by Design also offers compelling graphic evidence on jobs, incomes, wages, and other measures of economic well-being most relevant to low- and middle-income workers. Josh Bivens tracks these trends carefully, giving a lesson in economic history that is readable yet rigorous in its analysis. Intended as both a stand-alone volume and a companion to the new State of Working America website that presents all of the data underlying this cogent analysis, Failure by Design will become required reading as a road map to the economic problems that confront working Americans.

Looking for America? asks Sam Toperoff, Ivan Solotaroff has drawn the map, and it takes you down, down, down, to the junkyard of the Dream Machine. He tells us exactly what happens when the Devil comes to collect and tells it brilliantly. Ivan Solotaroff never blinks. Never. A remorselessly dispassionate chronicler of the absurd, the troubled, and the deformed, Ivan Solotaroff has an uncanny ability to find his way into the private lives of public figures at their moments of greatest epiphany, abasement, and deluded grandeur. With none of the judgement, artifice, or tropes of literary journalism, the eleven essays of No Success Like Failure present a vision of the American ego at its most fragile. Among them: Sympathy for the Devil on the life, times, and burgeoning environmental awareness of Charles Manson; In the Land of the Fischer King, an account of Bobby Fischer's public reappearance in war-ravaged Serbia-Montenegro; Once a Man, Twice a Child, which covers the criminal trials of soul-star James Brown; Superhuman, All Too Superhuman, on the pugilistic career and vagina dentata of Mark Gastineau; King of the Park, on the rise and fall of the street comic Charlie Barnett. In these tales of unknowns, household names, and has-beens Solotaroff shows us what it is like to be trapped in the harsh spotlight of American popular culture, revealing in unflinching detail the hysteria and pathos of our national delusions.

A growing population and increasing urbanization over the past century have made it difficult to locate suitable ground for siting infrastructures in densely populated areas. The Deep Mixing Method (DMM) was developed and put into practice in Japan in 1975 to cope with the headaches of stability and/or excessive settlement in soft soil areas. This method involves using cement and/or lime as a soil stabilizer, added in-situ to deep soils, and has now been adopted not only in Japan but in the USA and other parts of the world as well. This book presents properties of this treated soil method, its various applications, its design and execution, and accumulated research results over the last twenty-five years.