Operating in a start-up and entrepreneurial environment that is innovative, fast-paced, and requires multitasking brings about the realization that a demonstrable gap exists between what leadership expects of consultants and how they, in reality, work, referred to as the expectation-reality gap (ERG). Whether you have an idea, are ready to initiate, or are building your consulting organization, you will benefit from the content of this book. Once your leadership and consultants grasp the themes, writes Jacobs, they will respond with urgency to become key players and gain significant momentum for your start-up, and consulting business. Jacobs masterfully applied the input-process-output (IPO) model and descriptive attributes to demonstrate and analyze the ERG, and guide readers to gain insight into why the expectation-reality gap occurs, and what inadequacies might exist in terms of culture, capability, and leadership. Jacobs provides for each theme, a checklist of questions to ascertain whether your organization employs practices to avoid or narrow the ERG. Realizing the ERG themes exist and understanding the context is a powerful instrument. For hiring teams during the recruitment process; client-engagement leaders when engaging consultants in business development activities; project leaders in assigning and mentoring team members; executive management in starting, leading, and managing consulting organizations; and for individual consultants understanding what leaders expect. My Expectations Nearly Killed My Dream is the checklist methodology every entrepreneur needs to build a non-conventional business, an influential culture, and talent that can sustain an environment characterized by client value, speed, and adaptability.

“He wrapped the rope around his body, got ready to rappel and leaned back. Standing about five feet from him, I heard a sharp scraping, Suddenly Ed was flying. I could see him fall, wordless, fifty feet free, then strike the steep ice below…he was sliding and bouncing down. He passed out of sight, but I heard his body bouncing. There wasn't a chance of his stopping for 4,000 feet.” —From David Robert's The Mountain of My Fear In these thrillingly true tales of narrow brushes with death, Cecil Kuhne has amassed a wide range of stories that show the awesome power of the mountains. Spanning five continents, from the frosty tip of Mount McKinley in the dead of the winter, to the unexplored vastness of the Himalayas and beyond, this is a pulse-pounding collection of disaster and survival at the top of the world. Also featuring: • Joe Simpson's Touching the Void—An inspiring story of a climber who topples into a icy crevasse and, though crippled, starving and frostbitten, still manages to crawl to rescue. • Jon Krakauer's Eiger Dreams—Reaching the limits of his own climbing skills, the author makes a crucial decision whether to brave the treacherous higher altitudes or return to base. • Nando Parrado's Miracle in the Andes—The stunning first-person account of a Peruvian rugby team's airplane crash in the Chilean Andes and their harrowing journey down the mountain for help.

With elements of suspense and emotion, The Dream Warrior is designed to capture the imagination as well as to provoke serious thought and reflection about one's life. It continually asks the question: "Does a man have but one destiny?" How does a man or woman get to be the person they become? What unknown forces determine what a person feels; what a person thinks; and what life a person gets to live? How does a person handle their thoughts and feelings? How does a person handle the adversities and challenges that they face throughout their life? And when a person reaches the "September of their years", what gives them satisfaction when they look back at their life?

“Impressive . . . [Cristina García’s] story is about three generations of Cuban women and their separate responses to the revolution. Her special feat is to tell it in a style as warm and gentle as the ‘sustaining aromas of vanilla and almond,’ as rhythmic as the music of Beny Moré.”—Time Cristina García’s acclaimed book is the haunting, bittersweet story of a family experiencing a country’s revolution and the revelations that follow. The lives of Celia del Pino and her husband, daughters, and grandchildren mirror the magical realism of Cuba itself, a landscape of beauty and poverty, idealism and corruption. Dreaming in Cuban is “a work that possesses both the intimacy of a Chekov story and the hallucinatory magic of a novel by Gabriel García Márquez” (The New York Times). In celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the novel’s original publication, this edition features a new introduction by the author. Praise for Dreaming in Cuban “Remarkable . . . an intricate weaving of dramatic events with the supernatural and the cosmic . . . evocative and lush.”—San Francisco Chronicle “Captures the pain, the distance, the frustrations and the dreams of these family dramas with a vivid, poetic prose.”—The Washington Post “Brilliant . . . With tremendous skill, passion and humor, García just may have written the definitive story of Cuban exiles and some of those they left behind.”—The Denver Post

Jackie Allan was a normal teenaged boy, he aspired to pick up his grades and leave highschool and his hum-drum life and small town behind. But little did he know his trip down the straight and narrow road was about to take a shard turn Straight down the crooked path!

The highly anticipated, thrilling sequel to the New York Times bestseller, Strange the Dreamer, from National Book Award finalist Laini Taylor, author of the bestselling Daughter of Smoke & Bone trilogy. Sarai has lived and breathed nightmares since she was six years old. She believed she knew every horror, and was beyond surprise. She was wrong. In the wake of tragedy, neither Lazlo nor Sarai are who they were before. One a god, the other a ghost, they struggle to grasp the new boundaries of their selves as dark-minded Minya holds them hostage, intent on vengeance against Weep. Lazlo faces an unthinkable choice--save the woman he loves, or everyone else?--while Sarai feels more helpless than ever. But is she? Sometimes, only the direst need can teach us our own depths, and Sarai, the muse of nightmares, has not yet discovered what she's capable of. As humans and godspawn reel in the aftermath of the citadel's near fall, a new foe shatters their fragile hopes, and the mysteries of the Mesarthim are resurrected: Where did the gods come from, and why? What was done with thousands of children born in the citadel nursery? And most important of all, as forgotten doors are opened and new worlds revealed: Must heroes always slay monsters, or is it possible to save them instead? Love and hate, revenge and redemption, destruction and salvation all clash in this gorgeous sequel to the New York Times bestseller, Strange the Dreamer./DIV