IN LITTLE MORE THAN HALF A DECADE, Facebook has gone from adorm-room novelty to a company with 500 million users. It is one ofthe fastest growing companies in history, an essential part of thesocial life not only of teenagers but hundreds of millions ofadults worldwide. As Facebook spreads around the globe, it createssurprising effects—even becoming instrumental in political protestsfrom Colombia to Iran. Veteran technology reporter David Kirkpatrick had the fullcooperation of Facebook’s key executives in researching thisfascinating history of the company and its impact on our lives.Kirkpatrick tells us how Facebook was created, why it hasflourished, and where it is going next. He chronicles its successesand missteps, and gives readers the most complete assessmentanywhere of founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the central figure inthe company’s remarkable ascent. This is the Facebook story thatcan be found nowhere else. How did a nineteen-year-old Harvard student create a company thathas transformed the

In all his years in the Chicago Fire Department, LieutenantReed Solliday has never experienced anything like this recentoutbreak of house fires--devastating, vicious, and,in one case,homicidal. He has another problem--his new partner, Detective MiaMitchell. She's brash, bossy, and taking the case in a direction henever imagined. Mia's instincts tell her the arsonist is making this personal.And as the infernos become more deadly, one look at the victims'tortured faces convinces her and Reed that they must work closer tocatch the killer. With each new blaze, the villain ups the ante,setting firetraps for the people Reed and Mia love. The truth isalmost too hot to handle: This monster's desire for death anddestruction is unquenchable...and for Mia he's started thecountdown to an early grave.

COMPANIES TODAY ARE UNDER MORE PRESSURE THAN EVER to increaseproductivity. In this BusinessWeek bestseller, Jason Jenningsidentifies the world's most productive companies and reveals theirsecrets--none of which, remarkably, include layoffs. The companieshe features are surprise standouts in their industries,fromRyanair, Which generates three times more profit per employee thanthe legendary Southwest Airlines, to Nucor, a steel firm with anannual growth of seventeen percent for the past thirty-one yearsand the highest paid workers in the business. Drawing on these andother amazing companies, Jennings presents his readers with solidadvice on how to streamline businesses, eliminate waste, andinspire greatness within a workforce. Full of unexpected resultsand irrev-erent observation, Less Is More offers the key to rampingup the "productivity meter" in any industry.

When The Machine That Changed the World was first published in 1990, Toyota was half the size of General Motors. Today Toyota is passing GM as the world's largest auto maker and is the most consistently successful global enterprise of the past fifty years. This management classic was the first book to reveal Toyota's lean production system that is the basis for its enduring success. Now reissued with a new Foreword and Afterword, Machine contrasts two fundamentally different business systems -- lean versus mass, two very different ways of thinking about how humans work together to create value. Based on the largest and most thorough study ever undertaken of any industry -- MIT's five-year, fourteen-country International Motor Vehicle Program -- this book describes the entire managerial system of lean production. Nearly twenty years ago, Womack, Jones, and Roos provided a comprehensive de*ion of the entire lean system. They exhaustively documented its advantages over the mass production model pione

When the Harvard Business Review asked Robert Sutton forsuggestions for its annual list of Breakthrough Ideas, he told themthat the best business practice he knew of was 'the no assholerule'. Sutton's piece became one of the most popular articles everto appear in the HBR. Spurred on by the fear and despair thatpeople expressed, the tricks they used to survive with dignity inasshole-infested places, the revenge stories that made him laughout loud and the other small wins that they celebrated againstmean-spirited people, Sutton was persuaded to write THE NO ASSHOLERULE. He believes passionately that civilised workplaces are not anaive dream, that they do exist, do bolster performance and thatwidespread contempt can be erased and replaced with mutual respectwhen a team or organisation is managed right. There is a hugetemptation by executives and those in positions of authority tooverlook this trait especially when exhibited by so-calledproducers, but Sutton shows how overall productivity suffers whenthe w