It is a book authored by John Perkins and published by Berrett Koehler Publisher in 2004. Mr. Perkins's core message in his book is that American corporations and government agencies employ two types of operatives: "economic hit men," who bribe emerging economies, and "jackals," who may be used to overthrow or even murder heads of state in Latin America and the Middle East to serve the greater cause of American empire. In ensuring the system works there emerges a group of  professionals  corps, educated at the elite universities of the world, carefully selected by the National Security Agency, recruited by corporations and let loose on the world. Based on overblown growth projections, these professionals convince developing countries to take on loans to buy modern infrastructure. The money goes from the World Bank, USAID, or other organizations straight to the corporations that were contracted to build the projects, leaving the country up to their neck in debt.
And since those growth projections are invariably overblown, and the infrastructure needs constant maintenance, the country remains in debt and grows more and more dependent on the good will of the United States.
Written in a dynamic first person voice, Perkins explains how he began as an EHM and his professional activity with Chas. T. Main, an “independent” utilities consultant to the governments of various developing countries. He would write exaggerated predictions on potential utilities use (i.e. hydroelectric generators) and convincing leaders to take on loans that they couldn’t possibly repay, in order to commission American engineering companies to build the infrastructure. Perkins traveled all over the world and witnessed key events including Saudi money-laundering affair, the fall of the Shah of Iran, the assassination of Panama’s President Omar Torijos and the subsequent US invasion of Panama.
In 1980, Perkins quit his job and founded an alternative energy company. He prospered, in part because of favors from former colleagues in return for keeping quiet. He also stayed on the payroll of various corporations and received generous commissions. In 1990, he dropped out. He sold his company and started to fight for the rights of South American indigenous cultures, whose environments he had helped to destroy in the first place. Finally, the events of Sept. 11, 2001 convinced him to finish writing the book and publish it.
 Often it is assumed that the failure to reap the successes from international construction projects has been due to naive optimism, or that intervening circumstances can be blamed which could not have been foretold. But Perkins makes perfectly clear that MAIN, the international financial community, and the US government knew perfectly well the game being played.

 The book is also being taught in classrooms at DePaul University here in Chicago and at Wheaton College in Norton, Mass. Hollywood has also shown an interest: Beacon Pictures bought an option to make a movie from the book as a prospective vehicle for Harrison Ford.

 
This book is like the kid you hated in high school, but he let you cheat off his test a couple of times so you kind of like him. I have grudging respect for this book, but every time someone raves about it, I usually just want to punch them in the face.
Rich Dad, Poor Dad is an absolute juggernaut of a book–it’s been on the bestseller lists for as long as I remember. I re-read this book yesterday. Man, there are some really great points, like how rich people make money work for them and how everyone else works for money. The first chapter is pure magic–read it. One of my favorite quotes is from his Rich Dad:

Most people never study the subject [money]. They go to work, get their paycheck, balance their checkbooks, and that’s it. On top of that, they wonder why they have money problems. Few realize that it’s their lack of financial education that is the problem.

He takes a dim view of people who blindly make decisions without stopping to ask themselves why:

A friend of mine in Hawaii is a great artist. He makes a sizable amount of money. One day his mother’s attorney called to tell him that she had left him $35,000. This is what was left of her estate after the attorney and the government took their shares. Immediately, he saw an opportunity to increase his business by using some of this money to advertise. Two months later, his first four-color, full-page ad appeared in an expensive magazine that targeted the very rich. The ad ran for three months. He received no replies from the ad, and all of his inheritance is now gone. He now wants to sue the magazine for misrepresentation.
This is a common case of someone who can build a beautiful hamburger, but knows little about business. When I asked him what he learned, his only reply was that “advertising salespeople are crooks.” I then asked if he would be willing to take a course in sales and a course in direct marketing. His reply, “I don’t have the time, and I don’t want to waste my money.”

