Friday Books and Talks 06/06/2014

Friday Books and Talks 06/06/2014

How the Best Leaders Lead
by Brian Tracy

In How the Best Leaders Lead, Brian Tracy reveals the strategies he teaches top executives to achieve astounding results in difficult markets against determined competition. You will learn how to set clear goals and objectives for yourself and others, set priorities and focus on key tasks, solve problems faster and make better decisions, determine the ideal leadership style for any situation, motivate your people, and develop an exciting future vision for your business.

 

The Coaching Manager
by Joseph R. Weintraub, James M. Hunt

When managers communicate a genuine interest in helping rather than evaluating their employees, they create opportunities for everyone to learn. Managers who try to help employees learn and become more productive in the process. In The Coaching Manager, James Hunt and Joseph Weintraub introduce an easy-to-implement developmental coaching model based on their extensive work with thousands of managers, executives and MBA students. The goal is for managers to help employees learn to be more productive on a day-to-day basis. This model encourages employees to take greater responsibility for their learning and development while forging a healthy relationship between manager and employee.

 

How sampling transformed music
By Mark Ronson

Sampling isn’t about “hijacking nostalgia wholesale,” says Mark Ronson. It’s about inserting yourself into the narrative of a song while also pushing that story forward. In this mind-blowingly original talk, watch the DJ scramble 15 TED Talks into an audio-visual omelette, and trace the evolution of “La Di Da Di,” Doug E. Fresh and Slick Rick’s 1984 hit that has been reimagined for every generation since.

 

Comics that ask “what if?”
By Randall Munroe

Web cartoonist Randall Munroe answers simple what-if questions (“what if you hit a baseball moving at the speed of light?”) using math, physics, logic and deadpan humor. In this charming talk, a reader’s question about Google’s data warehouse leads Munroe down a circuitous path to a hilariously over-detailed answer — in which, shhh, you might actually learn something. “And I love calculating these kinds of things, and it’s not that I love doing the math. I do a lot of math, but I don’t really like math for its own sake. What I love is that it lets you take some things that you know, and just by moving symbols around on a piece of paper, find out something that you didn’t know that’s very surprising. And I have a lot of stupid questions, and I love that math gives the power to answer them sometimes.”

 

What ants teach us about the brain, cancer and the Internet
By Deborah Gordon

Ecologist Deborah Gordon studies ants wherever she can find them — in the desert, in the tropics, in her kitchen … In this fascinating talk, she explains her obsession with insects most of us would happily swat away without a second thought. She argues that ant life provides a useful model for learning about many other topics, including disease, technology and the human brain.

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