Built to Lose


Book Description

"From front offices to college campuses, Jake Fischer takes you on an engrossing tour of the NBA in its latest golden age, when some of the most captivating teams won by losing." —Lee Jenkins, former Sports Illustrated NBA writer An insider account of modern NBA team-building, based on hundreds of exclusive interviews A single transcendent talent?can change the fortunes of an NBA franchise. One only has to recall the frenzy surrounding recent top pick Zion Williamson to recognize teams' willingness to lose games now for the sake of winning championships later. It's a story that weaves its way behind closed doors to reveal intricate machinations normally hidden from public view. Backed by extensive reporting and hundreds of interviews with top players, coaches, and executives, Jake Fischer chronicles secret pre-draft workouts, feuding between player agents and executives, surprising trade negotiations, interpersonal conflicts, organizational power struggles, and infamous public relations fiascos, making for a fascinating look at the NBA. The definitive account of the NBA's tanking era, when teams raced to the bottom in the hope of eventually winning a championship.




The Power of Trust


Book Description

A ground-breaking exploration of the changing nature of trust and how to bridge the gap from where you are to where you need to be. Trust is the most powerful force underlying the success of every business. Yet it can be shattered in an instant, with a devastating impact on a company’s market cap and reputation. How to build and sustain trust requires fresh insight into why customers, employees, community members, and investors decide whether an organization can be trusted. Based on two decades of research and illustrated through vivid storytelling, Sandra J. Sucher and Shalene Gupta examine the economic impact of trust and the science behind it, and conclusively prove that trust is built from the inside out. Trust emerges from a company being the “real deal”: creating products and services that work, having good intentions, treating people fairly, and taking responsibility for all the impacts an organization creates, whether intended or not. When trust is in the room, great things can happen. Sucher and Gupta’s innovative foundation for executing the elements of trust—competence, motives, means, impact—explains how trust can be woven into the day-to-day and the long term. Most importantly, even when lost, trust can be regained, as illustrated through their accounts of companies across the globe that pull themselves out of scandal and corruption by rebuilding the vital elements of trust.




Burn Rate


Book Description

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • In this “gripping” (TechCrunch), “eye-opening” (Gayle King, Oprah Daily) memoir of mental illness and entrepreneurship, the co-founder of the menswear startup Bonobos opens up about the struggle with bipolar disorder that nearly cost him everything. “Arrestingly candid . . . the most powerful book I’ve read on manic depression since An Unquiet Mind.”—Adam Grant, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Think Again and host of WorkLife At twenty-eight, fresh from Stanford’s MBA program and steeped in the move-fast-and-break-things ethos of Silicon Valley, Andy Dunn was on top of the world. He was building a new kind of startup—a digitally native, direct-to-consumer brand—out of his Manhattan apartment. Bonobos was a new-school approach to selling an old-school product: men’s pants. Against all odds, business was booming. Hustling to scale the fledgling venture, Dunn raised tens of millions of dollars while boundaries between work and life evaporated. As he struggled to keep the startup afloat, Dunn was haunted by a ghost: a diagnosis of bipolar disorder he received after a frightening manic episode in college, one that had punctured the idyllic veneer of his midwestern upbringing. He had understood his diagnosis as an unspeakable shame that—according to the taciturn codes of his fraternity, the business world, and even his family—should be locked away. As Dunn’s business began to take off, however, some of the very traits that powered his success as a founder—relentless drive, confidence bordering on hubris, and ambition verging on delusion—were now threatening to undo him. A collision course was set in motion, and it would culminate in a night of mayhem—one poised to unravel all that he had built. Burn Rate is an unconventional entrepreneurial memoir, a parable for the twenty-first-century economy, and a revelatory look at the prevalence of mental illness in the startup community. With intimate prose, Andy Dunn fearlessly shines a light on the dark side of success and challenges us all to take part in the deepening conversation around creativity, performance, and disorder.




