the infinite game
How do we win a game that has no end? Finite games, like football or chess, have known players, fixed rules and a clear endpoint. The winners and losers are easily identified. Infinite games, games with no finish line, like business or politics, or life itself, have players who come and go. The rules of an infinite game are changeable while infinite games have no defined endpoint. There are no winners or losers—only ahead and behind.
The question is, how do we play to succeed in the game we’re in?
In this revelatory new book, Simon Sinek offers a framework for leading with an infinite mindset. On one hand, none of us can resist the fleeting thrills of a promotion earned or a tournament won, yet these rewards fade quickly. In pursuit of a Just Cause, we will commit to a vision of a future world so appealing that we will build it week after week, month after month, year after year. Although we do not know the exact form this world will take, working toward it gives our work and our life meaning.
Leaders who embrace an infinite mindset build stronger, more innovative, more inspiring organizations. Ultimately, they are the ones who lead us into the future.
The letters of john and jude
The letters of John and Jude deal with heretical teachings within the early church. Here William Barclay uses his characteristically approachable writing style to offer fresh translations and compelling commentary on these texts.
For almost fifty years and for millions of readers, the Daily Study Bible commentaries have been the ideal help for both devotional and serious Bible study. Now, with the release of the New Daily Study Bible, a new generation will appreciate the wisdom of William Barclay. With clarification of less familiar illustrations and inclusion of more contemporary language, the New Daily Study Bible will continue to help individuals and groups discover what the message of the New Testament really means for their lives.
the preacher’s commentary
The Preacher's Commentary, Complete 35-Volume Set: Genesis–Revelation offers pastors, teachers, and Bible study leaders clear and compelling insights into the entire Bible that will equip them to understand, apply, and teach the truth in God's Word.
Each volume is written by one of today's top scholars, and includes:
Innovative ideas for preaching and teaching God's Word
Vibrant paragraph-by-paragraph exposition
Impelling real-life illustrations
Insightful and relevant contemporary application
An introduction, which reveals the author's approach
A full outline of the biblical book being covered
Scripture passages (using the New King James Version) and explanations
Covering the entire Bible and combining fresh insights with readable exposition and relatable examples, The Preacher's Commentary will help you minister to others and see their lives transformed through the power of God's Word. Whether preacher, teacher, or Bible study leader--if you're a communicator, The Preacher's Commentary will help you share God's Word more effectively with others.
blackout
It’s time for a black exit.
Political activist and social media star Candace Owens addresses the many ways that Democrat Party policies hurt, rather than help, the African American community, and why she and many others are turning right.
Black Americans have long been shackled to the Democrats. Seeing no viable alternative, they have watched liberal politicians take the black vote for granted without pledging anything in return. In Blackout, Owens argues that this automatic allegiance is both illogical and unearned.
She contends that the Democrat Party has a long history of racism and exposes the ideals that hinder the black community’s ability to rise above poverty, live independent and successful lives, and be an active part of the American Dream. Instead, Owens offers up a different ideology by issuing a challenge: It’s time for a major black exodus. From dependency, from victimhood, from miseducation—and the Democrat Party, which perpetuates all three.
Owens explains that government assistance is a double-edged sword, that the Left dismisses the faith so important to the black community, that Democrat permissiveness toward abortion disproportionately affects black babies, that the #MeToo movement hurts black men, and much more. Weaving in her personal story, which ushered her from a roach-infested low-income apartment to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, she demonstrates how she overcame her setbacks and challenges despite the cultural expectation that she should embrace a victim mentality.
Well-researched and intelligently argued, Blackout lays bare the myth that all black people should vote Democrat—and shows why turning to the right will leave them happier, more successful, and more self-sufficient.
one vote away: how a single supreme court seat can change history
With Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s sudden passing, control of the Supreme Court—and with it the fate of the Constitution—has become the deciding issue for many voters in the 2020 presidential election. And the stakes could not be higher.
With a simple majority on the Supreme Court, the left will have the power to curtail or even abolish the freedoms that have made our country a beacon to the world. We are one vote away from losing the Republic that the Founders handed down to us. Our most precious constitutional rights hang by a thread.
