How to sustain our world for future generations has perplexed us for centuries. We have reached a crossroads: we may choose the rocky path of responsibility or continue on the paved road of excess that promises hardship for our progeny. Independent efforts to resolve isolated issues are inadequate. Different from these efforts and from other books on the topic, this book uses systems thinking to understand the dominant forces that are shaping our hope for sustainability. It first describes a mental model - the bubble that holds our beliefs - that emerges from preponderant world views and explains current global trends. The model emphasizes economic growth and drives behavior toward short-term and self-motivated outcomes that thwart sustainability. The book then weaves statistical trends into a system diagram and shows how the economic, environmental, and societal contributors of sustainability interact. From this holistic perspective, it finds leverage points where actions can be most effective and combines eight areas of intervention into an integrated plan. By emphasizing both individual and collective actions, it addresses the conundrum of how to blend human nature with sustainability. Finally, it identifies primary three lessons we can learn by applying systems thinking to sustainability. Its metaphor-rich and accessible style makes the complex topic approachable and allows the reader to appreciate the intricate balance required to sustain life on Earth.

Seven Seconds or Less is a book about applied intuition for mergers and partnerships, human resource management, new product development, and other important aspects of business.

Companies and leaders have relied on intuition or "gut feeling" since the beginning of time. The proper use of intuition is a liberal art, not an occult one. This book demystifies the process of learning to use intuition on demand in the world of business. Through the use of intuitive techniques and qualified professionals, companies can have the benefit of hindsight now. They can find out in advance how actual or potential decisions play out in the future and adjust those decisions to avoid undesirable outcomes, while increasing desirable ones. The result is greater productivity, higher morale, lower costs, and better service The techniques are lighthearted and fun, and yet the implications are significant. Decision making in seven seconds or less may signal a new era in business development.

Competition in today's global economy has become more complex due to the adoption of digitization and advanced methods of performance. Firms are compelled to adapt to new challenges that are altering the economic scope while maintaining a competitive edge. Empirical research is needed that highlights innovative and dynamic strategies that will allow corporations to maintain a level of sustainability and remain competitive in the global market. Dynamic Strategic Thinking for Improved Competitiveness and Performance provides emerging research exploring the innovative methods organizations have implemented in order to improve their overall effectiveness. This book analyzes novel strategies companies are using to adjust and respond to modern challenges including globalization and digitization. Featuring coverage on a broad range of topics such as digital business, social media, and human capital, this book is ideally designed for researchers, policymakers, managers, practitioners, executives, government officials, students, and academicians seeking research on modern strategic performance methods for improving corporate sustainability and competitiveness.

This book addresses one of the enduring questions of democratic government: why do governments choose some public policies but not others? Political executives focus on a range of policy issues, such as the economy, social policy, and foreign policy, but they shift their priorities over time. Despite an extensive literature, it has proven surprisingly hard to explain policy prioritisation. To remedy this gap, this book offers a new approach called public policy investment: governments enhance their chances of getting re-elected by managing a portfolio of public policies and paying attention to the risks involved. In this way, government is like an investor making choices about risk to yield returns on its investments of political capital. The public provides signals about expected political capital returns for government policies, or policy assets, that can be captured through expressed opinion in public polls. Governments can anticipate these signals in the choices they make. Statecraft is the ability political leaders have to consider risk and return in their policy portfolios and do so amidst uncertainty in the public's policy valuation. Such actions represent the public's views conditionally because not every opinion change is a price signal. It then outlines a quantitative method for measuring risk and return, applying it to the case of Britain between 1971 and 2000 and offers case studies illustrating statecraft by prime ministers, such as Edward Heath or Margaret Thatcher. The book challenges comparative scholars to apply public policy investment to countries that have separation of powers, multiparty government, and decentralization.

