An insightful and practical new guide to how sustainable people management works in today’s global economy, with guidance on how to transform the way your organization recruits, hires, upskills, and retains its people In Work Different: 10 Truths for Winning in the People Age, a team of business experts and workforce advisors give an incisive take on the staffing challenges facing leaders in the modern global economy. The book reveals how executives and decision makers can adapt their people agenda for shifts in labor models and employee sentiment. You’ll look ahead to what’s next and learn how to weave sustainability and resilience into your business priorities and make real progress on profits, people, and the planet. You’ll also discover: How generative AI and labor trends will converge to put a premium on agile organizations How to understand what people really want from the organizations they’re employed by: The Lifestyle Contract How you can build a culture that transcends structures and walls, and places skills at the heart of change How stakeholder capitalism and ESG are drawing a new roadmap for success An indispensable resource for executives, managers, board members, human resources professionals, and other business leaders, Work Different: 10 Truths for Winning in the People Age is the no-nonsense, hands-on people management blueprint that you’ve been waiting for.
A sustainable solution for funding your retirement lies in plain sight--rental property. Anyone, of any age, can take advantage of this often overlooked income generator.
“Important . . . [a] landmark presidential biography . . . Bird is able to build a persuasive case that the Carter presidency deserves this new look.”—The New York Times Book Review An essential re-evaluation of the complex triumphs and tragedies of Jimmy Carter’s presidential legacy—from the expert biographer and Pulitzer Prize–winning co-author of American Prometheus Four decades after Ronald Reagan’s landslide win in 1980, Jimmy Carter’s one-term presidency is often labeled a failure; indeed, many Americans view Carter as the only ex-president to have used the White House as a stepping-stone to greater achievements. But in retrospect the Carter political odyssey is a rich and human story, marked by both formidable accomplishments and painful political adversity. In this deeply researched, brilliantly written account, Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer Kai Bird deftly unfolds the Carter saga as a tragic tipping point in American history. As president, Carter was not merely an outsider; he was an outlier. He was the only president in a century to grow up in the heart of the Deep South, and his born-again Christianity made him the most openly religious president in memory. This outlier brought to the White House a rare mix of humility, candor, and unnerving self-confidence that neither Washington nor America was ready to embrace. Decades before today’s public reckoning with the vast gulf between America’s ethos and its actions, Carter looked out on a nation torn by race and demoralized by Watergate and Vietnam and prescribed a radical self-examination from which voters recoiled. The cost of his unshakable belief in doing the right thing would be losing his re-election bid—and witnessing the ascendance of Reagan. In these remarkable pages, Bird traces the arc of Carter’s administration, from his aggressive domestic agenda to his controversial foreign policy record, taking readers inside the Oval Office and through Carter’s battles with both a political establishment and a Washington press corps that proved as adversarial as any foreign power. Bird shows how issues still hotly debated today—from national health care to growing inequality and racism to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—burned at the heart of Carter’s America, and consumed a president who found a moral duty in solving them. Drawing on interviews with Carter and members of his administration and recently declassified documents, Bird delivers a profound, clear-eyed evaluation of a leader whose legacy has been deeply misunderstood. The Outlier is the definitive account of an enigmatic presidency—both as it really happened and as it is remembered in the American consciousness.
The Good Spy is Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Kai Bird’s compelling portrait of the remarkable life and death of one of the most important operatives in CIA history – a man who, had he lived, might have helped heal the rift between Arabs and the West. On April 18, 1983, a bomb exploded outside the American Embassy in Beirut, killing 63 people. The attack was a geopolitical turning point. It marked the beginning of Hezbollah as a political force, but even more important, it eliminated America’s most influential and effective intelligence officer in the Middle East – CIA operative Robert Ames. What set Ames apart from his peers was his extraordinary ability to form deep, meaningful connections with key Arab intelligence figures. Some operatives relied on threats and subterfuge, but Ames worked by building friendships and emphasizing shared values – never more notably than with Yasir Arafat’s charismatic intelligence chief and heir apparent Ali Hassan Salameh (aka “The Red Prince”). Ames’ deepening relationship with Salameh held the potential for a lasting peace. Within a few years, though, both men were killed by assassins, and America’s relations with the Arab world began heading down a path that culminated in 9/11, the War on Terror, and the current fog of mistrust. Bird, who as a child lived in the Beirut Embassy and knew Ames as a neighbor when he was twelve years old, spent years researching The Good Spy. Not only does the book draw on hours of interviews with Ames’ widow, and quotes from hundreds of Ames’ private letters, it’s woven from interviews with scores of current and former American, Israeli, and Palestinian intelligence officers as well as other players in the Middle East “Great Game.” What emerges is a masterpiece-level narrative of the making of a CIA officer, a uniquely insightful history of twentieth-century conflict in the Middle East, and an absorbing hour-by-hour account of the Beirut Embassy bombing. Even more impressive, Bird draws on his reporter’s skills to deliver a full dossier on the bombers and expose the shocking truth of where the attack’s mastermind resides today.
In his book Kai Bulling proposes the systems constellation as an instrument for change agents. An innovative general model of the systems constellation as a management intervention is constructed that presents the method as a synergetic combination of functional elements. This creates a new level of transparency that will support practitioners and managers in understanding its benefits and challenges as well as tailoring interventions to a specific case.
