The Last Day, The Last Hour - The Currie Libel Trial

As information and data volumes grow at explosive rates, the challenges of managing this information is turning into a losing battle for most companies and they end up drowning in data while thirsting for insights. This is made worse by the severe skills shortage in analytics, data presentation and communication.

This latest book by best-selling management expert Bernard Marr, will equip you with a set of powerful skills that are vital for successful managers now and in the future. Increase your market value by gaining essential skills that are in high demand but in short supply.

Loaded with practical step-by-step guidance, simple tools and real life examples of how leading organizations such as Google, CocaCola, Capital One, Saatchi & Saatchi, Tesco, Yahoo, as well as Government Departments and Agencies have put the principles into practice.

The five steps to more intelligent decision making are:

• Step 1: More intelligent strategies – by identifying strategic priorities and agreeing your real information needs
• Step 2: More intelligent data – by creating relevant and meaningful performance indicators and qualitative management information liked back to your strategic information needs
• Step 3: More intelligent insights – by using good evidence to test and prove ideas and by analysing the data to gain robust and reliable insights
• Step 4: More intelligent communication – by creating informative and engaging management information packs and dashboards that provide the essential information, packaged in an easy-to-read way
• Step 5: More intelligent decision making – by fostering an evidence-based culture of turning information into actionable knowledge and real decisions

"Bernard Marr did it again! This outstanding and practical book will help your company become more intelligent and more successful. Marr takes the fields of business-intelligence, analytics and scorecarding to bring them together into a powerful and easy-to-follow 5-step framework. The Intelligent Company is THE must-read book of our times."
—Bruno Aziza, Co-author of best-selling book Drive Business Performance and Worldwide Strategy Lead, Microsoft Business Intelligence

"Olivia Parr Rud does a remarkable job of weaving together many topics in a strategic way. As 'quants,' we're fascinated with data and fact-based decision-making. But success only comes when you consider the human factor, especially effective communications. Making topics like evolutionary biology, complexity science, and systems thinking relevant for business success is a unique and compelling view. As Max Frisch said, 'We hired workers and human beings came instead.'"
—Anne Milley, Senior Director, Technology Product Marketing, SAS

"Business Intelligence Success Factors is a must-read for anyone implementing BI on an organizational level. This book explains the business landscape and the underlying reasons for our current volatility, offering clear guidance on navigating our information rich global economy."
—Ron Powell, Editorial Director, Business Intelligence Network

Transform challenges into opportunities with emerging Business Intelligence technologies

Written by an expert in data mining and statistical analysis, this valuable resource unveils the connection between the increased use of BI and the need for new, proven theories and models in BI, as well as the guidance to implement them successfully in your organization.

Too many organizations invest in performance management and business intelligence projects, without first establishing the needed conditions to ensure success. But the organizations that lay the groundwork for effective change first reap the benefits.

In Profiles in Performance: Business Intelligence Journeys and the Road Map for Change, Howard Dresner (author of The Performance Management Revolution) worked with several extraordinary organizations to understand their thriving "performance-directed culture." In doing so, he developed a unique maturity model-which served as both a filter to select candidates and as a lens to examine accomplishments.

• Interviews with people from all sides of the organization: business users, finance, senior management and the IT department
• Provides a complete picture of their progress from inception to current state

“Speaking in the Past Tense participates in an expanding critical dialogue on the writing of historical fiction, providing a series of reflections on the process from the perspective of those souls intrepid enough to step onto what is, practically by definition, contested territory.”

— Herb Wyile, from the Introduction

The extermination of the Beothuk ... the exploration of the Arctic ... the experiences of soldiers in the trenches during World War I ... the foibles of Canada’s longest-serving prime minister ... the Ojibway sniper who is credited with 378 wartime kills—these are just some of the people and events discussed in these candid and wide-ranging interviews with eleven authors whose novels are based on events in Canadian history.

These sometimes startling conversations take the reader behind the scenes of the novels and into the minds of their authors. Through them we explore the writers’ motives for writing, the challenges they faced in gathering information and presenting it in fictional form, the sometimes hostile reaction they faced after publication, and, perhaps most interestingly, the stories that didn’t make it into their novels.

