Barrytown, Dublin, has something to sing about. The Commitments are spreading the gospel of the soul. Ably managed by Jimmy Rabbitte, brilliantly coached by Joey 'The Lips' Fagan, their twin assault on Motown and Barrytown takes them by leaps and bounds from the parish hall to the steps of the studio door. But can The Commitments live up to their name? The bestselling book behind the long-running West End stage show. 'Unstoppable fun. A big-hearted, big-night out' The Times

Dan Savage’s mother wants him to get married. His boyfriend, Terry, says “no thanks” because he doesn’t want to act like a straight person. Their six-year-old son DJ says his two dads aren’t “allowed” to get married, but that he’d like to come to the reception and eat cake. Throw into the mix Dan’s straight siblings, whose varied choices form a microcosm of how Americans are approaching marriage these days, and you get a rollicking family memoir that will have everyone—gay or straight, right or left, single or married—howling with laughter and rethinking their notions of marriage and all it entails.

A 4-Step Plan that Guides You Toward Your Goals and Holds You Accountable for Achieving Them Have you ever gotten really excited about a goal that you wanted to achieve and then had a hard time following through with it? Do you frequently say that you're going to do something and then either forget about it or get too busy and end up not doing it? If so, The Commitment Book can help! In it, we introduce you to our Commitment Training Program, which is a simple system that helps you come up with a realistic commitment and then holds you accountable for keeping it. We focus on keeping the commitment rather than the goal itself. When you can keep your word, your self esteem will immediately rise! Our system gives you the tools for a lifetime of following through on what you say you will do! It is broken into the following four steps: 1. Find your commitment 2. Commit to your commitment 3. Keep your commitment 4. Celebrate, re-evaluate, and recommit to your commitment It is written to be a workbook and gives you the opportunity to really explore what you want to commit to in life. It is great for individuals to use to follow their goals. It's also a great tool for families, teachers, counselors, and corporations. An excerpt from the introduction: Do you want to change anything about your life? Maybe you've already tried but ran out of steam (or got distracted, lost interest, or decided you didn't have time) before you accomplished your goal. If so, you're not alone! Most people already know what they want and how to get it. So why isn't everyone accomplishing their goals and living their dreams? Commitment. If you can commit to change, this book can help.

Winner of the Project Management Institute’s David I. Cleland Project Management Literature Award 2010 It’s no wonder that project managers spend so much time focusing their attention on risk identification. Important projects tend to be time constrained, pose huge technical challenges, and suffer from a lack of adequate resources. Identifying and Managing Project Risk, now updated and consistent with the very latest Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK)® Guide, takes readers through every phase of a project, showing them how to consider the possible risks involved at every point in the process. Drawing on real-world situations and hundreds of examples, the book outlines proven methods, demonstrating key ideas for project risk planning and showing how to use high-level risk assessment tools. Analyzing aspects such as available resources, project scope, and scheduling, this new edition also explores the growing area of Enterprise Risk Management. Comprehensive and completely up-to-date, this book helps readers determine risk factors thoroughly and decisively...before a project gets derailed.

To create a competitive advantage, a company must commit itself to developing a set of capabilities superior to its competitors; But such commitments tend to be costly and hard to reverse. How then, should a company decide which broad path, or strategy, to commit itself to? And how are competition and uncertainty to be accounted for in that decision? In this brilliant reassessment of how companies gain and sustain competitive advantage, Pankaj Ghemawat consolidates contemporary research in economics and other disciplines into a comprehensive yet practical framework for comparing commitments to strategically distinct options. This framework will help managers address specific strategic choices such as entry, exit, vertical/horizontal integration, capacity expansion, and innovation, as well as choices of generic strategy. Step by systematic step, Ghemawat provides managers with the tools and techniques they need to improve the quality of the choices that they make. Specifically, Ghemawat discusses: * how to identify the choices that are truly strategic -- that involve commitment -- before rather than after the fact * how to analyze the short-run and long-run competitive positions implied by a particular strategic option * how to assess the sustainability of superior competitive positions over time * how to account for the flexibility afforded by a particular option in dealing with future uncertainties * how to deal with both honest mistakes and deliberate distortions in the process of choice This pathbreaking book will help managers invest in the future. Its logic applies to choices involving disinvestment as well as those involving investment -- and to choices that embody elements of both. Its logic can be used for diagnostic purposes, such as the valuation of business, and most broadly, it win force managers to think about important issues that they may have tended to ignore. Ghemawat's discussion of these important ideas is concise, studded with detailed examples, based on rigorous research and, above all, practical. It will become required reading for thoughtful practitioners as well as practitionersto-be in the 1990s.

The Commitment Phobe uncovers the truth behind men who can't commit and the women who attract them. With humor and candor, this in-depth book finally explains how to spot a Commitment Phobe, what drives him to run away or cheat and how to finally break the cycle of a push/pull relationship and create lasting love. You will recognize yourself throughout the pages, changing the relationship game once and for all.

From USA Today Bestselling Romance Author S. E. Lund, Book 3 in the Unrestrained Series: Newly engaged, Drake and Kate start their life together in Nairobi, Kenya, where Drake is teaching and working as a surgeon to help out an old friend. Before they can even get settled in their new home, they are faced with challenges to their view of themselves and their relationship. Will their love survive? Unrestrained is the third book in the bestselling trilogy in which the intense and passionate relationship between Drake and Kate unfolds as they search for their happy ever after.

With extraordinary candor and generosity, Diane Rehm, the nationally known Public Radio broadcaster, and her lawyer husband, John, open up for the reader their marriage of forty-two years, revealing the strong and passionate bond between them as well as the conflicts and turmoils that can overtake a relationship. In a series of highly charged dialogues, they grapple with their pronounced differences of background, attitude, and expectation, so that we actually watch them working to understand each other and themselves, and to resolve issues that even after their decades together have remained hurtful and destructive. Their book is divided into twenty-six chapters, each centered on a difficult and important issue: the expression or repression of anger; strong disagreements about money, about family, about religion, about raising children; temperamental differences—she gregarious, he a loner; the complexities of sexual relationships, and the dangers of sexual estrangement and of the intrusion of a third person into a marriage; challenges arising from professional conflicts, from retirement, from aging, from illness. What makes Toward Commitment so fascinating is the opportunity to overhear a husband and wife bravely anatomizing their relationship and confronting their points of discord. What makes it so extraordinary—and so valuable—is their total honesty. These perceptive and searching discussions will resonate with any two people who care enough about each other to reach painfully deep inside themselves in order to resolve their difficulties and emerge closer than ever.

This is a study of Austen Chamberlain's term of office as Stanley Baldwin's Foreign Secretary from 1924-29. It is argued that Chamberlain's priority was a two-stage policy in Western Europe, which aimed at pacifying both France and Germany, as well as encouraging the League of Nations.