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Go to your nearest park (it doesn't matter what it is), collect three items from it, and tell me how each item relates to the park and how Theodore Roosevelts conservation efforts paved way for the park to exist.

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Find local businesses, view maps and get driving directions in Google Maps.

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Using the free version of Soundtrap, create a campaign song that Theodore Roosevelt could have used for his run under a third party. Use three of the ideas that he ran on his platform.

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Using Canva, a campaign poster for Theodore Roosevelt, that he could have used for his 1912 election.

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Canva is a free-to-use online graphic design tool. Use it to create social media posts, presentations, posters, videos, logos and more.

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Theodore Roosevelt was known for being one of the most athletic presidents of all time. Read the blog post and then using Google Sheets, create a workout plan (in a spreadsheet format) for someone wanting to emulate is overall fitness.

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In the spirit of stats such as WAR, VORP and others sabermetric breakdowns, the PAS -- President Athlete Score -- was created to determine the Most Athletic U.S. President. Teddy Roosevelt placed in the top 5 overall, but his devotion to the martial arts was one of his distinguishing achievements. Here's a closer look at the man who was president from 1901 to 1909, and then made another run for the Oval Office in 1912 on the ticket of the Bull Moose Party.
When most presidents take a beating, they do it in the headlines, not in a headlock. Teddy Roosevelt preferred the literal version.

During his political career, he voluntarily subjected himself to a staggering number of brutal sparring sessions with championship-caliber fighters. Boxers; wrestlers; martial artists -- it didn't matter to Roosevelt. If they'd be willing to punch him in the face or pin him to the ground, he'd take them on. He felt it was the only way he could maintain his "natural body prowess."

Imagine Barack Obama having Sugar Shane Mosley over to the White House Gym for some heavy bag work and shadow boxing; or George W. Bush rolling around an Oval Office octagon with Brock Lesnar. That's the level of commitment we're talking about with Roosevelt. And this obsession started long before he was elected president.

While Roosevelt was governor of New York, he found out that the American middleweight wrestling champion was training in Albany. The instant he heard the news, he summoned the wrestler to the Governor's Mansion. After a short conversation, the wrestler agreed to come over three or four afternoons a week to train him. Roosevelt, who was in his early 40s at the time (nearly double the age of the wrestler), looked forward to his training sessions so much that he eventually bought a wrestling mat for the workout room. While neither combatant had a problem with the wrestling mat, Roosevelt's Comptroller did, and he refused to audit the bill for the mat, claiming that wrestling wasn't "proper Gubernatorial amusement."

"I am very glad I have been doing this Japanese wrestling, but ... My right ankle and left wrist and one thumb and both great toes are swollen sufficiently to more or less impair their usefulness, and I am well mottled with bruises elsewhere. Still I have made good progress, and since you have left they have taught me three new throws that are perfect corkers."

-- Teddy Roosevelt,
1904, in a letter to his sons following a judo lesson on the campaign trail.

The Comptroller suggested a billiards table, but unless Roosevelt was going to learn how to sword fight with the pool cues, it appeared he wasn't interested in the stationary sport. When the wrestler had to leave Albany, he felt bad that Roosevelt wouldn't have anybody to spar with, so he volunteered a friend who was a professional oarsman. During his second training session with the oarsman, Roosevelt caved in the poor guy's ribs and then suffered his own shoulder injury. With both of the men bloodied and bruised, they decided it might not be best for the Governor of New York to look like he was squaring off against Bill the Butcher every other day. Once Roosevelt recovered, he went back to his first love: Boxing.

Roosevelt's boxing career began the same way Mike Tyson's did: With an ass-kicking at the hands of bullies. Tyson had a speech impediment. Roosevelt had asthma. Both afflictions made these future pugilists appear weak and ripe for bullying. In Tyson's case, he learned early on that he was born with cinder blocks for fists and that he could punch his way through the young boys who would taunt him. Eventually, the taunting stopped, and the cheering began. Roosevelt wasn't born with a natural ability to fend for himself. In fact, he was born the opposite.

