Strategy

By the way, estate planning is for everone, not merely the "wealthy." The cost (in time and fees) to have a customed designed and implemented estate plan will probably be the best investment you will ever make to protect and preserve your wealth for your loved ones.

The Purple Book is one of the best resources for navigating career and life choices.

John Izzo, Ph.D.
Co-Author of Values Shift & Awakening Corporate Soul

The Purple Book of Career Strategies is a comprehensive job search guide for anyone who has lost their job or is unhappily employed and wants to make a change. It covers everything from initial career planning through to managing your emotions, job search strategies, preparing marketing materials, managing interviews and negotiating compensation, as well as self-employment as a career option. Although it would be particularly helpful to individuals who have never embarked on job search process (for example, long-term employees), it is also a useful resource for those requiring information on specific aspects of the job search process.

Barbara Moses, Ph.D. Best-selling author of The Good News About Careers - How You'll be Working in the Next Decade

OK. If I had to pick one chess reference book, it would be an opening encyclopedia (probably Nunn's) but this is the best in a different way. It's a book to refer to while you're trying to learn openings.

Many authors have suggested that the way to study an opening is first to walk through the main lines, then to play out some sample games to understand the themes and goals, then to learn the traps, and finally (if ever) to study the variations.

This book is the best reference for traps. In fact, it is the only satisfactory one, and for its uniqueness it deserves the MVB award.

There are a few other useful books of traps (Chernev's especially) but this one has advantages that set it apart:

* Volume -- Over 2000 short games are included, not one over 13 moves. These are tournament games, mostly from this century, so the mistakes made are not the sorts of blunders you will find in Internet blitz chess, but rather subtle errors that you could easily make yourself. (Burgess mentions an interesting exception, noting that the old penalty for an illegal move was a king move, which forced horrible positions and often resignation.)

* Breadth -- All reasonable openings are covered, including a few games for some dubious flank openings.

* Ease of use -- The table of contents lists openings by name. The index is by move order. (There is no index of games or players, but who cares?) If you're studying a given opening, you go to that chapter. If you're studying a particular variation, you find the page in the index. For each variation, there is at least one complete game plus branches for other games within it.

* Reliability -- Burgess went to great lengths, according to his introduction, to ensure that moves which receive question marks are truly mistakes and suggested alternatives are reasonable.

* Insight -- The notes are excellent. Each chapter has a brief summary of the odds of an opening's difficulty. Transposing move-orders are usually mentioned. Some games have little anecdotes or historical connections. Whenever a game is resigned for less-than-obvious reasons (as most of these are) Burgess explains the mate threat or material loss to us patzers succinctly and precisely.

This is really a book of how NOT to play openings. It will complement any repertoire books and opening encyclopediae. I highly recommend it for your shelf, even to intermediate players (like me). You might find it entertaining. You will find it useful.

Buy this book!

Many authors have suggested that the way to study an opening is first to walk through the main lines, then to play out some sample games to understand the themes and goals, then to learn the traps, and finally (if ever) to study the variations.

This book is the best reference for traps. In fact, it is the only satisfactory one, and for its uniqueness it deserves the MVB award.

There are a few other useful books of traps (Chernev's especially) but this one has advantages that set it apart:

* Volume -- Over 2000 short games are included, not one over 13 moves. These are tournament games, mostly from this century, so the mistakes made are not the sorts of blunders you will find in Internet blitz chess, but rather subtle errors that you could easily make yourself. (Burgess mentions an interesting exception, noting that the old penalty for an illegal move was a king move, which forced horrible positions and often resignation.)

* Breadth -- All reasonable openings are covered, including a few games for some dubious flank openings.

* Ease of use -- The table of contents lists openings by name. The index is by move order. (There is no index of games or players, but who cares?) If you're studying a given opening, you go to that chapter. If you're studying a particular variation, you find the page in the index. For each variation, there is at least one complete game plus branches for other games within it.

* Reliability -- Burgess went to great lengths, according to his introduction, to ensure that moves which receive question marks are truly mistakes and suggested alternatives are reasonable.

* Insight -- The notes are excellent. Each chapter has a brief summary of the odds of an opening's difficulty. Transposing move-orders are usually mentioned. Some games have little anecdotes or historical connections. Whenever a game is resigned for less-than-obvious reasons (as most of these are) Burgess explains the mate threat or material loss to us patzers succinctly and precisely.

