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Decentering Whiteness in the Workplace: A Guide for Equity and Inclusion
by Janice Gassam AsareYour DEIJ efforts are stagnating because you continue to center whiteness. Creating a truly anti-racist organization requires learning how to identify and rectify the systemic, and often unconscious, centering of white culture and values in the workplace.Corporate America continues to struggle with racial equity in a post-George Floyd world. As the United States becomes more diverse and the public consciousness continues to shift, successful racial equity efforts in the workplace are needed now more than ever. Decentering Whiteness in the Workplace exposes the ways that white culture and expectations are centered in the modern American workplace and the fears within corporate spaces about talking candidly, openly, and honestly about whiteness, white supremacy, and anti-Blackness.Readers will discover: A direct and straightforward analysis about what white-centering is An evaluation of the different ways that whiteness is centered in the workplace, such as bereavement and holiday policies and dress codes A guide on how to recognize and decenter whiteness within oneself and at work Solutions for people to contribute individually and systemically to anti-oppressionDecentering Whiteness in the Workplace provides a crucial guidebook with practical solutions for leaders, DEIJ practitioners, and anyone hoping to truly create an anti-racist workplace.
Guide to Contract Pricing: Cost and Price Analysis for Contractors, Subcontractors, and Government Agencies
by John Edward MurphyPerform Contracting Successfully!This master reference — in its fifth edition — contains everything you need to know about government pricing rules and regulations in one easy-to-use volume.Guide to Contract Pricing: Cost and Price Analysis for Contractors, Subcontractors, and Government Agencies, Fifth Edition, explains how the government conducts business and walks you through every step of the contracting process. This fully updated edition includes a new chapter on the role of auditors in contract pricing as well as five new detailed appendices. You'll be able to:+ Master the steps of the sealed bid process+ Improve your skills at evaluating bids, proposals, and quotations+ Perfect your ability to analyze direct and indirect labor costs+ Improve your chances for securing a fair and reasonable price
Building Resilience with Appreciative Inquiry: A Leadership Journey through Hope, Despair, and Forgiveness
by Jeanie Cockell Joan McArthur-BlairJourney through hope, despair, and forgivenessLeaders cannot predict the complex challenges they are called on to face. Veteran consultants Joan McArthur-Blair and Jeanie Cockell show that Appreciative Inquiry (AI) is an invaluable tool to build resilience.AI is a widely used change approach that emphasizes identifying what's working well in a system. Leaders can use AI to increase their ability to weather the storms they'll inevitably encounter and be resilient. A profound guide, this book features personal accounts from leaders across a variety of settings describing how they've practiced appreciative resilience in the ongoing cycle of hope, despair, and forgiveness.
Measuring and Improving Social Impacts: A Guide for Nonprofits, Companies, and Impact Investors
by Marc J. Epstein Kristi YuthasPhilanthropic NGOs, foundations, and corporations face endlessly competing needs when deciding to invest or donate for maximum social impact. This book fills an enormous gap by providing a system to measure, operationalize, and improve any organization's impact investments.
Believe-in-You Money: What Would It Look Like If the Economy Loved Black People?
by Jessica NorwoodOffering a revolution in Black business financing, this book centers the entrepreneur and responds to the systemic failures surrounding Black wealth building.America has a huge racial wealth gap today. Owning a business is one of the best ways to build wealth-but entrepreneurs need capital. And investing in Black companies is obstructed by systemic racism and implicit biases that continue to create barriers to success. Merging historical information and data with tactical examples and explanations, this practical guide shows us what needs to be done to change the way we support Black companies and how we think about wealth.Norwood calls for investors to move away from extractive, individualistic, and exploitative approaches to capital and entrepreneurship. She asks us to move toward transformational, restorative, regenerative, and interdependent relationships to repair the impacts of systemic racism. Investors, large and small, need to say to Black business owners, We believe in you.With an entrepreneur-centric approach, Believe-in-You Money challenges the systemic failure surrounding Black companies. This book is a guide on how Black entrepreneurs can be supported in sustainable ways and offers a shift in the way we think about who can be an investor while also aiming to change our personal relationships with money.
