Never waste a crisis. Some businesses—and some people—will emerge from today’s economic tumult stronger and more dominant than when it started. Others will weaken and fade. It all depends on critical choices they make right now. Geoff Colvin, one of America’s most respected business jour-nalists, says even the scariest turbulence has an upside. The best managers know that conventional thinking won’t help them in tough times. They’re taking smart, practical steps—frequently unconventional and even counterintuitive—that will not only keep them strong, but will also distance them from the pack for years to come. The dozens of top-performing leaders Colvin interviewed reject the common view that slashing costs and firing employ­ees are the only effective tactics. They see volatility as a rich opportunity to reinvent their organizations and lay the ground-work for future growth. Colvin shows us how these strategies really work, using exam-ples of major companies that have successfully applied them.

Never waste a crisis - the current recession is a turning point into a new economic world, a world full of opportunity for those who understand what's happening, why it's happening, and what it means for them. Some businesses - and some people - will emerge from this downturn stronger and more dominant than when it started. Others will weaken and fade. It all depends on critical choices they make right now. Geoff Colvin, one of world's most respected business journalists, says even the scariest recession has an upside. The best managers know that conventional thinking won't help them win in these tough times. They're taking smart, practical steps that will not only keep them strong, but will also distance them from the pack for years to come. The dozens of top-performing leaders Colvin interviewed reject the common view that slashing costs and firing employees is all that matters. They see the recession as a rich opportunity to restructure, reinvent and reimagine their businesses and lay the groundwork for future growth. Written in Colvin's characteristic reader-friendly style, "The Upside of the Downturn" shows how anyone - from small business owner to global conglomerate CEO - can benefit from his ten solidly grounded strategies. He shows how to find opportunities that will increase your company's competitiveness and build its long-term value. For example: reset priorities. Easy to say, harder to do. Pursuing the lofty goals set in good times can be disastrous now; re-evaluate people and steal some good ones. Mass layoffs are a tempting way to cut costs, but great companies often find smarter alternatives. And if your competitors are unwise enough to fire their best people, grab them; keep investing in the core. Trim the fat from your budgets but not the muscle. The best companies actually increase some spending in a recession, funding the areas that make them unique and valuable; and, price with courage. Many companies assume they must - yet the long-term damage often outweighs the short-term boost. Colvin shows how these strategies really work, using examples of major companies that have applied them with inspiring results and discovered those hidden gems of opportunity and those elusive 'green shoots' of recovery.

From best-selling author and acclaimed journalist Geoff Colvin, this is a guide for managing through the recession that shows how companies can use it as an opportunity to restructure, reinvent and reimagine their business.

Never waste a crisis. Some businesses—and some people—will emerge from today’s economic tumult stronger and more dominant than when it started. Others will weaken and fade. It all depends on critical choices they make right now. Geoff Colvin, one of America’s most respected business jour-nalists, says even the scariest turbulence has an upside. The best managers know that conventional thinking won’t help them in tough times. They’re taking smart, practical steps—frequently unconventional and even counterintuitive—that will not only keep them strong, but will also distance them from the pack for years to come. The dozens of top-performing leaders Colvin interviewed reject the common view that slashing costs and firing employ­ees are the only effective tactics. They see volatility as a rich opportunity to reinvent their organizations and lay the ground-work for future growth. Colvin shows us how these strategies really work, using exam-ples of major companies that have successfully applied them.

Poetry is dead. Poetry is all around us. Both are trite truisms that this book exploits and challenges. In his 1798 Advertisement to Lyrical Ballads, William Wordsworth anticipates that readers accustomed to the poetic norms of the day might not recognize his experiments as poems and might signal their awkward confusion upon opening the book by looking round for poetry, as if seeking it elsewhere. Look Round for Poetry transforms Wordsworth’s idiomatic expression into a methodological charge. By placing tropes and figures common to Romantic and Post-Romantic poems in conjunction with contemporary economic, technological, and political discourse, Look Round for Poetry identifies poetry’s untimely echoes in discourses not always read as poetry or not always read poetically. Once one begins looking round for poetry, McGrath insists, one might discover it in some surprising contexts. In chapters that spring from poems by Wordsworth, Lucille Clifton, John Keats, and Percy Bysshe Shelley, McGrath reads poetic examples of understatement alongside market demands for more; the downturned brow as a figure for economic catastrophe; Romantic cloud metaphors alongside the rhetoric of cloud computing; the election of the dead as a poetical, and not just a political, act; and poetic investigations into the power of prepositions as theories of political assembly. For poetry to retain a vital power, McGrath argues, we need to become ignorant of what we think we mean by it. In the process we may discover critical vocabularies that engage the complexity of social life all around us.