Bøger af John Mack

From John Mack, former CEO of Morgan Stanley, an intimate personal memoir and riveting business story, recounting how he helped grow the company from 300 to 50,000 employees over four decades, transformed a notoriously competitive culture into a successful and collaborative one, and lead the company through the 2008 financial crisis.During his thirty-four-year tenure at Morgan Stanley, John Mack’s goal was to build the strongest and most productive team on Wall Street. His ability to motivate his employees to do their best work, especially in times of crisis, was fostered by his willingness to slash through bureaucracy and stand up to powerful interests. A forceful personality, one journalist said Mack was “described as ‘charismatic’ so regularly that it could be part of his name.” In Up Close and All In, Mack traces his personal journey from a one-stoplight North Carolina mill town to a fortieth-floor corner office on Wall Street—and shares the life lessons he learned along the way. He developed a titanium-strength stomach for risk, stress, and competition while landing accounts early in his career, as investment banks fought like wolfpacks to take advantage of new deregulation, fielding business raids, booms, and busts. As he rose through the ranks, he never forgot where he came from, relying on his instincts, doing what was right, and listening to his people on the front lines. This culture of trust and collaboration helped Morgan Stanley anticipate future trends before other firms, adapt quickly, and achieve record profits. This gripping memoir includes both humbling lows—like when Mack made the difficult decision to leave Morgan Stanley in 2001—and exhilarating highs—such as when he made an eleventh-hour agreement with the Japanese bank Mitsubishi to save the company during the 2008 financial crisis, having refused to give in when top regulators pressured him to sell the firm for $2 per share. With humor and honesty, Mack shares advice on both business and life: how to create a culture of team players, how to keep perspective during crises, how to make difficult decisions when all eyes are on you, and more. From a singular man who’s as unafraid to cry publicly as he is to anger some of the most powerful people in the world, this is an indispensable guide to living and leading well.

This title looks at the ways people interact because of the sea, navigate their course across it, and live on and around it. The book also considers the characteristics of different seas and oceans and investigates how the sea is conceptualized in cultures around the world.

The British Museum boasts one of the finest collections of African art in the world. In Africa: Arts & Cultures, John Mack and an international team of artists and scholars draw on this world-famous collection to take us on a beautifully illustrated tour of African art and the various cultures that created it. Readers expecting the masks and wooden figures commonly collected a century ago will be surprised by the wide variety of art forms covered here, from a Tunisian wedding tunic, to a water bottle of ostrich eggshell from the San in southern Africa, to a multimedia monoprint made by a Nigerian artist in 1999. Moreover, in a rare departure, the book covers the art of all five regions of Africa, including Saharan Africa, with each geographical section introduced by a British Museum curator who provides historical and cultural context for the art from that region. But most important, this is a book of many voices. The art carries the voices of artists, ancient and modern, looking into their own culture and also out into the world around them. Commentaries on the art are written by historians, anthropologists, curators, artists--both insiders and outsiders whose breadth of experience dismantles easy notions of "Africanness." Above all, there are African voices: African artists comment on their own work and that of the past; and scholars from African universities shed light on the objects of their specialty. By presenting art from across the continent, past and present, coupled with astute commentary by a worldwide cross-section of artists and scholars, Africa: Arts & Cultures offers an innovative approach that allows the reader to better appreciate African art in its totality.

A collection of twenty-four stories that are variously exciting, moving, funny, sad, intriguing and satisfying. Some stories are politically correct; most are not. Many of the stories are about people to be admired for how they cope in extremis, or for going above and beyond their duty thus becoming heroes and heroines, friends or lovers in the process. There are stories involving unsavoury and deluded men and women who reveal just as much about humanity as their heroic counterparts, albeit exhibiting less admirable aspects of human behaviour. Each story goes some way towards 'Closing the Gap' that exists between men and women, the lost and lonely, rich and poor, ambitious and disillusioned. If writing forces honesty upon the writer it also makes that honesty evident to the reader and it is to those elements we all recognise and identify with that will bring you the most pleasure when you engage with John Mack's tales.

A collection of ten stories and two novellas. Some of the stories are about the Glory Days each of us might be lucky enough to experience, no matter how fleeting those days might seem in lives well lived. Other stories are about people less admirable whose Glory Days might not seem so to all but themselves. Yet others are stories about people, individuals and couples that reveal their humanity; good, bad and indifferent. While many of the stories are set in New Zealand the location is not necessarily crucial to the tale being told. For all that, each story stands alone as a tale with no other function than to entertain the reader.