The Economics of Higher Purpose: Eight Counterintuitive Steps for Creating a Purpose-Driven Organization
by Robert E. Quinn Anjan V. ThakorTwo distinguished scholars offer eight steps to help organizations discover and embrace an authentic higher purpose—something that will dramatically improve every aspect of any enterprise, including the bottom line.What does a lofty notion like purpose have to do with business basics like the bottom line? Robert E. Quinn and Anjan J. Thakor say pretty much everything. Leaders and managers are taught that employees are self-interested and work resistant, so they create systems of control to combat these expectations. Workers resent these systems, and performance suffers. To address the performance issues, managers double down on the coercion, creating a vicious cycle and a self-fulfilling prophecy. But there is a better way. Quinn and Thakor show that when an authentic higher purpose permeates business strategy and decision-making, the cycle is broken. Employers and employees see themselves as working together toward an inspiring goal, not just trying to hit quarterly targets. They fully engage, become proactive contributors, and, ironically, easily exceed those quarterly targets. Based on their widely acclaimed Harvard Business Review article, Quinn and Thakor offer eight sometimes surprising steps for shifting from a transaction-oriented mind-set focused on constraints to a purpose-oriented mind-set focused on possibility. This iconoclastic book will help any organization discover its authentic purpose and weave it into the fabric of everything it does, leading to unprecedented levels of personal satisfaction, service and product innovation, and economic growth.
The Power of Disability: 10 Lessons for Surviving, Thriving, and Changing the World
by Al Etmanski"This book reminds us of what we have in common: the power to create a good life for ourselves and for others, no matter what the world has in store for us." —Michael J. FoxThis book reveals that people with disabilities are the invisible force that has shaped history. They have been instrumental in the growth of freedom and birth of democracy. They have produced heavenly music and exquisite works of art. They have unveiled the scientific secrets of the universe. They are among our most popular comedians, poets, and storytellers. And at 1.2 billion, they are also the largest minority group in the world.Al Etmanski offers ten lessons we can all learn from people with disabilities, illustrated with short, funny, inspiring, and thought-provoking stories of one hundred individuals from twenty countries. Some are familiar, like Michael J. Fox, Greta Thunberg, Stephen Hawking, Helen Keller, Stevie Wonder, and Temple Grandin. Others deserve to be, like Evelyn Glennie, a virtuoso percussionist who is deaf—her mission is to teach the world to listen to improve communication and social cohesion. Or Aaron Philip, who has revolutionized the runway as the first disabled, trans woman of color to become a professional model. The time has come to recognize people with disabilities for who they really are: authoritative sources on creativity, love, sexuality, resistance, dealing with adversity, and living a good life.
The Five Legends: A Journey to Heal Divided Hearts
by Anasazi FoundationDrawing on 30 years of helping families in-crisis, this profound fable by the Anasazi Foundation illustrates the anguish of conflict and shows how we can end war within ourselves, within families, and even between nations.The Five Legends tells the story of two estranged brothers, leaders of their people, who find themselves on an unexpected journey. Struggling against each other, they stumble and fall into a great and terrible canyon. Trapped, the two brothers are rescued by an old man—"the last of a people"—who offers to guide them out of the canyon if they agree to learn the five legends of peace. The brothers agree and begin a journey that may not only save themselves, but also their people.The brothers learn that to heal any conflict we must first look within ourselves. As this fable beautifully puts it, "War does not begin or end with armies and leaders. In truth, war begins and ends within each of us—within our hearts. When we choose to war with others, we turn our hearts away from them and blind ourselves to their light. …To have a heart at war is to invite war into your life." The path to peace begins when we stop thinking about "me" and start thinking about "WE."This poetic and moving allegory is written for all ages. Its message is both timeless and desperately needed for our own time
The Power of Appreciative Inquiry: A Practical Guide to Positive Change
by Amanda Trosten-Bloom Diana D. WhitneyNEW EDITION, REVISED AND UPDATED The Power of Appreciative Inquiry describes the internationally embraced approach to organizational change that dramatically improves performance by engaging people to study, discuss, and build upon what’s working – strengths – rather than trying to fix what’s not. Diana Whitney and Amanda Trosten-Bloom, pioneers in the development and practice of Appreciative Inquiry (AI), provide a menu of eight results-oriented applications, along with case examples from a wide range of organizations to illustrate Appreciative Inquiry in action. A how-to book, this is the most authoritative and accessible guide to the newest ideas and practices in the field of Appreciative Inquiry since its inception in 1985. The second edition includes new examples, tools, and tips for using AI to create an enduring capacity for positive change, along with a totally new chapter on award-winning community applications of Appreciative Inquiry.