As a child, he was more like Samuel L. Jackson's Mr. Glass in "Unbreakable" than the eventual Rough Rider he would become. Here's how the future president describes himself as a child in his autobiography: "Having been a sickly boy, with no natural bodily prowess ... I was at first quite unable to hold my own when thrown into contact with other boys of rougher antecedents. I was nervous and timid."

And here's how he describes the first real beating he took: "Having an attack of asthma, I was sent off by myself to Moosehead Lake. On the stage-coach ride ... I encountered a couple of other boys who were about my own age ... They found that I was a foreordained and predestined victim, and industriously proceeded to make life miserable for me. The worst feature was that when I finally tried to fight them I discovered that either singly could not only handle me with easy contempt, but handle me so as not to hurt me and yet to prevent my doing any damage whatever in return."

In short, they toyed with the future president. This incident scarred Roosevelt and he resolved that day to do something about it. Shortly after returning from his trip, he asked his father's permission to learn how to box. His dad set him up with ex-prizefighter John Long and Roosevelt's love affair with the sweet science began. Roosevelt began his training with little natural ability, but he was eager to learn and practiced hard. After a few months, Long entered him into a tournament in the lightweight division and to everyone's surprise, he won. The competition wasn't top flight, and the title didn't lead to any future belts, but the experience stayed with Roosevelt and he boxed throughout his college career at Harvard. He was never a champion (even though he sparred with champions), but he was always game to fight and he made it to the finals of a recreational tournament once. While Roosevelt's boxing career wasn't illustrious, it allowed for the rarest of opportunities: The chance for a normal guy to cold cock the leader of the free world without any repercussions.

One such incident involving a young artillery captain ultimately led to Roosevelt retiring from the sport for good. The event happened during a sparring session in the middle of his presidency. Once again, TR found himself in the squared circle with a man almost half his age. After holding his own for several rounds, the president missed landing a left hook on his opponent, and the young captain "cross countered [the president] on the eye, smashing the little blood vessels." Roosevelt's eye never healed properly, which meant the punch signaled the end of our most storied presidential pugilist's career.

Leave it to Teddy Roosevelt to take a simple tennis club and turn it into a precursor to the Ironman Triathlon. The "Tennis Cabinet" began early in Roosevelt's presidency as a group of men who, as the name would suggest, played tennis with the president in the afternoons. The crew started out innocently enough, but it wasn't long before TR decided that smacking a ball over a net with a racket for a few hours was tedious. Not only that, there was almost no risk for serious injury, which meant the thrill-seeking president wasn't getting his much needed adrenaline rush to balance out the boring hours he had to log running the United States.

Pretty soon, the daily tennis sessions were replaced by what Roosevelt called "rough, cross-country walks," which would be like describing the Iditarod as a nice sleigh ride. In fact, these "walks" were nothing of the sort; they were obstacle courses whose main goal was to push each man close to his physical limit. Some days they'd hike down to the bottom of Rock Creek in Washington, D.C. and others they'd trek across the Potomac River. The way they kept things interesting was to look at a map and randomly decide on a destination to hike to from the White House. They'd make a point of not researching whether there were any obstacles or bodies of water in the way and they'd head out with the goal to not veer from the straight line to their destination for any reason.

This led to some hairy scuffling down river beds, hikes over mountains, rock climbing, and perhaps most insanely of all, swimming across half-frozen rivers in the early spring and late fall. As if auditioning for a pre-Discovery Channel President v. Wild, our Bear Grylls-esque Commander-in-Chief often bragged that the routes he picked on these "rough cross-country walks" would force the men to swim through Rock Creek while "ice was floating thick upon it." "Once I invited an entire class of officers who were attending lectures at the War College to come on one of these walks," Roosevelt says in his autobiography. "I chose a route which gave us the hardest climbing along the rocks and the deepest crossings of the creek; and my army friends enjoyed it hugely being the right sort, to a man."

