Strategic Planning for Success offers you a pragmatic guide to the design and development of practical and pragmatic strategic thinking and organizational alignment that will yield high-impact results and measurably add value to you, your organization, your clients, and society. Unlike other books on the topic, this volume goes beyond simply detailing the tools and techniques of design and development by clearly showing how to align what you do with what will be most valuable to all stakeholders. Using this unique approach will yield extraordinary results adding measurable value that flows...

The earliest decisions that lead to development projects are among the most critical in determining long-term success. This phase of project development transforms exciting ideas into project proposals, setting the stage for a variety of actions that will eventually lead (if all goes well) to desirable results. From deciding to propose a sanitation project in South Asia to selecting approaches that strengthen school management in South America, these decisions are the starting place of development. This book is your guide to having assessing needs and then making essential decisions about...

For nine days one early May, Ryan Watkins along with two brothers, Jeremy and Chris Jones, attempt to backpack the entire length of the infamous Appalachian Trail through the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. From his very first steps into the Smokies, Ryan quickly learns the seventy-mile stretch of trail is far more difficult than he ever imagined. The trio battles through torrential rains, lightning, snow, fatigue, multiple encounters with bears and a standoff with a timber rattlesnake as they march more than eighty miles from Standing Bear Farms, a small hostel north of the Great Smoky...