In "Got Progress?" Norm Smith addresses the most important questions for project managers today. He offers a practical guidebook for managing projects with ease, results, and, yes, even style. Want to realize a project management career of success, recognition, and respect? Join this pioneer of Progress Management for straightforward advice, empowering skills, new ways of thinking, and more.

What does it mean to bring progress—schools, electricity, roads, running water—to paradise? Can our consumer culture and desire to “do good” really be good for a community that has survived contentedly for centuries without us? In October 2008, climbing expedition leader and attorney, Jeffrey Rasley, led a trek to a village in a remote valley in the Solu region of Nepal named Basa. His group of three adventurers was only the third group of white people ever seen in this village of subsistence farmers. What he found was a people thoroughly unaffected by Western consumer-culture values. They had no running water, electricity, or anything that moves on wheels. Each family lived in a beautiful, hand-chiseled stone house with a flower garden. Beyond what they already had, it seemed all they wanted was education for the children. He helped them finish a school building already in progress, and then they asked for help getting electricity to their village. Bringing Progress to Paradise describes Rasley’s transformation from adventurer to committed philanthropist. We are attracted to the simpler way of life in these communities, and we are changed by our experience of it. They are attracted to us, because we bring economic benefits. Bringing Progress to Paradise offers Rasley’s critical reflection on the tangled relationship between tourists and locals in “exotic” locales and the effect of Western values on some of the most remote locations on earth.

A blues musician is blasted into a parallel world in a novel that’s “a houserockin’ good time” cowritten by the New York Times–bestselling author (Booklist). Slim’s a Texas bluesman of a certain age, down on his luck and just about broke—but hey, that’s what the blues are all about. He loves his music: “Not the popular blues, homogenized, synthesized, and zombilized; but the real down-home gut-bucket blues.” Then one day the music loves him back. In a single hot burst of lightning that comes straight up out of the ground, Slim finds himself in Tejas. It’s a little bit magic and a whole lot different, but the blues are the same. And the blues—manifest here in the form of a maple-necked, pearl-gray Fender Stratocaster with blue-chrome pickups, aka the Gutbucket—need him and need him bad. The Strat’s fallen into the hands of T-Bone Pickens and his Vipers, who want to suck up all its power and turn it to evil. Slim’s off and running on the Gutbucket Quest, with the help of his new mentor, rhythm guitarist Progress T. Hornsby, and a purely unstoppable blues singer named Nadine.