Executive Power (ranking of a president's physical strength): 5

Looking at Roosevelt's rigorous physical activities, it was almost as if he was trying to prove on a daily basis that he was the strongest president. Boxing? Check. Wrestling? Check. Martial Arts? Check. In fact, Roosevelt trained with world famous judo master Yoshiaka Yamashita, eventually rising to the level of brown belt. During his presidency, he was punched in the face, body slammed, submerged in a frozen river and shot - the first three voluntarily, the last one, involuntarily. If surviving all four doesn't earn you a 5 in the Executive Power rankings, nothing will.

Running Ability (ranking of physical fitness and cardio): 4

Roosevelt was president about 80 years before the running and jogging craze began in the 1980s, but he actively pursued his own version of both -- only with obstacles in the way. TR scores well in this category, but a 5 is reserved for the absolute highest of fitness achievements. Only 6 presidents received a perfect score in this category and while Roosevelt is at the top of the list, his sparring sessions fair slightly lower than running a marathon (George W. Bush), swimming 3 miles in the open ocean while dragging a wounded soldier (JFK), or being an All-American college football player (Gerald Ford). For once, TR will have to settle for being almost the best.

Weighs & Means (ranking how fit a president stayed while in office): 5

No contest here. It would be hard to argue that a president sought out more physical activity while in office than TR. There's no need to go over his activities again, but it's safe to say that for modern presidents, Theodore Rex set the bar for exercise very, very high.

If a president got a trophy for activity level, Roosevelt would get a perfect score here again. Unfortunately, while he boxed in college, he never won a championship; and while he earned a brown belt, he never competed for a title; and while he created torturous, triathlon like obstacle courses, he never won any medals in a real competition. That's why he gets a 4 and not a 5. Only four presidents earned a 5 in this category. Ford earned his for being an NCAA All-American and football champion. George H.W. Bush earned his for playing in the college baseball World Series at Yale, twice. And Eisenhower got his 5 for earning a starting spot on the West Point football team as both a linebacker and running back. Oh, and Hoover got a 5 for inventing his own sport -- though it still wasn't enough to push him to the top of this list.

Mettle of Honor (physical toughness and endurance): 5

There's a fine line between toughness and strength. TR walked on both sides. His willingness to engage in hand-to-hand combat has already been established, but is there a greater measure of toughness than how he acted after he was shot? Just before he was about to give a speech in Milwaukee, Roosevelt took a .32 caliber bullet to the chest at point blank range from a would-be assassin. Fortunately, he had some papers and a glasses case in his coat pocket to blunt the initial force of the impact, however, the bullet ended up lodged in the president's chest. After a short delay, TR went on to deliver his speech -- with the bullet still in his body. After a few words, perhaps our manliest president pulled the bloodstained script of his speech from his chest pocket and said, "You see, it takes more than one bullet to kill a Bull Moose." He won over the crowd, and a solid 5 score for toughness, in the process.
Follow Jon Finkel on Twitter @Jon_Finkel.

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Teddy Roosevelt: The U.S. President That Was Always Rough And Ready To Throw Down

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In the spirit of stats such as WAR, VORP and others sabermetric breakdowns, the PAS -- President Athlete Score -- was created to determine the Most Athletic U.S. President . Teddy Roosevelt placed in the top 5 overall, but his devotion to the martial arts was one of his distinguishing achievements.

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Take this virtual tour of Theodore Roosevelt's birthplace. Then create a Google Doc and write a reflection on how you think his upbringing was, using five examples from the tour to explain your rationale.

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Virtual Tour of Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace National Historic Site - National Park Service - Google Arts & Culture

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The 'The Lion's Room', is one of two exhibit galleries at Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace, which inhabit the structure formerly owned by Theodore's uncle, ...

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Using the site 270towin.com, giving CA to Democrats; OK and TX to the Republicans. Figure out what are the minimum amount of states a 3rd party would need in order to win a general election.

