Thomas McGuire – författare

In 1924, John Lars Nelson travels to the Shumagin Islands in the Gulf of Alaska. He tells people he is doing a botanical survey, but the real goal of his quest is a mysterious orchid described by a naturalist in 1741 and never again seen. During his journey, John Lars hitches a ride on a schooner whose bootlegger captain has a hidden past. John Lars also meets a young Aleut woman, Natasha Christiansen. She becomes his guide and leads him to question the validity of everything he thought he knew. Together, they reach Nagai Island where the search for the orchid comes to a violent conclusion.

Nora Tyler returns to Alaska after many years away and finds work on a salmon fishing boat, but the long, hard season brings both deep friendships and unexpected violence.Over the course of the long, hard season, Nora reawakens to the beauty of fishing for salmon on the outer coast. Her four crewmates have their own troubled pasts, and she forms a different bond with each one. A rivalry develops with another boat, the Viking Hero. When a woman is lost overboard from the Hero, Nora tries to understand what happened and finds that the Hero was dealing drugs and her crewmate Danny was part of the action. Toby’s ex-girlfriend, Sara, takes the place of the missing woman and finds herself in a difficult situation with no easy way out. At the end of the season, Nora and her crewmates go duck hunting on the Stikine River flats. Two of the Hero’s crew appear, perhaps not by chance, and the confrontation turns violent.

Building Business Value through Talent uniquely describes how a CEO and CHRO can accelerate business growth by working together to design and operationalize value-driven talent strategies.CEOs focus on decisions that will drive the business strategy forward while HR leaders routinely try to satisfy the needs of the largest number of employees. Often, the two align superficially or in administrative ways – and to put out the occasional flash fire. This book changes that dynamic by unlocking the investment potential of HR and empowering an unprecedented, tangible and measurable partnership between CEOs and CHROs. Framed as a product guide, the "product" is visualized as the HR Operating Model necessary to succeed in our modern economy: a business-based talent planning and investment strategy to sustain talent solutions and intellectual capital growth.This product guide provides the tools and insights that business leaders are seeking in order to win the ever more challenging battles in their war for talent. Learning and adopting these winning practices will provide a visible testament to the effective leadership of any CEO and CHRO team.