Senator Ted Cruz has spent his entire career on the front line of the war to protect our constitutional rights. And as a Supreme Court clerk, solicitor general of Texas, and private litigator, he played a key role in some of the most important legal cases of the past two decades.
In One Vote Away, you will discover how often the high court decisions that affect your life have been decided by just one vote. One vote preserves your right to speak freely, to bear arms, and to exercise your faith. One vote will determine whether your children enjoy their full inheritance as American citizens.
God may endow us with “certain unalienable rights,” but whether we enjoy them depends on nine judges—the “priests of the robe” who have the last say in our system of government. Drawing back the curtain of their temple, Senator Cruz reveals the struggles, arguments, and strife that have shaped the fate of those rights. No one who reads One Vote Away can ever again take a single seat on the Supreme Court for granted.
how to destroy america in three easy steps
A growing number of Americans want to tear down what it’s taken us 250 years to build—and they’ll start by canceling our shared history, ideals, and culture.
Traditional areas of civic agreement are vanishing. We can’t agree on what makes America special. We can’t even agree that America is special. We’re coming to the point that we can’t even agree what the word America itself means. “Disintegrationists” say we’re stronger together, but their assault on America’s history, philosophy, and culture will only tear us apart.
Who are the disintegrationists? From Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States to the New York Times’ 1619 project, many modern analyses view American history through the lens of competing oppressions, a racist and corrupt experiment from the very beginning. They see American philosophy as a lie – beautiful words pasted over a thoroughly rotted system. They see America’s culture of rights as a façade that merely reinforces traditional hierarchies of power, instead of being the only culture that guarantees freedom for individuals.
Disintegrationist attacks on the values that built our nation are insidious because they replace each foundational belief, from the rights to free speech and self-defense to the importance of marriage and faith communities, with nothing more than an increased reliance on the government.
This twisted disintegrationist vision replaces the traditional “unionist” understanding that all Americans are united in a shared striving toward the perfection of universal ideals.
How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps shows that to be a cohesive nation we have to uphold foundational truths about ourselves, our history, and reality itself—to be unionists instead of disintegrationists. Shapiro offers a vital warning that if we don’t recover these shared truths, our future—our union—as a great country is threatened with destruction.
The river of doubt
At once an incredible adventure narrative and a penetrating biographical portrait, The River of Doubt is the true story of Theodore Roosevelt’s harrowing exploration of one of the most dangerous rivers on earth.
The River of Doubt—it is a black, uncharted tributary of the Amazon that snakes through one of the most treacherous jungles in the world. Indians armed with poison-tipped arrows haunt its shadows; piranhas glide through its waters; boulder-strewn rapids turn the river into a roiling cauldron.
After his humiliating election defeat in 1912, Roosevelt set his sights on the most punishing physical challenge he could find, the first descent of an unmapped, rapids-choked tributary of the Amazon. Together with his son Kermit and Brazil’s most famous explorer, Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon, Roosevelt accomplished a feat so great that many at the time refused to believe it. In the process, he changed the map of the western hemisphere forever.
Along the way, Roosevelt and his men faced an unbelievable series of hardships, losing their canoes and supplies to punishing whitewater rapids, and enduring starvation, Indian attack, disease, drowning, and a murder within their own ranks. Three men died, and Roosevelt was brought to the brink of suicide. The River of Doubt brings alive these extraordinary events in a powerful nonfiction narrative thriller that happens to feature one of the most famous Americans who ever lived.
LEADERSHIP IN TURBULENT TIMES
Are leaders born or made? Where does ambition come from? How does adversity affect the growth of leadership? Does the leader make the times or do the times make the leader?
In Leadership, Goodwin draws upon the four presidents she has studied most closely—Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Lyndon B. Johnson (in civil rights)—to show how they recognized leadership qualities within themselves and were recognized as leaders by others. By looking back to their first entries into public life, we encounter them at a time when their paths were filled with confusion, fear, and hope.
Leadership tells the story of how they all collided with dramatic reversals that disrupted their lives and threatened to shatter forever their ambitions. Nonetheless, they all emerged fitted to confront the contours and dilemmas of their times.
