Face the Giants Standing Between You and the Success You EnvisionMany leaders hesitate to innovate, struggle with uncertainty, or find themselves unsure of how to reach the future they imagine. Turning the Giant offers a clear, experience-driven path forward.John Berra—who rose from a shy, uncertain university student to Chairman of Emerson Process Management and a member of the Process Automation Hall of Fame—shares the insights gained from decade...

American independent cinema has been an important creative and cultural media entity for the past fifteen years. The approach of this sector is one of cultural construction that simultaneously provides a socio-political reference through which critics and audience can attach certain films to popular movements and ideas. Declarations of Independence questions the supposed autonomy of this cinema and asks if independent film can possibly survive in the face of the mass-production and profit ...

Building on and bringing up to date the material presented in the first instalment of Directory of World Cinema: Japan, this volume continues the exploration of the enduring classics, cult favourites and contemporary blockbusters of Japanese cinema with new contributions from leading critics and film scholars. Among the additions to this volume are in-depth treatments of two previously unexplored genres – youth cinema and films depicting lower-class settings – considered alongside...

Few jobs in Hollywood are as shrouded in mystery as the role of the producer. What does it take to be a producer, how does one get started, and what on earth does one actually do? In So You Want to Be a Producer Lawrence Turman, the producer of more than forty films, including The Graduate, The River Wild, Short Circuit, and American History X, and Endowed Chair of the famed Peter Stark Producing Program at the University of Southern California,...

Behind your familiar astrological chart lurks another chart entirely, one whose existence you may never have suspected. It carries your treasures and your wounds. Where the astrologer s predictions and the realities of your life might not in all honesty have lined up, this chart-behind-the-chart will help you see why. This second, hidden chart tells the tale of who you were in a prior lifetime. It speaks of what wounded you then and what work you left undone. It warns of old ghosts that ha...

Trenchantly on point and bursting with insight, anthropologist Grant McCracken shows American corporations how keeping a finger on the pulse of contemporary cultural trends can change their business practices for the better -- and ahead of the curve.Levi-Strauss, the jeans and apparel maker, missed out on the hip-hop trend. They didn't realize that those kids in baggy jeans represented a whole new -- and lucrative -- market opportunity, one they could have seen com...

Welcome to Culturematic: How Reality TV, John Cheever, a Pie Lab, Julia Child, Fantasy Football, Burning Man, the Ford Fiesta Movement, Rube Goldberg, NFL Films, Wordle, Two and a Half Men, a 10,000-Year Symphony, and ROFLCom Memes Will Help You Create and Execute Breakthrough IdeasA Culturematic is a little machine for making culture. It’s an ingenuity engine.Once wound up and released, the Culturematic acts as a probe into the often-alien world of contemp...

Humans have been meditating on the Moon since the beginning of our time on earth. As long as there has been anything we could call astrology, it has been central to all theories of celestial influence. But why do astrologers pay so little attention to its phases? In these pages, Steven Forrest, bestselling author of The Inner Sky, shows how we have been blinded to the lunar phases by a set of cultural attitudes now drifting into extinction. He demonstrates that our Celtic ancestor...

Action! Excitement! Transmedia! Step inside Comic-Con to discover the cultural trends that will shape our world“I’ve been in comics so long I sometimes think I invented ’em! But I just read Rob Salkowitz’s terrific new book and, y’know what? Even I learned new stuff! If you’re a comic book nut like me, miss it at your own risk!”—Stan Lee, Legendary Comic Creator and Publisher“Salkowitz tells it pretty much like it is: the good, the b...

The animations of Japan's Studio Ghibli are amongst the highest regarded in the movie industry. Their delightful films rank alongside the most popular non-English language films ever made, with each new eagerly-anticipated release a guaranteed box-office smash. Yet this highly profitable studio has remained fiercely independent, producing a stream of imaginative and individual animations. The studio's founders, long-time animators Isao Takahata and Hayao Miyazaki, have created timeless mas...

During the heyday of the studio system spanning the 1930s, ‘40s, and ‘50s, virtually all the American motion picture industry’s money, power, and prestige came from a single activity: selling tickets at the box office. Today, the movie business is just a small, highly visible outpost in a media universe controlled by six corporations–Sony, Time Warner, NBC Universal, Viacom, Disney, and NewsCorporation. These conglomerates view films as part of an immense, synergistic, vertically integrate...

See Dragon Ball with new eyes. This book is your cultural tour guide of Dragon Ball, the world’s most recognized anime and manga series.Over 11 years in development, at over 2,000 pages of content, and featuring over 1,800 unique terms, Dragon Ball Culture is a 7 Volume analysis of your favorite series. You will go on an adventure with Son Goku, from Chapter 1 to 194 of the original Dragon Ball series, as we explore every page, every panel, and every sentence, to reveal the hidden ...