Turnaround: Crisis, Leadership, and the Olympic Games
Author: Mitt Romney
Mitt Romney, Governor of Massachusetts, built a career turning around troubled companies. As the CEO of Bain Capital and Bain & Company, he and his firm helped propel the success of hundreds of companies, from venture start-ups to the world's largest corporations. In 1999, the Salt Lake Winter Olympic Games Organizing Committee turned to him to take over and run the Salt Lake Olympic Games. Romney was reluctant—and with good reason.
Sullied by scandal, on the brink of financial disaster, and with federal investigators, bankers, and the press at its door, the Salt Lake Organizing Committee's senior managers admitted the organization was paralyzed. But Romney had too much American patriotism to let it become a catastrophe for his country. So he accepted the biggest turnaround challenge of his life.
In Turnaround, Romney reveals how he tackled the seemingly insurmountable obstacles facing the Salt Lake Winter Games. In Turnaround, you'll learn how Romney and his management team:
-eliminated a financial crisis and delivered a profitable Olympic Games;
-built a culture of excellence that inspired gold medal performances from the employees;
-skillfully won the support of government officials, corporate sponsors, local residents, athletes and the international Olympic movement.
With Romney at the helm, and through the teamwork, tenacity, and creativity of the staff he assembled and supported, the organizing committee succeeded against the odds in producing one of the finest Olympic Games ever - a proud moment for America, a great installment in Olympic history, and a valuable object lesson in what effective management and leadership can do.
Publishers Weekly
It's not well remembered, but the planned 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics were scandal-ridden and in complete disarray until Romney took over as CEO in early 1999. In this management primer, he makes his rescue job seem very simple: he came in, displayed a positive attitude and hired competent, committed people, and the result was a successful Olympics that few had thought possible. That same attitude is displayed throughout this book, as Romney is quick to credit those around him for the games' success. He's thorough as he details how he revamped the budget, kept costs down and marketed the games to sponsors. His self-deprecating honesty is refreshing and appealing. As he writes after emphasizing the importance of selling the games: "I know there are people out there who love to sell, but it is far from my favorite thing." He's also honest about his criticism of the Salt Lake City leaders who were tainted by their efforts to buy votes from International Olympic Committee members to get the city the games. The same traits that make Romney, now the governor of Massachusetts, an unobtrusive leader don't always serve the book; some readers will want to see more sparks fly. But those looking for a training manual in how to run a high-profile organization will be rewarded. Agent, Mel Berger. (Aug. 4) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Books about: Indian Home Cooking or Southern on Occasion
New York's Bravest: Eight Decades of Photographs from the Daily News
Author: Patrice OShaughnessy
On September 11, the world was shown the face of bravery. As one woman so poignantly put it: As we ran out, they ran in. These heroes were doing the job they do each day, protecting more than 8 million residents in the area of 320 square miles that is New York City. That horrible day, we were made heartbreakingly aware of the risks these people take daily; risks their loved ones knew all too well.
First-hand witnesses to the heroism of the FDNY, the photographers of The Daily News knew these risks too. They have been covering the life and death situations the human drama that fire creates since the founding of the The Daily News in 1919.
These seasoned photographers of the Daily News have chased firetrucks in their radio cars since the earliest days of photojournalism, photographing children and animals being rescued from burning buildings, and capturing the disbelief on the faces of those gazing at the remnants of their lives, going up in smoke. These photographers know intimately the faces of those left behind in covering the all too many funerals, mourning with the families a loss felt not only across a city of millions, but acutely within a deeply bonded fraternity across the country.
Culled from the archive of The Daily News, consisting of more than 6 million images, this book represents more than eighty years of the world renowned New York City Fire Department in action, fighting fires, rescuing lives, and bringing peace and order to chaos, fear, and destruction.
In the Fire Department of New York, there are more than 11,400 Fire Officers and Firefighters. In addition, the FDNY includes 2,800 EMS and Paramedics personnel. This book is a tribute to their dedication, bravery, and humanity.
Library Journal
The world discovered New York's firefighters in the thick of their department's greatest single loss and paradoxically one of its greatest achievements-the evacuation of thousands from the burning Trade Center towers. But the courage and skill displayed last September were, argues Golway, the culmination of three centuries of firefighting culture developed doing hazardous work in an increasingly vertical city. Golway is city editor and columnist for the New York Observer and coauthor of The Irish in America, but more to the point for this moving history, he is the son and grandson of New York City firemen and no stranger to the "culture of firefighting." In So Others Might Live, the first full history of the FDNY in 60 years, Golway shows the department's emergence from amateur bucket brigades into the beginnings of a specialized force and up to the present, never letting a memorable figure or vivid moment escape his narrative. The book is simultaneously a social history of the changing city and a dramatic record of the disasters that have assaulted and periodically reshaped it: Manhattan's great fire of 1776 made thousands homeless and leveled a quarter of the city's structures, for instance, while city firefighters played a crucial role during America's worst riot-the draft riots of 1863-before establishing New York's first professional force two years later. Golway's narrative updates a classic history by Costello, Our Firemen: A History of the New York Fire Departments Volunteer and Paid, originally published in 1887 and now abridged and republished under a new name. Costello delivers all the sooty romantic lore in high style ("Onward, still onward, swept the fiery bosom of destruction") while detailing the evolution of a firefighting force that is the recognizable progenitor of the one that rushed up into the burning towers. Another worthy companion to Golway's book is New York's Bravest: Eight Decades of Photographs from the Daily News, which records 80 years of New York firefighting through 166 pages of dramatic picture stories-children plucked breathlessly from harm, a building transformed by hosing during a winter fire into a glittering ice palace, the seven-alarm blaze caused by a jet collision over Brooklyn in December 1960-that have been the life's blood of the photo tabloid since its creation in 1919. The book concludes with the department's worst fire of all. "It has been more than two centuries since Benjamin Franklin wrote of the love firefighters had for each other," Golway observes in So Others Might Live. "In the ruins of the Twin Towers, in the memorials for the fallen, in the embraces and salutes and unchanged rituals, the world saw the power of that love."-Nathan Ward, "Library Journal" Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
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