Michael Symmons Roberts’s fourth book of poetry, Corpus, was the winner of the 2004 Whitbread Poetry Award, and was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Forward Prize, and the Griffin International Prize. His sixth collection, Drysalter, was the winner of both the Forward Prize and the Costa Poetry Prize in 2013. He collaborated with Paul Farley on Edgelands (Cape/Vintage) and will do so again in The Deaths of the Poets (Cape, 2017). He has also worked many times with the composer James MacMillan. He has published two novels, and is Professor of Poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Michael Symmons Roberts

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Elizabeth Handy

Charles Handy

The world needs new ideas, now products, new kinds of associations and institutions, new initiatives, new art and new designs. But these new things seldom come from established organisations. They come from individuals - the New Alchemists. What drives people to create something from nothing? Is it ambition, the need for self-fulfilment? Is it to do with money, power, or even genes? Is there a mood of the time that encourages people? Can anyone do it? Charles Handy has talked to a range of extraordinary characters - from Trevor Baylis and Richard Branson to Jane Tewson and Terence Conran. And Elizabeth Handy has used her new style of composite portraits to highlight aspects of all the different alchemists in their particular environments. The New Alchemists is a fascinating and inspirational investigation into the creative and entrepreneurial process.

The New Alchemists

Paul Donovan

All Our Todays is the first book about the BBC's most influential news and current affairs programme, published to celebrate Today's 40th anniversary in October 1997. Paul Donovan tells the programme's story from the early days of Jack de Manio, through the great partnership of Brian Redhead and John Timpson, to the current triumvirate of Jamies Naughtie, John Humphrys and Sue MacGregor. He analyses the reasons for the programme's success, examines its ofter fiery relationship with prominent politicians, and takes the reader behind the scenes in the Today studio. Full of funny and touching anecdotes, this book will be essential reading for Today's five million listeners.

All Our Todays

Colin Chapman

Selling the Family Silver is, moreover, the controversial 'warts and all' story of Britain's privatization programme, past and future. The chairmen, the cheats, the fanfares and the flops - from all sides of the political, social and economic coin, the author examines the contentious demise of nationalization and the real effectiveness of the private giants that have replaced it, finally posing the fundamental question: Has privatization worked?

Selling The Family Silver

Has Privatization Worked?

Catherine Laylle

In 1984, Catherine Laylle, a Frenchwomen living in London, met and married a German medical student, Dieter. The couple had two sons, Alexander and Constantin. When, however, at Dieter's insistence, they moved back to his home town in Germany, the marriage began to fall apart. Dieter refused to get a job, Catherine found living with his family oppressive and eventually, she returned to London with the children. The boys spent term time with their mother, holidays with their father - until the summer of 1994, when Dieter decided that his sons should be raised as Germans and, with the support of the local judge, defied the London court ruling that gave Catherine custody. Catherine went to the courts in London, Germany and the Hague - but it seemed that no court outside the jurisdiction of Lower Saxony would overrule the decision. Today, Alexander is eleven and Constantin is nine. Catherine has barely seen them in the two years since Dieter kidnapped them - and then only under the supervision of one of his friends. This is the harrowing story of a mother's attempts to regain her children, and of her desperate struggle against a tyrannical family and the blind injustice of the courts in Europe.

Two Children Behind A Wall

Sumantra Ghoshal

Christopher A. Bartlett

MANAGING ACROSS BORDERS is the definitive guide to the management of companies in today's global environment. Since its first publication in the US in 1989 it has established its authors as the leading authorities on the transnational company. It is based on a study of a diverse group of multinational companies including Procter &amp; Gamble, Unilever, General Electric, Philips, Matsushita, ITT, Ericsson and NEC. The characteristics of these multinationals and the process described by Bartlett and Ghoshal provides valuable lessons on how to develop the organisational structures, administrative processes and management perspective necessary to success. 'Bartlett and Ghoshal make an important and highly practical contribution in a book that represents the leading edge of thinking on this important subject. ' - Michael Porter, author of Competitive Strategy, Competitive Advantage of Nations etc.

