Working Backwards

Working Backwards is an insider's breakdown of Amazon's approach to culture, leadership, and best practices from two long-time Amazon executives—with lessons and techniques you can apply to your own company, and career, right now. In Working Backwards, two long-serving Amazon executives reveal the principles and practices that have driven the success of one of the most extraordinary companies the world has ever known. With twenty-seven years of Amazon experience between them—much of it during the period of unmatched innovation that created products and services including Kindle, Amazon Prime, Amazon Studios, and Amazon Web Services—Bryar and Carr offer unprecedented access to the Amazon way as it was developed and proven to be repeatable, scalable, and adaptable. With keen analysis and practical steps for applying it at your own company—no matter the size—the authors illuminate how Amazon’s fourteen leadership principles inform decision-making at all levels of the company. With a focus on customer obsession, long-term thinking, eagerness to invent, and operational excellence, Amazon’s ground-level practices ensure these characteristics are translated into action and flow through all aspects of the business. Working Backwards is both a practical guidebook and the story of how the company grew to become so successful. It is filled with the authors’ in-the-room recollections of what “Being Amazonian” is like and how their time at the company affected their personal and professional lives. They demonstrate that success on Amazon’s scale is not achieved by the genius of any single leader, but rather through commitment to and execution of a set of well-defined, rigorously-executed principles and practices—shared here for the very first time. Whatever your talent, career or organization might be, find out how you can put Working Backwards to work for you.

From a writer Steve Almond calls "the master of the down and out that just got worse" comes a collection of stories that live vividly in the reader's memory long after the final page has been turned. Taking place in a world of desperate people who cling to hope, but have few expectations, Roberge introduces us to a motley crew of cripples, drug addicts, former child actors, chimpanzee boxers, exterminators, and assorted criminals. These desperate, boldly original stories are distinguished by a stark prose reminiscent of Denis Johnson or Lorrie Moore, but are, ultimately, all their own--powerful, riveting, deeply felt, and darkly funny.

Jann Arden is funny. And sincere. She has legions of devoted fans. And a radio show. She is a darling of the music scene—always candid, always unplugged. You thought you knew Jann Arden, but there is more—to her readers' delight, in Falling Backwards Jann reveals her childhood, her bond with family, her struggle in the formative years and what keeps her so grounded in the whirlwind entertainment industry. Jann has always been true to herself, except for a minor lapse when she was young. Oh wait, wasn't that all of us? From the tender and honest to the laugh-out-loud funny, Jann's stories from home and from the road during her pre-celebrity years will take you to unexpected places, including high school parties in farmer's fields, sleepovers under the stars, hard-to-believe summer jobs and the time she was stuck upside down in a brick barbecue. She reminds us of the inestimable value to a child of having teachers who believe in you and wide open spaces to play. But with the good times come the bad (and not just the bad perm). Jann opens up about the darker side of her so-called prairie perfect nuclear family and the first signs that her eldest brother was a uniquely troubled young man. In the days when Jann was experiencing a lot of firsts—first school play, first home perm, first kiss—how lucky for all of us that she stole away to her basement and taught herself her first song on her mother's guitar. In addition to being an incredible musician and multi-award-winning lyricist, Jann is a natural writer and simply an inspiration. Jann will capture your heart—and keep you in stitches—with her powerful stories about coming of age as an artist and as a human being. Jann brings her wit and that infectious sparkle to everything she does. This book is no exception.

A ground-breaking guide to understanding how aging happens in our cells and how to maintain and repair those cells--and roll back joint pain and muscle loss at any age--through gentle, scientifically designed workouts based on Classical Stretch and Essentrics, developed by the author and star of PBS's Classical Stretch series. It's never too late to slow down, or even reverse, the effects of aging. The human body is designed to function for the full length of its life--and with gentle, full-body flexibility and strengthening exercises we can look and feel tremendous, vibrant and active at any age, and well into our senior years. After all, the body is the world's most efficient self-healing machine. And yet, remarkably, many of us neglect the single most important system in the body--the one that makes all the others work--the muscular system. The typical message we get as we age is that we can move less and should take it easy--exactly the wrong advice. Surprisingly, fitness enthusiasts often do as much harm to their bodies as people living sedentary lives. For example, yoga instructors get tennis elbow or carpal tunnel syndrome from daily stress on wrists and elbows; Pilates instructors suffer pectoral and tricep muscle atrophy and even professional athletes grow overweight and suffer countless ACL, meniscus and disc injuries. Ligaments are virtually ignored by most exercises routines and yet joint health is essential in order to remain active. But these afflictions don't happen overnight, and with Aging Backwards we can slow or prevent their onset, and often reverse their symptoms.

