The Innovative CIO


Book Description

“Does your organization fumble when it comes to innovation? ‘The Innovative CIO’ presents a pragmatic guide to overcoming the 10 ‘innovation killers’ within your company.” --Dennis McCafferty “CIO Insight”, 1/23/2013 (www.cioinsight.com/it-management/innovation/slideshows/ten-ways-to-kill-innovation/) “Are you unwittingly stifling your employees’ entrepreneurial spirit? ‘The Innovative CIO’ discusses ‘innovation killers’ that could be holding back your small business or startup.” --Paul Shread “TIME/Business & Money”, 1/29/2013 (business.time.com/2013/01/29/removing-barriers-to-innovation/#ixzz2JSrUlD3A) The Chief Information Officer’s influence in the business organization has been waning for years. The rest of the C-suite has come to regard Information Technology as slow, costly, error-prone, boring, and unresponsive to business needs. This perception blinds company leaders to the critical value IT can deliver and threatens the competitive health and long-term survival of their enterprise. The modern CIO must reassert the operational and strategic importance of technology to the enterprise and reintegrate it with every department and level of the business from boardroom to mailroom. IT leaders must design, sell, and implement a vigorous culture of IT competence and innovation that pervades the enterprise. The culture must be rooted in bidirectional exchange across organizations and C-level policies that drive technology innovation as the engine of business innovation. The authors, international IT strategists and innovators, quantify the benefits and risks of IT innovation, survey and rank the myriad innovation opportunities from mature, new, and emerging technologies,and identify the organizational structures and processes that have been proven to deliver ongoing innovation. Buttressing their brief with dozens of case studies and specific examples, The Innovative CIO shows you how to: Take advantage of the IT and business innovation opportunities created by new and emerging technologies Shift IT innovation from afterthought to prime mover in strategic business planning Inject IT into the dynamic core of your organization’s culture, training, structure, practice, and policy




Rogue Regimes


Book Description

Explores U.S. foreign policy with regard to nations such as Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Libya, uncovering the reasons why these countries are so menacing to the United States.










Dancing with the Devil


Book Description

The world has seldom been as dangerous as it is now. Rogue regimes—governments and groups that eschew diplomatic normality, sponsor terrorism, and proliferate nuclear weapons—threaten the United States around the globe. Because sanctions and military action are so costly, the American strategy of first resort is dialogue, on the theory that “it never hurts to talk to enemies.” Seldom is conventional wisdom so wrong. Engagement with rogue regimes is not cost-free, as Michael Rubin demonstrates by tracing the history of American diplomacy with North Korea, Iran, Iraq, Libya, the Taliban’s Afghanistan, and Pakistan. Further challenges to traditional diplomacy have come from terrorist groups, such as the PLO in the 1970s and 1980s, or Hamas and Hezbollah in the last two decades. The argument in favor of negotiation with terrorists is suffused with moral equivalence, the idea that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. Rarely does the actual record of talking to terrorists come under serious examination. While soldiers spend weeks developing lessons learned after every exercise, diplomats generally do not reflect on why their strategy toward rogues has failed, or consider whether their basic assumptions have been faulty. Rubin’s analysis finds that rogue regimes all have one thing in common: they pretend to be aggrieved in order to put Western diplomats on the defensive. Whether in Pyongyang, Tehran, or Islamabad, rogue leaders understand that the West rewards bluster with incentives and that the U.S. State Department too often values process more than results.







A Dictionary of Slang, Jargon & Cant - Embracing English, American, and Anglo-Indian Slang, Pidgin English, Gypsies' Jargon and Other Irregular Phraseology - Volume II - L to Z


Book Description

First published in 1897, “A Dictionary of Slang, Jargon and Cant” includes definitions for a wide range of contemporary slang-English words, as well as those relating to American, Anglo-Indian slang, pidgin English, “gypsies' jargon”, and other interesting contemporary phraseology. English is a language that has been forever changing, gaining vibrancy and colour from many other languages, countries, cultures and communities. This volume explores some of the influences, providing definitions, examples, etymological information, and more. Highly recommended for all lovers of the English Language. Many vintage books such as this are becoming increasingly scarce and expensive. It is with this in mind that we are republishing this volume now in an affordable, modern, high-quality edition complete with a specially commissioned new introduction.




EMBRACE THE TWILIGHT 2 (Harlequin Comics)


Book Description

In the distant past, a prophetess named Sarafina was sentenced to the lonely fate of becoming a vampire. While she was still human, she would sometimes be visited by her “guardian spirit”—a man named Will, with whom she fell in love. On one of his last visits, he told the now-ageless prophetess, “I’m from the future. Trust me…and wait for me.” So Sarafina waited until the day when she finally found him…Colonel Will Stone, an American war hero who’d just returned home. Sarafina should be thrilled to reunite with him, but deep in her heart she’s already made other plans, convinced that he could never truly love her.