International institutions, from the International Monetary Fund to the International Olympic Committee, are perceived as bastions of sclerotic mediocrity at best and outright corruption at worst, and this perception is generally not far off the mark. In the wake of the 2008 financial crash, Daniel W. Drezner, like so many others, looked at the smoking ruins of the global economy and wondered why global economic governance structure had failed so spectacularly, and what could be done to reform them in the future. But then a funny thing happened. As he surveyed their actions in the wake of the crash, he realized that the evidence pointed to the exact opposite conclusion: global economic governance had succeeded. In The System Worked, Drezner, a renowned political scientist and international relations expert, contends that despite the massive scale and reverberations of this latest crisis (larger, arguably, than those that precipitated the Great Depression), the global economy has bounced back remarkably well. Examining the major resuscitation efforts by the G-20 IMF, WTO, and other institutions, he shows that, thanks to the efforts of central bankers and other policymakers, the international response was sufficiently coordinated to prevent the crisis from becoming a full-fledged depression. Yet the narrative about the failure of multilateral economic institutions persists, both because the Great Recession affected powerful nations whose governments managed their own economies poorly, and because the most influential policy analysts who write the books and articles on the crisis hail from those nations. Nevertheless, Drezner argues, while it's true that the global economy is still fragile, these institutions survived the "stress test" of the financial crisis, and may have even become more resilient and valuable in the process. Bucking the conventional wisdom about the new "G-Zero World," Drezner rehabilitates the image of the much-maligned international institutions and demolishes some of the most dangerous myths about the financial crisis. The System Worked is a vital contribution to our understanding of an area where the stakes could not be higher.

A Simple Mindset Tweak Will Change Your Life. After a fifteen-year nightmare operating a stagnant service business, Sam Carpenter developed a down-to-earth methodology that knocked his routine eighty-hour workweek down to a single hour—while multiplying his bottom-line income more than twenty-fold. In Work the System, Carpenter reveals a profound insight and the exact uncomplicated, mechanical steps he took to turn his business and life around without turning it upside down. Once you “get” this new vision, success and serenity will come quickly. You will learn to: • Make a simple perception adjustment that will change your life forever. • See your world as a logical collection of linear systems that you can control. • Manage the systems that produce results in your business and your life. • Stop fire-killing. Become a fire-control specialist! • Maximize profit, create client loyalty, and develop enthusiastic employees who respect you. • Identify insidious “errors of omission.” • Maximize your biological and mechanical “prime time” so that you are working at optimum efficiency. • Design the life you want—and then, in the real world, quickly create it! You can keep doing what you have always done, and continue getting mediocre, unsatisfactory results. Or you can find the peace and freedom you’ve always wanted by transforming your business or corporate department into a finely tuned machine that runs on autopilot!

"If a historian were allowed but one book on the American involvement in Vietnam, this would be it." — Foreign Affairs When first published in 1979, four years after the end of one of the most divisive conflicts in the United States, The Irony of Vietnam raised eyebrows. Most students of the war argued that the United States had "stumbled into a quagmire in Vietnam through hubris and miscalculation," as the New York Times's Fox Butterfield put it. But the perspective of time and the opening of documentary sources, including the Pentagon Papers, had allowed Gelb and Betts to probe deep into the decisionmaking leading to escalation of military action in Vietnam. The failure of Vietnam could be laid at the door of American foreign policy, they said, but the decisions that led to the failure were made by presidents aware of the risks, clear about their aims, knowledgeable about the weaknesses of their allies, and under no illusion about the outcome. The book offers a picture of a steely resolve in government circles that, while useful in creating consensus, did not allow for alternative perspectives. In the years since its publication, The Irony of Vietnam has come to be considered the seminal work on the Vietnam War.

Examines contemporary trends in employment and unemployment, in hours of work, and in the nature of jobs and proposes strategic options for organized labor in the current political context.

The issues of poverty, inequality, racial injustice, and climate change have never been more pressing or paralyzing. Current approaches to social change, which rely on linear thinking and traditional power dynamics to 'solve' social problems, are not helping. In fact, they may only beentrenching the status quo.Systemic social challenges produce bewildering results when we try to solve them due to their complexity, scale, and depth. While strategies to tackle complexity and scale have received significant attention and investment, challenges that arise from deeply-held beliefs, values, and assumptions thatno longer serve us well have been largely overlooked. This book draws on stories of committed social changemakers to uncover a set of principles and practices for social change that dramatically depart from the industrial approach. Rather than delivering solutions or being lured by grander visionsof 'systems change', these principles and practices focus on the process of change itself. Simple yet profound, these stories distil a timely set of lessons for leaders, scholars, and policymakers on how connection, context, and power sit at the heart of the change process, ensuring broader agencyfor people and communities while building social systems that are responsive in a rapidly-changing world.

The ultimate guide book on how to influence your boss to make decisions in your favour. Starting from the recommendation to work out the company's informal system (ie the way it really works), Michael Shea divulges the secret skills of influence, here defined as the capability to change the minds or decisions of others without having the final authority, so to do. mother-in-law factor, committeemanship, out of committeemanship, the use of facts, hype, the adoption of options, the three options approach and playing on stress. Michael Shea illustrates them from his own experience in business, in politics and in dealing with the media.

A history of the Hollywood film industry as a modern system of labor, this book reveals an important untold story of an influential twentieth-century workplace. Ronny Regev argues that the Hollywood studio system institutionalized creative labor by systemizing and standardizing the work of actors, directors, writers, and cinematographers, meshing artistic sensibilities with the efficiency-minded rationale of industrial capitalism. The employees of the studios emerged as a new class: they were wage laborers with enormous salaries, artists subjected to budgets and supervision, stars bound by contracts. As such, these workers--people like Clark Gable, Katharine Hepburn, and Anita Loos--were the outliers in the American workforce, an extraordinary working class. Through extensive use of oral histories, personal correspondence, studio archives, and the papers of leading Hollywood luminaries as well as their less-known contemporaries, Regev demonstrates that, as part of their contribution to popular culture, Hollywood studios such as Paramount, Warner Bros., and MGM cultivated a new form of labor, one that made work seem like fantasy.