The blueprint for achieving growth and driving shareholder value by embedding support for innovation into every facet of your business Breaking Away is one of the first books to bridge the gap between leadership and innovation by revealing what it takes to create both breakthrough ideas and the leaders who make them happen. Written by the chief innovation officer for Coca-Cola and a leading recruiter of innovation leaders, Breaking Away provides a framework that executives, managers, and entrepreneurs can use to create an environment that drives REAL innovation, the breakthrough products or services that are: efficient to produce or deliver; in demand; and profitable. Interviews and case studies of global giants like Burberry, Mastercard, Nestle, GE, HP, Nintendo, and others, show you how leaders put these principles into action: How Ford beat Toyota to the hybrid (and why everyone thinks the Japanese company got there first); how GE is changing the face of cancer treatment; how a self-confessed “snackaholic” drove Lesser Evil Snacks to 120% Y-o-Y growth-and a place among the INC. 500 “fastest growing companies” index.

Publisher description

Published to wide acclaim in England, "Several Deceptions" introduces a new writer with a fresh voice, making her debut with four entertaining novellas.

The perfect book for the well-heeled, independent traveler. Everything you need to know to plan a successful trip: drive your car, rent a car, travel by luxury bus. What to see and where to stay. Mexico is a dream destination: beautiful beaches, archaeological treasures, fascinating Colonial towns, colorful markets, breathtaking whale watching, butterfly reserves, fine golf courses, outstanding museums, delicious food, glorious cathedrals, and cosmopolitan cities. Beyond all these attractions Mexico offers a dazzling variety of accommodations from elegant city hotels to thatched-roof cottages on deserted beaches.

In three novellas with a common theme - what it means for a woman to be good.

An immensely moving account of a strange and magical interracial love affair, The Winter Queen illuminates the Netherlands of the seventeenth century. Amid the dark ambiance of the time, the exiled Queen Elizabeth of Bohemia and Pelagius, a West African prince and former slave, fall in love and secretly marry. With great erudition and compassion, Jane Stevenson vividly renders both a portrait of an extraordinary relationship and a tumultuous political history. Set against a historical backdrop enriched with the art, philosophy, and religion of the Dutch Golden Age, "scene succeeds scene in Vermeer-like richness of color" (Memphis Commercial Appeal).

Balthasar Stuart, the son of Elizabeth of Bohemia and an African prince, works as a doctor in late seventeenth-century Holland, until he is driven out by the plague to build a new life in Restoration London and Barbados.

An authoritative, richly illustrated history, and affectionate celebration, of Siena, one of the best-loved and most-visited cities in Italy. Occupying a hilltop site in the midst of a vast, undulating landscape, Siena is as much a magnet for contemporary tourism as Florence. However, its proud republican past presents an intriguing contrast with its Medici-dominated northern Tuscan rival, with which it tussled for local supremacy for much of the High Middle Ages. From the twelfth century, profiting from its advantageous position on a major pilgrim route, the Republic of Siena developed into a major European power and remained an important commercial, financial and artistic centre for four centuries. Jane Stevenson charts the changing fortunes of a city that rose to an astonishingly productive cultural heyday in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, suffered a catastrophic late medieval decline in the aftermath of the Black Death, but transcended the loss of its wider political power to enjoy a prosperous civic afterlife. Siena today enjoys a cherished position as a uniquely well-preserved medieval city, crammed with world-class art and architecture, furnished with appealing and intriguing traditions, and set in a heavenly landscape.

When a collection of old manuscripts is discovered, a young Oxford don and his scholarly friends discover that the true queen of England may be a young and gifted black scientist of independent mind in Barbados.