Business & Computer Technologies Resource Guide

How can I take a data-driven approach to company culture? What should I measure and which metrics should I focus on? How can people analytics and behavioural science impact culture? Based on insights from the largest ever behavioural research study which examined the organizational impact of 220+ behaviours from 60 organizations, across 61 countries, Culture Analytics provides an evidence-based approach to organizational culture. It outlines the leading and lagging culture indicators, explains how to identify actionable insights from your people and culture data as well as how to apply predictive analytics to company culture. There is also guidance on the 30 employee behaviours which have the most impact on company culture and how to apply behavioural science interventions to drive these in your organization. The second part of the book covers key areas where culture analytics can be applied to drive business performance. These areas include talent acquisition and retention, employee engagement, EDI (equity, diversity and inclusion), wellbeing, psychological safety as well as resilience, strategy, innovation, change management and risk. Full of practical advice, this book also includes real world examples from Barclays, Pfizer, American Airlines, EDF Energy, Saudi Telecom Company, Cisco and Ethiad Airways. Making the complex world of people analytics and behavioural science accessible and applicable to all senior HR professionals and business leaders, Culture Analytics shows how to take a robust, evidence-based approach to company culture to drive workforce and organizational performance and deliver tangible business value.

In Decentralizing Finance: How DeFi, Digital Assets and Distributed Ledger Technology Are Transforming Finance, blockchain and digital assets expert Kenneth Bok offers an insightful exploration of the current state of decentralized finance (DeFi). As distributed ledger technology (DLT) increasingly optimizes and democratizes financial ecosystems worldwide, this book serves as a comprehensive guide to the most salient aspects of the ongoing transformation. The text delves into both crypto-native DeFi and DLT applications in regulated financial markets, providing: Comprehensive analysis of crypto-native DeFi across key areas such as its competitive landscape, infrastructure, financial instruments, activities, and applications Coverage of key risks, mitigation strategies, and regulatory frameworks, analyzed through the perspective of international financial standard-setting bodies Insight into how DLT is reshaping traditional financial systems through innovations like central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), tokenized assets, tokenized deposits, and institutional-grade DeFi platforms In a world where financial technology is rewriting the fundamental code of digital currency, the future of money is undeniably DLT-centric. How will this seismic shift interact with existing financial infrastructures? Can decentralization and traditional banking coexist and potentially synergize? This book endeavors to answer these pressing questions for financial professionals navigating these transformative times. Authored by a former Goldman Sachs trader, past Head of Growth at Zilliqa, and an early Ethereum investor with extensive experience in both traditional finance and the crypto ecosystem, Decentralizing Finance provides you with an insider's perspective on the revolution that is DeFi.

In The Crypto Launderers: Crime and Cryptocurrencies from the Dark Web to DeFi and Beyond, renowned anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist financing expert David Carlisle delivers a fascinating breakdown of the impact of crime on the world of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Tracking the history and evolution of crypto crime from the rise of the Dark Web to the present day, Carlisle recounts how an increasingly complex money laundering ecosystem has taken root in the crypto space. He describes in vivid detail how North Korean cyber thieves, Russian hackers, narcotics traffickers, and other illicit actors have moved billions of dollars' worth of cryptocurrencies through the blockchain, exploiting new technological innovations to profit from their crimes. In response, regulators, private industry, and law enforcement have begun fighting back against bad actors abusing cryptocurrencies - scoring critical victories along the way, but also igniting important and sometimes fierce debates about the future of innovation, finance, and the law. The author explains: A wide variety of technologies exploited by criminals, including mixers, privacy coins, Bitcoin ATMs, decentralized finance applications, and NFTs The rise of ransomware and the industrialization of the cybercriminal ecosystem How the transparency of the blockchain leaves criminals vulnerable to detection, while fueling controversial debates about financial privacy Emerging innovations, such as the rise of the metaverse, that could shape the future of crypto crime An engrossing and comprehensive analysis of the intersection of crime, technology, and finance, The Crypto Launderers will prove impossible to put down for readers with an interest in law, finance, tech, and the blockchain - as well as for anyone with even a passing interest in cryptocurrencies.