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This isn't a popularity contest™

It will take 270 electoral votes to win the 2024 presidential election. Click states on this interactive map to create your own 2024 election forecast. Create a specific match-up by clicking the party and/or names near the electoral vote counter. Use the buttons below the map to share your forecast or embed it into a web page.

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270toWin - 2024 Presidential Election Interactive Map

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Create your own forecast for the 2024 presidential election

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Analyze Theodore Roosevelt's "Man in the Arena" speech. Read it multiple times and determine how you think Theodore Roosevelt would have articulated the speech. Then create and share a Google Doc with your thoughts on how he would have delivered the speech.

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Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know

R ETHINKING can cause uncertainty. Make us uncomfortable. Feel uneasy. It can threaten our identities. But rethinking can also help us find solutions to old problems, deepen our perspective, release us from inherited dogma and other people's opinions, and understand how our closely held values relate and are applied to our changing environment.

Adam Grant challenges us to Think Again-to question what we think we know. "Unfortunately, when it comes to our own knowledge and opinions, we often favor feeling right over being right."

Grant's colleague Phil Tetlock discovered that when we think and talk (and scan social media), we tend to slip into the mindsets of three different professions: preachers, prosecutors, and politicians. "The risk is that we become so wrapped up in preaching that we're right, prosecuting others who are wrong, and politicking for support that we don't bother to rethink our own views." (Grant offers a short Think Again quiz on his website.) The approach to ideas and opinions that we need to be gravitating to is the scientist mindset. It is a mindset of curiosity and a search for truth rather than becoming defensive, offensive, or appeasing.

Rethinking is not a question of how smart you are. "The brighter you are, the harder it can be to see your own limitations. Being good at thinking can make us worse at rethinking."

What does matter is how curious and actively open-minded you are. Actively in the sense that we are searching for reasons why we might be wrong.

A key to rethinking is being able to detach yourself from your beliefs. This takes two forms: "detaching your present from your past and detaching your opinions from your identity."

Who you are should be a question of what you value, not what you believe. Values are your core principles in life-they might be excellence and generosity, freedom and fairness, or security and integrity. Basing your identity on these kinds of principles enables you to remain open-minded about the best ways to advance them.

It is quite common for differences of opinion to turn into a relational conflict-personal and emotional-filled with animosity and vindictiveness. Task conflict is often desirable in order to get to the best answer. "The absence of conflict is not harmony, it's apathy."

When a clash gets personal and emotional, we become self-righteous preachers of our own views, spiteful prosecutors of the other side, or single-minded politicians who dismiss opinions that don't come from our side.

While it's nice to have people around us that agree with us, successful people need a challenge network-people we trust that can point out blind spots, doubt our knowledge and be humble about our expertise. In short, people who will question us and hold us accountable for rethinking our perspectives. Wilbur Wright once wrote, "Honest argument is merely a process of mutually picking the beams and motes out of each other's eyes so both can see clearly."

Grant notes that "research suggests that we want people with dissimilar traits and backgrounds but similar principles. Diversity of personality and experience brings fresh ideas for rethinking and complementary skills for new ways of doing."

In a debate, it is best to begin with finding common ground. It's a dance. "When we concede that someone else has made a good point, we signal that we're not preachers, prosecutors, or politicians trying to advance an agenda. We're scientists trying to get to the truth."

At the same time, keep your argument simple. Too many, and you will dilute the power of each and every one. "We don't have to convince them that we're right-we just need to open their minds to the possibility that they might be wrong."

When we know that we might not really know, rather than investigating, "we become mental contortionists, twisting and turning until we find an angle of vision that keeps our current views intact." And we can become quite hostile. No surprise there.

It's hard to get others to change. It's better to help them find their own reason to change. And the best way to do that is to listen-ask questions. What we have to avoid is the righting reflex-"the desire to fix problems and offer answers."

