"We find it's always better to fire people on a Friday. Studies have statistically shown that there's less chance of an incident if you do it at the end of the week." —Bob Slydell, Office Space

We resurrected this site just over a year ago. Like a Phoenix, that mythical firebird in Patrick Lencioni's short fables, inBubbleWrap gloriously arose from it's own ashes, took on a human form, and spread business books like seeds to the four corners of these United States (except in Hawaii, Alaska and, strangely, Arkansas—where state lottery laws forbid our offers. What do you have against Ram Charan, Arkansas?).

We started this site back up again in an attempt to give away each of the books reviewed in Jack and Todd's 100 Best Business Books of All Time. We weren't able to get them all, but the ones we could get, we have given away. All except for today's offer, Warren Bennis's On Becoming a Leader.

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If there exists any means of possessing a reality absolutely instead of knowing it relatively, of placing oneself within it instead of looking at it from outside points of view, of having the intuition instead of making the analysis: in short, of seizing it without any expression, translation, or symbolic representation—metaphysics is that means. Metaphysics, then, is the science which claims to dispense with symbols.

{ahem} What I think Bergson is trying to say is... I don't know what the hell Bergson is trying to say. {/ahem}

I think Gary Klein might, though. Klein is the author of The Power of Intuition. Intuition is an often discussed trait in business management and decision making today, most popularly in Malcolm Gladwell's Blink, but it wasn't always. It was Gary Klein that brought intuition to work, and it is a decidedly more utilitarian intuition than Henri Bergson's.

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The Balanced Scorecard was published over a decade ago, in 1996. But, even before it was a book, it was a tool—a management system developed by Robert Kaplan and David Norton. The key word in there is system (as opposed to a management philosophy), because a good system can be implemented within any structure and improve any organization, whereas a philosophy is something you have to fit in, something you have to sell to those within your company, something you have to get them to buy into.

To use a baseball analogy, any team can evaluate player talent using raw data, and develop a system for how they evaluate that data and set a strategy for putting a strong team on the field that wins games and draws fans. Some teams, however, have the idea that character is more important. They want nine scrappy, selfless and hungry players. They don't care as much about statistics. They want players that will run out every ground ball and into every wall, that fit with the philosophy of the franchise. They figure that nine players like that, scrapping it up on every play and playing together, will somehow exceed their collective talent level—will play better than nine prima donna superstars who just collect their vast pay checks and run around with Kate Hudson. And, as much as that philosophy appeals to my Midwestern sensibilities, as much as it may feel right sometimes, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

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One of the more popular offers since we began our attempt to give away each of the books in The 100 Best Business Books of All Time was Michael Watkins First 90 Days. But, since giving away the book in June, he has put out another book—Your Next Move: The Leader's Guide to Navigating Major Career Transitions, released last month by Harvard Business Press—so we're revisiting Mr. Watkins.

Like The First 90 Days, it has much to do with becoming a successful manager of others, transitioning from being a productive member of a team to leading a team of your own. But, whereas The First 90 Days offers more across-the-board advice covering transitions in general, Your Next Move is more specifically tailored toward specific types of transitions and direct challenges, such as how to handle a promotion and manage your former peers. Watkins explains in his introduction:

"This book is about how leaders can survive and thrive in classic career changes that virtually everyone faces on their road to the top. The chapters that follow build on my work in The First 90 Days, but delve much more deeply into the distinct, tough transitions that leaders face. You will get clear road maps—advice and tools—to surmount the challenges associated with your next move ... and every on after that."

This week, we're offering you both Your Next Move and The First 90 Days. We have 20 copies of the set.

If you'd like to learn more about The First 90 Days, or read what I think of the 24-hour news cycle, head back to our original offer. If you're interested in getting a head start on Your Next Move, you can find an excerpt (and an interview with the author) at businessweek.com.

We have 25 copies of The Art of Innovation to give away this week. It was authored by IDEO general manager Tom Kelley with Jonathan Littman (who this year released a book entitled I Hate People, which makes one wonder how he pulled off coauthoring this book). IDEO, of course, is the rock-star design firm of Palo Alto, California—"Silicon Valley's design firm of choice" as Todd writes in The 100 Best. IDEO wins so many awards it's hard to keep up with their accolades, but I do know they were just this year ranked #10 on Fast Company's list of The World's Most Innovative Companies. The Art of Innovation begins with the story of this great company, but quickly turns to processes and practices your company can implement. Again, from Todd's review:

The opening pages read more like a company biography than a guide to product transformations, but by chapter three, The Art of Innovation picks up speed and shows why this book is a prime example of what can make a business book so valuable.