99 to 1: How Wealth Inequality Is Wrecking the World and What We Can Do about It
by Chuck CollinsOver the past thirty years, we’ve seen a radical redistribution of wealth upward to a tiny fraction of the population. Here, activist Chuck Collins explains how it happened and marshals wide-ranging data to show exactly what the 99/1 percent divide means in the real world and the damage it causes to individuals, businesses, and the earth. Most important, he answers the burning question, what can be done about it? He offers a common-sense guide to bringing about a society that works for everyone: the 100 percent. This is a struggle that can be won. After all, the odds are 99 to 1 in our favor.
Practical Innovation in Government: How Front-Line Leaders Are Transforming Public-Sector Organizations
by Dean M. Schroeder Alan G RobinsonThis book is a comprehensive guide to an exciting new approach that managers at any level can use to transform their corners of government.Whether people want more government or less, everyone wants an efficient government. Traditional thinking is that this requires a government to be run more like a business. But a government is not a business, and this approach merely replaces old problems with new ones.In their six-year, five-country study of seventy-seven government organizations-ranging from small departments to entire states-Alan Robinson and Dean Schroeder found that the predominant private-sector approaches to improvement don't work well in the public sector, while practices that are rare in the private sector prove highly effective. The highest performers they studied had attained levels of efficiency that rivaled the best private-sector companies.Rather than management making the improvements, as is the norm in the private sector, these high-performers focused on front-line-driven improvement, where most of the change activity was led by supervisors and low-level managers who unleashed the creativity and ideas of their employees to improve their operations bit by bit every day.You'll discover how Denver's Department of Excise and Licenses reduced wait times from an hour and forty minutes to just seven minutes; how the Washington State Patrol garage tripled its productivity and became a national benchmark; how a K8 school in New Brunswick, Canada, boosted the percentage of students reading at the appropriate age level from 22 percent to 78 percent; and much more.
Dare to Serve: How to Drive Superior Results by Serving Others
by Cheryl A BachelderThe expanded and revised edition of Dare to Serve answers the question How do you transform an ailing company into an industry darling? Adopt servant leadership!In this updated edition of Dare to Serve, former Popeyes CEO Cheryl Bachelder shows that leading by serving is a rigorous and tough-minded approach that yields the best results. When she was named CEO of Popeyes in 2007, the stock price had slipped from $34 in 2002 to $13. The brand was stagnant, the team was discouraged, and the franchisees were just plain angry. Nine years later, restaurant sales were up 45 percent, restaurant profits had doubled, and the stock price was over $61. Servant leadership is sometimes derided as soft or ineffective, but this book confirms that challenging people to reach a daring destination, while treating them with dignity, creates the conditions for superior performance. The second edition of this bestselling book includes Bachelder's post-Popeyes observations and new examples of how you can switch your leadership from self to serve. Ever engaging and inspirational, Bachelder takes you firsthand through the transformation of Popeyes and shows how anyone, at any level can become a Dare-to-Serve leader.
