«Business Model Generation is a handbook for visionaries, game changers, and challengers striving to defy outmoded business models and design tomorrow′s enterprises. If your organization needs to adapt to harsh new realities, but you don′t yet have a strategy that will get you out in front of your competitors, you need Business Model Generation . Co–created by 470 «Business Model Canvas» practitioners from 45 countries, the book features a beautiful, highly visual, 4–color design that takes powerful strategic ideas and tools, and makes them easy to implement in your organization. It explains the most common Business Model patterns, based on concepts from leading business thinkers, and helps you reinterpret them for your own context. You will learn how to systematically understand, design, and implement a game–changing business model––or analyze and renovate an old one. Along the way, you′ll understand at a much deeper level your customers, distribution channels, partners, revenue streams, costs, and your core value proposition. Business Model Generation features practical innovation techniques used today by leading consultants and companies worldwide, including 3M, Ericsson, Capgemini, Deloitte, and others. Designed for doers, it is for those ready to abandon outmoded thinking and embrace new models of value creation: for executives, consultants, entrepreneurs, and leaders of all organizations. If you′re ready to change the rules, you belong to «the business model generation!»

The guide that defines the results required at each organizational level to sustain business success It's not enough to build a company full of people with leadership skills. The Performance Pipeline digs deep into the real work of executing business results at each leadership layer. Filled with lessons and examples from the author's 40 years of experience Shows how to set performance standards, make sure the right work is being done, and remove performance barriers Illustrates how leaders can make the transition to the next level and achieve full performance This book gives leaders in any industry an advantage over the competition.

About the series: The Norton Casebooks in History provide students with everything they need for in-depth study of select topics in major periods studied in American and world history. Each volume consists of an introductory essay by the editor on the topic, primary sources, and recent essays by historians that explore different interpretations. Each volume combines the most authoritative text available with contextual and critical materials that bring the topic to life for students.

«Play communities existed long before massively multiplayer online games; they have ranged from bridge clubs to sports leagues, from tabletop role-playing games to Civil War reenactments. With the emergence of digital networks, however, new varieties of adult play communities have appeared, most notably within online games and virtual worlds. Players in these networked worlds sometimes develop a sense of community that transcends the game itself. In Communities of Play, game researcher and designer Celia Pearce explores emergent fan cultures in networked digital worlds — actions by players that do not coincide with the intentions of the game's designers. Pearce looks in particular at the Uru Diaspora — a group of players whose game, Uru: Ages Beyond Myst, closed. These players (primarily baby boomers) immigrated into other worlds, self-identifying as refugees; relocated in There.com, they created a hybrid culture integrating aspects of their old world. Ostracized at first, they became community leaders. Pearce analyzes the properties of virtual worlds and looks at the ways design affects emergent behavior. She discusses the methodologies for studying online games, including a personal account of the sometimes messy process of ethnography. Pearce considers the «play turn» in culture and the advent of a participatory global playground enabled by networked digital games every bit as communal as the global village Marshall McLuhan saw united by television. Countering the ludological definition of play as unproductive and pointing to the long history of pre-digital play practices, Pearce argues that play can be a prelude to creativity.»

Risk is everywhere and paying attention to it is important if you are involved in financial markets. This means anyone involved in financial markets cannot ignore it, including you. All financial risks are swept under three headings: market risk, credit risk, and operational risk. The interactions between these risks have the potential to spell disaster or success for anyone with long or short positions in the market. This book addresses all the tools and techniques to address these risks in a comprehensive and holistic fashion, while at the same time providing readers with intuition and rules of thumb aided by understanding and applying advanced quantitative measures. After reading this book, you will understand why risk has become its own essential discipline on Wall Street and beyond for investors, bankers, and corporations.

