Poker columnist, psychotherapist and author James A. McKenna goes deep into the psychology of poker, revealing how to use the psychological patterns that govern opponents to trap them into making mistakes. McKenna explains how consistent winners use different bait for different prey and how they trap and avoid traps by noticing the difference between players at the table. McKenna demonstrates the different approaches needed for different personalities, outlining the traps for each, and shows readers how to take their game to a higher level.

Reclusive movie star Jessica Lessing is finally coming out of hiding—to confront her father, a con man who has been selling her out to the paparazzi for years. On her four-day road trip to Las Vegas, she encounters three unexpected allies—Vivian, a teenager with newborn twins; Lynn, a dog shelter owner living in isolation on a ranch in rural Nevada; and Dana, a fearless ex-military bodyguard wrestling with secrets of her own. As their fates collide, each woman will find a chance at redemption that she never would have thought possible. MacKenzie Bezos’s taut prose, tough characters, and nuanced insights give this novel a complexity that few thrillers can match. This ebook edition includes a Reading Group Guide.

This book examines five countries in South East Asia that are instructive case studies of how the region has had to negotiate pathways of development beyond crises and traps. At two ends of just one decade, 1997–2007, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam all had to weather the shocks of an East Asian financial crisis and a global financial crisis. Some economies might have buckled completely under those shocks and been condemned to long-term stagnation. Yet these five economies, part of the larger Asian region, emerged with continued if slower economic growth. An important theme of this book is that their resilience has been partly derived from the pursuit of growth and competitiveness along less known or recommended pathways. The chapters of this book take a novel approach to South East Asia’s search for growth and improvement. They do not begin by evaluating how far macro-level performances would take a particular country towards high-income status. Instead they provide original insights into actual cases of intermediate ways of achieving growth, upgrading and income improvement in non-privileged sectors. Such cases may hold more relevant lessons for the majority of developing countries than the experiences of highly developed economies.

The annual budgeting process is a trap. Pressured by fixed targets and performance incentives, managers focus on making the numbers instead of making a difference, meeting set goals instead of maximizing potential. With their compensation at stake, managers often resort to deceitful-even unethical-behavior. In the end, everybody loses-the employee, the company, and ultimately the customer. Now, finance experts Jeremy Hope and Robin Fraser reveal the results of an intensive study aimed at fixing the broken budgeting process. They argue that companies must abandon traditional budgeting contracts in favor of a radical new model that links performance measurement to evolving competitive benchmarks-and shifts the firm's focus from controlling employee behavior to delivering customer value. The Beyond Budgeting model is built on the best practices of companies that have successfully revised their centralized planning and budgeting processes. It combines a leadership vision that devolves more authority to operating managers and a finance vision that enables fast decision making through appropriate tools and accessible information. Through vivid examples, Hope and Fraser illustrate how companies can implement these shared visions-and the long-term benefits that accrue from embracing them. Offering a compelling case for breaking free from the budgeting trap, this book paves the way toward making organizations better places to work for, invest in, and do business with.

Based on the success of the World Scientific publication OC Governing and Managing KnowledgeOCO edited by Thomas Menkhoff, Hans-Dieter Evers and Chay Yue Wah in 2005, this unique volume presents 16 new theoretical-practical papers on the strategic aspects of developing knowledge-based economies with case studies from South Korea, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, Philippines and Uzbekistan. A key question which the book seeks to answer is what Asian policy-makers and leaders in government, economy and society can do to further enhance learning and capability formation so as to foster sustainable development in an increasingly globalized world. It addresses the politico-cultural and socio-economic challenges of effectively managing both knowledge resources and coping with the great digital divide created by globalization, continuous technology innovations and rapid external change. A key objective of the publication is to enable latecomers in the knowledge race to understand some of the critical success factors of sustainable knowledge-based development and what it takes to build a resilient knowledge-based economy.

To stay competitive in today’s market, organizations need to adopt a culture of customer-centric practices that focus on outcomes rather than outputs. Companies that live and die by outputs often fall into the "build trap," cranking out features to meet their schedule rather than the customer’s needs. In this book, Melissa Perri explains how laying the foundation for great product management can help companies solve real customer problems while achieving business goals. By understanding how to communicate and collaborate within a company structure, you can create a product culture that benefits both the business and the customer. You’ll learn product management principles that can be applied to any organization, big or small. In five parts, this book explores: Why organizations ship features rather than cultivate the value those features represent How to set up a product organization that scales How product strategy connects a company’s vision and economic outcomes back to the product activities How to identify and pursue the right opportunities for producing value through an iterative product framework How to build a culture focused on successful outcomes over outputs

Beyond the Subjectivity Trap challenges the paradigm of the hard problem of consciousness by contesting the relevance and primacy of human thought. By tracing the evolved egocentricity of the 'I' as an entrapping limitation on our thinking the book argues that once the Subjectivity Trap is understood and escaped we can appreciate the non-existence of the mind–body divide, the pure functionality of the brain, and the limitlessness of our potential.