Combining the instincts of a journalist and the insight of the leader of a national business organization at the forefront of climate policy, Bob Keefe provides the first in-depth look at how the most important climate action in history is reshaping our economy, the way we live, and the future of our planet. He shows how the future long predicted by pundits, policymakers and prognosticators has arrived, and how smart businesses and communities are seizing the opportunities that come with it. Keefe introduces readers to the next generation of clean energy entrepreneurs and innovators, and takes us to places like Kings Mountain, N.C. and Blue Oval City, Tenn., modern-day clean economy frontier towns where battery and electric vehicle factories are sprouting from fallow fields and reinvigorating communities previously bypassed by earlier economic shifts.

The little-engine-that-could story of how a band of scrappy entrepreneurs are reviving the enterprise of manufacturing clothing in the United States. For decades, clothing manufacture was a pillar of U.S. industry. But beginning in the 1980s, Americans went from wearing 70 percent domestic-made apparel to almost none. Even the very symbol of American freedom and style-blue jeans-got outsourced. With offshoring, the nation lost not only millions of jobs but also crucial expertise and artistry. Dismayed by shoddy imported "fast fashion"-and unable to stop dreaming of re-creating a favorite shirt from his youth-Bayard Winthrop set out to build a new company, American Giant, that would swim against this trend. New York Times reporter Steven Kurutz, in turn, began to follow Winthrop's journey. He discovered other trailblazers as well, from the "Sock Queen of Alabama" to a pair of father-son shoemakers and a men's style blogger who almost single-handedly drove a campaign to make "Made in the USA" cool. Eye-opening and inspiring, American Flannel is the story of how a band of visionaries and makers are building a new supply chain on the skeleton of the old and wedding old-fashioned craftsmanship to cutting-edge technology and design to revive an essential American dream.

A deeply reported work of journalism that explores the promises and perils of microfinance, told through the eyes of international lenders and women borrowers in West Africa In the mid-1970s, Muhammad Yunus, an American trained Bangladeshi economist, met a poor female stool maker who needed money to expand her business. In an act widely known as the beginning of microfinance, Yunus lent $27 to forty-two women, hoping small credit would help the women pull themselves out of poverty. Soon, Yunus's Grameen Bank was born, and the idea of giving very small, high-interest loans to poor people took off. In 2006, Yunus and the Grameen Bank won the Nobel Peace Prize for "efforts to create economic and social development from below." But there's a problem with this story. There are mounting concerns that these small loans are as likely to bury poor people in debt as they are to pull them from poverty, with borrowers from India to Kenya facing consequences such as jail time and forced land sales. Reportedly hundreds have even committed suicide. What happened? Did microfinance take a wrong turn, or was it flawed from the beginning? Mara Kardas-Nelson's We Are Not Able to Live in the Sky is about unintended consequences, blind optimism, and the decades-long ramifications of seemingly small policy choices. The book is rooted in the stories of women borrowers in Sierra Leone, West Africa. Their narratives, woven through a deep history of modern international development, are set against the rise of Yunus's vision that tiny loans would "put poverty in museums." Kardas-Nelson asks: What is missed with a single, financially focused solution to global inequity that ignores the real drivers of poverty? Who stands to benefit and, more important, who gets left behind?