Read this if you want to sell more books, make more money as an author, or rank higher in your category. My name is Nick Vulich. The first thing you should know about me is I'm not a writer, and I'm not an expert on self-publishing either. I never worked in the industry, and I don't have any experience working for the big publishers. In fact, the only thing I consider myself an expert in is how to sell on eBay, Amazon, and Fiverr...So why should you listen to me? Like most indie authors, I came into publishing through the back door. I had a story to tell, and one day I just sat down and let it all come out. What I wrote wasn't pretty, or polished...but, it helped a lot of people sell more stuff on eBay. What I couldn't say with fancy prose, I made up for with enthusiasm. Because of that, my books sold. I'm not going to lie to you. It wasn't easy. I read just about every book available on self-publishing. I studied up on KDP Free days, Countdown Deals, price pulsing...

Using examples from different historical contexts, this book examines the relationship between class, nationalism, modernity and the agrarian myth. Essentializing rural identity, traditional culture and quotidian resistance, both aristocratic/plebeian and pastoral/Darwinian forms of agrarian myth discourse inform struggles waged 'from above' and 'from below', surfacing in peasant movements, film and travel writing. Film depictions of royalty, landowner and colonizer as disempowered, 'ordinary' or well-disposed towards 'those below', whose interests they share, underwrite populism and nationalism. Although these ideologies replaced the cosmopolitanism of the Grand Tour, twentieth century travel literature continued to reflect a fear of vanishing rural 'otherness' abroad, combined with the arrival there of the mass tourist, the plebeian from home.

Russia is one of the world's largest emerging economies. With economic development come technological revolution, growth, and change at every level of society. In Tech, Smart Cities, and Regional Development in Contemporary Russia, editor Bruno S. Sergi brings together expert contributors to explore, and explain, these changes. With chapters on FinTech, the cost of technological growth, and innovation risk management, the contributors grapple with ideas about technology and the intertwined issues that Russia faces in the 21st Century. It includes a wealth of information on today's Russian technological revolution, the overall roles of regional capitals and smart cities, and the role of Russian growth at the regional and international level. Looking across modern Russian development and growth strategies, constraints, and challenges, these chapters follow on from two volumes by the same editor: Exploring the Future of Russia's Economy and Markets: Towards Sustainable Economic Development (2018), and Modeling Economic Growth in Contemporary Russia (2019). Together, the trilogy is essential reading for students and researchers of contemporary international economics, Russian economic affairs, and emerging economies' development.

This book is about Data Analytics. In that respect, it is like others. What distinguishes it from the rest is the variety of open-source tool applications. This book incorporates the use of R Studio, Python, SAS Studio (University Edition), and KNIME. This book is also about manipulating Big Data. Apache Hadoop on Hortonworks Sandbox is introduced and we manage, move, handle, and transform data using Apache Hive, Apache Spark, MapReduce and TEZ, with terminal shell commands and Ambari. We show you how to set up a virtual machine in Microsoft Azure. We then use the data in later chapters for modeling. We cover Descriptive Modeling and Predictive. The content includes Support Vector Machines, Decision Tree learning, Random Forests, Naive and Empirical Bayes, Gradient Boosting, Cluster Modeling, Generalized Linear Models, Logistic Regression, and Artificial Neural Networks. Every chapter includes completely worked examples using one or more open-source tools.

In Islam, philanthropy is a spectrum of activity, and these activities differ in their purpose and in the principles on which they operate. To fully understand philanthropy, it is vital to examine not only its purpose but its motive and outcomes. This book identifies three types of philanthropy within this spectrum: Philanthropy as relief (zakat), which seeks to alleviate human suffering; philanthropy as an improvement (waqf), which seeks to maximize individual human potential and is energized by a principle that seeks to progress individuals and their society; and philanthropy as reform (sadaqah), which seeks to solve social problems. Philanthropy as civic engagement seeks to build better community structures and services and is directed by civic responsibility. This book explores philanthropy in Islam that covers the three primary spectra of activity: zakat, waqf, and sadaqah. Combining contributions from the Conference on Philanthropy for Humanitarian Aid under the joint organization of Sultan Sharif Ali Islamic University and the International Research Centre of Islamic Economics and Finance, International Islamic University College in collaboration with the Islamic Research and Training Institute, this book will be of interest to students, policymakers, practitioners, and researchers in the areas of Islamic finance and Islamic economics.