A breakthrough guide to the real lessons of business Have you ever noticed that individuals of brilliance often fall short of their true potential? Great ideas, concepts and initiatives seldom break through the sea of business mediocrity. As a senior international leader with over 30 years corporate experience, Hamish Thomson has discovered that true transformation and breakthrough comes from personal insight — derived not from intellect or technical mastery, but from experience and observation of real-life occurrences. It’s Not Always Right to Be Right offers unique business and leadership insights, teachable models, and practical advice on what one needs to do differently to achieve desired results. Writing in a casual, autobiographical style, Hamish shares the key experiences and hard-won lessons that enabled him to drive significant change when all the right ways of doing things didn’t work. Packed with fascinating true-to-life stories and powerful, often counterintuitive lessons, this invaluable guide: Distills a lifetime of business wisdom into a single volume Offers honest business and leadership lessons drawn from a long and successful corporate career Features learning messages, practical steps, and shareable strategic models and frameworks to help you make a tangible difference where it counts Provides strategic models that can be used to frame discussions and drive change in individuals, teams, and entire organizations It’s Not Always Right to Be Right is a must-read for anyone starting out in the business and corporate world, for anyone in the middle of their career looking to break through to the next level, and for senior leaders seeking to improve performance and drive meaningful change.

Service workers share their funniest and most cringeworthy stories of difficult, demanding, and just plain mind-boggling encounters with the public . . . “Ma’am, the rules clearly state that you cannot have any liquids over 3.4 ounces in your carry-on. If you’d like to, you could—” “But that’s not a liquid!” “Excuse me, ma’am?” “It’s not a liquid! It’s water!” Retailers, restaurants, and tech support providers believe service is king, but in The Customer Is Not Always Right, A.J. Adams proves that customers will do anything they can to put that motto to the test. Enjoy tales from the creator of the popular website Not Always Right, including half that are previously unpublished, showcasing customer-relations horror stories everyone can relate to. No matter what side of the counter you’re on, there are hilarious accounts about everything that can go wrong between the customer and retail or service provider. Whether it's a confrontation in the drive-through over not enough fries or arguing over a one-cent price difference on milk, this book proves the principle of “the customer is always right” can be dead wrong.

Strange debris is found in a field near Roswell, New Mexico. Many suspect it is an alien spacecraft. Fires burn beneath a town for over 50 years. Rocks weighing several hundred pounds move across land on their own. Are these unbelievable tales real? Find out in this fascinating collection of short stories. Who isn't fascinated by the world of the weird? These story collections are the ultimate in high-interest reading. The people, places, and things within their pages range from the peculiar to the preposterous, from the creepy to the utterly terrifying, and from the odd to the awful. Yet all stories are based on eyewitness accounts or the solid research of serious investigators. Captivating facts are included in a "Strange Truth" section following each story.

Like many ambitious New York City teenagers, Craig Gilner sees entry into Manhattan's Executive Pre-Professional High School as the ticket to his future. Determined to succeed at life—which means getting into the right high school to get into the right college to get the right job—Craig studies night and day to ace the entrance exam, and does. That's when things start to get crazy. At his new school, Craig realizes that he isn't brilliant compared to the other kids; he's just average, and maybe not even that. He soon sees his once-perfect future crumbling away.

