Mr. Welch was born in Salem, Massachusetts. He received his B.S. degree from the University of Massachusetts and his M.S. and Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the University of Illinois.

He began his career with the General Electric Company in 1960 and in 1981 became the company's eighth Chairman & CEO. In his 20 years as CEO of General Electric, he transformed the company from a bureaucratic behemoth to a dynamic and revered powerhouse. During his tenure, GE market value grew from $13 billion to $400 billion. In the process, Welch's management innovations have made him the most influential CEO of his era.

Upon his retirement from GE in 2001, Mr. Welch wrote his #1 New York Times and international best-selling autobiography, JACK: Straight From The Gut. He has also spent much of his time traveling around the world, speaking to people at every level of an organization, answering their questions on dozens of wide-ranging topics. These sessions were the inspiration for his new best-selling book, Winning.

In 2000 he was named Manager of the Century by Fortune magazine. In 2005, he was voted Most Admired CEO of the past 20 years by Chief Executive magazine readers and the World's Greatest Leader Today in a Fast Company magazine survey.

Mr. Welch is currently the head of Jack Welch, LLC, where he serves as an advisor to a small group of Fortune 500 business CEOs and speaks to business people and students around the world. He and his wife Suzy write a bi-weekly column for Business Week magazine and a world-wide weekly syndicated column appearing in over 25 countries answering questions about business, company, or career challenges.

Which is more dangerous, a gun or a swimming pool? What do schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers have in common? Why do drug dealers still live with their moms? How much do parents really matter? What kind of impact did Roe v. Wade have on violent crime?

These may not sound like typical questions for an economist to ask. But Steven D. Levitt is not a typical economist. He is a much-heralded young scholar who studies the riddles of everyday life-from cheating and crime to sports and child-rearing - and whose conclusions regularly turn the conventional wisdom on its head. He usually begins with a mountain of data and a simple, unasked question. Some of these questions concern life-and-death issues; others have an admittedly freakish quality. Thus the new field of study contained in this book: Freakonomics.

Through forceful storytelling and wry insight, Levitt and co-author Stephen J. Dubner show that economics is, at root, the study of incentives - how people get what they want, or need, especially when other people want or need the same thing. In Freakonomics, they set out to explore the hidden side of well, everything. The inner workings of a crack gang. The truth about real-estate agents. The myths of campaign finance. The telltale marks of a cheating schoolteacher. The secrets of the Ku Klux Klan.

What unites all these stories is a belief that the modern world, despite a surfeit of obfuscation, complication, and downright deceit, is not impenetrable, is not unknowable, and - if the right questions are asked - is even more intriguing than we think. All it takes is a new way of looking. Steven Levitt, through devilishly clever and clear-eyed thinking, shows how to see through all the clutter.

Freakonomics establishes this unconventional premise: if morality represents how we would like the world to work, then economics represents how it actually does work. It is true that readers of this book will be armed with enough riddles and stories to last a thousand cocktail parties. But Freakonomics can provide more than that. It will literally redefine the way we view the modern world

That Clara Adams-Ender would make something of herself was never a question. Her parents saw to that. But just how far she would go, they could never have imagined. Born one of 10 children to sharecropping parents near Raleigh, North Carolina, Adams-Ender's hard work helped her use an Army nursing scholarship to finish college, become chief nurse of the US Army Nurse corps in charge of 22,000 nurses worldwide, and become the first nurse in Army history to become commanding general of a base, Fort Belvoir, Virginia.

Along the way, Adams-Ender overcame poverty, race, and gender issues, and today runs her own management consulting firm based on her philosophy of caring about people. She describes her strategies for going under, over, around, or through obstacles but never letting them stop her from meeting her personal and professional goals.

Adams-Ender has just written her autobiography, My Rise to the Stars: How a Sharecropper's Daughter Became an Army General. Next, she intends to write about leadership and "the positive things people can do to keep themselves going from day to day." I'm trying to help make people stars, she says. "Not everyone can be a general, but everyone can be a star if you care about yourself and make sure you are dealing with folks with dignity and respect."