Speaking in the Past Tense provides fascinating insights into the construction of national historical narratives and myths, both those familiar to us and those that are still being written.

What is XBRL and how can it help you streamline your business reporting? This plain-English guide from the "father of XBRL," Charles Hoffman, will tell you what it is, why it is, and how you can get on the bus with this new SEC-mandated business reporting standard for publicly-traded companies. A CPA, Hoffman is credited with the idea of applying XML data to financial reporting; XBRL is the language that resulted. Learn to prepare financial statements with XBRL, use it for strategic planning, move all relevant departments in your company to the same system, and more.

• XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language) is an XML-based open standard for accounting data; author Charles Hoffman is credited with the idea of applying XML data to financial reporting
• Plan for XBRL implementation, set action-oriented agendas, and identify stakeholders and subject-matter experts within your organization
• Learn to choose from and adapt existing XBRL taxonomies to comply with US GAAP and IFRS standards

Collected by the Ronald Reagan Foundation, The Notes is a fascinating window into the mind of our fortieth president. While the #1 New York Times bestselling Reagan Diaries detailed daily life inside the Oval Office, The Notes encapsulates a lifetime of reflections on work, marriage, and family. Classic one-liners such as "Flattery is what makes husbands out of bachelors" and "Money may not buy friends, but it will help you to stay in contact with your children" shed light on the man known as the "Great Communicator," and a sampling of Reagan's favorite speeches, poems, and passages from literature reveal the writers and thinkers he turned to time and again for advice, inspiration, humor, and hope.

Historic, illuminating, and deeply captivating, The Notes is a remarkable collection of the thoughts of one of our most beloved presidents.

"A highly accessible collection of essays on contemporary thinking in performance management. Readers will get excellent overviews on the Balanced Scorecard, strategy maps, incentives, management accounting, activity-based costing, customer lifetime value, and sustainable shareholder value creation."
—Robert S. Kaplan, Harvard Business School; coauthor of The Balanced Scorecard: Translating Strategy into Action, The Execution Premium, and many other books

"Gary Cokins demonstrates in this book that performance management is not a mysterious black art, but a structured, process-oriented discipline. If you want your performance management system to be a smoothly running analytical machine, read and apply the ideas in this book—it's all you need."
—Thomas H. Davenport, President's Distinguished Professor of Information Technology and Management, Babson College; coauthor of Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning

"Drawing on a deep reservoir of knowledge and experience gained from hundreds of customer engagements around the world, Gary Cokins offers an authoritative examination of the major dimensions of performance management. Cokins not only paints a rich and textured view of the major principles and concepts driving performance management implementations, he offers a nuanced look at the important subtleties that can spell the difference between success and failure. This is an informative and enjoyable text to read!"
—Wayne Eckerson, Director of Research, The Data Warehouse Institute (TDWI); author of Performance Dashboards: Measuring, Monitoring, and Managing Your Business

"[In this] very insightful book, the view of an integrated performance management framework with a goal to link various operational activities with business strategy is an excellent approach to manage and improve business. Gary's explanation of risk-based performance management, for providing the capability to achieve long-term objectives with reliably calculated risks, is definitely thought provoking."
—Srini Pallia, Global Head and Vice President of Business Technology Services, Wipro Technologies, Bangalore, India

An international best-seller when first published, this is Wade Davis's portrait of the richness and diversity of the world's indigenous cultures and why they matter to us all.

Davis has travelled the world for more than thirty years, studying the mysteries of sacred plants and celebrating the poetics of culture. His explorations of indigenous life in places as remote and diverse as the Canadian Arctic, the rain forests of Borneo and the Amazon, and the surreal cultural landscape of Haiti have taught him that many of these cultures are in danger of losing their way of life -- a loss that affects humans on a global scale.

In Light at the Edge of the World Davis' looks at the "ethnosphere" -- the diversity of ways of thinking and living that traditional cultures have to teach us about our place in the world, and how we affect one another and our surroundings.