Dream Team


Book Description

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Acclaimed sports journalist Jack McCallum delivers the untold story of the greatest team ever assembled: the 1992 U.S. Olympic Men’s Basketball Team. As a writer for Sports Illustrated, McCallum enjoyed a courtside seat for the most exciting basketball spectacle on earth, covering the Dream Team from its inception to the gold medal ceremony in Barcelona. Drawing on fresh interviews with the players, McCallum provides the definitive account of the Dream Team phenomenon. He offers a behind-the-scenes look at the controversial selection process. He takes us inside the team’s Olympic suites for late-night card games and bull sessions where superstars like Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, and Larry Bird debated the finer points of basketball. And he narrates a riveting account of the legendary intrasquad scrimmage that pitted the Dream Teamers against one another in what may have been the greatest pickup game in history. In the twenty years since the Dream Team first captivated the world, its mystique has only grown. Dream Team vividly re-creates the moment when a once-in-a-millennium group of athletes came together and changed the future of sports—one perfectly executed fast break at a time. With a new Afterword by the author. “The absolute definitive work on the subject, a perfectly wonderful once-you-pick-it-up-you-won’t-be-able-to-put-it-down book.”—The Boston Globe “An Olympic hoops dream.”—Newsday “What makes this volume a must-read for nostalgic hoopsters are the robust portraits of the outsize personalities of the participants, all of whom were remarkably open with McCallum, both then and now.”—Booklist (starred review)




You Can Drop It!


Book Description

Most Registered Dietitian Nutritionists Couldn’t Claim This— “I Lost 100 Pounds and Now I’m Sharing How I Did It with You!” MORE THAN 240,000 CLIENTS CAN’T BE WRONG! My name is Ilana Muhlstein and I wrote You Can Drop It! to help you learn my personal and proven system to drop weight and keep it off—without sacrifice—and it’s so simple that you’ll love it! This unique approach has become famous thanks to my renowned 2B Mindset program. The 2B Mindset is designed with the built-in ability for customization so that it is optimally effective and can work for everyone. It has already helped thousands of people lose weight—some more than 100 pounds—while never asking them to go hungry or cut out the foods that they love. You Can Drop It! doesn’t just give you the key knowledge you need to lose weight. It adds motivational principles and real-life examples and it’s the perfect complement to my successful program. No counting calories! No portion control! No feeling hungry! No off-limits foods! No exercise required! Finally—weight loss with FREEDOM! Here’s Exactly Why YOU CAN DROP IT! Will Work: You're going to feel full and satisfied. (You can still eat comforting foods, in big portions, and enjoy 50+ delicious recipes inside.) You’ll eat the foods you love. (Nothing is off-limits, not even dessert or a glass of wine.) You’ll be in control. (Say goodbye to emotional and mindless eating.) You can finally keep off the weight! (These powerful weight-loss tools will be yours for life.) The 2B Mindset method changed my life. I struggled with yo-yo dieting the whole first half of my life. I was always the big one in the group. By the time I turned 13, I weighed over 200 pounds, and I felt terrible about myself. That’s when I realized I had to break the cycle. Through trial and error, and lots of research, I discovered a simple and effective way to lose weight, while still eating large portions and the foods I loved. Over time, I lost 100 pounds, and kept the weight off. . . even after having two beautiful children. My secret? It’s called the 2B Mindset. It has helped thousands of my clients lose weight too—and now it will help you.




Sly Moves


Book Description

Are you ready to be a contender? Sylvester Stallone's action–oriented program for getting fit and eating right is also a revealing portrait of one of Hollywood's biggest stars. Sly Moves is more than just a handbook on fitness and nutrition. It's a provocative and candid inside look at the trials and triumphs of one of Hollywood's most famous stars. Throughout his career, Sly has always been body conscious, and as he experimented with intense training methods for various films, he has learned – often the hard way – what works and what definitely doesn't. His goal here is to help readers change harmful fitness habits, learn to counter reckless eating, and appreciate who they are even when they don't feel much like action heroes. Part 1 is a history of Sylvester Stallone's physique, as the Rocky star shares stories about his being bullied as a child, finding comfort and strength at the gym, and then later, the wild ride of fad diets, crash–training regimens and workout disasters that fringed on obsession. Part 2, The Sly Moves workout, outlines four exercise programs: classic, advanced, women's and hardcore. The workouts only require a commitment of about three hours a week (exactly the same amount of time Sly works out). The Sly Moves eating plan (Part 3) is Sly's nutrition guide, highlighted by a unique meal plan for a lifetime of good eating. Part 4 gives Sly an opportunity to inspire and encourage readers to make Sly Moves part of a long–term picture of health, fitness and wellbeing, with tips on everything from keeping goals and relaxation techniques to lessons learned from The Contender.




