The Purpose Gap

In The Purpose Gap, Patrick Reyes reflects on a family member's death after a long struggle with incarceration and homelessness. As he asks himself why his cousin's life had turned out so differently from his own, he realizes that it was a matter of conditions. While they both grew up in the same marginalized Chicano community in central California, Patrick found himself surrounded by a host of family, friends, and supporters. They created a different narrative for him than the one the rest of the world had succeeded in imposing on his cousin. In short, they created the conditions in which Patrick could not only survive but thrive. Far too much of the literature on leadership tells the story of heroic individuals creating their success by their own efforts. Such stories fail to recognize the structural obstacles to thriving faced by those in marginalized communities. If young people in these communities are to grow up to lives of purpose, others must help create the conditions to make that happen. Pastors, organizational leaders, educators, family, and friends must all perceive their calling to create new stories and new conditions of thriving for those most marginalized. This book offers both inspiration and practical guidance for how to do that. It offers advice on creating safe space for failure, nurturing networks that support young people of color, and professional guidance for how to implement these strategies in one's congregation, school, or community organization.

Discover the Purpose Advantage! Customers, employees, and investors are no longer satisfied with companies providing good products, good prospects, and good profits—they want them to do some social good, too. These “purpose-driven” companies do better on nearly every traditional metric: greater customer loyalty, higher retention, more innovation, and a healthier bottom line. But a nice mission statement and donations to charity won't make your company stand out. Using scores of real-world examples and practical exercises, John Izzo and Jeff Vanderwielen help leaders find a truly authentic purpose, one that is a natural fit for them and their organization. They describe concrete actions leaders can take to ensure that employees own it, customers and recruits connect with it, and every corporate action and activity reflects it.

The market for business knowledge is booming as companies looking to improve their performance pour millions of pounds into training programmes, consultants, and executive education. Why then, are there so many gaps between what firms know they should do and waht they actual do? This volume confronts the challenge of turning knowledge about how to improve performance into actions that produce measurable results. The authors identify the causes of this gap and explain how to close it.

A WALL STREET JOURNAL BUSINESS BESTSELLER The future of work is already here, and what this future looks like must be a pressing concern for the current generation of leaders in both the private and public sectors. In the next ten to fifteen years, rapid change in a post-pandemic world and emerging technology will revolutionize nearly every job, eliminate some, and create new forms of work that we have yet to imagine. How can we survive and thrive in the face of such drastic change? Deanna Mulligan offers a practical, broad-minded look at the effects of workplace evolution and automation and why the private sector needs to lead the charge in shaping a values-based response. With a focus on the power of education, Mulligan proposes that the solutions to workforce upheaval lie in reskilling and retraining for individuals and companies adapting to rapid change. By creating lifelong learning opportunities that break down boundaries between the classroom and the workplace, businesses can foster personal and career well-being and growth for their employees. Drawing on her own experiences, historical examples, and reports from the frontiers where these issues are unfolding, Mulligan details how business leaders can prepare for and respond to technological disruption. Providing a framework for concrete and meaningful action, Hire Purpose is an essential read about the transformations that will shape the next decade and beyond.

Traction. Startups Need It. Learn How To Get It. Vision, groundbreaking ideas, total commitment, and boundless enthusiasm characterize most startups, but they require capital to go from promising product to scalable business. More than 80 percent of all early-stage startups fail. Most of them can build a product, but the vast majority stumble when it comes time to take those products to market due to poor “market engineering” skills. Traversing the Traction Gap exposes the reasons behind that scary failure rate and provides a prescriptive how-to guide, focused specifically on market engineering techniques, so startups can succeed. The go-to-market hurdle is insurmountable to many startups. Just when they most need to establish a foothold in the market, they run short on time and money. This is the Traction Gap, that period of time introducing a new product into the marketplace and being able to scale it during a rapidly closing window of opportunity. Traversing the Traction Gap is a practical guidebook for navigating the tumultuous early life of a startup. Based on real-life examples, the advice from Cleveland and the members of the Wildcat Venture Partners team provides a roadmap and metrics for succeeding where others have failed.