Mobile robots range from the Mars Pathfinder mission's teleoperated Sojourner to the cleaning robots in the Paris Metro. This text offers students and other interested readers an introduction to the fundamentals of mobile robotics, spanning the mechanical, motor, sensory, perceptual, and cognitive layers the field comprises. The text focuses on mobility itself, offering an overview of the mechanisms that allow a mobile robot to move through a real world environment to perform its tasks, including locomotion, sensing, localization, and motion planning. It synthesizes material from such fields as kinematics, control theory, signal analysis, computer vision, information theory, artificial intelligence, and probability theory. The book presents the techniques and technology that enable mobility in a series of interacting modules. Each chapter treats a different aspect of mobility, as the book moves from low-level to high-level details. It covers all aspects of mobile robotics, including software and hardware design considerations, related technologies, and algorithmic techniques. This second edition has been revised and updated throughout, with 130 pages of new material on such topics as locomotion, perception, localization, and planning and navigation. Problem sets have been added at the end of each chapter. Bringing together all aspects of mobile robotics into one volume, Introduction to Autonomous Mobile Robots can serve as a textbook or a working tool for beginning practitioners.

There is a need for a resource that focuses on writing for publication that discusses the components of a manuscript, types of manuscripts, and the submission process. This groundbreaking book fills that need and includes information on how to develop writing skills by offering guidance on becoming an excellent manuscript reviewer and outlining what makes a good review. It shows how to craft scholarly papers and other writing suitable for submission to academic journals. The book offers on developing a manuscript suitable for publication in scholarly journals including tips on follow through with editors, rejection, and rewrites and re-submittals.

What makes your company great today, however, wont necessarily make it great tomorrow. Evolving is critical to long-term corporate performance and health. Humankinds greatest invention isnt the wheel, it is organization: people working together towards a goal that is beyond what can be achieved by the sum of individuals acting alone. As each generation finds better and better ways of working together, we perform at levels that previous generations could never have imagined. On top of long term trends like cost-free availability of information and deriving differentiation by creating an experience, the world appears to be emerging from the most profound and far-reaching economic crisis since the great depression of the 1930s. And five other factors will continue to drive global change: the historic shift in economic growth from the developed to the developing world; an unprecedented imperative for mature economics to raise productivity to preserve living standards; the rise of new networks of communication and trade; a profound challenge in balancing economic growth and environmental sustainability; and an expanded role for the state in regulating markets. For organizations to not only be excellent but stay excellent, companies need to respond to these challenges with tact and understanding that with the right techniques, change can be driven to a companys advantage. If you are a leader of people who wants to change things for the better, this book is for you. If you want to leave a profound and lasting legacy in your organization and the stakeholder it serves, this book will help you do so.

Essential Medical Genetics gives a balanced introduction to the basic principles of genetics and how it is applied to the understanding and treatment of diseases with a genetic component. Divided into three sections, basic principles, common situations in clinical genetics, and electronic databases, it covers all the information that medical students are taught at both preclinical and clinical level. The third section on electronic databases assists students on how to get the most out of these as they become more and more fundamental to undergraduate courses on genetics.

With 2 billion sites on the Web, who’s looking at yours? Google Analytics can tell you. With great new features including advanced customization and segmentation capabilities, Analytics supplies information about your site visitors that helps you ramp up the value of your site. And like its two previous editions, this guide shows you what’s new in Google Analytics, how to get the most from the program, and what to do with what you learn. — Understand the concepts, set up your Google Analytics program, use the right goals and filters, and read the reports. — Learn to interpret and apply Analytics results, even if you’re not a Web pro. — See how other companies use Analytics data. — Explore new features such as AdSense integration, cost data settings, motion charts, custom reports, and event tracking. — Apply the information you’ll get from reports on traffic, visitors, content, site searches, and more. — Drill down deeper with advanced techniques, tips, and hacks.

