Elliott Parker

Silver Medal Winner, Axiom Business Book Awards 2025 (Business & Economics) Silver Medal Winner, Foreword INDIE Awards 2025 (Business & Economics) Silver Medal Winner, Independent Publisher Awards 2025 (Business/Career/Sales) Grand Prize Finalist, First Horizon Award Finalist & Business Honorable Mention, Eric Hoffer Award 2025 Winner, American Book Fest "Best Book" Awards 2024 (Business: Entrepreneurship & Small Business) There's a problem with innovation inside of big companies. And it's not what you think. Corporations are better managed than ever, but they're less capable of delivering the breakthroughs that change our world for the better. Big companies are too often focused on efficiency instead of resiliency. They're optimized for safety and predictability, for maintenance of the status quo. Their focus on capital efficiency leads them to engage in an illusion of innovation: activity that feels like innovation but leads to value destruction, not progress. This book explains why meaningful innovation naturally emerges from deliberate inefficiency and how large corporations can harness the power of small teams—startups—to drive radical change through systematic experimentation. The Illusion of Innovation explores: • What the Federal Witness Protection Program reveals about the power of individuals • How the Amazon river basin relies on random evolution to build resiliency • How the NBA's shift to the three-point rule demonstrates the importance of thoughtful experiments • How one-thousand-year-old businesses survive crises We need scaled corporations to recover their problem-solving capacity. This means questioning decades of embedded assumptions about why corporations exist and finding ways to run faster, cheaper, and weirder experiments. It's time to build again.

Of all economic recessions experienced by the United States in the postwar period, the Great Recession that began in 2008 was the deepest, longest, and most destructive. Nevada was among the hardest hit states, its people reeling from the aftereffects, and the state government also experiencing a severe fiscal crisis. University of Nevada economics professor Elliott Parker and then-State Treasurer Kate Marshall make sense of what went wrong and why, with the hope the state will learn lessons to prevent past mistakes from being made again. This is a different kind of economics book. Parker uses his expertise from doing research on the East Asian fiscal crisis to give profound insights into what happened and how to avoid future catastrophes. Marshall personalizes it by providing vignettes of what it was actually like to be in the trenches and fighting the inevitable political battles that came up, and counteracting some of the falsehoods that certain politicians were spreading about the recession. Parker and Marshall’s book should be required reading for not only every single elected official in Nevada, but for any private citizen who cares about the public good.

"Florida, I do not choose you. When I retire, instead I'll go to the attic, slip out my flashlight, shine through the cobwebs, sift through my boxes of things, and dig out my Game Boy. I'll flip the on-switch and transport myself to a monochrome world where cities are named after colors, people speak in pixels, and kids hunt Pok mon in fields and capture them in metal balls." Muse Poems is a poetry collection steeped in love, heartbreak, and relentless optimism.This collection explores imagination, reality, and the sometimes blurry space between the two. It takes the reader on a journey filled with imagery and witty humor. This crazy world can sometimes be a bitter place, but the poetry in Muse Poems will help you see the good. And relish every moment of it.V1.0

"Everyone's trying to outsmart the androids these days. I saw on the news that some kid discovered how to unlock another one percent of the brain. Now he claims to understand the secrets of the universe, and he's got the equations to prove it." What if a poetry collection took place in the year 2300 with human and android narrators? What does it mean to love, lose, and grieve in 3D? Android Poems is a deliciously kinetic poetry collection that imagines a futuristic world where technology and reality blend. With equal parts light and darkness, these thought-provoking poems will re-engineer everything you thought about being human. V1.0