KGNU's Claudia Cragg speaks here with Catie Marron about her second book, 'City Squares: "City Squares: Eighteen Writers on the Spirit and Significance of Squares Around the World".

In this important collection, eighteen renowned writers, including David Remnick, Zadie Smith, Rebecca Skloot, Rory Stewart, and Adam Gopnik evoke the spirit and history of some of the world’s most recognized and significant city squares, accompanied by illustrations from equally distinguished photographers.

Over half of the world’s citizens now live in cities, and this number is rapidly growing. At the heart of these municipalities is the square—the defining urban public space since the dawn of democracy in Ancient Greece. Each square stands for a larger theme in history: cultural, geopolitical, anthropological, or architectural, and each of the eighteen luminary writers has contributed his or her own innate talent, prodigious research, and local knowledge.

Divided into three parts: Culture, Geopolitics, History, headlined by Michael Kimmelman, David Remnick, and George Packer, this significant anthology shows the city square in new light. Jehane Noujaim, award-winning filmmaker, takes the reader through her return to Tahrir Square during the 2011 protest; Rory Stewart, diplomat and author, chronicles a square in Kabul which has come and gone several times over five centuries; Ari Shavit describes the dramatic changes of central Tel Aviv’s Rabin Square; Rick Stengel, editor, author, and journalist, recounts the power of Mandela’s choice of the Grand Parade, Cape Town, a huge market square to speak to the world right after his release from twenty-seven years in prison; while award-winning journalist Gillian Tett explores the concept of the virtual square in the age of social media.

This collection is an important lesson in history, a portrait of the world we live in today, as well as an exercise in thinking about the future. Evocative and compelling, City Squares will change the way you walk through a city.

KGNU's Claudia Cragg talks here for the radio show/podcast 'It's The Economy' with Susan Packard, the co-founder of HGTV and the only female founding member of Scripps Networks. (Twitter: @PackardSusan)

Women in the workforce have heard it all: Lean in, lean out, be bossy, be passive, separate work and home life…the conflicting guidance can be dizzying. So, Packard has simplified the rules. In NEW RULES OF THE GAME: 10 Strategies for Women in the Workplace (Prentice Hall Press/Penguin, February 2014).

In this, she uses her thirty years of experience - from 'secretary' to Executive VP - to give women an encouraging and achievable strategy for accomplishing workplace goals: gamesmanship.

Packard says that she has realized what’s really important in corporate America: to her, it is learning a man's rules for grit and gamesmanship and then outplaying them. It's not about platitudes or appearances, but rather utilizing the strategic thinking regularly found in sports and video games that men typically excel in to develop creativity, focus, optimism, teamwork and ultimately success.  

However, her advice applies NOT ONLY to women. Men, millennials and even children, have a lot to learn from what she has to say. 

KGNU's Claudia Cragg speaks here for the 'It's The Economy' with AOL's "Steve" Case.

Case, whose full name is Stephen McConnell Case', is an American entrepreneur, investor, and businessman. He is best known as the co-founder and former chief executive officer and chairman of America Online (AOL).

Twitter: @SteveCase @ThirdWaveBook

Since his retirement as chairman of AOL Time Warner in 2003, he has gone on to invest in early and growth-stage startups through his Washington, D.C. based venture capital firm Revolution LLC.

Case serves as a Presidential Ambassador for Global Entrepreneurship (PAGE) and was a member of Barack Obama'sCouncil on Jobs and Competitiveness. He also serves on the National Advisory Council on Innovation and Entrepreneurship (NACIE). Case is also chairman of UP Global, a non-profit organization focused on fostering strong entrepreneurial communities, created in 2013 from the merger of Startup America Partnership and Startup Weekend.

Together with his wife, Joan, they run The Case Foundation. 

His new book is: The Third Wave: An Entrepreneur's Vision of the Future

KGNU's Claudia Cragg speaks here with Don Tapscott, a Canadian man whose name is profoundly associated with new technologies and business practice. He is the CEO of the Tapscott Group and one of the most influential living theorists about business and society. (Twitter: @dtapscott)

In November 2013, 'Thinkers 50' named him the 4th most important business thinker in the world.

A June 2013 Forbes.com analysis of social media identified him as the most influential management thinker in the world.

He is the author or co-author of 15 widely read books about new technologies and new media, 

Tapscott is the author of 15 books about the digital revolution in business and society, including Wikinomics and the landmark work, The Digital Economy, which has just been published in a 20th Anniversary edition. He is also chancellor of Trent University.

Alex Tapscott is the CEO of North West Passage Ventures, an advisory firm building early stage companies in the blockchain space. (Twitter: @alextapscott)

Together, they are authors of the new book, The Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin is Changing Money, Business and the World.