One of our most distinguished thinkers argues that the "rise of the rest" is the great story of our time.

"This is not a book about the decline of America, but rather about the rise of everyone else." So begins Fareed Zakaria's important new work on the era we are now entering. Following on the success of his best-selling The Future of Freedom, Zakaria describes with equal prescience a world in which the United States will no longer dominate the global economy, orchestrate geopolitics, or overwhelm cultures. He sees the "rise of the rest"—the growth of countries like China, India, Brazil, Russia, and many others—as the great story of our time, and one that will reshape the world. The tallest buildings, biggest dams, largest-selling movies, and most advanced cell phones are all being built outside the United States. This economic growth is producing political confidence, national pride, and potentially international problems. How should the United States understand and thrive in this rapidly changing international climate? What does it mean to live in a truly global era? Zakaria answers these questions with his customary lucidity, insight, and imagination.

Mega-bestselling author Ken Blanchard and celebrated business leaders Don Hutson and Ethan Willis present an inspiring story that reveals the secrets to becoming a successful entrepreneur.

In The One Minute Entrepreneur, Ken Blanchard (coauthor of the #1 bestselling business classic The One Minute Manager), Don Hutson, CEO of U.S. Learning, and Ethan Willis, CEO of Prosper Learning, tell the inspiring story of one man’s challenges in creating his own business. Through a powerful and engaging narrative, we confront many of the typical problems all entrepreneurs face in starting up their business, from finding new sources of revenue to securing the commitment of their people and the loyalty of their customers. More important, we learn the secrets to becoming a successful entrepreneur, including how to build a firm foundation, how to ensure a steady cash flow, and how to create legendary service. In addition, the book offers invaluable advice, delivered through One Minute Insights, from such entrepreneurs and thinkers as Sheldon Bowles, Peter Drucker, Michael Gerber, and Charlie “Tremendous” Jones.

Today, in the midst of the largest entrepreneurial surge in U.S. history, four out of five small businesses continue to fail. The One Minute Entrepreneur offers businesspeople and would-be entrepreneurs a treasure trove of wisdom on how to think, act, and succeed in creating and sustaining a business, no matter what their industry.

DO YOU HAVE THE OPPORTUNITY TO DO WHAT YOU DO BEST EVERY DAY?

Chances are, you don't. All too often, our natural talents go untapped. From the cradle to the cubicle, we devote more time to fixing our shortcomings than to developing our strengths.

To help people uncover their talents, Gallup introduced the first version of its online assessment, StrengthsFinder, in the 2001 management book Now, Discover Your Strengths. The book spent more than five years on the bestseller lists and ignited a global conversation, while StrengthsFinder helped millions to discover their top five talents.

In its latest national bestseller, StrengthsFinder 2.0, Gallup unveils the new and improved version of its popular assessment, language of 34 themes, and much more (see below for details). While you can read this book in one sitting, you'll use it as a reference for decades.

Loaded with hundreds of strategies for applying your strengths, this new book and accompanying website will change the way you look at yourself -- and the world around you -- forever.

What do you do? Tim Ferriss has trouble answering the question. Depending on when you ask this controversial Princeton University guest lecturer, he might answer:

“I race motorcycles in Europe.”
“I ski in the Andes.”
“I scuba dive in Panama.”
“I dance tango in Buenos Aires.”

He has spent more than five years learning the secrets of the New Rich, a fast-growing subculture who has abandoned the “deferred-life plan” and instead mastered the new currencies—time and mobility—to create luxury lifestyles in the here and now.

Whether you are an overworked employee or an entrepreneur trapped in your own business, this book is the compass for a new and revolutionary world. Join Tim Ferriss as he teaches you:

• How to outsource your life to overseas virtual assistants for $5 per hour and do whatever you want
• How blue-chip escape artists travel the world without quitting their jobs
• How to eliminate 50% of your work in 48 hours using the principles of a forgotten Italian economist
• How to trade a long-haul career for short work bursts and freuent "mini-retirements"
• What the crucial difference is between absolute and relative income
• How to train your boss to value performance over presence, or kill your job (or company) if it’s beyond repair
• What automated cash-flow “muses” are and how to create one in 2 to 4 weeks
• How to cultivate selective ignorance—and create time—with a low-information diet
• What the management secrets of Remote Control CEOs are
• How to get free housing worldwide and airfare at 50–80% off
• How to fill the void and create a meaningful life after removing work and the office

The Challenge:
Built to Last, the defining management study of the nineties, showed how great companies triumph over time and how long-term sustained performance can be engineered into the DNA of an enterprise from the verybeginning.

