Doug Engstrom imagines a future all too terrifying—and all too possible—in this eerie, dystopic speculative fiction debut about corporate greed, debt slavery, and gun violence that is as intense and dark as Stephen King’s The Long Walk. Like many Americans in the middle of the 21st century, aspiring actress Kira Clark is in debt. She financed her drama education with loans secured by a “lifetime services contract.” If she defaults, her creditors will control every aspect of her life. Behind on her payments and facing foreclosure, Kira reluctantly accepts a large signing bonus to become a corporate gunfighter for TKC Insurance. After a year of training, she will take her place on the dueling fields that have become the final, lethal stop in the American legal system. Putting her MFA in acting to work, Kira takes on the persona of a cold, intimidating gunslinger known as “Death’s Angel.” But just as she becomes the most feared gunfighter in TKC’s stable, she’s severely wounded during a duel on live video, shattering her aura of invincibility. A series of devastating setbacks follow, forcing Kira to face the truth about her life and what she’s become. When the opportunity to fight another professional for a huge purse arises, Kira sees it as a chance to buy a new life . . . or die trying. Structured around a chilling duel, Corporate Gunslinger is a modern satire that forces us to confront the growing inequalities in our society and our penchant for guns and bloodshed, as well as offering a visceral look at where we may be heading—far sooner than we know.

Sylvie considers herself a team player at her artificial intelligence (AI) company, but when she uncovers her colleagues’ illegal activities, pleasing everyone becomes impossible. Torn about what to do, she confides in her personal trainer, who’s dismayed not only by the choices she faces but also by her advocacy of AI, a technology he considers dangerous. Despite the barbs the two trade at the gym, they are drawn to each other. If only Sylvie weren’t continually summoned to the Miami estate of her mother and stepfather, where illness, death, a disputed will, and the rekindled ashes of an old flame swirl into a disaster that follows Sylvie back to Boston, bringing harm to her and those she cares about.

A private airport security contractor becomes a counterterrorism operative to prevent a terrorist attack in this “timely, edge-of-the-seat thriller” (Bookpage) from the author of the #1 internationally bestselling The Intern’s Handbook. Kennedy—a private airport security contractor—knows more about airports than the head of the TSA, and he feels more comfortable in his British Airways Club World flatbed seat than in his own home. Haunted by the memory of his sister’s death on 9/11, Kennedy takes his job and the protection of the American people very seriously. So when he’s kidnapped and recruited into a CIA ghost operation known as Red Carpet, he jumps at the opportunity to become a civilian asset working with a team of some of the CIA’s best counterterrorism analysts and spec ops soldiers as they race against the clock to stop the greatest terrorist threat the United States will ever face. With the same bold voice that earned him rave reviews for his previous novels, Shane Kuhn’s The Asset is an “exhilarating” (Publishers Weekly, starred review) read with an “ultimate twist that makes readers’ jaws drop” (Kirkus Reviews).

A bold vision about the ways companies will adapt and be reborn in a revolutionary world where business models implode and the search is on for what will work. . . . The fate of newspapers and the music industry is a harbinger of what awaits every company: an aging business model in its death throes as people finally wake up to the grim fact that their products and the way they deliver them are completely out of sync not only with what customers want but how they want it. But Michael Malone–the author who, when the Internet was still the domain of technical experts, enabled his readers to see clearly the opportunities of the then-emerging digital age–is back and once again making sense of a future just around the corner. Business considerations such as the wireless World Wide Web, billions of new consumers, and an entrepreneurial ethos are all converging. How a corporation is organized and how people will be managed and employed will change more quickly than anyone realizes. With technology poised to connect a billion new consumers from the most remote parts of the globe, corporations will enter a volatile economic era marked by unprecedented threats and opportunities. Survival will require companies to be “protean”–nimble shape-shifters able to change direction and identity in response to a rapidly evolving international marketplace. They must, in other words, act like perpetual entrepreneurial start-ups. In our Web 2.0 world “the future arrived yesterday,” since the tools for success already exist and are the means for companies becoming protean. Malone provides remarkable insights into how this emerging corporate form will work and why it’s the key to competitiveness. Find out: • Why the traditional CEO as master of the universe will be extinct. The CEO will be a chameleon, adapting management style and attitude to each company’s constituency. • How to identify a core group of employees who will provide stability through their knowledge of the company's history, values, and culture. • How to effectively recruit, manage, and retain the best talent in an increasingly nontraditional, entrepreneurial, and peripatetic workforce. • Who stakeholders are, why they matter, and how they will extend beyond any comparable business organization to this point. • Why the rigid boundaries between for-profit and nonprofit ventures are likely to dissolve through alternate forms of value creation, resulting in hybrid enterprises. By embracing impermanence and becoming true shape-shifters, protean businesses will not only endure, they’ll come to dominate large segments of the global economy. Provocative and pragmatic, The Future Arrived Yesterday is a dynamic blueprint for a tumultuous economic age.

The emergence of relationship management as a paradigm for public relations scholarship and practice requires a close examination of just what is achieved by public relations--its definition, function and value, and the benefits it generates. Initiated by the editors' interest in cross-disciplinary exploration, this volume evolved to its current form as a result of the need for a framework for understanding public relations and the potential impact of organization-public relationships on the study, practice, and teaching of public relations. Ledingham and Bruning include contributions that present state-of-the-art research in relationship management, applications of the relational perspective to various components of public relations, and the implications of the approach to influence further research and practice. The discussion conducted here is certain to influence and promote future theory and practice on the concept of relationship management.

The development of a film script is a long and complex process, initially creatively driven by the writer, but managed by a producer or development executive. This text examines the process and considers how to create the best processes and environments for developing stories and concepts for film.

Insanity and compulsiveness, the gamblers spirit pervades this upside down top-heavy society – a society that values the ignorance of well positioned marketing sales types over informed intellect. Capitalism is a fundamentally coherent societal framework if it can be encapsulated from the political substrate and left to small and medium sized corporations without the destructive influences of industry oligarchy. Later stage capitalism unfortunately empowers the crafty snake oil dealers groomed in cult like educational institutions to buyout all the original creative entrepreneurs. This collection of essays in Volume 2 continues to show how our current societal framework is designed to benefit the few at the expense of the many and how we can change this trajectory of wealth despotism into an egalitarian cooperative community of equally important community participants.