"What we have to offer can be boiled down to one concept: the power of zero. We get more done with less of just about everything, from our people to our workplaces to our vendors. Zilch is what drives us to be more innovative, more passionate, more creative. So stop whining about your budget cuts and start asking yourself what you'd do if you had zilch. You'll be surprised just how powerful that is."

After years of being told to emulate the corporate world, not-for-profit CEOs like Nancy Lublin now find the shoe on the other foot. Tough times have forced businesses to slash their headcount, marketing budgets, and other resources. Managers at small startups and Fortune 100 companies alike are now expected to do more with less-but how?

No one is more qualified to answer that question than the leaders who always thrive on a shoestring.

Take Nancy Lublin, for instance. She learned firsthand how much you can accomplish with zilch (or close to it). As the founder of Dress for Success, which provides low-income women with interview suits and career development training, she turned a $5,000 inheritance into a global franchise. Then, as CEO of DoSomething.org, she helped turn a struggling startup into one of the largest and most successful youth volunteer groups in the world.

Now she draws on her experiences as well as interviews with other "rock star" leaders of flourishing not-for-profits-including Wendy Kopp of Teach For America, Darell Hammond of KaBOOM!, Greg Baldwin of VolunteerMatch.org, and John Lilly of Mozilla. Their examples prove the power of zero in business by teaching us how to:

* Motivate and retain good people without offering huge financial incentives
* Use the power of bartering to leverage every asset and minimize your liabilities
* Create cherished brands without throwing money at studies and focus groups
* Market your goods or service without paying a penny

Lublin's tone is a unique mix of "let's have some fun" and "here's the straight dope." Her expert advice will help any business or organization to get ahead through the power of zero.

Jim Norton is a pervert

in the truest sense of the word. The physical equivalent of a tall slug, he pays top dollar for massages with happy endings and is fascinated by shitty sitcoms and fat girls. He is also, at times, racially offensive and morally repugnant. He spares no one in his comedy -- least of all himself.

Now, in this outrageous, blisteringly funny collection of essays, Norton tackles the topics that are near and dear to his heart: from public events like the legendary Voyeur Bus incident on the Opie and Anthony Show, which culminated in all involved being taken to jail, or seeking a hug from his childhood idol Gene Simmons, to deeply private moments, including a teenage Jim's embarrassing poetry-writing attempts while in rehab, and his inexpensive sexual experience with an unwashed MILF (a Monolith I'd Like to Forget). His stories are raw, searingly honest in their attention to detail, and most of all, hilarious.

Filled with personal photos and nearly fifty candid and uncompromising essays, Happy Endings is one of a kind...and probably best read on an empty stomach.

When Harry needs to count out 100 balloons, he runs into trouble. A fun way to understand counting up to and down from 100 by tens, fives, twos, and singles.

Hoping to earn enough money to go to see the Globetrotters basketball team, Mick agrees to babysit a rambunctious young girl, but it is his faith that gets him into the game.

Konrad Ventana's The Unbearable Sadness of Zilch is positively Post-Lux- post-modern, post-enlightenment drama that exposes the pathos of creativity-a moveable feast for anyone who loves Hollywood stories and film noir.

The Unbearable Sadness of Zilch is a treatise on existentialism, modernism, and the emergence of nouveau feminism. Set in Hollywood Neo-noir and guided by an intrepid philosophical counselor (life coach), the reader investigates The Lost Love of the Latest Tycoon, examining the role of the muse, the magnificent intemperate impulses of the femme fatale, and the allure of the casting couch, while witnessing the fall of an empire in the twilight of the egoists.

The author, an American Scientist and Visionary, provides a unique view of the creative process and its varied sources. Using the pseudonym, Konrad Ventana, literally 'Bold Counsel through a Window,' the author looks behind the scenes at the ideologies of our modern times and examines the potential for future development.

A comic "portrait of the artist" as a young cineaste-gone-wrong, The Late Projectionist chronicles the exploits of a nose-thumbing grouser about Ingmar Bergman's films, aspiring small town libertine and petty criminal who finds that love does not redeem so much as waylay wicked intentions. Our hero is a self-professed "screen memoirist," cafe bon vivant and Swedish B-film aficionado caught in a quagmire of betrayal, intrigue and comic misadventure as he pursues a lucrative antiquarian book caper (and the fetching demoiselle who threatens its success). At once a sexy, madcap kunstlerroman-gone-awry and indicting riff on a generation's malaise, The Late Projectionist takes a telepathic peek into the bizarre inner-lives of steamy baristas, self-mutilating poets, solvent-slugging actors and a movie theater projectionist whose agenda far surpasses what's on the marquee.