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In Work 2.0, Bill Jensen introduces us to a new breed of managers and organizations that are maximizing productivity, developing leaders at all levels, constantly innovating, attracting exceptional talent, and winning in the marketplace.

The key to their success is recognizing that the most valuable assets in the company are the time, attention, knowledge, passion, energy, and social networks of the frontline workers. As Jensen convincingly argues, building a corporate infrastructure that gives people what they need to “get stuff done”—and then get out of their way—yields surprising results: greater alignment of personal and corporate goals, more satisfied employees and customers, and a competitive edge that keeps everyone moving forward together.

For centuries we’ve believed that work was where you learned discipline, initiative, honesty, self-reliance—in a word, character. A job was also, and not incidentally, the source of your income: if you didn’t work, you didn’t eat, or else you were stealing from someone. If only you worked hard, you could earn your way and maybe even make something of yourself.

In recent decades, through everyday experience, these beliefs have proven spectacularly false. In No More Work: Why Full Employment is a Bad Idea, historian James Livingston explains how and why Americans still cling to work as a solution rather than a problem—why it is that both liberals and conservatives announce that “full employment” is their goal when job creation is no longer a feasible solution for any problem, moral or economic. The result is a witty, stirring denunciation of the ways we think about why we labor, exhorting us to imagine a new way of finding meaning, character, and sustenance beyond our workaday world—and showing us that we can afford to leave that world behind.

While the American South had grown to expect a yellow fever breakout almost annually in the 1800s, the 1878 epidemic was without question the worst ever. Moving up the Mississippi in the late summer, in the span of just a few months the fever killed more than 18,000 people. The city of Memphis was particularly unprepared and hard hit, of the approximately 20,000 who didn’t flee the city, 17,000 contracted the fever and more than 5,000 of its citizens died.

Fever Season isn’t the typical tale of an epidemic. It is a far more interesting story of how a catastrophe reversed a society’s expectations of its people, showing the designated good and brave as neither. As reporters wired stories of the horrors of the epidemic to an appalled world, Memphis’s street-corner discussions became part of the national conversation. The behavior of many raised uncomfortable questions at the time, as it still does in reading about it now. What kind of moral order produced ministers who deserted their congregations in their hour of need, while prostitutes and gamblers risked their lives to nurse the sick? When fathers ran away, leaving their families to die, what did that say about the accepted notions of manhood?

For a brief time, the crisis in Memphis required that the normal social order of 19th century America be suspended. The greater story of 1878 is what happened to lead the survivors in Memphis to question the conventional verities about gender, race, and more existentially, good, evil, the nature of duty and of faith.

Expertly researched, using the accounts and diaries of those who chose to stay and those who were left behind, Fever Season unfolds the events of that summer and fall. In it we meet people of great courage and compassion, many of whom died for having those virtues. It also tells the story of how a disease can shape the future of a city, as yellow fever did to Memphis.

Few of us would question that the infrastructures of our globalized world are proof of the flat, Friedmanesque world in which we live. We manufacture our goods wherever we can get the best price and ship them anywhere the market demands efficiently. We can connect with any of hundreds of millions of people from pretty much every country in the world through global communication networks and social networking tools.

Once we stop looking at the infrastructure—the roads, the air routes, the shipping lanes, the cables – and start looking at the flows of traffic, it becomes very clear that some parts of the world are far more connected than others. Globalization, it turns out, is unequally distributed. We can read newspapers from Australia, India, Nigeria, Ghana, Canada, at no cost and end up with a wider view of the world. The reality is that—on average—we don’t. In fact, we get less news from international sources today than we did forty years ago. If you look carefully enough, it’s not hard to see that we live in an age of imaginary globalization.

Digital Cosmopolitans is an eye-opening reconsideration of the state of our global world, one in which it is easier to ship bottles of water from Fiji to Atlanta than it is to get news from Toronto to New York. Drawing on a wide range of contemporary research in cognitive science, psychology and sociology, it explains why a technological connection between people doesn’t inevitably lead to human connection and at the ways in which we’ve fooled ourselves into thinking that we are cosmopolitan and connected.
Having this wider picture of the world is critical for global survival. Problems like global warming, pandemic, and collective security can’t be solved by individuals or by nations acting alone—they’re global problems and they’re going to require global solutions and the most exciting opportunities—to make a difference, to make something beautiful, or to make a profit—are global in scale. We need to build solutions based on massive, transnational cooperation, which needs to begin with dialog that crosses linguistic, social, national lines.

There’s good news—we’ve got the tools we need to do this, the infrastructure that could make the world a wider place. And we’re starting to figure out what we’d need to do to build connections around the world that are real, not theoretical. Rich in examples from business, science, politics, and media, Digital Cosmopolitans explores the landscape of social, technical and policy innovations designed to more tightly connect the world and features a close look at some of the most innovative projects underway in corporate research labs and the cybercafes of developing world cities.

The picture of Mexico we most often see today, is the one of rampant drug violence and illegal immigration. While, unfortunately, there is truth to those images, they are far from the complete story. And the instinctive response—walling ourselves off—is counterproductive and even harmful to our national interests.

Overlooked in today’s bloody headlines is Mexico’s fundamental transformation. In over three short decades it has gone from a poor to a middle class nation, a closed to an open economy, an authoritarian to a vibrant (if at times messy) democracy, and a local to an increasingly binational society. But while things are much better than portrayed, Mexico does face a true security challenge. It stands at a crossroads. It can follow a path toward a top ten economy, an open democracy, and a leading world voice, or one that spirals down into drug-fueled corruption and violence. Today’s choices will define not only Mexico’s future, but also that of the United States. Perhaps no other nation is as indelibly intertwined with our economy, society, and daily lives. What happens in Mexico will affect the United States for decades to come.

Two Nations Indivisible tells the story of the making of modern Mexico, and what it means for the United States. Recounting the economic, political, social, and security changes of the last thirty years, it provides a roadmap for the greatest overlooked foreign policy challenge of our time -relations with our southern neighbor. For the good of both countries, it argues against walling the United States off from its neighbor; and instead for investing finally in a true partnership.