If you find yourself at the bedside of a child with multiple handicaps and complex medical needs, you need to read this book. Whether you are a nurse, doctor, parent or family member, health care professional, or a personal ally of an individual who is disabled, you will benefit from reading the stories in the book and the analysis of issues by the editor. It sometimes happens that some people, whether a professional or not, will be tempted to think of such children as better off dead-an extremely dangerous assumption. Illness and suffering do not diminish the value of a person's life, and no one has the right to decide whether or not a person should live or die. This book gives firsthand accounts of the experiences of handicapped children and their families in health care settings. Their experiences vary from doctor to doctor, nurse to nurse, and hospital to hospital. The key difference is that some people held a strong belief that every person's life has intrinsic value and that their lives were sacred. Yet others measured the value of a life according to external factors, such as level of disability, impairments, and level of suffering, whether presumed or real. You can guess which people gave better care, and which children lived longer and better accordingly. In spite of the difficult challenges that handicapped children and their families face as described in these stories, this book is a book of hope. You will be inspired by the courageous tenacity of parents who literally stood at the bedside of their children, often for months, and protected and affirmed the well-being of their child. This is a book about people who made a difference, a difference between life and death.

The recent forced landing of a U.S. Navy EP-3 surveillance aircraft on Hainan Island after aerial harassment by Chinese fighters underscores that the dangers of the Cold War are not behind us. Reconnaissance-intelligence gathering-has always been one of the most highly secretive operations in the military. Men risk their lives with no recognition for themselves, flying missions that were almost always unarmed and typically pose as weather survey or training flights. Now the true stories of these brave young men can at last be told. Larry Tart and Robert Keefe, former USAF airborne recon men themselves, provide a gripping, unprecedented history of American surveillance planes shot down by China and Russia-from the opening salvoes of the Cold War to the most recent international standoff with China. Appearing here for the first time are many crucial documents, ranging from formerly highly classified U.S. files to conversations with Khrushchev and top secret reports from the Russian presidential archives. Along with previously unreleased military details, this meticulously researched book includes MiG fighter pilot transcripts and interviews with participants from both sides-including survivors of downed American planes. From the Baltic to the Bering Seas, from Armenia and Azerbaijan to China, Korea, and the Sea of Japan, these gripping accounts reveal the drama of what really happened to Americans shot down in hostile skies. The Price of Vigilance brings to life the harrowing ordeals faced by the steel-nerved crews, the diplomatic furor that erupts after shootdowns, and the grief and frustration of the families waiting at home-families who, most often, were never told what their loved ones were doing. Armed with the results of recent crash-site excavations, advanced DNA testing, and the reports of local witnesses who can finally reveal what they saw, Tart and Keefe have written a real-life thriller of the deadly cat-and-mouse game of intelligence gathering in the air and across enemy borders. The centerpiece of the book is the fate of USAF C-130 60528 and its crew of seventeen, shot down over Armenia on September 2, 1958, with no known survivors. Tart and Keefe also vividly describe other shootdowns, including the tense stand off between the U.S. and China after an American reconnaissance aircraft was forced to land on Hainan Island in April 2001. The Price of Vigilance pays moving tribute to the courage and patriotism of all the U.S. Air Force and U.S. Navy crews, including those captured and the more than two hundred who never returned. Larry Tart and Robert Keefe wish to publicly acknowledge to the families, and to the nation, that we will never forget their sacrifice.

How organizations can anticipate threats, spot opportunities, and act faster when the time is right; with rich examples including Adobe, MasterCard, and Amazon. When turbulence is the new normal, an organization's survival depends on vigilant leadership that can anticipate threats, spot opportunities, and act quickly when the time is right. In See Sooner, Act Faster, strategy experts George Day and Paul Schoemaker offer tools for thriving when digital advances intensify turbulence. Vigilant firms have greater foresight than their rivals, while vulnerable firms often miss early signals of external threats and organizational challenges. Charles Schwab, for example, was early to see and act on the promise of “robo-advisors”; Honeywell, on the other hand, stumbled when Nest Labs came out first with a “smart” thermostat. Day and Schoemaker show leaders how to assess their vigilance capabilities and cultivate insight and foresight throughout their organizations. They draw on a range of cases, including Adobe and Intuit's move to the cloud, Shell's investment in clean energy, and MasterCard's early recognition of digital challenges. Day and Schoemaker describe how to allocate the scarce resource of attention, how to detect weak signals and separate them from background noise, and how to respond strategically before competitors do. The challenge is not just to act faster but to act wisely, and the authors suggest ways to create dynamic portfolios of options. Finally, they offer an action agenda, with tips for fostering vigilance and agility throughout an organization. The rewards are stronger market positions, higher profits and growth, more motivated employees, and organization longevity.