Leveraging the Impact of 360-Degree Feedback, Second Edition
by Craig Chappelow Sylvester Taylor John W. FleenorFrom the Center for Creative Leadership, this essential guide is updated with new insights, tips, and tools to help organizations get the most out of 360-degree feedback.This hands-on guide from the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL) shows how to implement effective 360-degree feedback systems as part of leadership development initiatives in organizations. Written for professionals who work inside organizations and external consultants working with clients, the book draws on over twenty years of research and practice in organizations both large and small. Expert authors from CCL provide step-by-step guidelines for successful 360-degree feedback as well as best practices observed and tested with CCL's broad base of clients. The second edition is updated with advances in the field over the past ten years and features new chapters on what affects validity, why the process can fail, and the future of leadership. The book includes worksheets, checklists, and other tools to use or adapt with a 360-degree feedback process in any organization.
Acquisition Management
by R. M. EngelbeckYour Step-by-Step Guide to Today's Best Procurement Practices"Acquisition Management is a great book for those in the government acquisition business. It is complete and well documented. I was especially impressed with the format which makes it valuable for training people new to the acquisition field and as a reference to those with more experience."Brig. Gen. James C. Dever, Jr.USAF (Ret.)Formerly, DCS Contracting and Manufacturing, Air Force Systems CommandWhether you're a contractor or government personnel, one thing is for sure: The federal procurement process is undergoing a major overhaul. And, to be successful, you must master a host of new methods, rules, and requirements. New from Management Concepts, Acquisition Management is the first step-by-step guide to the government's new strategies and methods for procurement.This new, streamlined acquisition process adopts the best practices of the business world to boost cost-efficiency and reduce the time from contract development to delivery. Acquisition Management prepares you fully to understand and apply these new acquisition techniques, teaching you how to manage contract risk and work more effectively as a member of a multi-functional team.Key Features• Reviews acquisition principles to help you develop a basis for decision-making• Gives you step-by-step guidance for every phase of the process, from solicitation to closeout• Places the procurement process in a risk management context to help you troubleshoot problems and ensure success• Outlines the roles and tasks of major players in the process to help you work more effectively as part of the contracting team• Presents pertinent information from the FAR at each applicable point in the acquisition process
The Pebble and the Avalanche: How Taking Things Apart Creates Revolutions
by Moshe YudkowskyThe Pebble and the Avalanche shows how the Internet, the auto industry, music downloading, and other rapidly evolving industries are all connected by the same dynamic -- disaggregation. Moshe Yudkowsky shows why this dynamic is crucial to survival in the 21st century marketplace, and how you can use it to bring about change in your industry. Disaggregation means taking things apart -- for example, the break-up of AT&T, which greatly improved phone service. But there are more subtle examples. Separating information from the storage medium -- digital music doesn't rely on records, tapes, or CDs; digital photographs don't require paper; and digital movies don't need film -- has enabled millions of people to create and share their work (and others') far more easily than ever before, with enormous implications. Think of this process as an avalanche: at the top of a mountain, rocks are jammed together in a solid mass. Pry some of these rocks loose and you will unleash a tremendous outpouring of energy that sweeps everything from its path. The same thing happens in technology: with the right innovation, you can pry the pieces of technology apart and unleash an outpouring of powerful ideas that shake apart whole industries. Yudkowsky details exactly how disaggregation works, describing five different ways of taking things apart, and the many ways it can be used to generate new innovations. The Pebble and the Avalanche provides strategies for successfully adapting to a disaggregation revolution, and points towards the future, identifying several industries that are about to be completely transformed by disaggregation.
