Business

We are on the verge of the nation's worst nursing shortage in history. Dedicated nurses are leaving hospitals in droves, and there are not enough new recruits to the profession to meet demand. Even hospitals that were once very highly regarded for the quality of their nursing care, such as Boston's Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, now struggle to fill vacant positions. What happened? Dana Beth Weinberg argues that hospital restructuring in the 1990s is to blame.

In their attempts to retain profit margins or even just to stay afloat, hospitals adopted a common set of practices to cut costs and increase revenues. Many strategies squeezed greater productivity out of nurses and other hospital workers. Nurses' workloads increased to the point that even the most skilled nurses questioned whether they could provide minimal, safe care to patients. As hospitals hemorrhaged money, it seemed that no one--not hospital administrators, not doctors--felt they could afford to listen to nurses.

Through a careful look at the effects of the restructuring strategies chosen and implemented by Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, the author examines management's efforts to balance service and survival. By showing the effects of hospital restructuring on nurses' ability to plan, evaluate, and deliver excellent care, Weinberg provides a stinging indictment of standard industry practices that underestimate the contribution nurses make both to hospitals and to patient care.

Kevin O'Leary shares invaluable secrets on entrepreneurship, business, money and life.

Can you make millions just by "visualizing yourself rich" as some business prophets suggest? Don't buy it, says Kevin O'Leary. If you want to be a successful entrepreneur and amass wealth, you're going to have to work for it. But the good news is: with the right guidance, focus and perseverance, you can turn entrepreneurial vision into lucrative reality and have the personal freedom that only wealth can buy.

Kevin O'Leary would know. The much-feared and revered Dragon on the immensely popular show Dragons' Den (and Shark Tank in the U.S.) started his company in his basement with a $10,000 loan from his financially savvy mother. A few years later, Kevin sold that company for more than four billion dollars. In this compelling, candid and, above all else, brutally honest business memoir, Kevin provides engaging, practical advice and lessons that will give anyone a distinct competitive edge.

Everyone on Wall Street knows Jim Cramer, and Cramer knows Wall Street better than anyone. For fifteen years he ran Cramer, Berkowitz, one of the Street's most successful hedge funds with a compounded annual return of 24% after all fees. In Confessions of a Street Addict he takes us from his fascination with the stock market as a middle-class kid in the Philadelphia suburbs to Harvard, where he began managing money. After an apprenticeship at Goldman, Sachs, Cramer set out on his own with his wife, Karen, the "Trading Goddess," as his partner. Cramer brilliantly describes the life of a money manager -- the frenetic pace, the constant pressure to outperform the market and other fund managers, and the shark-like attacks fund managers make as they circle a fund perceived to be in trouble.

At the same time that he was managing money, Cramer was one of the best-known commentators on the financial markets. A former president of the Harvard Crimson, Cramer had been a newspaper reporter before he began managing money. While he was a fund manager, he wrote for SmartMoney and other publications, making him one of the first money managers to offer insight and analysis from inside the world of finance. With the rise of the Internet and online publishing, he co-founded TheStreet.com, the online financial Web site. In one of the most fascinating chapters in this book, Cramer takes us inside the IPO of TheStreet.com, where he found himself a knowledgeable but helpless onlooker as his own Web site came on the market at an unrealistically high price that it never reached again, a harbinger of the dot-com disasters that would soon haunt the stock market.

Throughout the book Cramer is characteristically outspoken, outrageous, and candid about everyone, himself included. There has never been a high-wired, high-octane book about Wall Street like this one.

Why not make money and make a difference, too?

A revolutionary blueprint for growing wealth, finding fulfillment, and changing the world by living your values.

In the emerging era of Conscious Money, we achieve prosperity by tapping into the power of values, consciousness, and sound economic principles. By applying the wisdom of Conscious Money to your personal finances, you can build a foundation for sustainable wealth and true fulfillment. No longer will you need to choose between your core values and your paycheck. Instead you'll expand on-the-job creativity, grow income through conscious practices, and change the world as you:

- identify your unique personal values;

- break down barriers to financial success;

- partner with companies that reflect your values;

- express your values through conscious shopping;

- tap into higher consciousness at the office;

- harness your intuition to clarify financial choices; and

- invest in enterprises that honor the planet.