No common pattern describes the trajectory of leadership. Although set apart in background, abilities, and temperament, these men shared a fierce ambition and a deep-seated resilience that enabled them to surmount uncommon hardships. At their best, all four were guided by a sense of moral purpose. At moments of great challenge, they were able to summon their talents to enlarge the opportunities and lives of others.
This seminal work provides an accessible and essential road map for aspiring and established leaders in every field. In today’s polarized world, these stories of authentic leadership in times of apprehension and fracture take on a singular urgency.
INTELLECTUALS & RACE
Thomas Sowell's incisive critique of the intellectuals' destructive role in shaping ideas about race in America
Intellectuals and Race is a radical book in the original sense of one that goes to the root of the problem. The role of intellectuals in racial strife is explored in an international context that puts the American experience in a wholly new light.
The views of individual intellectuals have spanned the spectrum, but the views of intellectuals as a whole have tended to cluster. Indeed, these views have clustered at one end of the spectrum in the early twentieth century and then clustered at the opposite end of the spectrum in the late twentieth century. Moreover, these radically different views of race in these two eras were held by intellectuals whose views on other issues were very similar in both eras.
Intellectuals and Race is not, however, a book about history, even though it has much historical evidence, as well as demographic, geographic, economic and statistical evidence -- all of it directed toward testing the underlying assumptions about race that have prevailed at times among intellectuals in general, and especially intellectuals at the highest levels. Nor is this simply a theoretical exercise. The impact of intellectuals' ideas and crusades on the larger society, both past and present, is the ultimate concern. These ideas and crusades have ranged widely from racial theories of intelligence to eugenics to "social justice" and multiculturalism.
In addition to in-depth examinations of these and other issues, Intellectuals and Race explores the incentives, the visions and the rationales that drive intellectuals at the highest levels to conclusions that have often turned out to be counterproductive and even disastrous, not only for particular racial or ethnic groups, but for societies as a whole.
the pioneers
As part of the Treaty of Paris, in which Great Britain recognized the new United States of America, Britain ceded the land that comprised the immense Northwest Territory, a wilderness empire northwest of the Ohio River containing the future states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin. A Massachusetts minister named Manasseh Cutler was instrumental in opening this vast territory to veterans of the Revolutionary War and their families for settlement. Included in the Northwest Ordinance were three remarkable conditions: freedom of religion, free universal education, and most importantly, the prohibition of slavery. In 1788 the first band of pioneers set out from New England for the Northwest Territory under the leadership of Revolutionary War veteran General Rufus Putnam. They settled in what is now Marietta on the banks of the Ohio River.
McCullough tells the story through five major characters: Cutler and Putnam; Cutler’s son Ephraim; and two other men, one a carpenter turned architect, and the other a physician who became a prominent pioneer in American science. They and their families created a town in a primeval wilderness, while coping with such frontier realities as floods, fires, wolves and bears, no roads or bridges, no guarantees of any sort, all the while negotiating a contentious and sometimes hostile relationship with the native people. Like so many of McCullough’s subjects, they let no obstacle deter or defeat them.
Drawn in great part from a rare and all-but-unknown collection of diaries and letters by the key figures, The Pioneers is a uniquely American story of people whose ambition and courage led them to remarkable accomplishments. This is a revelatory and quintessentially American story, written with David McCullough’s signature narrative energy.
in the garden of beasts
A mild-mannered professor from Chicago, Dodd brings along his wife, son, and flamboyant daughter, Martha. At first Martha is entranced by the parties and pomp, and the handsome young men of the Third Reich with their infectious enthusiasm for restoring Germany to a position of world prominence. Enamored of the “New Germany,” she has one affair after another, including with the suprisingly honorable first chief of the Gestapo, Rudolf Diels.
But as evidence of Jewish persecution mounts, confirmed by chilling first-person testimony, her father telegraphs his concerns to a largely indifferent State Department back home. Dodd watches with alarm as Jews are attacked, the press is censored, and drafts of frightening new laws begin to circulate. As that first year unfolds and the shadows deepen, the Dodds experience days full of excitement, intrigue, romance—and ultimately, horror, when a climactic spasm of violence and murder reveals Hitler’s true character and ruthless ambition.
