The Phoenix Crisis

The leaders of the Phoenix Conspiracy are poised to usher in The Hour of Ascension. And it is up to Calvin to expose the conspiracy before the Empire collapses in a firestorm of civil war. The Organization, the Akiras, CERKO, the Advent, the Phoenix Ring... it all comes down to this moment. And the question on everyone's mind is, can the Empire survive? Or will it be lost to the tempest.

On the surface, the galaxy seems peaceful. Humankind prospers from the Capital World to the far reaches of the Corridor. But to those who can see the signs, it's clear something is wrong. Long, dark fingers are pulling strings inside the military, making clandestine deals with enemy states to fulfill a dark design. Calvin is an intelligence agent working for the Imperial government. He's young, his methods are unorthodox, but he gets results. So when a former military hero steals a warship and threatens to start a war, Calvin is sent to eliminate him. But as he chases his prey across the stars, he realizes they are both pawns in a shadowy chess game that shakes kingdoms, divides empires, and threatens civilization everywhere. And if he is to uncover the mystery and expose the conspiracy he must confront—and embrace—the darkest elements of the galaxy and throw himself and everyone he loves into the line of fire.

A radical new leadership strategy to transform business as we know it—from a dream team of INSEAD professors and mega-bestselling author Ram Charan The business landscape is littered with the wreckage of companies that crashed and burned when an apocalypse came—in the shape of new competitive technologies, upstart entrants, demographic shifts, and new world orders. Who can feel safe in firestorm change? The authors of The Phoenix Encounter Method don’t advise safety. In fact, their method of leadership thinking requires you to imagine burning your business to the ground—throwing yourself into a firestorm change—and turning the upheaval to your organization’s advantage. It can then rise, phoenix-like, from the ashes, stronger and more powerful than ever. Written with a sense of urgency and purposefully radical provocation, The Phoenix Encounter Method represents the forward thinking of legendary business guru Ram Charan and professors from the senior global leadership program of INSEAD, one of the world’s top graduate business schools. The resulting methodology, based on analysis of thousands of articles, studies, reports, and academic and business practice, was field tested in real-life Phoenix Encounters conducted with more than fifteen hundred senior executives—from startups and family businesses to legacy companies—representing a broad range of industry and sectors in both developed and developing economies. Whatever your sector or industry, if you’re responsible for your organization’s ability to use change as a transformative opportunity, you’ll appreciate the dramatic impact The Phoenix Encounter Method will have on you, your leadership, and your organization.

The threat of civil war looms over humanity. Summers races to find the isotome weapons, Nimoux is trapped, Shen awakens to a strange new life, and Calvin hunts for the true puppetmaster. Desperate to discover the deepest layer of the conspiracy before it's too late. And in the shadows, Blackmoth brews a storm of chaos, hellbent on subjecting the galaxy to the dark design of his One True God.

***Over a half-million sold! And available now, the Wall Street Journal Bestselling sequel The Unicorn Project*** “Every person involved in a failed IT project should be forced to read this book.”—TIM O'REILLY, Founder & CEO of O'Reilly Media “The Phoenix Project is a must read for business and IT executives who are struggling with the growing complexity of IT.”—JIM WHITEHURST, President and CEO, Red Hat, Inc. Five years after this sleeper hit took on the world of IT and flipped it on it's head, the 5th Anniversary Edition of The Phoenix Project continues to guide IT in the DevOps revolution. In this newly updated and expanded edition of the bestselling The Phoenix Project, co-author Gene Kim includes a new afterword and a deeper delve into the Three Ways as described in The DevOps Handbook. Bill, an IT manager at Parts Unlimited, has been tasked with taking on a project critical to the future of the business, code named Phoenix Project. But the project is massively over budget and behind schedule. The CEO demands Bill must fix the mess in ninety days or else Bill's entire department will be outsourced. With the help of a prospective board member and his mysterious philosophy of The Three Ways, Bill starts to see that IT work has more in common with a manufacturing plant work than he ever imagined. With the clock ticking, Bill must organize work flow streamline interdepartmental communications, and effectively serve the other business functions at Parts Unlimited. In a fast-paced and entertaining style, three luminaries of the DevOps movement deliver a story that anyone who works in IT will recognize. Readers will not only learn how to improve their own IT organizations, they'll never view IT the same way again. “This book is a gripping read that captures brilliantly the dilemmas that face companies which depend on IT, and offers real-world solutions.”—JEZ HUMBLE, Co-author of Continuous Delivery, Lean Enterprise, Accelerate, and The DevOps Handbook

This book is an attempt to give a global explanation to the global crisis that the Western world has been experiencing since 2007. The crisis was explained as a financial crisis, a debt crisis, and a currency crisis. However, the author explains how we should look at the crisis as a general economic phenomenon, in which the financial, debt and currency aspects are related to each other, but are not enough to clearly understand the root of the boom and bust economy. Through a deep methodological analysis, the author clarifies why present economists are not able to understand the real nature of the crisis and limit their look to some aspects of it. Also, referring to great past economists like Schumpeter, Spiethoff, Mises and Hayek, he tries to build a new integrated approach to business cycle theory, able to take into account different contributions. A description is included as to why the free market organisation can work in developing an economic system with sustainable growth, while central planning cannot.Finally, theres an explanation as to why Europe today should not abandon EURO currency, identifying a way out from the present situation, stressing how only a radical change toward a real free market society will allow the system, after a painful readjustment, to walk toward the light.