This is really a book of how NOT to play openings. It will complement any repertoire books and opening encyclopediae. I highly recommend it for your shelf, even to intermediate players (like me). You might find it entertaining. You will find it useful.

SGT. T. Yoshimura CO H (Ranger) 75th Infantry (aiborne) Vietnam 1970-1971

Here are the book's chapter titles: (1) Knowledge -- The Motherlode of Value (2) The Loose-Tight World of Innovation (3) Leading . . . with an attitude (4) Strategy in a $20 Billion Startup (5) Relentless Approach to Innovation (6) Collective Power of Pairs (7) Measuring Your Measurement System (8) Getting from Here to There

The key point of the book is that each company needs to create an attitude among its people which fosters growth. Meyer does a good job of comparing and contrasting what what makes innovation work from what makes running existing operations excell. Unless you create this attitude, the normal operating needs will push out the needs of innovation.

Building on Intel's Andy Grove's advice about paranoia, Meyer proposes having positive paranoia in regard to the need or positive momentum and change. He also encourages companies to look outward solely, rather than inward. He wants a flatter organizational structure that blurs the organizational boundaries among functions. He favors promoting people who have a passion for innovation and what your company does. He suggests stretch goals that are acted upon, with the whole process repeated.

I found the thoughts in the book to be accurately portrayed and very appropriate advice. A number of the examples were also new to me, which made the book more interesting. A good adjunct to this book is Mike Pessemier's original research from the 1970s on how the best companies develop new products. The case studies in this book draw on important lessons from that research.

Don't sit on your laurels. Develop your innovation attitude by applying the lessons of this book as a first step! That's the kind of leadership that can make a difference!

Meyer presents many attributes of successful, aggressive information-age companies and provides stimulating ideas about where and how to steer an organization's culture. Maintaining a sense of urgency and challenging things that brought about current success are hard to do, but this book sheds some light on how to avoid complacency.

I find the book a tad chauvinistic about Silicon Valley, but the area certainly has an enviable track record. I do think his ideas will work elsewhere. :)

This book represents the best understanding of Russia's strategic forces available outside the Russian military. You can be sure that the people who really want to understand Russia's nuclear complex and their strategic rocket forces have a copy of this book. This is particularly remarkable since the contributors, all Russians, to this comprehensive overview have based their solid analysis solely on publicly available information--publicly available but dispersed over a wide variety of sources--and then used their scientific understanding to present in a thoughtful, authoritative, and most of all useful account.

Open the book to almost any page and you will find useful and important information. For instance, chapter eight presents a table of Russian nuclear tests, including the test's primary goal. This is the only such compellation I have seen and far exceeds similar lists for the United States. Right away you can see that the Soviet Union used significantly fewer tests on making sure their nuclear weapons would not explode accidentally than did the United States. Does that mean their weapons represent a significantly greater risk of accidental nuclear detonation? An interesting question to ponder.

The story behind the book would, perhaps, make even more thrilling reading. While based on information that the Russian government itself made public, recent years have seen an unjustified persecution of the book's authors by the Russian Federal Security Bureau, the successor to the KGB. In fact, one of the contributors is in under arrest (for other work he did) and all the unsold Russian language editions of this book have been confiscated by the Russian government.

Readers in both Russia and the United States who are seriously concerned about nuclear war and peace should read this book.

As an example, here are three things that I benefited from immediately. After you read the book, you'll have your own list.

1. The mental aspect of boat preparation. You have to do whatever it takes to KNOW that your boat is fast and ready to win. Otherwise, when you're going slow you'll be making excuses instead of finding what's wrong and fixing it.

2. A killer diagram showing spinnaker pole positioning for reaching. This diagram makes it completely obvious what to do, but it's TOTALLY contrary to the "prevailing wisdom" among most of the folks I sail with. But the first time I used Buddy's position, boy did we point with that chute!

3. A great description of "feathering" the boat upwind on the beat.

As always, the winning combination is read, then sail, read some more, sail some more, then repeat. If you don't go on the water to practice, no book can help you.

The downside is that the book was written before the new racing rules came into effect, so be sure you're fully familiar with the rules before taking Buddy's advice on tactics that rely specifically on rules for their validity. (For example, in one circumstance the advice to a leeward boat is to luff up quickly, and "tap" a windward boat, fouling them out of the race. You'll be on thin ice if you try this in the new rules, with their clear emphasis on the importance of avoiding collisions.)