The book does a fantastic job teaching how to think about work and money. Its early parts are some of the best . But I don’t agree with the book’s focus on real estate, which is far too complicated for beginning investors, and the high-level advice with few actionable recommendations. Many people love this book for teaching them how they they’re supposed to think about money–but if you ask them what they’ve done to get there, in my experience, the people who rave about this book haven’t done much. Unfortunately, Rich Dad, Poor Dad doesn’t have many actionable suggestions. I’d recommend this book as an excellent way to challenge your thinking about work and money, but only if you combine it with other books that make tactical recommendations of financial issues. I’ll cover more books I love and hate later.

 
Who is the audience for this book? Most people buy it to keep it on their coffee table to start conversations -- the typical voter would not read it through. Most political analysts know everything that's in here already -- there are no daring new policies nor deep personal revelations. I've concluded that the intended audience is the except -- people like me. This book got excerpted in Time magazine, for example, and Obama got a big cover spread, with a presidential headline. The Time excerpts were pleasant to read -- a little uplift for a few pages. But the book is just so chock-full of respectfulness and understanding and consensus-building and bipartisanship that no excerpter can find anything BUT uplift in any excerpt (including me).
So my conclusion is that the book is INTENDED for that purpose -- a successful attempt to get Obama into the national spotlight by writing a political tome that everyone will like and few will actually read through. This book contains nothing but numerous uplifting anecdotes of building consensus based on understanding one's opponents' point of view, of bipartisanship based on mutual respect. Reading an excerpt or two fills one with an uplifting feeling. Reading the original in its entirety, however, feels like slogging through uplifting anecdote after uplifting anecdote, to the point where it feels formulaically forced. The formula goes like this for every issue: "The proponents believe X. The opponents believe Y. I tend to lean toward the proponents' views, but I have great respect for the opponents, and we should work together on consensus solutions." I imagine that Obama met with his ghostwriter and outlined his issue stances, then told the ghostwriter to frame each one in a context of that sort of bipartisan respect.
Overall, of course, this is exactly the sort of book needed for the presidential trail. Having the book on coffeetables across America, despite being unread, means Barack's smiling face is in people's living rooms and he's in people's conversations. Having uplifting anecdotes excerpted in Time and OnTheIssues means people will read about their favorite topic, be uplifted, and repeat the anecdote to their fellow voters. It doesn't matter that the SAME formula is used for EVERY issue -- people aren't interested in EVERY issue, just their favorite ones. But if you want to get to know Obama, read instead Dreams From My Father, which is indeed a revealing biography and a deep look at his compelling personal story. This book is written instead for the campaign trail.
I do have a fantasy about how Obama came up with the title (because people like Obama hire people like me to come up with titles like "The Audacity of Hope"). I imagine that Obama wants to elicit a subconscious connection with Howard Dean -- who is characterized by his audacious campaign style -- and simultaneously elicit a subconscious connection with Bill Clinton -- whose book titles often include his hometown of Hope, Arkansas, as in Between Hope and History. Obama's title hence attempts to elicit a subconscious feeling that "Obama has the audacity of Dean, but with Clinton's chances of success." Maybe I'm reading too much subconsciousness into it -- but it's people like me who write these titles, so who knows.

 

THE PRINCESS DIARIST
By Carrie Fisher

After it was announced last year that Carrie Fisher was going to publish the diaries she kept while playing Princess Leia during the filming of “Star Wars” in 1976, some corners of the fandom blogosphere went full-tilt tizzy in anticipation. Fisher, after all, had already proved herself as an entertaining scribe with four novels, a one-woman Broadway show, her Twitter feed and two previous memoirs recounting her family history, career, addictions and mental-health issues.

“The Princess Diarist” is her latest memoir. One wonders, though, after 40 years of the “Star Wars” franchise — with its seven films (Fisher in four of them so far), countless documentaries, talk-show appearances, conventions and the internet’s obsessive cataloging — what’s left to tell? Could there really be any more just-remembered anecdotes, maybe quaffing tequila shooters on set with Darth Vader?