The New Social Learning: A Guide to Transforming Organizations Through Social Media
by Tony Bingham Marcia ConnerThe first book to help organizations understand and harness the extraordinary workplace learning potential of social media Cowritten by the CEO of the world's largest workplace learning organization and a consultant and writer with extensive experience on the forefront of workplace learning technology Features case studies showing how organizations around the world have transformed their businesses through social media Most business books on social media have focused on using it as a marketing tool. Many employers see it as simply a workplace distraction. But social media has the potential to revolutionize workplace learning. People have always learned best from one another -- social media enables this to happen unrestricted by physical location and in extraordinarily creative ways. The New Social Learning is the most authoritative guide available to leveraging these powerful new technologies. Tony Bingham and Marcia Conner explain why social media is the ideal solution to some of the most pressing educational challenges organizations face today, such as a widely dispersed workforce and striking differences in learning styles, particularly across generations. They definitively answer common objections to using social media as a training tool and show how to win over even the most resistant employees. Then, using examples from a wide range of organizations -- including Deloitte, IBM, TELUS, and others -- Bingham and Conner help readers sort through the dizzying array of technological options available and decide when and how to use each one to achieve key strategic goals. Social media technologies -- everything from 140-character "microsharing" messages to media-rich online communities to complete virtual environments and more -- enable people to connect, collaborate, and innovate on levels never before dreamed of. They make learning dramatically more dynamic, stimulating, enjoyable, and effective. This greatly anticipated book helps organizations create a contemporary learning strategy that is as timely as it is transformative.
Get There Early: Sensing the Future to Compete in the Present
by Bob JohansenThese days, every leader struggles with a paradox: you can’t predict the future, but you have to be able to make sense of it to thrive. In the age of the Internet, everyone knows what’s new, but to succeed you have to be able to sort out what’s important, devise strategies based on your own point of view, and get there ahead of the crowd. Bob Johansen shares techniques the Institute for the Future has been refining for nearly forty years to help leaders navigate what, borrowing a term from the Army War College, he calls the VUCA world: a world characterized by volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. As the institute’s ten-year forecast makes clear, leaders now face fewer problems with neat solutions and more dilemmas: recurring, complex, messy, and puzzling situations. Get There Early lays out the institute’s three-step Foresight to Insight to Action Cycle that will allow readers to sense, make sense of, and win with dilemmas. Johansen offers specific techniques, ranging from storytelling to simulation gaming, as well as real-world examples to help readers turn the VUCA world on its head through creative use of vision, understanding, clarity, and agility. This book offers hope for leaders facing the constant tension—a dilemma in itself—between judging too soon and deciding too late.
Erasing Institutional Bias: How to Create Systemic Change for Organizational Inclusion
by Tiffany Jana Ashley Diaz MejiasAll humans have bias, and as a result, so do the institutions we build. Internationally sought after diversity consultant Tiffany Jana offers concrete ways for anyone to work against institutional bias no matter what their position is in an organization. Building upon the revelatory power of her book Overcoming Bias, which addressed managing individual and interpersonal bias, Erasing Institutional Bias scales up the framework to impact systemic change in organizations. Jana and coauthor Ashley Diaz Mejias bring together in-depth research on how biases become embedded into workplace cultures with practical and engaging tools that will mobilize readers toward action. They confront specific topics such as racism, sexism, hiring and advancement bias and retribution bias, meaning when organizations develop a culture of aggression, and offer solutions for identifying and controlling them. This book urges readers to ask questions such as, "Are we attempting to create systems in which all people can thrive? What kind of world and what kind of workplaces are we cultivating?" These questions, the authors say, must first be answered by ourselves, recognizing our own role in perpetuating harmful biases that come to define institutions. In a world divided, Erasing Institutional Bias is designed to raise awareness about imbalances and help us hold ourselves accountable for creating a world that works for everyone. Each of us can evaluate our own current role in perpetuating systemic bias and define our new role in breaking it down. Jana and Mejias inspire and equip us so that we can all affect organizational change, together.
The Frictionless Organization: Deliver Great Customer Experiences with Less Effort
by David Jaffe Bill PriceLearn how frictionless organizations cut costs, grow revenue, and create loyal fans by creating products and services that work so well, their customers never have to contact them for the wrong reasons.This book will help any customer-facing organization deliver better customer experiences, save money, and increase revenue. Veteran customer service experts Bill Price and David Jaffe, coauthors of the bestseller The Best Service Is No Service, explain how organizations can design products, sales, and support so that customer effort is reduced or, better still, removed. This simplicity for the customer is what Price and Jaffe call frictionless. The book defines a straightforward methodology, drawing on more than thirty practical examples from leading companies across four continents. The approach provides a radically different way for the whole business to focus on the customer experience. It explains how any organization can look at all customer interactions as potential opportunities for improvement and question whether they are helpful or represent symptoms of friction. Lower friction innovators are disrupting established businesses in every industry. This detailed guide shows how any business-from start-ups to major multinational corporations-can remove friction. Being frictionless has become a strategic necessity, and now this strategy is available to any organization.