Managing Across Borders 2nd Ed

Michael Hammer

'An impressive list of America's top CEOs has been gushing with praise about the book, and forward thinkers in the software and management business are using it to find direction and insight in this messy, complicated - world.' InfoconomistIn Search of Excellence set the management programme for the 1980s.  Michael Hammer's Reengineering the Corporation set the standard for the 1990s.  Now The Agenda does the same for the 2000s: it is the essential handbook for 21st-century business. It's time for business to get serious again.  The 90s are over, and so are the ideas that came to the fore at the end of the decade: that the Internet changes everything, that entrepreneurship is the answer, that success is easy.  Tough times - that is, normal times - are back.  Money is tight, competition is intense and customers are more demanding than ever. The Agenda offers no silver bullets or empty slogans.  Its principles are neither theoretical nor abstract: they concentrate on the nuts and bolts of an enterprise that determine how well a company performs. The Agenda offers serious ideas for serious people, concrete guidelines that show managers how to rethink every aspect of a business and reshape it for the imperatives of the customer economy. Any company - large or small, manufacturing or service, high tech or low tech - can apply these principles.

The Agenda

What Every Business Must Do to Dominate the Decade

James Young

A marvellously funny and sharply observed account of a journey to Russia by one of Britain's most talented young writers. Moscow - a labyrinth where the humans try to keep one step ahead of the roaches. Everyone on the move, some in search of the quick buck, and others just trying to survive. All dazzled by the neon glare of the western dream. The soviet monolith has broken down in tribalism, tribes who go to war not just on the streets but in overheated rooms, with drugs, vodka and Cindy Crawford carrier bags. James Young gives an unparalleled account of today's Moscow from the bottom side up. He takes us on a odyssey through this strange no man's land where East meets West, where the old certainties have gone, the KGB men wear Italian suits, the Mafia tycoonskis style themselves on the Godfather flicks and the rest are queuing to change dollars.

Moscow Mule

Lynda King Taylor

Lynda King Taylor interviews 30 of the UK's top businesspeople, including some of Britain's toughest bosses, and talks to them about how they survived the recession and plan for continued success. As well as the most traditional captains of industry she meets trendsetters - the 'gold-collar' workers constituting the new generation of bright, young and highly motivated managers, and top figures from sport (Graham Gooch, Will Carling), the arts (Kenneth Branagh), finance, leisure, media, charities etc - plus outstandingly successful figures from the public sector.

Corporate Excellence In The Year 2000

:A Framework for Success

Nicholas Coleridge

Paper Tigers is a riveting, authoritative and in-depth study of newspaper barons of the world – men and women who wield immense power, and whose ever-changing media empires make compelling case studies of business success and failure. 
 
From Rupert Murdoch to Robert Maxwell, Conrad Black to Lord Rothermere, Katharine Graham to Punch Sulzberger, Coleridge interviewed them all. The results confirm his status as a devastatingly astute observer of our times, one with few equals today.

Paper Tigers

Samantha Phillips

Charlotte Christie is under no illusion about her job: at Fitzgerald Denton greed is good and you watch your back. But as she learns to handle the jokes and the backstabbing and prove her worth as a broker. Charlie unearths a scam. Almost untraceable, it could strike a deathblow to Lloyd's of London and bring the government to its knees. By avoiding Charlie, her opponents have made their single mistake. She has one chance to strike back.