From the New York Times bestselling author and MSNBC and podcast host, a powerful wide-angle reckoning with how the assault from attention capitalism on our minds and our hearts has reordered our politics and the very fabric of our society "An ambitious analysis of how the trivial amusements offered by online life have degraded not only our selves but also our politics." --New York Times "Brilliant book... Reading it has made me change the way I work and think."--Rachel Maddow We all feel it--the distraction, the loss of focus, the addictive focus on the wrong things for too long. We bump into the zombies on their phones in the street, and sometimes they're us. We stare in pity at the four people at the table in the restaurant, all on their phones, and then we feel the buzz in our pocket. Something has changed utterly: for most of human history, the boundary between public and private has been clear, at least in theory. Now, as Chris Hayes writes, "With the help of a few tech firms, we basically tore it down in about a decade." Hayes argues that we are in the midst of an epoch-defining transition whose only parallel is what happened to labor in the nineteenth century: attention has become a commodified resource extracted from us, and from which we are increasingly alienated. The Sirens' Call is the big-picture vision we urgently need to offer clarity and guidance. Because there is a breaking point. Sirens are designed to compel us, and now they are going off in our bedrooms and kitchens at all hours of the day and night, doing the bidding of vast empires, the most valuable companies in history, built on harvesting human attention. As Hayes writes, "Now our deepest neurological structures, human evolutionary inheritances, and social impulses are in a habitat designed to prey upon, to cultivate, distort, or destroy that which most fundamentally makes us human." The Sirens' Call is the book that snaps everything into a single holistic framework so that we can wrest back control of our lives, our politics, and our future.

An enlightening and entertaining interrogation of the myth of American self-reliance and the idea of hard work as destiny "Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration." This phrase, arguably Thomas Edison's most famous quote, has been drilled into the minds of generations of Americans. A fairly straightforward iteration of the idea that innovation, discovery, and ingenuity are the result of drive and grit above all, it has also come to represent much darker myths- that hard work always leads to success and that achievement is the product of individuals and not communities. In this model, those who come out on top are there because they earned it, and everyone else needs to buckle down, glove up, and, maybe one day, they'll get there too. As the wealth gap widens, communities crumble, and Americans work more for less, Adam Chandler raises the question- What happens when perspiration isn't enough? To answer it, he crisscrosses the country interviewing mayors, teachers, generals, pastors, construction workers, and entrepreneurs, to reveal just how untenable relying on "perspiration" as a strategy has truly become. He also delves into America's past to reveal how our government, education system, and culture at large have woven the idea of meritocracy deep into the fabric of American society and how some of history's most famous so-called bootstrappers really built their wealth. From George Washington to Seattle,Washington, Jay Gatsby to Bill Gates, 99% Perspiration unpacks the misguided obsession with hard work that has come to define both the American dream and nightmare, offering insight into how we got here and hope for where we may go.

The "gripping and astonishing story" (Douglas Preston) of the Cinta Larga, a tribe that had no contact with the West until the 1960s and came to run an illegal diamond mine in the Amazon.  Growing up in a remote corner of the world's largest rainforest, Pio, Maria, and Oita learned to hunt wild pigs and tapirs, and gathered Brazil nuts and açaí berries from centuries-old trees. The first highway pierced through in 1960. Ranchers, loggers, and prospectors invaded, and the kids lost their families to terrible new weapons and diseases. Pushed by the government to assimilate, they struggled to figure out their new, capitalist reality, discovering its wonders--cars, refrigerators, TV sets, phones--as well as a way to acquire them: by selling the natural riches of their own forest home. They had to partner with the white men who'd hunted them, but their wealth grew legendary, the envy of the nation--until decades of suppressed trauma erupted into a massacre, bloody retribution that made headlines across the globe. Based on six years of immersive reporting and research, When We Sold God's Eye tells a unique kind of adventure story, one that begins with a river journey by Theodore Roosevelt and ends with smugglers from New York City's Diamond District. It's a story of survival against all odds; of the temptations of wealth and the dream of prosperity; of an ecosystem threatened by our hunger for resources; of genocide and revenge. It's a tragedy as old as the first European encounters with Indigenous people, playing out in the present day. But most of all, it's the moving saga of a few audacious individuals--Pio, Maria, Oita, and their friends--and their attempts to adapt and even thrive in the most unlikely circumstances.