In this day and age when the sports pages of the local newspaper read like either a police report or a pharmacology text, it is impossible not to conclude that the mantra of winning has entered very dangerous ground. This book not only details these abuses and the dangers of the drugs themselves, but also addresses the misguided coaches, fialed mentors, and poor role models who have contributed to the decline of the sports-for-sports sake mentalitly.

The authors combine to produce a work that addresses some of the most pressing issues in athletics today. While the book focuses primarily on steroid and supplement abuse, it also covers unethical practices on the part of some coaches and athletes to gain a competitive edge. Finally, it offers healthy alternatives to supplements for athletes wishing to gain size and strength without putting their future health at risk.

This entertaining book seeks to unravel an array of pricing puzzles from the one captured in the book’s title to why so many prices end with "9" (as in $2.99 or $179). Along the way, the author explains how the 9/11 terrorists have, through the effects of their heinous acts on the relative prices of various modes of travel, killed more Americans since 9/11 than they killed that fateful day. He also explains how well-meaning efforts to spur the use of alternative, supposedly environmentally friendly fuels have starved millions of people around the world and given rise to the deforestation of rainforests in Malaysia and Indonesia.

Winning at all Costs: Sporting Giants and their Demons grapples with one of sport’s great conundrums: what raises outstanding champions above their rivals? What Gogarty and Williamson discover on their journey through the stadium of the mind is that the seed of greatness and domination can also be a curse. Why did Dean Karnazes head off on a 1000-mile ‘fun run’ after completing his 50th back-to-back marathon in the US? Why so many pranks and pratfalls for Gazza and how come Michael Jordan retired from basketball three times when he was already universally acknowledged as the greatest player of all time? What makes Jonny Wilkinson and David Beckham practice endlessly – it’s not just fitness. What made Mike Tyson graphically describe his aim in the ring to catch his opponent ‘right on the tip of the nose, because I try to push the bone into the brain.’ And just why is it that Romanian striker Adrian Mutu insists on wearing his underpants inside out? Winning at all Costs: Sporting Giants and their Demons is aimed at laymen who don’t think the unconscious is the place you reach on a Saturday night after sinking 15 pints. The book explores psychological triggers that just might have provided the electricity for some of the world’s most outstanding sporting successes. Those at the top are there for a reason, and as a defence for their more vulnerable selves, nowhere feels safer. Paul Gogarty is a journalist, television presenter, and award-winning author of The Water Road and The Coast Road. Ian Williamson is a practising Harley Street child and adolescent analyst. For 15 years, he played for and captained Blackheath and was on the fringes of the England rugby team. He is also a former Cambridge Blue and general sporting all-rounder and obsessive.

Michael Lewis’s instant classic may be “the most influential book on sports ever written” (People), but “you need know absolutely nothing about baseball to appreciate the wit, snap, economy and incisiveness of [Lewis’s] thoughts about it” (Janet Maslin, New York Times). One of GQ's 50 Best Books of Literary Journalism of the 21st Century Just before the 2002 season opens, the Oakland Athletics must relinquish its three most prominent (and expensive) players and is written off by just about everyone—but then comes roaring back to challenge the American League record for consecutive wins. How did one of the poorest teams in baseball win so many games? In a quest to discover the answer, Michael Lewis delivers not only “the single most influential baseball book ever” (Rob Neyer, Slate) but also what “may be the best book ever written on business” (Weekly Standard). Lewis first looks to all the logical places—the front offices of major league teams, the coaches, the minds of brilliant players—but discovers the real jackpot is a cache of numbers?numbers!?collected over the years by a strange brotherhood of amateur baseball enthusiasts: software engineers, statisticians, Wall Street analysts, lawyers, and physics professors. What these numbers prove is that the traditional yardsticks of success for players and teams are fatally flawed. Even the box score misleads us by ignoring the crucial importance of the humble base-on-balls. This information had been around for years, and nobody inside Major League Baseball paid it any mind. And then came Billy Beane, general manager of the Oakland Athletics. He paid attention to those numbers?with the second-lowest payroll in baseball at his disposal he had to?to conduct an astonishing experiment in finding and fielding a team that nobody else wanted. In a narrative full of fabulous characters and brilliant excursions into the unexpected, Michael Lewis shows us how and why the new baseball knowledge works. He also sets up a sly and hilarious morality tale: Big Money, like Goliath, is always supposed to win . . . how can we not cheer for David?