There are a good number of issues in the world where there is more going on than we know. The issues are complex and not binary-yes or no. Admitting the complexity of an issue is often a sign of credibility. And skeptics are not deniers. They are curious.

If you find yourself saying _____ is always good or _____ is never bad, you may be a member of an idea [or personality] cult. Appreciating complexity reminds us that no behavior is always effective and that all cures have unintended consequences.

Grant gives us many more reasons to rethink what we think than I have covered here. His concern is that by reading the book, we don't close the book on the issue of rethinking. The book brings awareness to our human nature, but it doesn't make us do anything about it. It's easy to look at our loosely held beliefs and rethink them. The challenge is to rethink those deeply held ideas and beliefs that tend to divide us-especially those ideas that we have blindly accepted from others. We-collectively-have outsourced far too much of our thinking. It's time to think again.

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How to Become a Hyper-Learner

STAYING relevant in this Digital Age requires that we learn, unlearn, and relearn as a way of being. Ed Hess calls it Hyper-Learning.

How well we think, learn, and engage in the human tasks of the future depends on how well we manage and optimize what's going on with our minds, brains, and bodies.

Humankind has always faced these challenges but what is different today is the intensity -the timeframe we have available to learn, unlearn, and relearn.

Our egos make us think we know more than we do and gets in the way of hyper-learning. Fear, too, is an inhibitor. If we are to be hyper-learn, we need to listen to understand other perspectives. Too often, we listen to argue or to reinforce our point.

To become a Hyper-Learner, we need to become our " Best Self cognitively, behaviorally, and emotionally." This requires three main steps:

Step 1: Achieve Inner Peace

Inner peace is important because in this state, you are better able to approach things with an open, nonjudgmental, and fearless mind. We cultivate inner peace by quieting our ego, our mind, and our body, and developing a positive emotional state.

With inner peace, you are better able to slow down and "exercise choice in your thinking, emotions, and behaviors."

What you must confront is the question of whether your ego is so loud that it impedes your ability to become a Hyper-Learner.

To become our Best Selves, our "selves" need to become more "selfless"-that is, we need to reduce the amount of time we are consumed by self-referential thinking in order to be more effective with the world outside of us and with others.

"A Quiet Mind is a calm, silent mind focused on the present moment." It is not competitive. It is a mind that tries to see the world as it is without judging or the distractions that come from multitasking or ruminating.

A Quite Body is one that is at peace. "It is not tense, chronically stressed, anxious, angry, fearful, or experiencing pain." Most of these issues are mental and deal with how we think. They can be influenced by certain meditation and deep breathing practices.

Positive emotions are essential to Hyper-Learning. We can learn to generate positive emotions. "Being kind to others, caring about others, being thankful for what you have, and experiencing simple daily joys all contribute to having a Positive Emotional State."

Step 2: Adopt a Hyper-Learning Mindset

Hess has indemnified two lifelong learning mindsets: the Growth Mindset and the NewSmart Mindset.

Carol Dweck popularized the Growth Mindset. As opposed to the fixed mindset, the growth mindset is based on the idea that our intelligence is not fixed but that we can learn, improve our skills, and grow. It sees potential.

The NewSmart Mindset redefines what "smart" is. Rather than seeing smart as knowledge accumulation and recall, NewSmart views smart and thinking in ways computers can't- "ways that involve exploration, discovery, imagination, morals, creativity, innovation, and critical thinking when there are lots of unknowns or little data."

Step 3: Behave Like a Hyper-Learner

As a Hyper-Learner, your behavior matters. "Behaviors are how you operationalize your values, belief, and purpose." Great line. Behaviors reflect how you see or define yourself. To change behaviors, you have to change the story you tell about yourself.

Behaviors are granular. They are reflected in how you talk, your tone, your physical presence, your volume, how you connect with people, how you listen, how you think, how you manage your emotions, how you ask questions, and how you react.

Hess asks us to list what behaviors do we think are necessary to become Hyper-Learners? He provides a list of some like curiosity, humility, social intelligence, empathy, courage, resilience, and trustworthiness.