Suffused with the tense atmosphere of the period, and with unforgettable portraits of the bizarre Göring and the expectedly charming--yet wholly sinister--Goebbels, In the Garden of Beasts lends a stunning, eyewitness perspective on events as they unfold in real time, revealing an era of surprising nuance and complexity. The result is a dazzling, addictively readable work that speaks volumes about why the world did not recognize the grave threat posed by Hitler until Berlin, and Europe, were awash in blood and terror.
the splendid and the vile
In The Splendid and the Vile, Erik Larson shows, in cinematic detail, how Churchill taught the British people “the art of being fearless.” It is a story of political brinkmanship, but it’s also an intimate domestic drama, set against the backdrop of Churchill’s prime-ministerial country home, Chequers; his wartime retreat, Ditchley, where he and his entourage go when the moon is brightest and the bombing threat is highest; and of course 10 Downing Street in London. Drawing on diaries, original archival documents, and once-secret intelligence reports—some released only recently—Larson provides a new lens on London’s darkest year through the day-to-day experience of Churchill and his family: his wife, Clementine; their youngest daughter, Mary, who chafes against her parents’ wartime protectiveness; their son, Randolph, and his beautiful, unhappy wife, Pamela; Pamela’s illicit lover, a dashing American emissary; and the advisers in Churchill’s “Secret Circle,” to whom he turns in the hardest moments.
The Splendid and the Vile takes readers out of today’s political dysfunction and back to a time of true leadership, when, in the face of unrelenting horror, Churchill’s eloquence, courage, and perseverance bound a country, and a family, together.
how to break growth barriers
Some churches grow rapidly, only to hit a ceiling. Other churches have experienced declining or static attendance--many of them for decades. Frustrated pastors and church leaders want growth methods that work, but without adding to pastoral fatigue.
How to Break Growth Barriers argues that growth comes when effective leadership and lay-empowerment skills work hand in hand. This requires a shift of focus from the shepherd as the primary caregiver to shepherd as developer and coach of many caregivers. The authors show pastors how to communicate a vision for the future and then how to lead the congregation into the paradigms necessary for potentially limitless growth.
The strategies found in this book are not only tried and true, and taken from a biblical perspective of a "harvest" vision. They're also newly updated to reflect our changing culture, including helpful charts and checklists for self-evaluation.
five presidents
The #1 New York Times bestselling author of Mrs. Kennedy and Me and Five Days in November reflects on his seventeen years on the Secret Service for presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Ford.
The assassination of one president, the resignation of another, and the swearing-in of the two who followed those traumatic events. Clint Hill was there, on duty, through Five Presidents.
After an extraordinary career as a Special Agent on the White House Detail, Clint Hill retired in 1975. His career spanned the administrations of Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard M. Nixon, and Gerald R. Ford. A witness to some of the most pivotal moments in the twentieth century, Hill lets you walk in his shoes alongside the most powerful men in the world during tumultuous times in America’s history—the Cold War; the Cuban Missile Crisis; the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy; the Vietnam War; Watergate; and the resignations of Vice President Spiro Agnew and President Nixon.
It was indeed a turbulent time—and through it all, Clint Hill had a unique insider perspective. His fascinating stories will shed new light on the character and personality of each of these five presidents, as Hill witnesses their human sides in the face of grave decisions.
the like switch
From a former FBI Special Agent specializing in behavior analysis and recruiting spies comes a handbook filled with his proven strategies on how to instantly read people and influence how they perceive you, so you can easily turn on the like switch.
The Like Switch is packed with all the tools you need for turning strangers into friends, whether you are on a sales call, a first date, or a job interview. As a Special Agent for the FBI’s National Security Division’s Behavioral Analysis Program, Dr. Jack Schafer developed dynamic and breakthrough strategies for profiling terrorists and detecting deception. Now, Dr. Schafer has evolved his proven-on-the-battlefield tactics for the day-to-day, but no less critical battle of getting people to like you.