Based on data collected for the Generation Gap Survey in Shanghai and updated to take into account contemporary trends, this book uses an empirical approach to study the generation gap in China. It covers various aspects of life from professional and family life to political participation and belief systems, analysing and comparing the values held by four different generations. Encompassing more than 2000 case studies and drawing on a wealth of fieldwork interviews, in particular it examines the experiences, thoughts and perceptions of adolescents, young adults, the middle-aged, and the elderly. As the largest sociological survey ever conducted regarding attitudes and value changes by different age groups in Shanghai, it highlights how social change and globalization have impacted on new generations, and the results indicate the dramatic difference and supersession of social ideologies between the generations. A unique piece of research, shedding light on a changing Chinese society, China’s Generation Gap will be of huge value to students and scholars of Chinese culture and society, Chinese social policy, globalisation and cultural studies.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST, NPR, AND KIRKUS REVIEWS A scathing portrait of an urgent new American crisis Over the last two decades, America has been falling deeper and deeper into a statistical mystery: Poverty goes up. Crime goes down. The prison population doubles. Fraud by the rich wipes out 40 percent of the world’s wealth. The rich get massively richer. No one goes to jail. In search of a solution, journalist Matt Taibbi discovered the Divide, the seam in American life where our two most troubling trends—growing wealth inequality and mass incarceration—come together, driven by a dramatic shift in American citizenship: Our basic rights are now determined by our wealth or poverty. The Divide is what allows massively destructive fraud by the hyperwealthy to go unpunished, while turning poverty itself into a crime—but it’s impossible to see until you look at these two alarming trends side by side. In The Divide, Matt Taibbi takes readers on a galvanizing journey through both sides of our new system of justice—the fun-house-mirror worlds of the untouchably wealthy and the criminalized poor. He uncovers the startling looting that preceded the financial collapse; a wild conspiracy of billionaire hedge fund managers to destroy a company through dirty tricks; and the story of a whistleblower who gets in the way of the largest banks in America, only to find herself in the crosshairs. On the other side of the Divide, Taibbi takes us to the front lines of the immigrant dragnet; into the newly punitive welfare system which treats its beneficiaries as thieves; and deep inside the stop-and-frisk world, where standing in front of your own home has become an arrestable offense. As he narrates these incredible stories, he draws out and analyzes their common source: a perverse new standard of justice, based on a radical, disturbing new vision of civil rights. Through astonishing—and enraging—accounts of the high-stakes capers of the wealthy and nightmare stories of regular people caught in the Divide’s punishing logic, Taibbi lays bare one of the greatest challenges we face in contemporary American life: surviving a system that devours the lives of the poor, turns a blind eye to the destructive crimes of the wealthy, and implicates us all. Praise for The Divide “Ambitious . . . deeply reported, highly compelling . . . impossible to put down.”—The New York Times Book Review “These are the stories that will keep you up at night. . . . The Divide is not just a report from the new America; it is advocacy journalism at its finest.”—Los Angeles Times “Taibbi is a relentless investigative reporter. He takes readers inside not only investment banks, hedge funds and the blood sport of short-sellers, but into the lives of the needy, minorities, street drifters and illegal immigrants. . . . The Divide is an important book. Its documentation is powerful and shocking.”—The Washington Post “Captivating . . . The Divide enshrines its author’s position as one of the most important voices in contemporary American journalism.”—The Independent (UK) “Taibbi [is] perhaps the greatest reporter on Wall Street’s crimes in the modern era.”—Salon

The way you parent, the clothes you buy, your relationships with your boss and your daughter, your attitude to money and sex, are, to an extraordinary extent, defined by the era into which you were born. Parents, the church, teachers and employers think they understand youngsters because they, too, were young once. But adults no longer live in the world that existed when they were teenagers. We may occupy the same space, home, classroom or office but we live in different worlds. And these worlds often collide. We've moved in one century from a 'built to last' to a 'throwaway' society. No wonder age differences are so vast. In this book you will discover your generation and those of the people who make up your life. Once you understand what makes them, and you, tick, the 'gen gap' begins to shrink. Fasten your seatbelt for a generational roller coaster ride - you may never think the same way again! In this book you'll understand why: your boss insists on endless meetings and conferences; your 20-something student doesn't want a 50-something computer teacher; you're in your 40s but still trying to prove yourself to Mom and Dad; your teacher should be learning from you.