Choosing Small

How maverick companies have passed up the growth treadmill — and focused on greatness instead. It’s an axiom of business that great companies grow their revenues and profits year after year. Yet quietly, under the radar, a small number of companies have rejected the pressure of endless growth to focus on more satisfying business goals. Goals like being great at what they do, creating a great place to work, providing great customer service, making great contributions to their communities, and finding great ways to lead their lives. In Small Giants, veteran journalist Bo Burlingham takes us deep inside fourteen remarkable companies that have chosen to march to their own drummer. They include Anchor Brewing, the original microbrewer; CitiStorage Inc., the premier independent records-storage business; Clif Bar & Co., maker of organic energy bars and other nutrition foods; Righteous Babe Records, the record company founded by singer-songwriter Ani DiFranco; Union Square Hospitality Group, the company of restaurateur Danny Meyer; and Zingerman’s Community of Businesses, including the world-famous Zingerman’s Deli of Ann Arbor. Burlingham shows how the leaders of these small giants recognized the full range of choices they had about the type of company they could create. And he shows how we can all benefit by questioning the usual definitions of business success. In his new afterward, Burlingham reflects on the similarities and learning lessons from the small giants he covers in the book.

Choosing Small With low achievement and high drop-out rates plaguing our larger public high schools, communities across the country are creating smaller, more personalized schools that share a larger campus. Drawing on the Coalition of Essential Schools' longtime experience in school design, Choosing Small offers practical and strategic guidance for educators interested in transforming their high school. Featuring interviews with educators experienced in school conversion, the book covers all aspects of the conversion planning and implementation process such as engaging a broad array of stakeholders, working with the district, creating vision statements for the new schools, building leadership and management structures, and identifying curricular options as well as instructional needs. Praise for Choosing Small "Choosing Small provides necessary lessons onhigh school conversions, one of the most difficultreform efforts of our time." —Theodore R. Sizer, founder,Coalition of Essential Schools "A guide to creating the kind of schooling thatour young people need and deserve." —Ron Wolk, founding editor, Education Week "Anyone in a school leadership position who istrying to create high schools for the twenty-firstcentury should read this book." —John Welch, superintendent, Highline Public Schools, Burien, Washington "This book is for those who have ever gone toschool, been in a school, or realized we coulddo more for our children." —Jamie Kane, principal, Skyview High School, Thornton, Colorado "A must-read for anyone interested inimproving learning outcomes for young peoplethrough smaller, redesigned high schools." —John A. Sanchez, executive director, East Side House Settlement, the Bronx, New York

Profiles fourteen companies that have achieved high levels of success by focusing on the quality of their products and services, rather than their bottom-line profits, in a guide for small businesses that reveals how to earn consistent revenues by becoming purpose-driven. Reprint. 50,000 first printing.

Congratulations, reader! You've successfully navigated through the trials of childhood and adolescence. Now, as you voyage through high school to college and beyond, you're set to begin your next big adventure: adulthood. A few big decisions await you, from majors and minors to jobs and careers (and maybe even marriage!). However, in between the big ones, you'll make a million other smaller, subtler choices that will underpin everything from your friendships to your bank account. These are the daily choices that will truly define you . . . so how will you choose? Choose Your Own Adulthood helps you approach these choices from a more thoughtful, curious, and ultimately self-aware perspective. You'll learn why responding is so much better than reacting, how loyalty is really overrated, which risks are worth taking and which are best avoided, and so much more. Exciting things await you on your journey toward adulthood: which path you take is for you to decide. Choose wisely!

In industrial organization and labour economics, many of the most interesting recent contributions have encompassed explicit dynamics as well as extensive form games. This book collects and explains a number of the most widely used techniques in dynamic economic analysis.

The text presents and discusses some of the most influential papers in Matrix Computation authored by Gene H. Golub, one of the founding fathers of the field. Including commentaries by leading experts and a brief biography, this text will be of great interest to students and researchers in numerical analysis and scientific computation.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 17th Australasian Conference on Information Security and Privacy, ACISP 2012, held in Wollongong, Australia, in July 2012. The 30 revised full papers presented together with 5 short papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 89 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on fundamentals; cryptanalysis; message authentication codes and hash functions; public key cryptography; digital signatures; identity-based and attribute-based cryptography; lattice-based cryptography; lightweight cryptography.

This book explores fundamental aspects of geometric network optimisation with applications to a variety of real world problems. It presents, for the first time in the literature, a cohesive mathematical framework within which the properties of such optimal interconnection networks can be understood across a wide range of metrics and cost functions. The book makes use of this mathematical theory to develop efficient algorithms for constructing such networks, with an emphasis on exact solutions. Marcus Brazil and Martin Zachariasen focus principally on the geometric structure of optimal interconnection networks, also known as Steiner trees, in the plane. They show readers how an understanding of this structure can lead to practical exact algorithms for constructing such trees. The book also details numerous breakthroughs in this area over the past 20 years, features clearly written proofs, and is supported by 135 colour and 15 black and white figures. It will help graduate students, working mathematicians, engineers and computer scientists to understand the principles required for designing interconnection networks in the plane that are as cost efficient as possible.