In The Like Switch, he presents these techniques for how you can influence, attract, and win people over. Learn how to think and react like your favorite TV investigators from Criminal Minds or CSI as Dr. Schafer shows you how to improve your LQ (Likeability Quotient), “spot the lie” both in person and online, master nonverbal cues that influence how people perceive you, and turn up or turn down the intensity of a relationship.
Dr. Schafer cracks the code on making great first impressions, building lasting relationships, and understanding others’ behavior to learn what they really think about you. With tips and techniques that hold the key to taking control of your communications, interactions, and relationships, The Like Switch shows you how to read others and get people to like you for a moment or a lifetime.
Leading change
Millions worldwide have read and embraced John Kotter’s ideas on change management and leadership.
From the ill-fated dot-com bubble to unprecedented M&A activity to scandal, greed, and ultimately, recession—we’ve learned that widespread and difficult change is no longer the exception. It’s the rule. Now with a new preface, this refreshed edition of the global bestseller Leading Change is more relevant than ever.
John Kotter’s now-legendary eight-step process for managing change with positive results has become the foundation for leaders and organizations across the globe. By outlining the process every organization must go through to achieve its goals, and by identifying where and how even top performers derail during the change process, Kotter provides a practical resource for leaders and managers charged with making change initiatives work. Leading Change is widely recognized as his seminal work and is an important precursor to his newer ideas on acceleration published in Harvard Business Review.
Needed more today than at any time in the past, this bestselling business book serves as both visionary guide and practical toolkit on how to approach the difficult yet crucial work of leading change in any type of organization. Reading this highly personal book is like spending a day with the world’s foremost expert on business leadership. You’re sure to walk away inspired—and armed with the tools you need to inspire others.
the great influenza
The strongest weapon against pandemic is the truth. Read why in the definitive account of the 1918 Flu Epidemic.
Magisterial in its breadth of perspective and depth of research, The Great Influenza provides us with a precise and sobering model as we confront the epidemics looming on our own horizon. As Barry concludes, "The final lesson of 1918, a simple one yet one most difficult to execute, is that...those in authority must retain the public's trust. The way to do that is to distort nothing, to put the best face on nothing, to try to manipulate no one. Lincoln said that first, and best. A leader must make whatever horror exists concrete. Only then will people be able to break it apart."
At the height of World War I, history’s most lethal influenza virus erupted in an army camp in Kansas, moved east with American troops, then exploded, killing as many as 100 million people worldwide. It killed more people in twenty-four months than AIDS killed in twenty-four years, more in a year than the Black Death killed in a century. But this was not the Middle Ages, and 1918 marked the first collision of science and epidemic disease.
A spy among friends
Told with heart-pounding suspense and keen psychological insight, and based on personal papers and never-before-seen British intelligence files, A Spy Among Friends is Ben Macintyre’s best book yet, a high-water mark in Cold War history telling.
Kim Philby was the greatest spy in history, a brilliant and charming man who rose to head Britain’s counterintelligence against the Soviet Union during the height of the Cold War—while he was secretly working for the enemy. And nobody thought he knew Philby like Nicholas Elliott, Philby’s best friend and fellow officer in MI6. The two men had gone to the same schools, belonged to the same exclusive clubs, grown close through the crucible of wartime intelligence work and long nights of drink and revelry. It was madness for one to think the other might be a communist spy, bent on subverting Western values and the power of the free world.
But Philby was secretly betraying his friend. Every word Elliott breathed to Philby was transmitted back to Moscow—and not just Elliott’s words, for in America, Philby had made another powerful friend: James Jesus Angleton, the crafty, paranoid head of CIA counterintelligence. Angleton's and Elliott’s unwitting disclosures helped Philby sink almost every important Anglo-American spy operation for twenty years, leading countless operatives to their doom. Even as the web of suspicion closed around him, and Philby was driven to greater lies to protect his cover, his two friends never abandoned him—until it was too late. The stunning truth of his betrayal would have devastating consequences on the two men who thought they knew him best, and on the intelligence services he left crippled in his wake.
loving your spouse when you feel like walking away
When you said, “I do,” you entered marriage with high hopes, dreaming it would be supremely happy.
You never intended it to be miserable.