"Today's war is the war against reality. Truth is being bombarded; our perception besieged. A minefield of illusory facts surrounds us. Detonations in unconsciousness go unnoticed. Before our eyes, a virtual universe is manifesting, the seeds of which have been intentionally planted. We cultivate these seeds with our ignorance. We give truth the power of lie, lie the power of truth." -John Mack A pocket-sized book of thoughts, contemplations, and aphorisms, Notes to Selfie: Bits of Truth in a Phoney World addresses complex issues of human consciousness asking us to question: Who are you in the Digital Age? What might you become? Are you still human, or are you already an avatar of your former Self? Philosophical, witty, concerning, and eye-opening, the truths in Notes to Selfie serve as simple cues to deepen our understanding of our humanity vis-à-vis the relentlessly encroaching digital landscape. What introspection and awareness might such insights open for your own navigation within this unpredictable land of the near future? Founder of the nonprofit Life Calling, John Mack's professional endeavors address the digital takeover of human consciousness, one of the most pressing issues of our times. On this topic, his creative passion has given life to multiple projects, including visual art, writing, and educational materials. Along the way he has generated a library of thoughts. In this book he shares a selection of these thoughts in the hopes to shed light on a subject where the darkness runs deeper than most assume.

In A Land Between Worlds, poet and photographer John Mack shares his vision on that part of the human condition which brings about our disconnection from nature, its further disconnection through smart devices, and provides clues that might lead us back to our natural unity with it. Covering nearly fifty of the most iconic U.S. National Parks, Mack uses poetry, landscape photography, and an interactive augmented reality app to invite us into a deep conversation about the encroaching digital landscape, our attachments to it, and the uncertain fate of our nature.After a four-year journey-flying more than 300,000 air-miles aboard over 200 flights, driving over 15,000 miles with the aid of over 25 car rentals, including hiking over 220 miles, 7 helicopter charters, 6 seaplane charters, 8 grizzly sightings, and 1 husky sled-poet and photographer John Mack returns with evidence of some of America's most iconic, natural sites and their current state of deterioration vis a vis the proliferation of smart devices and the encroaching virtual environment. In an attempt to shed light on the current state of our nature, Mack completes what he calls a "reconaissance mission," having crisscrossed the entire United States of America. Covering a land with length from Maine to Hawaii, a depth from the southern bend of Texas to the far reaches of Alaska's arctic circle, A Land Between Worlds shares Mack's vision of who we are in relation to our environment and looks for clues as to whether or not a balance between nature and today's increasingly seductive technology can be attained. Writes Mack, Today's world finds the human caught in a balancing act between technology and nature unlike ever seen before. With the invention of the smartphone, human beings across the planet are increasingly experiencing life through their screens. With the simple click of the on button, what was once intended to serve as a mere tool now serves as our reality. Caught in this maneuver is the fate of the human soul. As artificial as modern technology may seem, history has shown technology to be a natural and essential part of the human journey. Are we reaching a point, however, where this part of the journey might be taking over the journey's entirety? In these modern times of increasing dependence on digital devices, it behooves us to ask ourselves what, exactly, would allow such an overtaking to occur. Are the programmed lenses of the app-environment-gaming, social networking, news, lifestyle-so mesmerizingly colorful as to take precedent over the vibrant colors of life itself? Or, rather, is there a program already running inside our heads-one that first disconnects us from life's vibrance and only then finds us reaching for our screens to restore the vibrance for us? Comprised of gatherings from nearly fifty iconic U.S. National Parks, Mack uses poetry, landscape photography, and an interactive augmented reality app to invite us into a deep introspection about what it means to be human: What, if anything, can our National Parks teach us about the nature within us? A Land Between Worlds is evidence of hope in a world where nature, freedom, love, democracy, and reality itself are under attack. It's interactive juxtaposition of natural sanctuaries and their digital versions reveals the encroaching digital landscape, our attachments to it, and the uncertain fate of our nature. Available in signed, limited collector's editions and standard editions, A Land Between Worlds includes a "making of" video, reminding us of the art of human craft in an ever more digitized world. A Land Between Worlds is the official book of A Species Between Worlds: Our Nature, Our Screens, the exhibition showcased in New York City in January of 2022. The month-long exhibition attracted some of the most influential voices at the forefront of the battle to defend human awareness from the threats that unchecked use of computer-based technologies pose to our humanity. Available in signed, limited collector's editions and standard editions, the poetry book includes not only all of the exhibition's U.S. National Park images but also the project's entire collection of poems, many of which were not on display to the public.

This book reveals the historical context and the evolution of the technically complex Allied Signals Intelligence (Sigint) activity against Japan from 1920 to 1945.