Foundational introduction to the concept that organizations create major impacts by making small changes.

"From the director of Race to Nowhere comes a ... book for parents, students, and educators on how to revolutionize learning, prioritize children's health, and re-envision success for a lifetime"--

This book consists of essays that stand on their own but are also loosely connected. Part I documents how numbers and geometry arise in several cultural contexts and in nature: scale, proportion in architecture, ancient geometry, megalithic stone circles, the hidden pavements of the Laurentian library, the shapes of the Hebrew letters, and the shapes of biological forms. Part II shows how many of the same numbers and number sequences are related to the modern mathematical study of numbers, dynamical systems, chaos, and fractals.

A transformational guide to living a life of authenticity and abundance, rooted in love, acceptance, compassion, and kindness. Learn how to discover and embrace your inner power, release and heal the emotional residue from the past, and envision a future of unbounded possibilities that allows your passions and purpose to be fulfilled. Through insight, self-exploration, and step-by-step practical exercises, Powerful Beyond Measure guides you along the journey of lifelong spiritual growth—empowering you to take control of your destiny and create a life filled with joy, health, happiness, and success.

A touching, tender and at times funny account of a woman’s struggle for stature in a 4 foot 8½ inch tall body, Beyond Measure speaks to the heart of soul-breaking attempts to fit an arbitrary and elusive cultural ideal of physical perfection. Being short isn’t the problem, Ellen Frankel insists. Instead, the real difficulties lie in the social bias against short people. Frankel shares the difficulties of living short in a world in which stereotypes are based on gender and size. She moves beyond her own experience into the political realm in revealing how pharmaceutical companies—with government backing—are expanding the market for human growth hormone treatment by reclassifying healthy short children as patients in “need” of such injections in hopes of making them taller. She shares the dilemma of being subjected to simultaneous messages that her physical body should be bigger—that is, taller, but not wider—while her expansive spiritual body should be smaller. Self-destructive behaviors emerge from too much attention on the external rather than the internal workings of the soul. Frankel flirts with eating disorders and unhealthy relationships with powerful males in an attempt to compensate for her feelings of not “measuring up.” In the process, her real self slips farther away. The path out of her dilemma lies in the shadow of the tallest mountain on Earth. It is through a spiritual pilgrimage to Nepal that Frankel discovers her own strength and spirit, and that we are all dwarfed by Everest and beyond measure. "If you have ever measured your height or weight and felt good or bad about yourself as a result, you need this book," says Marilyn Wann, author of FAT!SO? Because You Don't Have to Apologize for Your Size. "In its pages, Ellen Frankel makes an important contribution to human liberation by telling the most fabulous story that can be told, the story of a person coming fully into her own. This book is thought-provoking, heart-rending, and a genuine solace for people of all sizes."

Waste has plagued almost every industrial-age firm for the past century. In this powerfully argued alternative to conventional cost management thinking, experts H. Thomas Johnson and Anders Bröms assert that any company can avoid the waste that is generated through excessive operating costs in the short run and excessive losses from market instability in the long run. To gain more secure levels of profitability, management must simply change how it thinks about work and how it organizes work. Profit Beyond Measure details how two extremely profitable manufacturers, Toyota and the Swedish truck maker Scania, have rejected the traditional mechanistic mindset of managing by results that generates waste. Johnson and Bröms explain how Toyota and Scania achieve their legendary cost advantage through a revolutionary concept they call managing by means (MBM). Instead of being driven to meet preconceived accounting targets, the production systems of Toyota and Scania are governed by the three precepts that guide all living systems: self-organization, interdependence, and diversity. Amid a wealth of new insights into Toyota's vaunted system, Johnson and Bröms introduce the tools of MBM to show how design, production, and profitability analysis are done to customer order. They demonstrate that by following the principles that emulate life systems, even a lean and profitable company can organize work to greatly lessen its long-term earnings instability and sharply reduce its short-run operating costs. Scania has achieved sixty-five years of financial stability and longevity in the face of fierce competition. Toyota has amassed a market value since 1988 that has rivaled -- or sometimes surpassed -- the American "Big Three" automakers combined. The principles that Johnson and Bröms set forth in Profit Beyond Measure can guarantee the same richer, longer life to any company that applies them.

A fascinating inquiry into the metrics, rituals, routines, and expectations through which we attempt to quantify and comprehend our lives.