Blonde Ambition

Ryan Mathews

Watts Wacker

In The Deviant's Advantage, Ryan Mathews and Watts Wacker demonstrate how ideas create increasingly profitable markets as they move from The Fringe, to the Edge, to the Realm of the Cool, to the Next Big Thing, to Social Convention. The book tracks the products and people haunting the fringes of sex, science, art, language, faith, war and marketing, branding and macro-economics. Tomorrow's commercial success is an obsession in the mind of today's deviant. Las Vegas is a perfect example: it morphed from a bus stop in the desert to a neon 'Sin City' and finally into a family vacation destination. In 1945 a handsome, murderous sociopath called Benny 'Bugsy' Siegel decided to build a luxury gambling oasis in the desert. At the time, Las Vegas was a crossroads in the middle of the desert. Siegel understood the emerging desire for escape in the American psyche - and out of nothing, created what became an enormous gambling haven. Las Vegas has now transformed itself into a gigantic family-oriented theme park, albeit one with slots and roulette wheels. It's become a holiday destination for the entire family, not just a place that fathers sneak off to. Las Vegas moved from the Fringe (Bugsy's original vision), to the Edge (the first hotel), to the Realm of the Cool (where everyone wanted to go), to the Next Big Thing (where everyone went), to Social Convention.

The Deviant's Advantage

How Fringe Ideas Create Mass Markets

Alan Rugman

Professor Alan Rugman is one of the world's leading academics in the field of international business and strategy. In The End of Globalization  he argues that we are currently witnessing the end of globalization and draws on new research and analysis to argue that globalization never really happened anyway. Like Bartlett and Ghoshal's Managing Across Borders,  this book is aimed at the market of practitioners and policy-makers, (not academics and theoreticians) showing them what the current state of the global economy means for them. Global business is dominated by the 500 largest multinational enterprises (MNEs) out of a total of 30,000 MNEs altogether.  The 500 MNEs that are the engines of international business 'think regional and act local'. Using analysis drawn from world-leading companies, Professor Rugman looks in detail at the managerial implications of the end of globalization, including in-depth discussion of corporate strategies, organizational structures, and analytical methods.

The End Of Globalization

T. Christian Miller

Ken Armstrong

Random House presents the audiobook edition of A False Report by T. Christian Miller and Ken Armstrong, read by Hillary Huber with an epilogue read by Ken Armstrong and an authors' note read by T. Christian Miller. 
 
Two Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists uncover the true story of Marie. She said she was raped; police said she lied. It was an easy case to close until two detectives cracked it back open. 
 
 On 11 August 2008, eighteen-year-old Marie reported that a masked man had broken into her home and raped her. Within days, police – and even those closest to Marie – became suspicious of her story: details of the crime just didn’t seem plausible. Confronted with the seeming inconsistencies, Marie broke down and said her story was a fabrication – a bid for attention. The police convicted her of making a false report. She was vilified as a liar. 
 
 More than two years later, some 1,600 kilometres away, detective Stacy Galbraith was assigned to a case of sexual assault. It bore an eerie resemblance to a rape that had taken place months earlier in a nearby town. Galbraith contacted the detective on that case, Edna Hendershot, and they joined forces. 
 
 Galbraith and Hendershot soon realised they were dealing with a serial rapist: a man who took calculated steps to erase all physical evidence, who photographed each of his victims, threatening to release the images online if the women went to the police. After weeks of meticulous investigation, they had a name. But they also had yet another victim – a young woman whose identity was a mystery, a possible missing link. It was imperative they find her. 
 
 Based on investigative files and extensive interviews with those involved, A False Report is a serpentine tale of doubt, lies and a hunt for justice. It unveils the disturbing reality of how sexual assault is investigated and the long history of scepticism towards its victims. But it is also the story of two women whose determined resolve and detective brilliance finally brought the truth to light.

A False Report

The chilling true story of the woman nobody believed

From the catwalks of Paris to the sweatshops of South Korea; from Seventh Avenue glitz to Tokyo new-wave… The sophisticated brokings of the fashion conspiracy have generated a powerful new force in the world economy; designer money. 
 
Nicholas Coleridge presents a fascinating portrait of the jet-setting matrons who are the gurus and tyrants of the fashion press; of fashion legends like Paloma Picasso and Tina Chow; of the top store buyers who command $700 million a season. He probes the incredible world of the designer billionaires like Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein and Yves St Laurent whose fashion empires are richer than entire Third World countries. 
 
