Offers leaders a blueprint to address the entire productivity culture of an organization to improve overall effectiveness.

Jonathan Meades has an obsessive preoccupation with places. He has spent thirty years constructing sixty films, two novels and hundreds of pieces of journalism that explore an extraordinary range of them, from natural landscapes to man-made buildings and 'the gaps between them', drawing attention to what he calls 'the rich oddness of what we take for granted'. This book collects fifty-four pieces and six film scripts that dissolve the barriers between high and low culture, good and bad taste, deep seriousness and black comedy. Meades delivers what he calls 'heavy entertainment' – strong opinions backed up by an astonishing depth of knowledge. To read Meades on places, buildings, politics or cultural history is an exhilarating workout for the mind. He leaves you better informed, more alert, less gullible.

As companies worldwide are moving more and more toward a virtual business model, this handbook offers insight for team members who collaborate on projects from geographically diverse locations. Included in this comprehensive reference guide is an explanation of virtual management and advice on how to coach and develop team members with success from far-off office locations. This practical discussion provides the teaching skills needed to help the current manager understand the complexity of the job and to be effective in this new and changing role. Sample evaluations prepare the prospective virtual managers to adequately assess and gauge the success and progress of a far-flung team.

For most people, home is a place with four walls. It's a place to eat, sleep, rest, and live. For a refugee, the concept of home is ever-changing, ever-moving, ever-wavering. And often, it doesn't have any walls at all. Eleven-year-old Lam escapes from Vietnam with Dee Dee during the Vietnamese Boat People Exodus in 1979, when people from Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia fled their homelands for safety. For a refugee, the trip is a long and perilous one, filled with dangerous encounters with pirates and greedy sailors, a lack of food and water, and even the stench of a dead body onboard. When they finally arrive at a refugee camp, Lam befriends Dao, a girl her age who becomes like a sister-a welcome glimmer of happiness after a terrifying journey. Readers will feel as close to Lam as the jade pendant she wears around her neck, sticking by her side throughout her journey as she experiences fear, crushing loss, boredom, and some small moments of joy along the way. Written in verse, this is a heartfelt story that is sure to build empathy and compassion for refugees around the world escaping oppression.

NEHI's "Health Care Without Walls: A Roadmap for Reinventing U.S. Health Care" embraces the vision of a more "distributed" health care system extending outside of traditional institutional settings - one that is more convenient, accessible, and arguably less costly than what the United States has now. By combining technologies such as telehealth with a reconfigured work force, the nation's health care system could be transformed into one that better anticipates individuals' needs; works to keep them as healthy as possible; and brings prevention and care out of conventional institutional settings into peoples' homes, workplaces, and other convenient locations."Health Care Without Walls: A Roadmap for Reinventing U.S. Health Care" is a product of NEHI's Health Care Without Walls initiative, which drew on the collective insights of approximately 200 individuals, including leaders of its five separate work streams focused on technology, the health care work force, payment, regulatory, and human factors issues. NEHI, the Network for Excellence in Health Innovation, is a national nonprofit, nonpartisan organization composed of stakeholders from across all key sectors of health and health care.

Corrigan argues that in the past 25 years the increased conglomerization of film production/distribution companies and the rise of VCR, satellite, and cable television technologies have altered the way films are made and how we view them. The result is a growing internationalization of national cinema cultures and an increasing fragmentation of the audience. Video has reduced the movie to private and domestic performance. At the same time, audiences are bombarded with a surfeit of images that leaves them with a battered sense of their place in history and culture. Corrigan notes that, combined with what many critics have recognized as the growing incoherence in film texts, these facts make it more meaningful to discuss films not as texts but as multiple cultural and commercial processes constructed by increasingly specialized audiences. ISBN 0-8135-1667-6: $36.00.

A House Without Walls is a powerful story of family, hope and redemption amidst the refugee crisis in Syria from the award-winning Elizabeth Laird, illustrated by Lucy Eldridge. Thirteen-year-old Safiya and her family have been driven out of Syria by civil war. Safiya knows how lucky she is – lucky not to be living in a refugee camp, lucky to be alive. But it's hard to feel grateful when she's forced to look after her father and brother rather than go back to school, and now that she's lost her home, she's lonelier than ever. As they struggle to rebuild their lives, Safiya realizes that her family has always been incomplete and with her own future in the balance, it's time to uncover the secrets that war has kept buried.