Advanced Consulting: Earning Trust at the Highest Level
by Bill PasmoreThis is the first book to address the specific needs and challenges faced by high-level consultants, who work on very complex projects and must win the confidence of the most senior leaders in organizations. Advanced consulting requires both expertise and personal qualifications that are distinct from those needed in everyday consulting. Advanced consultants work with high-level executive teams on complex issues such as strategy, organizational design, merger integration, digital disruption, culture change, and system-wide transformation. While neophyte consultants are often given a playbook to follow, advanced consultants need to invent methods that take full advantage of the opportunities that their work with clients presents. There is an art to advanced consulting as well as a science; who you are is as important as what you do. Bill Pasmore draws on his four decades of experience as a consultant and teacher of consultants to show readers how to see possibilities that are not evident, conduct analyses that support the value of more comprehensive work, build relationships that engender deeper trust, adapt to changing circumstances, and empower members of their team to take independent actions while maintaining overall control of an engagement. Illustrated with vivid real-world examples and including a self-assessment to measure your progress, this book equips you to advance to more senior positions in your firm or to build a successful independent practice.
Managing Hispanic and Latino Employees: A Guide to Hiring, Training, Motivating, Supervising, and Supporting the Fastest Growing Workforce Group
by Louis NevaerThe first book on supporting and developing Hispanic employees in any organization Identifies three overarching concepts that shape Hispanic culture and explores how they influence workplace behavior and expectations Written by a distinguished Hispanic author and authority on Hispanic economic behavior Hispanics are the largest minority group and the fastest growing demographic in the United States—they are already 15% of the population and 22% of the workforce, and it’s estimated that by 2050 those numbers will go up to 36% and 55% In this much-needed new book Louis Naevar helps non-Hispanic employers and colleagues understand how Hispanics see the business world—and the world in general—so they can better support and develop this dynamic group of workers. Drawing on his own ethnic background and years of experience as director of the organization Hispanic Economics, Nevaer identifies three concepts that shape Hispanic culture and often result in behaviors and beliefs very different than, and sometimes seemingly at odds with, those of non-Hispanics. He explores subtle nuances within the Hispanic community—which is no more monolithic than the “European” community—that will help employers appreciate differences and tensions between Hispanic workers. With this as an overarching framework, and using a wealth of specific examples, Nevaer shows how to develop Hispanic-friendly approaches in every aspect of the modern workplace, from recruitment, retention and evaluation to training, mentoring, and labor relations. As Hispanics become an ever-larger segment of the workforce, organizations who fail to make them feel welcome and valued risk losing access to a significant source of talent and innovation, not to mention a connection to a major evolving market. Managing Hispanic and Latino Employees is an invaluable resource for creating an environment where Hispanic workers feel comfortable, recognized and rewarded.
Source: The Inner Path of Knowledge Creation
by Joseph JaworskiAs he did in his classic Synchronicity, Joseph Jaworski once again takes us on a mind-expanding journey, this time to the very heart of creativity and deep knowing. Institutions of all sorts are facing profound change today, with complexity increasing at a speed and intensity we’ve never experienced before. Jaworski came to realize that traditional analytical leadership approaches are inadequate for dealing creatively with this complexity. To effectively face these challenges, leaders need to access the Source from which truly profound innovation flows. Many people, including Jaworski himself, have experienced a connection with this Source, often when called upon to respond in times of crisis—moments of extreme spontaneity and intuitive insight. Actions simply flow through them, seemingly without any sort of conscious intervention. But these experiences are chance occurrences—ordinarily, we don’t know how to access the Source, and we even have a blind spot as to its very existence. In an extraordinarily wide-ranging intellectual odyssey, Jaworski relates his fascinating experiences with quantum physicists, cognitive scientists, indigenous leaders, and spiritual thinkers, all focused on getting to the heart of the Source. Ultimately, he develops four guiding principles that encompass the nature of the Source and what we need to do to stay in dynamic dialogue with it. Using the combination of narrative and reflection that made Synchronicity so compelling, Jaworski has written a book that illuminates the essential nature not only of visionary leadership but also of relationships, consciousness, and ultimately reality itself.
