Our culture has lost its mind. Now, we are waging a bigger fight—a war for our soul. Is it possible our world has gone mad? We are under siege and the war is not from without; it is from within. The collapse of the Roman Empire occurred in a single generation and was not so much the result of invasions by their enemies but the result of moral decay and internal corruption. Similar patterns are emerging in America. We neglected or abandoned our traditional institutions long ago, but now it’s time to take them back. Today, forces are at work to strip the principles and precepts of faith from public venues or minimize their significance. Many progressive leaders are convinced that when Christianity disintegrates it will create peace on earth. But the loss of our heritage will merely create a spiritual vacuum that will be filled with folly, crammed with chaos, or invaded by Islam. The reality is: Western civilization will become so decadent and reckless that America will collapse like a house of cards. In Hope for This Present Crisis, Dr. Youssef provides a diagnosis of the insanity of the current culture and a seven-step prescription for restoring sanity to a world gone mad. Here’s the seven-step path to restoring a world gone mad: Remember the Truth – Stand firm on the truth of the gospel. Restore the Soul – Seek God’s approval─ not the approval of other people. Revitalize theFamily – Guard your children from the horrors of the Internet. Reestablish the Classroom – Support conscientious, caring public school teachers. Respect our Freedoms – Know your rights. Reform our Society – Morally and spiritually purify yourself. Revive the Church – Demonstrate the forgiving love of Jesus at all times. This book will teach you how to stand up to attacks on your faith, and defend Christianity as a meaningful contribution to society.

Today, organizations have achieved an overall failure rate above 80 percent with Lean, Six Sigma, Lean Six Sigma, and continuous improvement in general. This is certainly not due to a shortage of books, consultants, and other online resources about the methodologies and tools, or the success stories of Toyota and others. However, it is due to a shortage of knowledge and practice about the most critical success factors of improvement: leadership, sustaining infrastructure, behavioral and cultural transformation, and now emerging technology. These factors produce 90 percent of the success with continuous and sustainable improvement; the methodologies and tools represent an irrelevant 10 percent. For decades, most organizations have focused on this quick and easy, irrelevant 10 percent through an endless series of fad, in-vogue improvement programs as they attempt to mimic the best-in-class practices of the most successful organizations. Out of the Present Crisis: Rediscovering Improvement in the New Economy is the contemporary version of Deming’s famous 1982 book, "Out of the Crisis." The author builds a solid case for organizations to aggressively pursue the next generation of systematic and sustainable improvement through a combined strategy of Deming’s back-to-basics, innovation and breakthrough thinking, integration of emerging and enabling technology, and adaptive improvement across diverse environments and industries. The book’s practical, pragmatic style is backed up by many real world examples and personal experiences. If you're looking for another book about Lean or Six Sigma "tools" this is not it. But it is a book about how to achieve lasting success by making improvement the cultural standard of excellence and living code of conduct in organizations. This popular book provides executives with an up-to-date and proven reference guide for rediscovering successful systematic and sustainable improvement in today’s economy. The author demonstrates the importance of viewing improvement as a continuous manageable "process" and covers the most critical success factors of leadership, sustaining infrastructure, behavioral and cultural transformation, and emerging technology in a practical, no-nonsense, "how-to-do" style. The book provides specific guidance for all industries including public and private corporations, hospitals, financial services, airlines, municipalities, and federal, state, and local governments.

Why democracies believe they can survive any crisis—and why that belief is so dangerous Why do democracies keep lurching from success to failure? The current financial crisis is just the latest example of how things continue to go wrong, just when it looked like they were going right. In this wide-ranging, original, and compelling book, David Runciman tells the story of modern democracy through the history of moments of crisis, from the First World War to the economic crash of 2008. A global history with a special focus on the United States, The Confidence Trap examines how democracy survived threats ranging from the Great Depression to the Cuban missile crisis, and from Watergate to the collapse of Lehman Brothers. It also looks at the confusion and uncertainty created by unexpected victories, from the defeat of German autocracy in 1918 to the defeat of communism in 1989. Throughout, the book pays close attention to the politicians and thinkers who grappled with these crises: from Woodrow Wilson, Nehru, and Adenauer to Fukuyama and Obama. In The Confidence Trap, David Runciman shows that democracies are good at recovering from emergencies but bad at avoiding them. The lesson democracies tend to learn from their mistakes is that they can survive them—and that no crisis is as bad as it seems. Breeding complacency rather than wisdom, crises lead to the dangerous belief that democracies can muddle through anything—a confidence trap that may lead to a crisis that is just too big to escape, if it hasn't already. The most serious challenges confronting democracy today are debt, the war on terror, the rise of China, and climate change. If democracy is to survive them, it must figure out a way to break the confidence trap.