A manager’s instinct is to strive to control everything. That’s not just ineffective, it’s a practical impossibility. So, where should managers commit finite resources to achieve their enterprise’s mission? Eli Goldratt’s Theory of Constraints (“TOC”), introduced in The Goal, is a great place to start, but a terrible place to stop, as most readers can’t put that knowledge to use.Constraints hold organizations in check. Without them, productivity would be easy, and companies...

In 2016, five-year-old Kai was diagnosed with choroideremia. The same disease had taken his great-grandfather's sight two generations earlier, back when doctors had no name for it and called it something else entirely. It meant Kai's world would narrow year by year, the way his great-grandfather once described his own: like looking through a keyhole, until even that closed.Angela Ricketts had spent her life outrunning grief, not sitting still with it. But this news reached backward...

“There is no doubt that this is a truly original and groundbreaking work in applying the Theory of Constraints. I run a services company and learned some things about the services business. Anyone involved in large services companies needs to look at what John is proposing. I will definitely quote this material frequently.”Chad Smith, Managing Partner, Constraints Management Group“The information presented in this book is badly needed by service providers ...

Jim Rickett kept a diary of his work as a family doctor during the blitz of 1940/41. His work as a surgeon at the local hospital in Emsworth was acceptable and routine at the time, but is now unthinkable by modern standards. His practice was near Portsmouth which was targeted in regular bombing raids. He tells a compelling story as the bombing intensified in 1941 putting the local area under intense stress. He was called up into the Army and in 1944 he received an urgent posting to join th...

The collaboration of two friends—one a novelist, one a marine biologist—produced a volume in which fascinating popular science is woven into a narrative of man’s dreams, his ideals, and his accomplishments through the centuries. Sea of Cortez is one of those rare books that are all things to all readers. Actually the record of a brief collecting expedition in the lonely Gulf of California, it will be science to the scientist, philosophy to the philosopher, and to the average man a...

Go inside the high-stakes world of sports ownership as New York Times bestselling author and owner of the Baltimore Orioles David M. Rubenstein reveals the financial strategies, leadership secrets, and billion-dollar deal-making behind championship franchises through conversations with America's most powerful owners—Robert Kraft, Jeff Lurie, Tom Ricketts, and more.What does it really take to own a championship fran...

Harry Patch, born June 17, 1898, was the last British soldier alive to have fought in the trenches of the First World War. From his vivid memories of an Edwardian childhood, the horror of the Great War and fighting in the mud during the Battle of Passchendaele, working on the home front in the Second World War, and fame in later life as a veteran, The Last Fighting Tommy is the story of an ordinary man's extraordinary life.

On Paths of Ash is an extraordinary Australian World War II story. Robert and Jack Holman were working-class brothers who found themselves in three of the most horrific experiences of the war. They were interned in Changi prisoner-of-war camp, from where they became prison labourers on the infamous Burma Railway. From there they went as slaves to the coalmines of Japan, close enough to Nagasaki to see the mushroom cloud when the atomic bomb was dropped.This is Robert Holma...

A growing number of senior executives are coming to realize that strategic supply management can be a significant driver of improved corporate performance and better risk management. Spend analysis is the most critical component, and the starting point, of strategic supply management and is essential to achieving world-class performance. If you cant analyze your spend data, many opportunities for improvement beyond the low-hanging fruit are without doubt being missed. There is a lot of con...

The latest techniques for building a customer-focused enterprise environment "The authors have appreciated that MDM is a complex multidimensional area, and have set out to cover each of these dimensions in sufficient detail to provide adequate practical guidance to anyone implementing MDM. While this necessarily makes the book rather long, it means that the authors achieve a comprehensive treatment of MDM that is lacking in previous works." -- Malcolm Chisholm, Ph.D., Presi...

Captivity, Slavery and Survival as a Far East POW is the incredibly moving story of Gus Anckorn, a British soldier who was captured by the Japanese and held for over three and a half years. Before the war, Gus was a magician and throughout the war, entertained both fellow soldiers and Japanese guards with his tricks.Gus has a brilliant sense of humor and a 'tell it as it is' attitude which got him into a number of scrapes with both the Japanese and his own side. He has a remarkable humilit...

Extreme Programming (XP) is a radical new approach to software development that has been accepted quickly because its core practices--the need for constant testing, programming in pairs, inviting customer input, and the communal ownership of code--resonate with developers everywhere. Although many developers feel that XP is rooted in commonsense, its vastly different approach can bring challenges, frustrations, and constant demands on your patience.Unless you've got unlimited time ...