With his stunning debut novel, She's Come Undone, Wally Lamb won the adulation of critics and readers with his mesmerizing tale of one woman's painful yet triumphant journey of self-discovery. Now, this brilliantly talented writer returns with I Know This Much Is True, a heartbreaking and poignant multigenerational saga of the reproductive bonds of destruction and the powerful force of forgiveness. A masterpiece that breathtakingly tells a story of alienation and connection, power and abuse, devastation and renewal--this novel is a contemporary retelling of an ancient Hindu myth. A proud king must confront his demons to achieve salvation. Change yourself, the myth instructs, and you will inhabit a renovated world. When you're the same brother of a schizophrenic identical twin, the tricky thing about saving yourself is the blood it leaves on your bands--the little inconvenience of the look-alike corpse at your feet. And if you're into both survival of the fittest and being your brother's keeper--if you've promised your dying mother--then say so long to sleep and hello to the middle of the night. Grab a book or a beer. Get used to Letterman's gap-toothed smile of the absurd, or the view of the bedroom ceiling, or the influence of random selection. Take it from a godless insomniac. Take it from the uncrazy twin--the guy who beat the biochemical rap. Dominick Birdsey's entire life has been compromised and constricted by anger and fear, by the paranoid schizophrenic twin brother he both deeply loves and resents, and by the past they shared with their adoptive father, Ray, a spit-and-polish ex-Navy man (the five-foot-six-inch sleeping giant who snoozed upstairs weekdays in the spare room and built submarines at night), and their long-suffering mother, Concettina, a timid woman with a harelip that made her shy and self-conscious: She holds a loose fist to her face to cover her defective mouth--her perpetual apology to the world for a birth defect over which she'd had no control. Born in the waning moments of 1949 and the opening minutes of 1950, the twins are physical mirror images who grow into separate yet connected entities: the seemingly strong and protective yet fearful Dominick, his mother's watchful "monkey"; and the seemingly weak and sweet yet noble Thomas, his mother's gentle "bunny." From childhood, Dominick fights for both separation and wholeness--and ultimately self-protection--in a house of fear dominated by Ray, a bully who abuses his power over these stepsons whose biological father is a mystery. I was still afraid of his anger but saw how he punished weakness--pounced on it. Out of self-preservation I hid my fear, Dominick confesses. As for Thomas, he just never knew how to play defense. He just didn't get it. But Dominick's talent for survival comes at an enormous cost, including the breakup of his marriage to the warm, beautiful Dessa, whom he still loves. And it will be put to the ultimate test when Thomas, a Bible-spouting zealot, commits an unthinkable act that threatens the tenuous balance of both his and Dominick's lives. To save himself, Dominick must confront not only the pain of his past but the dark secrets he has locked deep within himself, and the sins of his ancestors--a quest that will lead him beyond the confines of his blue-collar New England town to the volcanic foothills of Sicily 's Mount Etna, where his ambitious and vengefully proud grandfather and a namesake Domenico Tempesta, the sostegno del famiglia, was born. Each of the stories Ma told us about Papa reinforced the message that he was the boss, that he ruled the roost, that what he said went. Searching for answers, Dominick turns to the whispers of the dead, to the pages of his grandfather's handwritten memoir, The History of Domenico Onofrio Tempesta, a Great Man from Humble Beginnings. Rendered with touches of magic realism, Domenico's fablelike tale--in which monkeys enchant and religious statues weep--becomes the old man's confession--an unwitting legacy of contrition that reveals the truth's of Domenico's life, Dominick learns that power, wrongly used, defeats the oppressor as well as the oppressed, and now, picking through the humble shards of his deconstructed life, he will search for the courage and love to forgive, to expiate his and his ancestors' transgressions, and finally to rebuild himself beyond the haunted shadow of his twin. Set against the vivid panoply of twentieth-century America and filled with richly drawn, memorable characters, this deeply moving and thoroughly satisfying novel brings to light humanity's deepest needs and fears, our aloneness, our desire for love and acceptance, our struggle to survive at all costs. Joyous, mystical, and exquisitely written, I Know This Much Is True is an extraordinary reading experience that will leave no reader untouched.

Customers are NOT always right...in fact, they can be outrageously wrong! If you've ever worked in a retail store, at a restaurant, or at any customer service job, then you know just how rude, strange, and wacky customers can be. The editors of the long-running site NotAlwaysRight.com have tirelessly sourced over 200 of the best real-life stories of ridiculous customers and the resilient employees that face them daily.

The author of the acclaimed memoir The Suicide Index returns with a virtuosic collection of stories, each a stirring parable of the power of love and the impossibility of understanding it. Spanning centuries and continents, from eighteenth-century Vienna to contemporary America, Joan Wickersham shows, with uncanny exactitude, how we never really know what’s in someone else’s heart—or in our own.

"In Common Valor, Frank Viscuso describes the firefighting world as only a firefighter can. Viscuso captures the human emotion and drama from firefighters who have endured a wide range of firefighting and rescue scenarios. He goes way beyond the stories that the public may hear about. With Common Valor, you live it. From these dramatic descriptions, you feel yourself right there, up close with the rescuers. From seeing fellow firefighters die to being caught in a flashover and living to tell about it, Common Valor captures the true spirit and camaraderie of firefighters." —Harvey Eisner If you are a firefighter, or hope to be one someday, you need to read Common Valor. This book captures the true spirit of firefighting and all the emotions that accompany what has been called both the greatest and most stressful job on earth.

A gorgeous visual celebration of America's public libraries including 150 photos, plus essays by Bill Moyers, Ann Patchett, Anne Lamott, Amy Tan, Barbara Kingsolver, and many more. Many of us have vivid recollections of childhood visits to a public library: the unmistakable musty scent, the excitement of checking out a stack of newly discovered books. Today, the more than 17,000 libraries in America also function as de facto community centers offering free access to the internet, job-hunting assistance, or a warm place to take shelter. And yet, across the country, cities large and small are closing public libraries or curtailing their hours of operation. Over the last eighteen years, photographer Robert Dawson has crisscrossed the country documenting hundreds of these endangered institutions. The Public Library presents a wide selection of Dawson's photographs— from the majestic reading room at the New York Public Library to Allensworth, California's one-room Tulare County Free Library built by former slaves. Accompanying Dawson's revealing photographs are essays, letters, and poetry by some of America's most celebrated writers. A foreword by Bill Moyers and an afterword by Ann Patchett bookend this important survey of a treasured American institution.

Volume 1: From Socrates to the Reformation.