Starting Ugly is a timeless tale about change and innovation, told through the entertaining parable of Gregory Sharp. Gregory is a businessman who's youth was spent creating a very successful lumber business. But as he continues to grow his company, he becomes blind to the practices and tools that helped him innovate. Unable to see past his blind spots, Gregory is about to lose everything, until he comes to a revelation that his former employee, Jeff helps him see: that perfect execution is critical; but constantly innovating by starting ugly is vital to continual success. Start Ugly is a call to arms to encourage you to take action on your ideas and creations so you can release yourself from the chains of perfectionism and experience the joy and growth that comes with launching. It's also a powerful reminder to continually innovate so complacency doesn't allow you to become obsolete in our fast-paced world.

The co-founder and longtime president of Pixar updates and expands his 2014 New York Times bestseller on creative leadership, reflecting on the management principles that built Pixar’s singularly successful culture, and on all he learned during the past nine years that allowed Pixar to retain its creative culture while continuing to evolve. “Might be the most thoughtful management book ever.”—Fast Company For nearly thirty years, Pixar has dominated the world of animation, producing such beloved films as the Toy Story trilogy, Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Up, and WALL-E, which have gone on to set box-office records and garner eighteen Academy Awards. The joyous storytelling, the inventive plots, the emotional authenticity: In some ways, Pixar movies are an object lesson in what creativity really is. Here, Catmull reveals the ideals and techniques that have made Pixar so widely admired—and so profitable. As a young man, Ed Catmull had a dream: to make the first computer-animated movie. He nurtured that dream as a Ph.D. student, and then forged a partnership with George Lucas that led, indirectly, to his founding Pixar with Steve Jobs and John Lasseter in 1986. Nine years later, Toy Story was released, changing animation forever. The essential ingredient in that movie’s success—and in the twenty-five movies that followed—was the unique environment that Catmull and his colleagues built at Pixar, based on philosophies that protect the creative process and defy convention, such as: • Give a good idea to a mediocre team and they will screw it up. But give a mediocre idea to a great team and they will either fix it or come up with something better. • It’s not the manager’s job to prevent risks. It’s the manager’s job to make it safe for others to take them. • The cost of preventing errors is often far greater than the cost of fixing them. • A company’s communication structure should not mirror its organizational structure. Everybody should be able to talk to anybody. Creativity, Inc. has been significantly expanded to illuminate the continuing development of the unique culture at Pixar. It features a new introduction, two entirely new chapters, four new chapter postscripts, and changes and updates throughout. Pursuing excellence isn’t a one-off assignment but an ongoing, day-in, day-out, full-time job. And Creativity, Inc. explores how it is done.

A big scary fish has trouble making the friends he longs for because of his appearance, until the day his size and strength save them all from a fisherman's net.

"This book is the first to explore the interaction of three media in contemporary Spain. Focusing on some of the best known and most important books, feature films, and television series in the country (including novelist Antonio Munoz Molina, director Pedro Almodovar, and the Spanish version of telenovela Ugly Betty), it addresses three pairs of linked issues central to Hispanic studies and beyond: history and memory, authority and society, and genre and transitivity. Much of the material is very recent and thus as yet unstudied. The book also focuses on the representation of gender, sexuality, and transnationalism in these texts. Drawing on approaches from both the humanities and social sciences it combines close readings of key texts with the analysis of production processes, media institutions, audiences, and reception."

One day Sophie comes home from school to find two questions in her mail: "Who are you?" and "Where does the world come from?" Before she knows it she is enrolled in a correspondence course with a mysterious philosopher. Thus begins Jostein Gaarder's unique novel, which is not only a mystery, but also a complete and entertaining history of philosophy.

Discusses how to reduce or overcome fear of death for those who hold a variety of beliefs on death including: the belief that there is no afterlife, that the there is an afterlife and it is something to be feared, that there is an afterlife and that it is something to look forward to, and that there is reincarnation after death.

After World War II, Americans constructed an unprecedented number of synagogues, churches, cathedrals, chapels, and other structures. The book is one of the first major studies of American religious architecture in the postwar period, and it reveals the diverse and complicated set of issues that emerged just as one of the nation's biggest building booms unfolded. Price argues that the resulting structures, as often mocked as loved, were physical embodiments of an important time in American religious history.