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What's the secret behind a truly great team? Have you ever been on a team where the talent was strong, but the team wasn't very good? Or the opposite: a team where not every single member was a rock star, but something about it just worked? In this book, Mike Robbins dives deep into the ways great teams build trust, collaborate and perform at the highest level. As an expert in teamwork, leadership and emotional intelligence, Mike draws on more than 18 years' experience working with top teams and organizations like Google and Microsoft, as well as his athletic career for the Kansas City Royals. The book's core principles include fostering an environment of psychological safety, honouring diversity and inclusion, addressing and navigating conflict, building trust and maintaining a balance of healthy expectations and empathy. Also featured are interviews with high-level business leaders and thought leaders to provide insights into an ever-changing workplace culture.
Rich countries are paying poor countries to fight climate change on their behalf - and one way they are doing it is through carbon sinks. These are reservoirs of organic carbon tied up in plants and in the earth, rather than being in the atmosphere as greenhouse gases. This book looks critically at this mode of climate change mitigation. Can it work? Is it just? Will poorer countries benefit? The book considers the scientific, economic and ethical basis for this type of mitigation. Previous attention has been focused mainly on reducing emissions from deforestation and land degradation (REDD), but this book is one of the first attempts to examine the potential for carbon sinks in agriculture in crop plants and the soil. In assessing this, the author examines exactly how north-south climate mitigation trading works, or does not, and what the pitfalls are. It highlights the complex relationship between agriculture, particularly different forms of farming systems, and the mitigation of climate change. The arguments are backed up by original research with farmers in Brazil to demonstrate the challenges and prospects which these proposals offer in terms of payments for environmental services from agriculture through carbon trading.
Mike, a sought-after motivational speaker and business consultant, has spent more than 15 years researching, writing, and speaking about essential human experiences and high performance in the workplace. His clients have ranged from Google to Citibank, from the U.S. Department of Labor to the San Francisco Giants. From what he's seen and studied over the years, Mike believes that for us to thrive professionally, we must be willing to bring our whole selves to the work that we do. That means acknowledging that we're all vulnerable, imperfect human beings doing the best we can. It means having the courage to take risks, speak up, have compassion, ask for help, connect with others in a genuine way, and allow ourselves to be truly seen. In this book, Mike outlines five principles we can use to approach our own work in this spirit of openness and humanity, and to help the people we work with feel safe enough to do the same, so that the teams and organizations we're a part of can truly succeed.
Three Seasons is a book of three novellas, unconnected with each other, but all set in the south of England in the 1980s. In Spring, a middle-aged Hull trawler skipper, his great days gone, has one last throw of the dice a South Coast port. In Summer, an ambitious young man makes his way in the booming Thames Valley property market, unconcerned with the damage he does to others. In Autumn, the Master of an Oxford college welcomes his two sons home, but they awake difficult memories from half a century before. Three Seasons is about the Thatcher era in Britain, but it is not about politics. These three stories are portraits of a country and its people on the verge of change.
Bestselling author Mike Robbins had a life that many little boys dream of. Drafted by the New York Yankees directly out of high school, Mike decided instead to postpone his professional baseball career until he finished college. After a successful stint at Stanford, he began life in the minor leagues as a pitcher with the Kansas City Royals organization, where he played for three years until an injury benched him for good. This devastating disappointment changed his life in wonderful ways that he could have never imagined. He now teaches and speaks around the world about teamwork, emotional intelligence and the value of appreciation and authenticity. In Nothing Changes Until You Do, Mike's third book, he looks at one of the most important and challenging aspects of life - our relationship with ourselves. Even the most successful person struggles with this delicate relationship, which has created an epidemic of self-criticism, self-doubt and thinking that our value is directly connected to the external world - our jobs, our finances, our appearance, our accomplishments, and so on. Through 40 short essays, Mike shows readers that none of this is true, and brings to light a new way to look at life. With themes spanning from the importance of trusting yourself to the benefits of vulnerability to the strength inherent in embracing powerlessness and change, Mike will help readers get out of their own way, so they can live a good life. He shows that with a little self-compassion and a healthy dose of self-acceptance, anyone can turn away from the negatives that manifest because of a critical self-perception- things like unkindness, addictions, sabotaged relationships, unnecessary drama and more.
In 1987 Mike Robbins, a 30-year-old London journalist, decided on a change of lifestyle and signed up for two years as an overseas volunteer. Some weeks later he found himself standing with his luggage in the middle of a featureless baked-earth plain in Eastern Sudan. It was over 100 deg F in the shade. And there was no shade. This is Robbins's account of the two years that followed, working with the Sudan Government in the last months of a failed democratic experiment, as the country coped with hundreds of thousands of refugees in the aftermath of the 1980s famine. But it is also a personal account of life as a development volunteer in a surprising, sometimes inspiring, country.