Every growing young must know cooking and understand reality. Maturing is about understanding recipes of reality as well as reality of recipes. Cooking is a great simulation of life’s relationship with reality. Cooking entails conscious construction of cause-effect relationship with different ingredients to create recipes of realities of experience-cognition of taste and aroma. Good life-living, like cooking, needs knowledge of causal relationships to create recipes of blissful realities, out of the ingredients of life-living information. This innovative cook book very humbly wishes to help you cook and taste all realities, the best way they should, to optimize life-living experiences, beyond restrictiveness of populism, viscerality and intuitiveness. As you grow and become an adult, your life journey unfolds in two related ways – first you consciously and conscientiously create new relationships with lot many novel and alternative realities and secondly; you continuously redefine and rebuild your existing relationships with all realities in this big world you live. This Relationship of You with Realities and its conscious-conscientious and artistic creation are critical to richness and diversity of experiences-cognitions, which alone is the true wealth of life-living. Cooking is a great modeling of this art and science of life-living and therefore every young must learn it well to be the masterchef of life. Life is largely about consciously having good and right ingredients and ‘cooking’ them to conscientiously create and recreate good and diverse recipes of beautiful, healthy and satisfying relationships with realities. You need to understand that the universe and world outside you only has Information. They are not Reality. Reality happens only when you cook and taste ‘Relationship with the Information’. The true-right-objective-holistic ‘Information’ is the best available ‘Ingredients’ of life-living recipes of realities. Recipes of reality and their experiencing depend on the experience as well as knowledge you have of infinite ingredients of information out there in the universe. Information is critical for blissful-harmonious life-living and reality of recipes requires that you understand the twin dimensions of information – Intuitive and Non-Intuitive. As you grow, you acquire ‘Ingredients of Information’ primarily through experiencing and it happens through the Intuitive-visceral and hardwired sense of utility-worth-righteousness of five senses and emotions. This intuitive sensory experiencing however is heavily prone and susceptible to fake-fudged-fraudulent-propagandist information as evidences for and against them come only with objective-scientific-holistic knowledge. This knowledge cannot be experienced by intuitive-visceral processes but only through disciplined and persevered learning. In fact, many information you get through intuitive experiencing, have to be ‘unlearnt’ through knowledge acquisition as many experienced Information are only partial and even wrong. Knowledge acquisition process is often non-intuitive and counter-intuitive, which are hard to accept as they stand antagonistic to intuitive sense of happiness. You cook not only for tastes as it is only an intuitive experiencing of happiness. You essentially cook and eat for health and energy needs of your body and health information is non-intuitive knowledge, which is often antagonistic to intuitive-visceral validation of tastefulness. Cooking and life need you to go beyond intuitive-visceral, self-validating rationality. Cooking makes you learn to balance between intuitive and non-intuitive information. It leads you to accept the importance of having true-right-holistic ‘Ingredients of Information’, to ‘cook’ most healthy as well as tasteful recipes of realities, for harmonious life-living. This novel-innovative-experimental cook book very humbly journeys all realities for your life-living wellness and prosperity. Welcome…

Beyond the Subjectivity Trap challenges the paradigm of the hard problem of consciousness by contesting the relevance and primacy of human thought. By tracing the evolved egocentricity of the 'I' as an entrapping limitation on our thinking the book argues that once the Subjectivity Trap is understood and escaped we can appreciate the non-existence of the mind–body divide, the pure functionality of the brain, and the limitlessness of our potential.

Beyond the Primary Commodity Trap offers an alternative paradigm for analysing African development from the current "e;aid and aids"e; narrative.Taking as its point of departure Africa's failure to extricate itself from over dependence on raw materials and its seeming inability to industrialise, it offers an analysis of the political forces that have shaped and continue to shape Africa's political economy. The book focuses particularly on the endemic poverty in the continent and how it interfaces with politics. Written with the general reader in mind, the book also examines some of the internal dynamics in Africa and how these combine with the continent's history and some other extraneous factors to explain the current conditions of economic poverty and the poverty of leadership in many parts of the continent.