Here are the jealousies, the glamour, the buccaneering, the espionage and the razzmatazz in a witty and penetrating guide to an extraordinary world.

The Fashion Conspiracy

Alex Brummer

Once upon a time Britain's pension system was admired around the world. Now, it's in tatters and vast numbers of people face the grim choice of enduring a poverty-stricken future or working until they drop. What on earth went wrong? 
 
In The Great Pensions Robbery award-winning journalist Alex Brummer ventures into the corridors of power to find out how politicians bent on penny-pinching, a civil service cowed into submission and individuals more interested in their careers than public service have all taken a part in fatally undermining a 100-year-old system. It's also a story of breathtaking hypocrisy, where those in charge have feather-bedded their own pensions while destroying those of ordinary people. And, as Brummer convincingly argues, we're only just starting to live with the appalling consequences.

The Great Pensions Robbery

How New Labour Betrayed Retirement

Gay Talese

How has Gay Talese found his subjects? How has he gotten them onto the page? What drives him to write? These are some of the questions at the heart of the narrative that combines memory, reflection, explanation and a satisfying obsession. I his trademark prose - precise, beautifully crafted, elegant - Talese traces the paths his passionate interests have made through his life and writing. He talks about first becoming absorbed in issues of race as a student in Alabama, about covering the civil rights struggle and about a recent interracial wedding in Selma. He reflects on the changing American sexual mores he has written about over the last 50 years, and gives an incisive examination of the lives of Lorena and John Bobbitt. He talks about his legendary Esquire profile of Frank Sinatra - judged by the magazine to be the finest in its long history - and about the ordinary men and women whose stories led to some of his most memorable work. And as he delves into the life of a young female Chinese soccer player, we see his consuming interest in the world in its latest manifestation. In these and other recollections and stories, he gives us a fascinating picture of both the serendipity and meticulousness involved in getting a story, and getting it right. 
 
Candid, humorous, deeply impassioned - a dazzling book about the nature of writing in one man's life, and of writing itself.

A Writer's Life

Chris Anderson

What happens when advances in technology allow many things to be produced for more or less nothing? And what happens when those things are then made available to the consumer for free? 
 
In his groundbreaking new book, The Long Tail author Chris Anderson considers a brave new world where the old economic certainties are being undermined by a growing flood of free goods - newspapers, DVDs, T shirts, phones, even holiday flights. He explains why this has become possible - why new technologies, particularly the Internet, have caused production and distribution costs in many sectors to plummet to an extent unthinkable even a decade ago. He shows how the flexibility provided by the online world allows producers to trade ever more creatively, offering items for free to make real or perceived gains elsewhere. He pinpoints the winners and the losers in the Free universe. And he demonstrates the ways in which, as an increasing number of things become available for free, our decisions to make use of them will be determined by two resources far more valuable than money: the popular reputation of what is on offer and the time we have available for it. In the future, he argues, when we talk of the 'money economy' we will talk of the 'reputation economy' and the 'time economy' in the same breath, and our world will never be the same again.

Free

The Future of a Radical Price

Deborah Spar

The advance of digital technology is creating whole new markets and industries.  Telecommunications is merging into media; information is blurring into entertainment; and commercial ventures of all types are being pulled into the amorphous space of the internet.Pirates, Prophets and Pioneers examines how these new technologies are pushing at the boundaries of existing rules and how governments are likely to respond to them.  Using material gathered from four years of academic research and confidential interviews, Debora Spar brings us inside the world of business and politics in the digital age.  In the process, she also takes us back in time, to explore to older technologies and earlier battles. Looking at the advent of radio and telegraphy, the rise of trans-oceanic trade and the development of satellite television, Spar finds striking parallels to our own time (for example, online music and software wars) and critical lessons for both business and politics.

Pirates, Prophets And Pioneers

Business and Politics Along the Technological Frontier

Richard Bacon

Have you ever been stitched up to the national press by your best mate? 
 
Or unintentionally upset a band with a slip of the tongue on a live TV show? 
 