"After years of rumors and speculation, Matt Hart sets out to peel back the layers of secrecy that protected the most powerful coach in running. What he finds will leave you indignant—and wondering whether anything in the high-stakes world of Olympic sport has truly changed." —Alex Hutchinson, New York Times bestselling author of Endure Game of Shadows meets Shoe Dog in this explosive behind-the-scenes look that reveals for the first time the unsettling details of Nike's secret running program—the Nike Oregon Project. In May 2017, journalist Matt Hart received a USB drive containing a single file—a 4.7-megabyte PDF named “Tic Toc, Tic Toc. . . .” He quickly realized he was in possession of a stolen report prepared a year earlier by the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) for the Texas Medical Board, part of an investigation into legendary running coach Alberto Salazar, a Houston-based endocrinologist named Dr. Jeffrey Brown, and cheating by Nike-sponsored runners, including some of the world’s best athletes. The information Hart received was part of an unfolding story of deception which began when Steve Magness, an assistant to Salazar, broke the omertà—the Mafia-like code of silence about performance-enhancing drugs among those involved—and alerted USADA. He was soon followed by Olympians Adam and Kara Goucher who risked their careers to become whistleblowers on their former Nike running family in Beaverton, Oregon. Combining sports drama and business exposé, Win at All Costs tells the full story of Nike’s running program, uncovering a corporate win-at-all-costs culture.

Since the “hunter-gatherer” days of old, human beings have instinctively worked in teams. But what have we really learned about what drives us to cooperate and collaborate with each other? Does all of the selfishness and scandal in business and government today suggest we have spilled the special sauce of teamwork? Doing More With Teams explores the ways to encourage a new form of competition, so that organizations complete the challenges before them to drive growth and get results. It offers a new premise for the concept of teamwork and challenges the perception that individualism is the only way to wealth. Through real-life and historical examples of teams that have inspired awe, this book lays out a solid set of principles that work for all kinds of teams, including: How aging teaches us the value of teams as a source of meaningfulness in life. How to establish clear principles that call for shared responsibility throughout an organization. How to avoid individual motivators that undermine the importance of teams. The costs of an excessive expectation of ceaseless victory. Why the best team captains are those who quickly and accurately assess team members’ capabilities—and determine how they affect the group. Doing More With Teams enlightens the world to a new, more ethical, and more collaborative way forward. It shows us how best to tap into the magic of teamwork.

From local coffee shops to the largest Fortune 500 companies, everyone is struggling to make the impossible choice between chasing short-term objectives and creating a secure future for their company. David Cote understood this dilemma and rejected it. In these pages, he shows you how taking the same revolutionary approach might be the smartest business decision you’ll ever make. This book reveals the bold the operational reforms and counterintuitive leadership practices you can put into practice that will allow you to do two conflicting things at the same time—pursue strong short- and long-term results. This tested and proven approach can strengthen your business like never before, and even rescue it from the brink of disaster no matter how dire the current circumstances may seem. In Winning Now, Winning Later, Cote shares 10 essential principles for winning today and tomorrow such as: Spot practices that seem attractive in the short term but will cost the company in the future Determine where and how to invest in growth for maximum impact Sustain both short-term performance and long-term investments even in challenging times, such as during recessions and leadership transitions Feel inspired to stand up to investors and other managers who are solely focused on either short- or long-term objectives Step back, think independently, and foster independent thinking among others around you Presenting a comprehensive solution to a perennial problem, Winning Now, Winning Later is a go-to guide for you and leaders everywhere to finally transcend short-termism’s daily grind and leave an enduring legacy of success.

Great leaders embrace a higher purpose to win. The Net Promoter System shines as their guiding star. Few management ideas have spread so far and wide as the Net Promoter System (NPS). Since its conception almost two decades ago by customer loyalty guru Fred Reichheld, thousands of companies around the world have adopted it—from industrial titans such as Mercedes-Benz and Cummins to tech giants like Apple and Amazon to digital innovators such as Warby Parker and Peloton. Now, Reichheld has raised the bar yet again. In Winning on Purpose, he demonstrates that the primary purpose of a business should be to enrich the lives of its customers. Why? Because when customers feel this love, they come back for more and bring their friends—generating good profits. This is NPS 3.0 and it puts a new take on the age-old Golden Rule—treat customers the way you would want a loved one treated—at the heart of enduring business success. As the compelling examples in this book illustrate, companies with superior NPS consistently deliver higher returns to shareholders across a wide array of industries. But winning on purpose isn't easy. Reichheld also explains why many NPS practitioners achieve just a small fraction of the system's full potential, and he presents the newest thinking and best practices for doing NPS right. He unveils the Earned Growth Rate (EGR): the first reliable, complementary accounting measure that can truly leverage the power of NPS. With keen insight and moving personal stories, Reichheld advances the thinking and practice of NPS. Winning on Purpose is your indispensable guide for inspiring customer love within your own teams and using Net Promoter to achieve both personal and business success.