Where Did the Jobs Go--and How Do We Get Them Back? - Your Guided Tour to America's Employment Crisis

"Slow Democracy just may be the best thing happening in America today. Connecting in a meaningful way with our community and reclaiming our power as citizens is both powerful and possible. Read this book and consider how this movement can revitalize the communities you care about!"

—Joan Blades, cofounder, MoveOn.org

Reinvigorate your community by reconnecting with democracy.

Just as slow food encourages chefs and eaters to become more intimately involved with the production of local food, and slow money helps us become more engaged with our local economy, slow democracy encourages us to govern ourselves locally with processes that are inclusive, deliberative, and citizen powered.

In Slow Democracy, community leader Susan Clark and democracy scholar Woden Teachout document the range of ways that citizens around the country are breathing new life into participatory democracy in their communities.

Large institutions and centralized governments, with top-down, expert-driven thinking, are no longer society’s drivers. In fact, they are often responsible for tearing communities apart. New decision-making techniques now pair with cutting-edge communication tools to make local communities—and the citizens who live there—uniquely suited to meet today’s challenges.

In Slow Democracy, readers learn the stories of residents who gain community control of water systems and local forests, parents who find creative solutions to divisive and seemingly irreconcilable school-redistricting issues, and a host of other citizen-led actions that are reinvigorating local democracy and decision making.

Along with real-life examples of slow democracy in action, Clark and Teachout also provide twenty simple guidelines for communities, and citizens, to use as ways to reinvigorate their local democratic process.

With a future more and more focused on local food, local energy, and local economies, Slow Democracy offers strategies to improve our skills at local governance and to reinvigorate community democracy.

Make Every Business Day a Masterpiece

“This fascinating book is a must-read for every leader or individual that aspires to become one. It eloquently offers tips, examples, and analogies that help the reader focus effort and attention in that noble attempt to become a better leader.”
—Eric Weber, Associate Dean IESE, Business School

“Unlike explorations of leadership that too often provide ‘more heat than light,’ O’Malley and Baker offer a refreshing and engaging lens that not only illuminates but inspires the reader.”
—Mary C. Gentile, Creator and Director of Giving Voice to Values, and Senior Research Scholar, Babson College

“This is not another book on leadership. Its essence is that all great leaders show an intense artistry. O’Malley and Baker give leadership criteria that weave business language with a strong dose of artistic principles. A great read.”
—Chuck Royce, Chairman, Royce Funds

“Impressive! O’Malley and Baker have written a book that is at once entertaining, intellectually engaging, and practical—a tough combination, rarely achieved.”
—Ed Greenberg, University of Colorado, coauthor of Turbulence

“O’Malley and Baker thoughtfully illustrate the intersections between leadership and art, explaining the requisite attributes for leadership excellence, such as focus, intellectual challenge, imagination, and authenticity.”
—Josh Weston, Honorary Chairman, Automatic Data Processing, Inc.

“O’Malley and Baker have written a wonderful book that illustrates the complexities and necessities of what should be understood as the ultimate qualities of leadership.”
—David Finn, Chairman, Ruder Finn, Inc.

About the Book:

Artists put their work on display for everyone to judge, accepting a position of vulnerability for want of something important to say and in the service of contributing to the common good. Artists bring people closer together by providing a forum for shared experiences. Artists challenge, excite, comfort, and motivate people, and they don’t learn their craft by reading about it in a book; they practice, push themselves and their means of expression, and execute, execute, execute.

These are exactly the same things effective business leaders do day in and day out.

In Every Leader Is an Artist, leadership experts O’Malley and Baker employ the “leadership as an art” metaphor to its conceptual limits: leadership is an art. Literally. And leaders are artists; they just happen to work in a different medium.

This groundbreaking look at leadership offers a completely new perspective on the age-old question: What separates the effective leader from the ineffective leader? O’Malley and Baker reveal 12 key characteristics shared by great artists and leaders, including:

• Intention: Makes an express commitment to achieve certain exceptional ends
• Authenticity: Expresses individuality and personal beliefs with honesty and transparency
• Engagement: Challenges the intellectual capacities of employees and tests their abilities to develop creative solutions to problems
• Imagination: Makes surprising and unconventional departures from the ordinary that create a new sense of awareness or understanding
• Form: Diligently combines various communications, structures, and policies into a unified, coherent whole

“Collectively, these attributes make great leadership possible, or, in their absence, difficult,” write the authors. “Their presence does not assure leadership excellence, but it does set the range of potential.”

Providing the tools and techniques for developing these qualities, the authors provide vignettes that draw parallels between the personal qualities of famous artists and effective leaders.

Every Leader Is an Artist will make you see your own leadership characteristics with newfound clarity and help you build upon them to be the best leader you can be. After reading this book, you will never think about leadership and your responsibilities as a leader in quite the same way again.

This entertaining guide introduces readers to the amazing world of the Ancient Greeks. It offers a complete rundown of Greek history alongside fascinating insights into daily life in Ancient Greece and a captivating overview of Greek mythology. Readers will discover how this ancient culture came to be the cornerstone of Western civilisation and the enormous influence it has had on our language, politics, education, philosophy, science, arts and sport.

• The history of Ancient Greece remains a wide topic of interest, particularly renowned for its influential and diverse culture
• This basic guide will allow greater access to this vibrant area of study, and provide a distinct and light-hearted approach to this vast area history
• Covers dozens of topics, including; the early civilisations, war & fighting, home & family, day-to-day life and much, much more!

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