This book was written with a child's heart and imagination in mind and given in to a life of continual playtime. Have Fun.

Good Strategy/Bad Strategy clarifies the muddled thinking underlying too many strategies and provides a clear way to create and implement a powerful action-oriented strategy for the real world. Developing and implementing a strategy is the central task of a leader. A good strategy is a specific and coherent response to—and approach for—overcoming the obstacles to progress. A good strategy works by harnessing and applying power where it will have the greatest effect. Yet, Rumelt shows that there has been a growing and unfortunate tendency to equate Mom-and-apple-pie values, fluffy packages of buzzwords, motivational slogans, and financial goals with “strategy.” In Good Strategy/Bad Strategy, he debunks these elements of “bad strategy” and awakens an understanding of the power of a “good strategy.” He introduces nine sources of power—ranging from using leverage to effectively focusing on growth—that are eye-opening yet pragmatic tools that can easily be put to work on Monday morning, and uses fascinating examples from business, nonprofit, and military affairs to bring its original and pragmatic ideas to life. The detailed examples range from Apple to General Motors, from the two Iraq wars to Afghanistan, from a small local market to Wal-Mart, from Nvidia to Silicon Graphics, from the Getty Trust to the Los Angeles Unified School District, from Cisco Systems to Paccar, and from Global Crossing to the 2007–08 financial crisis. Reflecting an astonishing grasp and integration of economics, finance, technology, history, and the brilliance and foibles of the human character, Good Strategy/Bad Strategy stems from Rumelt’s decades of digging beyond the superficial to address hard questions with honesty and integrity.

Developmental Education is an approach to education in school that aims at promoting children’s cultural development and their abilities to participate autonomously and well-informed in the cultural practices of their community. From the point of view of Cultural-historical Activity theory (CHAT), a play-based curriculum has been developed over the past decades for primary school, which presents activity contexts for pupils in the classroom that create learning and teaching opportunities for helping pupils with appropriating cultural knowledge, skills, and moral understandings in meaningful ways. The approach is implemented in numerous Dutch primary schools classrooms with the explicit intention to support the learning of both pupils and teachers. The book focuses especially on education of young children (4 – 8 years old) in primary school and presents the underpinning concepts of this approach, and chapters on examples of good practices in a variety of subject matter areas, such as literacy (vocabulary acquisition, reading, writing), mathematics, and arts. Successful implementation of Developmental Education in the classroom strongly depends on dynamic assessment and continuous observations of young pupils’ development. Strategies for implementation of both the teaching practices and assessment strategies are discussed in detail in the book.

The United States has failed to achieve strategic objectives in nearly every military campaign since Vietnam. This memoir describes how the United States can begin to build the American way of irregular war needed for success in modern conflict.

The parents of a child born without hearing describe their efforts to reach across the barrier of silence to teach their daughter to speak and enjoy a normal life.

Mary Renck Jalongo Interpersonal relationships present an interesting paradox to the young child. Although human bonds are a source of love, security and joy, they are, at the same time, the context in which children feel intense and complicated emotions such as jealousy, shame, resentment, sorrow, and rage. To illustrate, consider a series of incidents in the life of a young child named Melissa. All of these events were so memorable that they became oft-repeated family stories. At age 4, after Melissa was reprimanded by her mother, she packed a small plastic suitcase and announced that she was running away. Her mother kept a watchful eye while the preschooler stood at the end of the driveway for several moments. The child’s sister—eight years her senior—decided to go out and gently inquire about her younger sibling’s plans, to which Melissa responded ruefully, “I can’t run away. I remembered that I’m not allowed to cross the street by myself. ” Months later, Melissa enters kindergarten and she arrives home at the end of her school day, obviously upset. When asked about it, she says, “One of the kids told me I was doing my work wrong and it ruined my whole day. ” In first grade, Melissa has experience with one of the school child’s greatest fears: a mean teacher.