But what about the company that is not born with great DNA? How can good companies, mediocre companies, even bad companies achieve enduring greatness?

The Study:
For years, this question preyed on the mind of Jim Collins. Are there companies that defy gravity and convert long-term mediocrity or worse into long-term superiority? And if so, what are the universal distinguishing characteristics that cause a company to go from good to great?

The Standards:
Using tough benchmarks, Collins and his research team identified a set of elite companies that made the leap to great results and sustained those results for at least fifteen years. How great? After the leap, the good-to-great companies generated cumulative stock returns that beat the general stock market by an average of seven times in fifteen years, better than twice the results delivered by a composite index of the world's greatest companies, including Coca-Cola, Intel, General Electric, and Merck.

The Comparisons:
The research team contrasted the good-to-great companies with a carefully selected set of comparison companies that failed to make the leap from good to great. What was different? Why did one set of companies become truly great performers while the other set remained only good?

Over five years, the team analyzed the histories of all twenty-eight companies in the study. After sifting through mountains of data and thousands of pages of interviews, Collins and his crew discovered the key determinants of greatness -- why some companies make the leap and others don't.

Since its initial publication in 1994, Morrow's hardcover edition of Jeffrey Gitomer's The Sales Bible has sold over 117,000 copies, and another 100,000 in paperback (published by Wiley). But in the 13 years since then, Gitomer has made himself into a sales powerhouse with huge success around an inventively packaged series of books, with his classic The Little Red Book of Selling at its heart. Now at last, Gitomer has taken the title that began it all, and has completely revised it. The Sales Bible is totally reworked to fit into his line of bestselling sales titles. It's sure to be THE must-have title for sales professionals worldwide who've already come to know and trust Jeffrey's inventive, irreverent sales wisdom through his "Little [Color] Book of..." series.

In the midst of the most serious financial upheaval since the Great Depression, legendary financier George Soros explores the origins of the crisis and its implications for the future. Soros, whose breadth of experience in financial markets is unrivaled, places the current crisis in the context of decades of study of how individuals and institutions handle the boom and bust cycles that now dominate global economic activity. “This is the worst financial crisis since the 1930s,” writes Soros in characterizing the scale of financial distress spreading across Wall Street and other financial centers around the world. In a concise essay that combines practical insight with philosophical depth, Soros makes an invaluable contribution to our understanding of the great credit crisis and its implications for our nation and the world.

• Why do our headaches persist after taking a one-cent aspirin but disappear when we take a 50-cent aspirin?
• Why does recalling the Ten Commandments reduce our tendency to lie, even when we couldn't possibly be caught?
• Why do we splurge on a lavish meal but cut coupons to save twenty-five cents on a can of soup?
• Why do we go back for second helpings at the unlimited buffet, even when our stomachs are already full?
• And how did we ever start spending $4.15 on a cup of coffee when, just a few years ago, we used to pay less than a dollar?

In a series of illuminating, often surprising experiments, MIT behavioral economist Dan Ariely refutes the common assumption that we behave in fundamentally rational ways. Blending everyday experience with groundbreaking research, Ariely explains how expectations, emotions, social norms, and other invisible, seemingly illogical forces skew our reasoning abilities.

Not only do we make astonishingly simple mistakes every day, but we make the same types of mistakes, Ariely discovers. We consistently overpay, underestimate, and procrastinate. We fail to understand the profound effects of our emotions on what we want, and we overvalue what we already own. Yet these misguided behaviors are neither random nor senseless. They're systematic and predictable—making us predictably irrational.

From drinking coffee to losing weight, from buying a car to choosing a romantic partner, Ariely explains how to break through these systematic patterns of thought to make better decisions. Predictably Irrational will change the way we interact with the world—one small decision at a time.

Offers a complete system for downloading all those free-floating gotta-do's clogging your brain into a sophisticated framework of files and action lists--all purportedly to free your mind to focus on whatever you're working on.

Amazon Best of the Month, April 2008: Debit or credit? Paper or plastic? Lease or buy? Public or private school? Have you made the right choices? Probably not, according to the important new research on the science of choice. In clear and entertaining style, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness provides a crash course on how and why humans are prone to make bad choices, and what we can do about it. Through dozens of eye-opening examples, authors Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein demonstrate how "choice architecture"-- a fancy term for the particular scenario or context in which we are asked to make a decision -- can actually nudge us toward making better decisions. More importantly, the authors show that by putting the right "nudges" in place, choice architects (who range from cafeteria managers to divorce lawyers) can substantially improve just about everything important to us, from our retirement savings to the health of our planet, without removing our range of options. Recommended for fans and foes of Freakonomics and Predictably Irrational. --Lauren Nemroff