Remote Works: Managing for Freedom, Flexibility, and Focus
by Ali Greene Tamara SandersonThe future of work is here. You can no longer survive by copying and pasting old office techniques into a digital environment; it's exhausting, unproductive, and unsuccessful. There is a better way! Are you ready to rethink everything you know about how remote works?Drawing on their years of experience working at remote companies DuckDuckGo and Automattic, plus dozens of interviews with leading experts, Ali Greene and Tamara Sanderson have written the ultimate playbook for managing remote teams. This book addresses challenges such as communicating effectively (with fewer meetings!), eliminating frustration over what tools to use, establishing team norms, and focusing on getting things done. You will learn how to work best remotely and create a workplace designed for freedom, flexibility, and focus.For decades, we've planned our lives around our work. Now it's time to intentionally design work to fit our lives.
What Great Service Leaders Know and Do: Creating Breakthroughs in Service Firms
by James L. Heskett Leonard A. Schlesinger W. Earl Sasser Jr.Entire service businesses have been built around the ideas of Heskett, Sasser, and Schlesinger, pioneers in the world of service. Now they test their ideas against the actual experiences of successful and unsuccessful practitioners, as well as against demands of the future, in a book service leaders around the world will use as a guide for years to come. The authors cover every aspect of optimal service leadership: the best hiring, training, and workplace organization practices; the creation of operating strategies around areas such as facility design, capacity planning, queue management, and more; the use—and misuse—of technology in delivering top-level service; and practices that can transform loyal customers into "owners."Looking ahead, the authors describe the world of great service leaders in which "both/and" thinking replaces trade-offs. It's a world in which new ideas will be tested against the sine qua non of the "service trifecta"—wins for employees, customers, and investors. And it's a world in which the best leaders admit that they don't have the answers and create organizations that learn, innovate, "sense and respond," operate with fluid boundaries, and seek and achieve repeated strategic success.Using examples of dozens of companies in a wide variety of industries, such as Apollo Hospitals, Châteauform, Starbucks, Amazon, Disney, Progressive Insurance, the Dallas Mavericks, Whole Foods, IKEA, and many others, the authors present a narrative of remarkable successes, unnecessary failures, and future promise.
Seeing Systems: Unlocking the Mysteries of Organizational Life
by Barry OshryWhen breakdowns occur in organizational life, the tendency is to blame them on the personalities, motivations, and abilities of the individuals involved or on the specific characteristics of one’s organization. Barry Oshry demonstrates how everyday breakdowns stem from our failure to see how human systems shape our feelings about ourselves and our relationships with other individuals and groups. He shows how we can transform “system blindness” into system sight, enabling us to live and work together in productive partnership. Based on Oshry’s 30+ years of studying human interaction in social system life, Seeing Systems is profound in its implications while being easily accessible. In addition to illustrative cases and solid systems theory, the book is populated with pinballs; talking body parts; mysterious “swimmers”; amebocytes, slugs, and earthworms; dances of blind reflex; and tunnels of limited options. The result is a unique foundation for revolutionizing our understanding of system life. This new edition is revised throughout and features an extensive new section on having the wisdom and courage to face and work with the reality of uncertainty, a hopeful antidote to today’s righteous battles of certainty versus certainty. The new epilogue describes how Oshry is currently using theater, blogs, and podcasts to extend his multipronged revolution aimed at transforming system blindness into system sight.