We not only need to be different, but we must learn to work differently. Specifically, we need to humanize the workplace and create an environment that mitigates ego and fear.

Humanizing the Workplace means that the desired values and behaviors are woven into the daily way of working-the daily fabric of the organization-through practices that are used by all people every day.

Hess emphasizes the importance of emotional connections. And the answer to the question, why do I exist? "People are yearning for more from their work. They want more meaning and richness and to experience more joy. They want higher-quality emotional connections with others. And it's not just coming from younger generations."

What makes Hyper-Learning practical is its focus on behaviors. He does this through explanation but, more importantly, with a workshop/workbook format that encourages active participation with the text through reflection and journaling.

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Unexpected Leadership Lessons that Mobsters Can Teach Lawful Leaders

L EADERSHIP is a broad term, and it applies to those who you might not have a positive perception of - including mobsters.

We discovered through a rigorous analysis applying 70 years of Nobel-prize winning economics that Mobsters have leadership teams and structures that enable their success despite continuous efforts to disrupt them. Many of these crime syndicates have survived over a hundred years despite enormous law enforcement resources devoted to their daily demise. How is that possible when mobsters cannot simply have team members sign up for an online training course or activate their methods through "Mafia Academy?"

In our book, Relentless: The Forensics of Mobsters; Business Practices, we discovered the leadership principles of organized crime syndicates that forge high-performance teams of very loyal gangsters, incredibly strong brand names and cultures with a long-term perspective and an unrelenting customer focus. Relentless offers five transformative leadership lessons that leadership training programs must incorporate and promote. These include:
1. Follow the Same Fundamental Economic Principles as Mobsters
All organizations, lawful and unlawful, face the same corporate governance problem: how to attract, retain, and motivate a self-interested workforce to achieve the organization's mission and strategy. All firms must empower people with the knowledge and incentives to execute the task to benefit the organization. Then these individuals' performance must be measured and rewarded. Finally, leaders must develop a culture that communicates the organization's vision and strategy.

The American Mafia survives using well-defined organization charts that empower small crews of mobsters that specialized by racket: gambling, loan sharking, extortion, union corruption, and so forth. These crews kept roughly 75 percent of their illicit profits, passing the remainder up as a type of franchising fee. The mob bosses constructed enduring crime rings using core economic concepts of corporate governance that lawful managers also must follow. The same economic principles underlying McDonald's franchising model as a corporate governance scheme also are used by mob bosses running large families of criminals. Relentless teaches these time-honored principles using crime syndicates as case studies.
2. Mobsters Relentlessly Adapted Their Strategies and Corporate Governance to An Ever-Changing World
History is replete with countless leaders trying to pivot to a new reality when their world suddenly changes. Take Kodak trying to adapt to digital imaging, or JC Penny trying to compete in a new retail space, or everyone today trying to adapt and survive in a pandemic. Leaders' ecosystems evolve, and so too must their strategies. But new and bold strategies often require modifying corporate governance to attract, retain, and motivate a self-interested workforce to implement the often-controversial new strategies. It turns out that organized crime syndicates relentlessly search out and implement new rackets as opportunities present themselves.

National Prohibition in the 1920s offered local Mafias the opportunity to ramp up their bootlegging to provide the now banned alcohol, thereby generating enormous cash profits. During World War II, basic staples like sugar, meat, and even tires were rationed via coupons. Relentless and resourceful gangsters quickly filled the void with stolen or counterfeit rationing coupons.