When Silvia's country falls apart after a coup, she flees to London. Picked up by the police, she is dumped for weeks in a bed-and-breakfast with a crazy landlady, then rescued by cold intellectuals. She finds she is a nuisance to one side and a cause to the other, with no dreams, family or opinions of her own. Until she meets another, earlier, refugee; and then she has a surprise for everyone. The Lost Baggage of Silvia Guzmn is a story of flight, loss and the pain of exile. But it is also a sideways look at liberal London - perceptive, caustic and sometimes very funny.
In 1987 Mike Robbins, a young journalist in London, felt restless and decided to travel. He never really stopped. In the quarter century that followed he lived and worked in countries as diverse as the world itself. The pieces in this book take the reader from rural Sudan to the headwaters of the Amazon, from Semana Santa in Quito to Buddhist temples in the Himalayas, across Bhutan on a motorbike, into the ancient souk of Aleppo, to the steppes of Central Asia and finally to New York. Along the way there is Ethiopian gin, a sex tourist in Moscow, Kyrgyz women in cycling pants, a surreal toilet in Brussels, echoes of slavery in Brazil, and an encounter with Helen of Troy in Third Avenue. The Nine Horizons is an anarchic snapshot of a troubled but beautiful world in transition.
Rich countries are paying poor countries to fight climate change on their behalf - and one way they are doing it is through carbon sinks. These are reservoirs of organic carbon tied up in plants and in the earth, rather than being in the atmosphere as greenhouse gases. This book looks critically at this mode of climate change mitigation. Can it work? Is it just? Will poorer countries benefit? The book considers the scientific, economic and ethical basis for this type of mitigation. Previous attention has been focused mainly on reducing emissions from deforestation and land degradation (REDD), but this book is one of the first attempts to examine the potential for carbon sinks in agriculture in crop plants and the soil. In assessing this, the author examines exactly how north-south climate mitigation trading works, or does not, and what the pitfalls are. It highlights the complex relationship between agriculture, particularly different forms of farming systems, and the mitigation of climate change. The arguments are backed up by original research with farmers in Brazil to demonstrate the challenges and prospects which these proposals offer in terms of payments for environmental services from agriculture through carbon trading.
Praise for Be Yourself, Everyone Else is Already Taken Mike's book is a wonderful expression of authenticity in action-clear, honest, instructive, and a passionate call to be your true Divine Self. - Cheryl Richardson , New York Times best-selling author, Take Time for Your Life Mike Robbins provides a clear guide for intelligently and compassionately coming face-to-face with yourself and loving the person you meet. His five principles of authenticity teach us how to embrace and celebrate all aspects of who we are and what it means to be a spiritual being having a human incarnation. - Michael Bernard Beckwith , author, Spiritual Liberation Be Yourself, Everyone Else is Already Taken is an empowering and refreshing book about how to be successful, real, and fulfilled in life. I highly recommend it. - Gay Hendricks , New York Times best-selling author, Five Wishes Mike Robbins has written a powerful, down-to-earth, and insightful book on one of the most important aspects of happiness and fulfillment in life-authenticity. Be Yourself, Everyone Else Is Already Taken will give you tools and techniques to enhance your life and relationships in a profound way. - Marci Shimoff , New York Times best-selling author, Happy for No Reason Be Yourself, Everyone Else Is Already Taken reminds us that God created each one of us for a unique purpose.?We live in a world where the lines between fake and real have blurred. This powerful book teaches you how to access and express the realness you crave in your work, your relationships, and yourself. - Jon Gordon , author, The Energy Bus
Written by a former professional baseball player whose career was ended with an injury to his pitching arm in the middle of his third season, Focus on the Good Stuff is filled with passion, authenticity, and humor. Author Mike Robbins offers a step-by-step program with exercises for overcoming negative influence and obstacles, creating a truly grateful approach to life, and establishing an environment that can support success and peace of mind.
From Yankee Bucky F**ing Dent's spirit-shattering home run in the 1978 American League East playoff to Aaron Boone's pennant-winning blast for the Bombers twenty-five years later from Roger Clemens's treasonous signing (at least in Red Sox country) with the Yankees in 1998 to the infamous Curse of the Bambino that started it all, there is nothing in the history of sports more spirited, vitriolic, romantic, and impassioned than the rivalry between the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox. The Yankees vs. Red Sox Reader collects the finest writing on what is surely the pinnacle of contentious athletic team competition. A rich array of our most gifted sports writers chronicle an enmity that reaches far beyond the playing field as it is interwoven into the mythologies of these two cities and inextricably linked to the identity of the fans that inhabit them. Chronicling every cheer, jeer, and 1918 (the last year the Red Sox won the World Series) shouted from Fenway to the Bronx, The Yankees vs. Red Sox Reader is an absolute must for not only the fans of these storied franchises, but also anyone interested in the truly epic nature of a great sports rivalry.