“I’d rather win a Pulitzer Prize than be President of the United States,” John F. Kennedy confided to author Margaret Coit shortly after his election to the Senate in 1953. Kennedy got his wish four years later, when his book Profiles in Courage was awarded the Pulitzer for biography—even though it wasn’t among the finalists for the prize. Furthermore, the role of Ted Sorensen in drafting the main chapters in the book was never acknowledged by Kennedy’s inner circle, and Kennedy himself was hyper-sensitive until his dying day about rumors that cast doubt on his ownership of Profiles in Courage. Still, Jack Kennedy the writer is part of the Kennedy narrative that helped propel his political career. And he did indeed work for a time as a journalist, and brought a measures of erudition, wit, and charm to his speeches. But if the rumors surrounding authorship of Profiles in Courage were proven to be true prior to his ascendance to the Presidency, there might have been no brief and shining moment in America called Camelot.

Two-time New York City police commissioner Ray Kelly opens up about his remarkable life, taking us inside fifty years of law enforcement leadership, offering chilling stories of terrorist plots after 9/11, and sharing his candid insights into the challenges and controversies cops face today. The son of a milkman and a Macy's dressing room checker, Ray Kelly grew up on New York City's Upper West Side, a middle-class neighborhood where Irish and Puerto Rican kids played stickball and tussled in the streets. He entered the police academy and served as a marine in Vietnam, living and fighting by the values that would carry him through a half century of leadership-justice, decisiveness, integrity, courage, and loyalty. Kelly soared through the NYPD ranks in decades marked by poverty, drugs, civil unrest, and a murder rate that, at its peak, spiked to over two thousand per year. Kelly came to be known as a tough leader, a fixer who could go into a troubled precinct and clean it up. That reputation catapulted him into his first stint as commissioner, under Mayor David Dinkins, where Kelly oversaw the police response to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and spearheaded programs that would help usher in the city's historic drop in crime. Eight years later, in the chaotic wake of the 9/11 attacks, newly elected mayor Michael Bloomberg tapped Kelly to be NYC's top cop once again. After a decade working with Interpol, serving as undersecretary of the Treasury for enforcement, overseeing U.S. Customs, and commanding an international police force in Haiti, Kelly understood that New York's security was synonymous with our national security. Believing that the city could not afford to rely solely on "the feds," he succeeded in transforming the NYPD from a traditional police department into a resource-rich counterterrorism-and-intelligence force. In this vital memoir, Kelly reveals the inside stories of his life in the hot seat of "the capital of the world"-from the terror plots that nearly brought a city to its knees to his dealings with politicians, including Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama as well as Mayors Rudolph Giuliani, Bloomberg, and Bill DeBlasio. He addresses criticisms and controversies like the so-called stop-question-and-frisk program and the rebuilding of the World Trade Center and offers his insights into the challenges that have recently consumed our nation's police forces, even as the need for vigilance remains as acute as ever.

The hardest part of a manager's job isn't staying organized, meeting deliverable dates, or staying on budget. It's dealing with people who are too comfortable doing things the way they've always been done and too afraid to do things differently—workers who are, as author Bill Treasurer puts it, too “comfeartable.” Such workers fail to exert themselves any more than they have to, equating “just enough” with good enough. By avoiding even mild challenges, these workers thwart forward progress and make their businesses dangerously safe. To combat this affliction, Treasurer proposes a bold antidote: courage. In Courage Goes to Work, he lays out a comprehensive, step-by-step process that treats courage as a skill that can be developed and strengthened. He Treasurer shows how managers can build workplace courage by modeling courageous behavior themselves, creating an environment where people feel safe taking chances and helping workers deal with fear. To make the concept of courage more concrete, Treasurer identifies what he calls the Three Buckets of Courage: Try Courage, having the guts to take initiative; Trust Courage, being willing to follow the lead of others; and Tell Courage, being honest and assertive with coworkers and bosses. He illustrates each with a variety of vivid real-world examples and offers proven practices for helping your workers keep each bucket full. Aristotle said that courage is the first virtue because it makes all other virtues possible. It's as true in business as it is in life. With more courage, workers gain the necessary confidence to take on harder projects, embrace company changes with more enthusiasm, and extend themselves in ways that will benefit their careers and their company. Courage Goes to Work is the first book to take a systematic approach to developing a vital but overlooked component of business success.