Or ruined a dinner party by transforming everything alcoholic into water? 
 
Hello. I’m Richard Bacon and this is A Series of Unrelated Events. All of the stories are true. All of them happened to me. I’ve made the mistakes so you don’t have to (you’re welcome). 
 
So now, if you should ever find yourself sobbing on top of a box of gherkins in the stockroom of a Mansfield McDonald’s… having a Twitter conversation with your mum while she’s pretending to be an illiterate dog… performing stand-up to an audience who are funnier than you are… or just letting down all of the children of Great Britain… 
 
…you’ll know exactly what to do.

A Series of Unrelated Events

Phil Dowell

This book has grown out of the ideas, discriptions and examples which the author has developed and refined over fifteen years of delievering courses about business. to students at London Business School and to managers in his capacity as management consultant, its aim is to give a practical understanding of aspects of business which are often seen as `difficult' such as cash flow forecasting. Many of the vivid examples included are from small businesses because of their more accessible concepts, acahapters deal with a separate topic and may be read in any order. Although businessesset great store by trying to be different from competitors, it is the author`s thesis that in the final analysis the same essential activities are to be found over and over again. This book explains what is involved in thee essential activities. `A business must sell things, repeatedly, over time, for more money than it spends in so doing. Otherwise, it ceases to be a business. There are no exceptions.

Understanding Business

This is a first class addition to the ever popular 'Perfect' series and covers a growth area of management. More and more people are becoming consultants as layers of middle management are stripped out of major companies, releasing into the workplace people with plenty of valuable experience to hand on to new clients. This book covers the main areas of what it takes to become a consultant, setting up, getting work and getting repeat business, the necessary skills, carrying out the work and the financial side.

The Perfect Consultant

All You Need To Get it Right First Time

Nigel Barlow

The last two decades have seen the rise and rise of the service economy, where image - and customer perceptions - are crucially important in building a successful business. Rarely do we buy a hard, tangible object called a 'product'. Financial services sell peace of mind; car manufacturers sell a self-image and an aspirational lifestyle; computer and software companies offer 'solutions' - even food is fashion. Nigel Barlow draws on two decades of experience in 20 countries to argue that the age of service has failed to deliver on its promises. He goes far beyond the standard business-speak cliches of customer service to show why merely satisfying customers is not enough. He explores with original examples and first-hand experinces why service so often falls short of customer expectations, and shows how to think and act to create legendary service in the reader's own organization.

Batteries Included!

Creating Legendary Service

Eduardo Porter

Why is a life saved from a terrorist attack felt to be worth two saved from a natural disaster? Why are men more valuable than women? Why do Americans tip when Europeans don't? And how can orange juice be used to predict the weather? 
 
The Price of Everything starts with a simple idea: behind every decision we make lies a price, whether that's buying a cup of coffee, taking a new job, or deciding to become a parent. Prices are the invisible thread that connect and explain our society, our economy, our culture, our mistakes and our successes. Revealing connections that are ingenious and unexpected, Eduardo Porter shows just how fundamental the price of things, work, happiness, faith, family and the future are - both to our everyday behaviour and to civilisation as we know it.

The Price of Everything

The Cost of Birth, the Price of Death, and the Value of Everything in between

Andrew Leigh

Michael Maynard

Perfect Leader shows clearly how everybody can learn to exercise leadership. Are leaders born or made? The book is comprehensive yet concise and to the point. It is written in clear language and is designed to be of immediate, practical benefit to readers. It explains exactly what it takes to be a leader by identifying and examining the seven 'I's of leadership: Insight --Initiative --Inspiration --Involvement --Improvisation --Individuality --Implementation. Today's business methods, with their emphasis on teamwork, and on fewer layers of management, mean that there is a need for effective leaders to bring about corporate success - and in the process build themselves a satisfying 
career. 
 
The Perfect series is a range of practical guides that give clear and straightforward advice on everything from getting your first job to choosing your baby's name. Written by experienced authors offering tried-and-tested tips, each book contains all you need to get it right first time.

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