«I've struck it!» Mark Twain wrote in a 1904 letter to a friend. «And I will give it away--to you. You will never know how much enjoyment you have lost until you get to dictating your autobiography.» Thus, after dozens of false starts and hundreds of pages, Twain embarked on his «Final (and Right) Plan» for telling the story of his life. His innovative notion--to «talk only about the thing which interests you for the moment»--meant that his thoughts could range freely. The strict instruction that many of these texts remain unpublished for 100 years meant that when they came out, he would be «dead, and unaware, and indifferent,» and that he was therefore free to speak his «whole frank mind.» The year 2010 marks the 100th anniversary of Twain's death. In celebration of this important milestone and in honor of the cherished tradition of publishing Mark Twain's works, UC Press is proud to offer for the first time Mark Twain's uncensored autobiography in its entirety and exactly as he left it. This major literary event brings to readers, admirers, and scholars the first of three volumes and presents Mark Twain's authentic and unsuppressed voice, brimming with humor, ideas, and opinions, and speaking clearly from the grave as he intended.»

One of the country's most trusted leaders offers time-tested and real world advice for leading in economic hard times From business giant Bill George, the acclaimed author of Wall Street Journal's bestseller True North, comes the just-in-time guide for anyone in a leadership position facing today's unprecedented economic challenges. The former CEO of Medtronic draws from his own in-the-trenches experience and lessons from leaders (representing an array of companies) who have weathered tough economic storms. With straight talk and clear directions, George shows leaders specifically what they must do to become strong leaders and survive any crisis. His seven lessons include: Face Reality, Starting with Yourself; Never Waste a Good Crisis; and Be Aggressive: This is Your Best Chance to Win in the Market. Seven Lesson for Leading in Crisis is a survival kit for anyone in a leadership position. A concise handbook for applying proven leadership lessons in tough times Written by Bill George one of America's most trusted business leaders and author of True North and Authentic Leadership Offers realistic actions leaders can take to put their companies on the right long-term path Seven Lesson for Leading in Crisis gives leaders a solid strategy for staying the course.

«The first look at the philosophy behind Stephenie Meyer's bestselling Twilight series Bella and Edward, and their family and friends, have faced countless dangers and philosophical dilemmas in Stephenie Meyer's Twilight novels. This book is the first to explore them, drawing on the wisdom of philosophical heavyweights to answer essential questions such as: What do the struggles of «vegetarian» vampires who control their biological urge for human blood say about free will? Are vampires morally absolved if they kill only animals and not people? From a feminist perspective, is Edward a romantic hero or is he just a stalker? Is Jacob «better» for Bella than Edward?»

Never has advice on making money been so essential! Many of the world’s most successful businesses started during an economic downturn, so don’t let the credit crunch stop you. Make Your First Million shows you how to go it alone and make the money come rolling in! This straight-talking reality-check is one of the UK’s bestselling entrepreneurship titles of the last 18 months and in this new edition Martin shows you just how important it still is to follow your dreams — even in tough times. This edition includes a brand new introduction on why entrepreneurship is the right choice, even in the current financial climate. Martin Webb started his first business in the recession of the early 90s and expounds the myths surrounding stating in a recession and outlines the possible benefits and advantages – as well as the cautions.

Take a gondola ride on Venice's Grand Canal, where you'll find excellent views of St. Mark's Basilica. See chapter 5. Foldout map, plus detailed maps throughout Exact prices, directions, opening hours and other practical information Candid reviews of hotels and restaurants plus sights, shopping, and nightlife Itineraries, walking tours, and trip-planning ideas Insider tips from local expert authors

Wander the cobblestone streets of Prague's Old Town at twilight. See chapter 8. Detailed maps throughout Exact prices, directions, opening hours and other practical information Candid reviews of hotels and restaurants plus sights, shopping, and nightlife Itineraries, walking tours, and trip-planning ideas Insider tips from local expert authors

Explore the small village of Zermatt, at the base of the Matterhorn in the Valais region. See chapter 10. Detailed maps throughout Exact prices, directions, opening hours and other practical information Candid reviews of hotels and restaurants plus sights, shopping, and nightlife Itineraries, walking tours, and trip-planning ideas Insider tips from local expert authors