Millions of couples are struggling in desperate marriages. But the story doesn’t have to end there. Dr. Gary Chapman writes, “I believe that in every troubled marriage, one or both partners can take positive steps that have the potential for changing the emotional climate in their marriage.”
Loving Your Spouse When You Feel Like Walking Away, the revised and updated edition of the award-winning Desparate Marriages, teaches you how to:
Recognize and reject the myths that hold you captive
Better understand your spouse’s behavior
Take responsibility for your own thoughts, feelings, and actions
Make choices that can have a lasting, positive impact on you and your spouse
Truman
The life of Harry S. Truman is one of the greatest of American stories, filled with vivid characters—Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, Eleanor Roosevelt, Bess Wallace Truman, George Marshall, Joe McCarthy, and Dean Acheson—and dramatic events. In this riveting biography, acclaimed historian David McCullough not only captures the man—a more complex, informed, and determined man than ever before imagined—but also the turbulent times in which he rose, boldly, to meet unprecedented challenges. The last president to serve as a living link between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, Truman’s story spans the raw world of the Missouri frontier, World War I, the powerful Pendergast machine of Kansas City, the legendary Whistle-Stop Campaign of 1948, and the decisions to drop the atomic bomb, confront Stalin at Potsdam, send troops to Korea, and fire General MacArthur. Drawing on newly discovered archival material and extensive interviews with Truman’s own family, friends, and Washington colleagues, McCullough tells the deeply moving story of the seemingly ordinary “man from Missouri” who was perhaps the most courageous president in our history.
Four Tables
Have you ever wondered, What is my purpose in life? What am I doing here? What does God want me to do? Using a metaphor of the tables Ezekiel saw in his vision of a new temple, Ken Gurley explains the fourfold plan for each believer's life, that is, to love, grow, serve, and go. Small group discussions challenge readers to apply these foundational principles to their lives resulting in deeper personal consecration and a renewed sense of purpose.
If enough people in enough places repurpose themselves according to God’s plan for their lives, Ken Gurley writes, “it is my firm expectation that a harvest of great proportions will be unleashed. If a particular class, segment of the church, or even an entire assembly works its way through this material, I strongly suspect the church will see a great difference in its meaningfulness and relevance to the community in which it ministers."
Didn’t see it coming
Founding Pastor of one of North America's most influential churches, Carey Nieuwhof wants to help you avoid and overcome life's seven hardest and most crippling challenges: cynicism, compromise, disconnectedness, irrelevance, pride, burnout, and emptiness. These are challenges that few of us expect but that we all experience at some point. If you have yet to confront these obstacles, Carey provides clear tools and guidelines for anticipation and avoidance. On the other hand, if you already feel stuck in a painful experience or are wrestling with one of these challenges, he provides the steps you need to find a way out and a way forward into a more powerful and vibrant future.
The Glory of God in the Face of Jesus Christ
There is now a substantial scholarly consensus for the emergence of a high or divine Christology very early and from a Jewish context, but the questions of "how" and "why" need further study. Within the framework of traditional Jewish monotheism, Paul and other early Christians used the language of deity to describe Jesus. To investigate their view of Jesus, the author examines Paul's discourse in 2 Cor 3:16-4:6, employing insights from rhetorical criticism and Oneness Pentecostal Christology. He explains how early Christians proclaimed the deity of Jesus within their monotheistic Jewish context. He then identifies socio-rhetorical reasons for and practical consequences of the monotheistic deification of Jesus.
God’s Foreknowledge & Man’s Free Will
This book is a thought-provoking study of some issues concerning the historic Calvinist/Arminian debate. Does God know absolutely everything that's going to happen? Can He foresee future moral choices and actions which have not yet been made? If one's future responses and behavior are totally foreknowable, is she truly free? Dr. Richard Rice explores these and other fascinating questions which have sometimes divided Christians. The author gives new perspective on one of the most fundamental issues of the Christian faith: the relationship of God to His creation and the reality and extent of human freedom. Carefully scrutinizing the Scriptures on this subject, the author challenges the reader to examine for himself this critical issue of theology. With strong theological background and sound biblical scholarship, Dr. Rice presents his viewpoint in a convincing and readable style.