Joy, Inc.: How We Built a Workplace People Love

Joy, Inc.: How We Built a Workplace People Love by Richard Sheridan
English | 2013 | ISBN: 1591845874, 1591847125 | 288 pages | EPUB | 3,8 MB

“A guidebook for how leaders can motivate, engage, and recognize their people all the while growing the business profitably.” —Forbes

Every year, thousands of visitors come from around the world to visit Menlo Innovations, a small software company in Ann Arbor, Michigan. They make the trek not to learn about technology but to witness a radically different approach to company culture.

CEO Rich Sheridan removed the fear and ambiguity that typically make a workplace miserable. With joy as the explicit goal, he and his team changed everything about how the company was run. The results blew away all expectations. Menlo has won numerous growth awards and was named an Inc. magazine “audacious small company.”

Joy, Inc. offers an inside look at how Menlo created its culture, and shows how any organization can follow their methods for a more passionate team and sustainable, profitable results.

Locally Laid: How We Built a Plucky, Industry-Changing Egg Farm - from Scratch [Audiobook]

Locally Laid: How We Built a Plucky, Industry-Changing Egg Farm – from Scratch [Audiobook] by Lucie B. Amundsen
English | March 1, 2016 | ASIN: B01C4L1CRC, ISBN: 1504685849, 1504685830 | MP3@64 kbps | 8 hrs 27 mins | 232 MB
Narrator: Kate Reading | Genre: Nonfiction/Business/Farming

How a Midwestern family with no agriculture experience went from a few backyard chickens to a full-fledged farm – and discovered why local chicks are better.

When Lucie Amundsen had a rare night out with her husband, she never imagined what he’d tell her over dinner – that his dream was to quit his office job (with benefits!) and start a commercial-scale pasture-raised egg farm. His entire agricultural experience consisted of raising five backyard hens, none of whom had yet laid a single egg.

To create this pastured poultry ranch, the couple scrambles to acquire nearly 2,000 chickens – all named Lola. These hens, purchased commercially, arrive bereft of basic chicken-like instincts, such as the evening urge to roost. The newbie farmers also deal with their own shortcomings, making for a failed inspection and intense struggles to keep livestock alive (much less laying) during a brutal winter. But with a heavy dose of humor, they learn to negotiate the highly stressed no-man’s-land known as middle agriculture. Amundsen sees firsthand how these midsized farms, situated between small-scale operations and mammoth factory farms, are vital to rebuilding America’s local food system.

With an unexpected passion for this dubious enterprise, Amundsen shares a messy, wry, and entirely educational story of the unforeseen payoffs (and frequent pitfalls) of one couple’s ag adventure – and many, many hours spent wrangling chickens.

The Seventy Wonders of the Ancient World: The Great Monuments and How They Were Built

The Seventy Wonders of the Ancient World: The Great Monuments and How They Were Built

Thames & Hudson | 1999 | ISBN: 0500050961 | English | 312 pages | PDF | 77.2 MB

How were the ancient wonders of the world built? How many people did it take to build the Great Wall of China and the Sphinx at Giza? This text seeks to answer such questions, examining these spectacular feats of engineering and celebrating the achievements of the builders who worked without the aid of modern technology.

Built to Grow: Blending Architecture and Biology

Built to Grow: Blending Architecture and Biology (Edition Angewandte) by Barbara Imhof and Petra Gruber
English | 2015 | ISBN: 3035609209 | 176 pages | PDF | 14 MB

Built to Grow investigates patterns of growth and dynamics in nature with the aim of creating a new living architecture that can be applied to architectonic designs. It examines biological processes to identify basic principles of growth and translate them into exemplary architectonic ideas and visions. The project brings together experts from the fields of architecture, biology, art, mechatronics, and robotics.”