Recently, INTERPOL issued a global alert warning law enforcement in hundreds of countries to expect organized crime networks to target COVID-19 vaccines, both physically and online. The Mafia's corporate governance system created high-performance teams of entrepreneurial mobsters who quickly seized new openings. So too must lawful leaders relentlessly scan their environments for new opportunities and threats, adjust their strategies accordingly, and then make appropriate corporate governance adjustments to how they empower and motivate their workforce to achieve the amended strategies.
3. One Size Doesn't Fit All
Every leader must design a unique corporate governance scheme that matches its exclusive strategy. The Mafia, Hells Angels, and the Sinaloa Cartel had different missions and strategies, and so their leaders developed unique corporate governance schemes. While lawful leaders cannot simply mimic gangsters' governance schemes, they must apply the same economic principles mobsters follow that channel employees' self-interest to pursue new strategies. In other words, don't merely copy the corporate governance methods used by successful lawful companies because they unlikely will apply to your company's unique mission and strategy. Understand what motivates your workforce and design fulfilling jobs, performance measures, compensation schemes, and corporate cultures that create high-performance teams to deliver products and services that exceed your customers' expectations.
4. Ensure That All Four Pieces of the Organization's Corporate Governance Are Coordinated and Complement Each Other
Mafia crews sat around all day scheming possible heists. They had informants at airports who fed them information about valuable outbound cargos. The crew would hijack the truck and fence the goods splitting most of the money among themselves. The family boss empowered this crew to boost valuable cargo at airports. The crew had specific knowledge about the cargo. The performance measures were very simple - money generated and not getting caught. Performance was rewarded by the cash generated. And the culture attracted and retained immoral, very loyal, resourceful, and relentless criminals.

All four pieces of the Mafia's corporate governance were perfectly matched and complemented each other. Too often, lawful leaders deploy far too many performance measures that only confuse and dilute the subordinate's efforts. The mob kept their performance measures simple and few in number.
5. Make Corporate Culture the Differentiator
Culture consists of the values, norms, and behavior of how things are done around here. Engaging leaders know that alignment across hundreds, and even tens of thousands of employees takes time and nurturing through story-telling. They articulate and strive to live the norms, values, and behaviors that will drive performance and know that if they don't practice it from the top, no one down the ranks will even care.

One of the most surprising lessons we learned in researching Relentless was the importance of their cultures. The Mafia values immorality, loyalty, resourcefulness, and steadfastness and attracted and retained mobsters with these values. Wannabe Mafioso often waited decades before becoming made men. Once admitted, the Mafia family offered them protection from other bad guys and enormous prestige. Staying in the family required unyielding loyalty and a code of silence. Surviving since the 1920s testifies to the enormous strength of the American Mafia's culture. Lawful leaders should seek to build a culture that differentiates their organization from others.

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Jerold L. Zimmerman, Ph.D., is the co-author of Relentless: The Forensics of Mobsters; Business Practices. He is a globally recognized microeconomist and author of seven books and has taught organizational economics, accounting, and finance at the University of Rochester's Simon Business School for more than forty years. He has consulted with numerous clients, including Fortune 500 companies and management advisory firms, to demonstrate how organizational economics principles can improve a firm's culture and, eventually, its performance. Zimmerman is also a founding editor of the Journal of Accounting and Economics, one of the most highly referenced peer-reviewed journals in economics, and has served on several public company boards of directors. His fifty published studies and books include textbooks on economics and accounting and a trade book about designing organizations that create value. For more information, please visit jeroldzimmerman.com

Daniel P. Forrester is the co-author of Relentless: The Forensics of Mobsters; Business Practices. He is the founder of THRUUE, Inc an expert consultancy that assists leaders in bridging the gap between corporate culture and corporate strategy. He works with CEOs, boards of directors, and C-suite leaders, helping them align around a clear strategy while understanding reputational and cultural risk. Daniel has spent the past twenty-five years successfully building consulting practices in the financial services, telecommunications, and public services sectors, utilizing his entrepreneurial approach to strategy. His previous book, Consider: Harnessing the Power of Reflective Thinking in Your Organization, examines how leaders responded to the explosion of data and hyper-connectivity impacting organizations and the role reflection can play in dramatically changing corporate outcomes. For more information, please visit danielforrester.com and follow Daniel on Twitter.