Super Founders uses a data-driven approach to understand what really differentiates billion-dollar startups from the rest—revealing that nearly everything we thought was true about them is false! Ali Tamaseb has spent thousands of hours manually amassing what may be the largest dataset ever collected on startups, comparing billion-dollar startups with those that failed to become one—30,000 data points on nearly every factor: number of competitors, market size, the founder’s age, his or her university’s ranking, quality of investors, fundraising time, and many, many more. And what he found looked far different than expected. Just to mention a few: Most unicorn founders had no industry experience; There's no disadvantage to being a solo founder or to being a non-technical CEO; Less than 15% went through any kind of accelerator program; Over half had strong competitors when starting--being first to market with an idea does not actually matter. You will also hear the stories of the early days of billion-dollar startups first-hand. The book includes exclusive interviews with the founders/investors of Zoom, Instacart, PayPal, Nest, Github, Flatiron Health, Kite Pharma, Facebook, Stripe, Airbnb, YouTube, LinkedIn, Lyft, DoorDash, Coinbase, and Square, venture capital investors like Elad Gil, Peter Thiel, Alfred Lin from Sequoia Capital and Keith Rabois of Founders Fund, as well as previously untold stories about the early days of ByteDance (TikTok), WhatsApp, Dropbox, Discord, DiDi, Flipkart, Instagram, Careem, Peloton, and SpaceX. Packed with counterintuitive insights and inside stories from people who have built massively successful companies, Super Founders is a paradigm-shifting and actionable guide for entrepreneurs, investors, and anyone interested in what makes a startup successful.

In just twenty years, Amazon.com has gone from a start-up internet bookseller to a global company revolutionizing and disrupting multiple industries, including retail, publishing, logistics, devices, apparel, and cloud computing.But what is at the heart of Amazon's rise to success? Is it the tens of millions of items in stock, the company's technological prowess, or the many customer service innovations like "one-click"?As a leader at Amazon who had a front-row seat during its formative years, John Rossman understands the iconic company better than most. From the launch of Amazon's third-party seller program to their foray into enterprise services, he witnessed it all-the amazing successes, the little-known failures, and the experiments whose outcomes are still in doubt.In The Amazon Way, Rossman introduces readers to the unique corporate culture of the world's largest Internet retailer, with a focus on the fourteen leadership principles that have guided and shaped its decisions and its distinctive leadership culture.Peppered with humorous and enlightening firsthand anecdotes from the author's career at Amazon, this revealing business guide is also filled with the valuable lessons that have served Jeff Bezos's "everything store" so well-providing expert advice for aspiring entrepreneurs, CEOs, and investors alike.

What is understanding and how does it differ from knowledge? How can we determine the big ideas worth understanding? Why is understanding an important teaching goal, and how do we know when students have attained it? How can we create a rigorous and engaging curriculum that focuses on understanding and leads to improved student performance in today's high-stakes, standards-based environment? Authors Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe answer these and many other questions in this second edition of Understanding by Design. Drawing on feedback from thousands of educators around the world who have used the UbD framework since its introduction in 1998, the authors have greatly revised and expanded their original work to guide educators across the K-16 spectrum in the design of curriculum, assessment, and instruction. With an improved UbD Template at its core, the book explains the rationale of backward design and explores in greater depth the meaning of such key ideas as essential questions and transfer tasks. Readers will learn why the familiar coverage- and activity-based approaches to curriculum design fall short, and how a focus on the six facets of understanding can enrich student learning. With an expanded array of practical strategies, tools, and examples from all subject areas, the book demonstrates how the research-based principles of Understanding by Design apply to district frameworks as well as to individual units of curriculum. Combining provocative ideas, thoughtful analysis, and tested approaches, this new edition of Understanding by Design offers teacher-designers a clear path to the creation of curriculum that ensures better learning and a more stimulating experience for students and teachers alike.

Backwards and in Heels − women in film and their struggle against bias "After all, Ginger Rogers did everything that Fred Astaire did. She just did it backwards and in high heels" - Ann Richards Women in film since the beginning: Women have been instrumental in the success of American cinema since its very beginning. One of the first people to ever pick up a motion picture camera was a woman; as was the first screenwriter to win two Academy Awards, the inventor of the boom microphone and the first person to be credited with the title Film Editor. Throughout the entire history of Hollywood women have been revolutionizing, innovating, and shaping how we make movies. Yet their stories are rarely shared. The first women directors: This is what film reporter Alicia Malone wants to change. Backwards and in Heels tells the history of women in film in a different way, with stories about incredible ladies who made their mark throughout each era of Hollywood. From the first women directors, to the iconic movie stars, and present day activists. Each of these stories are inspiring accomplishments of women, and they also highlight the specific obstacles women have had to face. Backwards and in Heels combines research and exclusive interviews with influential women and men working in Hollywood today, such as Geena Davis, J.J. Abrams, Ava DuVernay, Octavia Spencer, America Ferrera, Paul Feig and many more, as well as film professors, historians and experts. Time to level the playing field: Think of Backwards and in Heels as a guidebook, your entry into the complex world of women in film. Join Alicia Malone as she champions Hollywood women of the past and present, and looks to the future with the hopes of leveling out the playing field.