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The book we have for you today is Joseph L. Badaracco, Jr.'s Questions of Character. Badaracco's approach is different than most in the business genre, in that the stories he uses to inform us aren't taken from research and real-life success stories, but pulled from the pages of great literature. "How does serious fiction help us understand leadership?" he asks. "It open doors to a world rarely seen ... It lets us watch leaders as they think, worry, hope, hesitate, commit, exult, regret, and reflect. We see their characters tested, reshaped, strengthened or weakened. These books draw us into leaders' worlds, put us in their shoes, and at times let us share their experiences."

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He is perhaps not the father, but certainly a father of modern Wall Street.

Hardly anyone calls him that though. Economists honor Fisher for his theoretical breakthroughs, but outside the discipline his chief claim to lasting fame is the horrendous stock market advice he proffered in the late 1920s. Read almost any history of the years leading up to the great crash of October 1929, and the famous Professor Fisher serves as a sort of idiot Greek chorus, popping up every few pages to assert that stock prices had reached a "permanently high plateau."

Well, if by "permanently high plateau," Fisher meant "about to fall drastically, plummeting the country into a prolonged depression," he was spot-on.

The book we have for you today, Roger Lowenstein's When Genius Failed, is a more recent example of academic faith in the rationality of markets going disasterously awry. It tells the story of Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM), a hedge fund started by John Meriwether that lured the best and brightest minds of American academia to Wall Street—Nobel Laureates of economics Myron Scholes and Robert C. Merton among them.

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Annette Simmons' The Story Factor reminds us of the power of stories and illustrates how we can use them to influence, inspire and motivate. She provides the techniques and inspiration to begin telling your own story more effectively, personally and proffessionally.

When asked where I work, I always reply "Well, do you remember Schwartz Bookshops?" That answer is partly due to the fact that Milwaukeeans will almost always know of Schwartz, which makes it easier to begin the explanation of how 800-CEO-READ formed (as Schwartz's business book division) and what we do. But that's not the only reason I invoke the bookshops... Harry W. Schwartz Bookshops is where our company's culture was formed, and we consider the bookshop history our own. When I speak of our company in those terms, I think it gives them a better idea of what our company is like—what our company is—lthan just telling them that we sell business books.

I've told the story here before...

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To do this, the authors counsel that "The best approach to take in our overcommunicated society is the oversimplified message." See, according to Ries and Trout, it is "not what you do to a product. Positioning is what you do to the mind ..." We discussed the physical retail environment a few weeks ago when we were offering Paco Underhill's Why We Buy—a book that perfected the science of designing retail space, ridding it of any clutter that may dissuade a prospective customer from a product they want to buy and simplifying their route to it. And, that is precisely what Ries and Trout have done for the mental retail environment, the world of marketing and advertising. They expertly describe how to position whatever you're selling in a prospect's mind—whether that be a product, service, idea, or (with chapters on career advanement and improvement) even yourself. There are even chapters on the positioning of a country (Belgium) and chuch (the Catholic).

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Camping the first night on a small peninsula jutting into Rend Lake in southern Illinois, basking in the moonlight with a cold beer next to a warm fire, I knew it was going to be a fine trip. Then it was on to the Civil Rights Museum in Memphis and a quick tour of Biel Street. After driving to the Natchez Trace State Forest from there and being met in battle at our campsite by kamikaze stinging flies dive-bombing our vehicle, we decided to drive on to Nashville. The flies won the battle, but we won the war that night. (What is up with the AT&T building in Nashville, by the way? It looks like the headquarters of a supervillain, what with its sinister, villainy spires and whatnot. All it needs is a windy mountain road leading up to it and some lightning in the background.)

Well, we found that windy mountain road the next morning off highway 129 in the mountains of Eastern Tennessee and North Carolina, where we would camp next to a cold, clear creek in a dry county. Cherokee for the "land of noon day sun," The Nantahala National Forest was the perfect place to rest up for the remainder of our vacation, and close to our final destination—Hendersonville, NC. We found that lightning for the background on our way home, driving through a brief thunderstorm in the Great Smokey Mountains, and when the rain cleared and mist rose so beautifully off the mountains, I thought we might have driven straight into the pages of a fantasy novel. But we were heading west, back home to our beloved Milwaukee, knowing our journey was nearing its end, just chasing daylight.

Chasing Daylight is the story of a man coming to the ultimate journey's end. Unlike The First 90 Days, which we featured recently here on this site, Chasing Daylight is all about one's last 90 days. It is the extraordinary memoir of a dying man, former KPMG CEO Eugene O'Kelly, written in the short span between when he was diagnosed with brain cancer and his death just three-and-a-half months later.

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You probably don't have as many headaches or the same job-security as the president, though. And, if you're changing jobs—whether moving within your company or to a new one—Michael Watkins contends that you don't have as long to prove yourself. In his classic, The First 90 Days, he lays out the do's and don'ts of transitioning in the workplace.

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