Tagged: human behavior

  Novelist Meg Wolitzer has written several popular novels including, The Wife, The Ten-Year Nap, and The Uncoupling. Her new novel is an exploration of friendship, coming-of-age, talent and success. The Interestings follows six artistic friends who meet as teenagers one pivotal summer at a camp called Spirit-in-the-Woods.

    Renowned author Anne Lamott, whose latest work of non-fiction is Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers is in town this morning to speak at Hudson Valley Community College in Troy at 11 AM. We are thrilled she stopped by here first.

Lamott uses humor to get her messages across about motherhood, loss, spirituality and alcoholism in her novels and non-fiction. Among her works are Operating Instructions, Hard Laughter, Rosie, and Some Assembly Required: A Journal of My Son’s First Son – which is just out in paperback.

  Alan Siegel and Irene Etzkorn have long consulted with businesses and organizations around the world, looking to streamline products, services, processes and communications. And they have achieved dramatic results.

In the new book, Simple: Conquering the Crisis of Complexity, Siegel and Etzkorn show us how having empathy, striving for clarity, and distilling your message can reduce the distance between company and customer, hospital and patient, government and citizen-and increase your bottom line.

Examining the best and worst practices of an array of organizations big and small-including the IRS, Google, Philips, Trader Joe's, Chubb Insurance, and ING Direct, and many more - Siegel and Etzkorn recast simplicity as a mindset, a design aesthetic, and a writing technique.

    What are the differences between a winning and losing performance? Why are we able to rise to the challenge one day, but wilt from it the next? Can we in fact become better competitors? In Top Dog: The Science of Winning and Losing, Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman use cutting edge science to tease out the hidden factors at the core of every great triumph - and every tragic failure.

Po Bronson joins us.