Refuse to Lose


Book Description

The inspiring and motivational inside story of 1996 UMass Minutemen coach John Calipari details his winning philosophy, "Refuse to Lose," which led the team, for the first time in their history, to the Final Four and resulted in professional and personal victory.




Tanking to the Top


Book Description

Enter the City of Brotherly Love and see how the NBA's Philadelphia 76ers trusted The Process–using a bold plan to get to first by becoming the worst. When a group of private equity bigwigs purchased the Philadelphia 76ers in 2011, the team was both bad and boring. Attendance was down. So were ratings. The Sixers had an aging coach, an antiquated front office, and a group of players that could best be described as mediocre. Enter Sam Hinkie—a man with a plan straight out of the PE playbook, one that violated professional sports' Golden Rule: You play to win the game. In Hinkie's view, the best way to reach first was to embrace becoming the worst—to sacrifice wins in the present in order to capture championships in the future. And to those dubious, Hinkie had a response: Trust The Process, and the results will follow. The plan, dubbed "The Process," seems to have worked. More than six years after handing Hinkie the keys, the Sixers have transformed into one of the most exciting teams in the NBA. They've emerged as a championship contender with a roster full of stars, none bigger than Joel Embiid, a captivating seven-footer known for both brutalizing opponents on the court and taunting them off of it. Beneath the surface, though, lies a different story, one of infighting, dueling egos, and competing agendas. Hinkie, pushed out less than three years into his reign by a demoralized owner, a jealous CEO, and an embarrassed NBA, was the first casualty of The Process. He'd be far from the last. Drawing from interviews with nearly 175 people, Tanking to the Top brings to life the palace intrigue incited by Hinkie's proposal, taking readers into the boardroom where the Sixers laid out their plans, and onto the courts where those plans met reality. Full of uplifting, rags-to-riches stories, backroom dealings, mysterious injuries, and burner Twitter accounts, Tanking to the Top is the definitive, inside story of the Sixers' Process and a fun and lively behind-the-scenes look at one of America's most transgressive teams. Including exclusive interviews with Joel Embiid, Ben Simmons, and Coach Brett Brown, Sam Hinkie, and more.




The Lost Continent


Book Description

"I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to." And, as soon as Bill Bryson was old enough, he left. Des Moines couldn't hold him, but it did lure him back. After ten years in England he returned to the land of his youth, and drove almost 14,000 miles in search of a mythical small town called Amalgam, the kind of smiling village where the movies from his youth were set. Instead he drove through a series of horrific burgs, which he renamed Smellville, Fartville, Coleslaw, Coma, and Doldrum. At best his search led him to Anywhere, USA, a lookalike strip of gas stations, motels and hamburger outlets populated by obese and slow-witted hicks with a partiality for synthetic fibres. He discovered a continent that was doubly lost: lost to itself because he found it blighted by greed, pollution, mobile homes and television; lost to him because he had become a foreigner in his own country.




A Second Wind


Book Description

While focusing on his core mission to preach the gospel worldwide, T.D. Jakes has seen many good people not spend enough quality time with family, friends, and God. They have gotten so swept up in the daily grind that they have failed to live the rich life that God desires for each of His people. In his new book, Jakes provides readers with strategies that will help them rejuvenate their life and turn their "busyness" into a "business." All readers-not just entrepreneurs-will benefit from Jakes' insightful advice so that they can use the days God has blessed them with wisely and finish each day strong!