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First Look: Leadership Books for February 2021

Here's a look at some of the best leadership books to be released in February 2021. Don't miss out on other great new and future releases not listed here.

Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know by Adam Grant

Intelligence is usually seen as the ability to think and learn, but in a rapidly changing world, there's another set of cognitive skills that might matter more: the ability to rethink and unlearn. In our daily lives, too many of us favor the comfort of conviction over the discomfort of doubt. We listen to opinions that make us feel good, instead of ideas that make us think hard. We see disagreement as a threat to our egos, rather than an opportunity to learn. We surround ourselves with people who agree with our conclusions, when we should be gravitating toward those who challenge our thought process. Think Again reveals that we don't have to believe everything we think or internalize everything we feel. It's an invitation to let go of views that are no longer serving us well and prize mental flexibility over foolish consistency. If knowledge is power, knowing what we don't know is wisdom.

Good Business: The Talk, Fight, Win Way to Change the World by Bill Novelli

An inspiring and practical look inside the mind of Bill Novelli, one of the founders of social marketing, Good Business challenges all of us to change the world for the better and is a blueprint for tackling today's critical issues. Throughout the book, Novelli argues that you can make a positive social difference regardless of what business you are in or where you are in your career. Readers will come away with the message that anyone who wants to have a positive impact on the world can do it right now from where they are―or can be inspired by Novelli's story to make the leap to somewhere they can.

Power Moms: How Executive Mothers Navigate Work and Life by Joann S. Lublin

For the first time in American history, a significant number of mothers are heading major corporations, including General Motors, Ulta Beauty, and Best Buy. Over the past several decades, women have made gains throughout executive suites. Yet these "Power Moms" still struggle with balancing their management responsibilities with raising children. Joann S. Lublin draws on the experiences of the nation's two generations of these successful women to measure how far we've come-and how far we still need to go.

Conflicted: How Productive Disagreements Lead to Better Outcomes by Ian Leslie

For most people, conflict triggers a fight or flight response. Disagreeing productively is a hard skill for which neither evolution or society has equipped us. It's a skill we urgently need to acquire; otherwise, our increasingly vociferous disagreements are destined to tear us apart. Productive disagreement is a way of thinking, perhaps the best one we have. It makes us smarter and more creative, and it can even bring us closer together. It's critical to the success of any shared enterprise, from a marriage, to a business, to a democracy. Isn't it time we gave more thought to how to do it well?

Hot Seat: What I Learned Leading a Great American Company by Jeff Immelt with Amy Wallace

A memoir of successful leadership in times of crisis: the former CEO of General Electric, named one of the "World's Best CEOs" three times by Barron's, shares the hard-won lessons he learned from his experience leading GE immediately after 9/11, through the economic devastation of the 2008-09 financial crisis, and into an increasingly globalized world. In Hot Seat, Immelt offers a rigorous, candid interrogation of himself and his tenure, detailing for the first time his proudest moments and his biggest mistakes. The most crucial component of leadership, he writes, is the willingness to make decisions. But knowing what to do is a thousand times easier than knowing when to do it. Perseverance, combined with clear communication, can ensure progress, if not perfection, he says. As the business world continues to be rocked by stunning economic upheaval, Hot Seat is an urgently needed, and unusually raw, source of authoritative guidance for decisive leadership in uncertain times.

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Build your leadership library with these specials on over 28 titles. All titles are at least 40% off the list price and are available only in limited quantities.

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"Compare the difference between the life of a man who does no reading and that of a man who does. The man who has not the habit of reading is imprisoned in his immediate world, in respect to time and space. His life falls into a set routine; he is limited to contact and conversation with a few friends and acquaintances, and he sees only what happens in his immediate neighborhood. From this prison there is no escape."

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R ETHINKING can cause uncertainty. Make us uncomfortable. Feel uneasy. It can threaten our identities. But rethinking can also help us find solutions to old problems, deepen our perspective, release us from inherited dogma and other people's opinions, and understand how our closely held values relate and are applied to our changing environment.

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