Well, as it turns out, Carrie Fisher does have some new information to share with her fans. But as they say online, if you’d rather find out yourself: SPOILER ALERT!

Her big reveal? She and Harrison Ford (who was married at the time) had a secret love affair during the shoot, or as she refers to it, “a very long one-night stand.” She hasn’t talked about it publicly until now and states that it’s only her side of the story, but tells it two ways: from her current viewpoint as a 60-year-old looking back and as a 19-year-old writing in her journal as it happened. (Whether anybody cares about the dalliance four decades later is debatable, but it does give a new perspective on their characters’ relationship in the sequels.)

The titular diaries take up about 70 pages of the book. If you’ve ever been a teenage girl with a paper-based diary (or sneaked into that teenage girl’s room to read that diary), the contents will be familiar: Deep thoughts about love, life and happiness, occasional rants, wobbly attempts at poetry and little spurts of personal insight are all splattered across the pages. It may not be great writing, but it’s an empathy tractor beam

Many entries show Fisher trying to process her feelings over the affair. Some even display a degree of self-awareness about her early writing efforts, which she describes as “adolescent jargon peppered with random selections from a fairly gaudy vocabulary.” Still, it feels invasive to be reading the material, even with her permission.

The present-day reflections wrapped around either side of the diary section are livelier and echo the style of her previous memoirs. Long riffs on her extremely devoted fans — she says she’s “moved by them” — are mixed in with slicing observations on Hollywood dysfunction and sexism (yes, a certain gold bikini comes up). One chapter recalls the creation of Princess Leia’s infamous dual-bun hairstyle and makeup choices: “And who wears that much lip gloss into battle? Me, or Leia, of course.”

In trying to establish separation from this movie character that’s been fused to her for two-thirds of her existence, Fisher offers a thoughtful, sardonic meditation on the price of fame, cost-of-living adjustments included. “Perpetual celebrity — the kind where any mention of you will interest a significant percentage of the public until the day you die, even if that day comes decades after your last real contribution to the culture — is exceedingly rare, reserved for the likes of Muhammad Ali,” she writes.

“The Princess Diarist” may not be the jolly trip down memory lane some fans are looking for. But like her 19-year-old self, Carrie Fisher doesn’t hold back on how she feels about life inside the “Star Wars” industrial complex — and that’s ultimately more interesting than another story about filming the Death Star trash-compactor scene.

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate : our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves who  am  I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous? Actually who are you not to be?….As we let our own light shine we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same” Nelson Mandela

I am opening my article with the great and valuable quote said by Nelson Mandela. He was a great leader , his leadership, many people has shed the light to many people in this world.

John Maxwell defines Leadership as “influence. That’s it! Nothing more and nothing less! He who thinks he leads and has no one following him/her is only taking a walk” Hogan  et.al (1994;493) argue that leadership is  “persuasion, not domination; persons who can require others to do their bidding because of their power are not leaders”

Generally the term can be defined as the process whereby an individual influence other in attaining the particular goals. These influenced individuals become to see those particular goals as theirs.

When we put our grasp to these definitions, we capture the frequently appeared terms which are Influence, People and Goals.


 
Influence; Is an act of making a person to do what you want him/her to do. Naturally every person has got an influence to his/her fellow but the degree varies from person to person, as Maxwell  puts as “Did you know that each of us influence at least ten thousands other people during our life time……?

People; In leadership arena, people are grouped into those who lead (leaders) and those who are led (followers/subordinates). People as thinking animals are the same, but under leadership arena they are grouped due to their personalities. Personalities are of two kinds; internal personality which involves person’s status and predictability. Another kind of personality is external which involves person’s reputation.

Goals; These are expected situations or conditions after accomplishment of a particular task.Goals are the sticky substance that bring together leaders and their subordinates in attaining such particular goals.