This book on Green Budget Reforms (GBR) provides comprehensive insight into how forerunner countries such as Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland, but also Hungary and Poland, have designed and taken first steps toward GBR, with emphasis on Ecological Tax Reform (ETR). The book covers the proceedings of an international seminar held in Slovenia with contributions from economists of the European Commission, the OECD, finance ministries and researchers. It also includes the first comprehensive case study of Slovenia, demonstrating the unique opportunities for GBR in Central and Eastern European Countries in particular. The book is for policy makers, consultants, lecturers, and scientists who wish to make and measure progress in sustainable development. Readers can choose from a range of market-based instruments applied in various countries and adapt them according to the requirements of their countries.
A masterful introduction to and appreciation of sociology as a window into our world The culmination of a distinguished career, this fascinating exploration into the nature of human social life describes the field of sociology as a way of looking at the world rather than as a simple gathering of facts about it. Kai Erikson notes that sociologists look out at the same human scenes as poets, historians, economists, or any other observers of the vast social landscape spread out before them, but select different aspects of that vast panorama to focus on and attend to. Erikson’s lively and accessible volume considers how sociology became a field of study, and how it has turned its attention over time to new areas of study such as race and gender and what Erikson calls “social speciation.” This book provides readers with new ways of thinking about human culture and social life—an exhilarating sense of what the world looks like when viewed with a sociologist’s eye.
An empirical study was undertaken (a) to examine the characteristics, influencing factors, and effectiveness of a distinctive Chinese management model adopted by the newly founded private enterprises in mainland China, as well as (b) to test the "fit" notion in contingency theory. The study was based on a random sample of 124 standardized personal interviews with CEOs of Chinese industrial and service companies in Beijing and Shanghai. The standardized questionnaire mainly contained the Aston structure scales (Pugh and Hickson 1976) and Khandwalla's (1977) management schedules. Besides, three case examples were studied including one state-owned bank and two private enterprises. Using AMOS structural equation modeling, size, mass-technology and uncertainty, as well as CEO need for achievement, environmental constraints and selected Chinese characteristics, were specified as influencing factors of "bureaucracy" and managerial practices, which included strategic orientation, leadership style, decision-making, communication and subcontracting. Another model analyzed the influence of various key success factors on organizational effectiveness. The findings provided support for the re-adoption of a distinctive Chinese management model in private companies, characterized by autocratic leadership, low formalization, "Chinese entrepreneurship" and network-based "webs". Private enterprises also tended to readopt and emphasize traditional Chinese family-related values. The distinctiveness of this model was, ceteris paribus, due to this emphasis on familism, which had a direct impact on organizational design and an indirect influence through its negative association with company size, which in turn significantly covaried with organizational design. This family-based ownership model was positively associated with organizational effectiveness. As regards contingency theory, the "traditional" fit hypotheses could not be rejected. In addition, less effective companies were not necessarily in "misfit". "Appropriate" structure, together with an optimizing planning style and firm age, were positively associated with performance. Managerial recommendations were codified in a CHINA(c) strategy framework for high effectiveness.
The question of whether religious experience can be trusted has been hotly debated in epistemology and philosophy of religion in recent years. Kwan surveys this contemporary philosophical debate, provides in-depth analysis of the crucial issues, and offer arguments for an affirmative answer to the above question. Kwan first argues against traditional empiricist epistemologies and defends Swinburne's Principle of Credulity which holds that we should trust our experiences unless there are special considerations to the contrary. The Principle of Credulity is renamed the Principle of Critical Trust to highlight the need for balance between trust and criticism and is used as the foundation for a new approach to epistemology, the Critical Trust Approach (CTA), which maintains an emphasis on experience but attempts to break loose of the straitjacket of traditional empiricism by broadening the evidential base of experience. Kwan then widens his focus by looking at theistic experience in the contemporary multicultural context.
Democracy has many attractive features. Among them is its tendency to track the truth, at least under certain idealized assumptions. That basic result has been known since 1785, when Condorcet published his famous jury theorem. But that theorem has typically been dismissed as little more than a mathematical curiosity, with assumptions too restrictive for it to apply to the real world. In An Epistemic Theory of Democracy, Goodin and Spiekermann propose different ways of interpreting voter independence and competence to make jury theorems more generally applicable. They go on to assess a wide range of familiar political practices and alternative institutional arrangements, to determine what constellation of them might most fully exploit the truth-tracking potential of majoritarian democracy. The book closes with a discussion of how epistemic democracy might be undermined, using as case studies the Trump and Brexit campaigns.
This book focuses on case studies of vocabulary strategy use and presents an in-depth account of the vocabulary learning experiences of Chinese students in the UK. It challenges the view that vocabulary strategies result only from learners’ cognitive choices, and provides insightful analysis of the interplay between learner characteristics, agency and context in the process of strategic learning. The author makes a strong case for using qualitative methodologies to examine the dynamic, complex and contextually situated nature of strategic vocabulary learning. Drawing on multiple data sources, the book discusses issues that are central to the continuing development of vocabulary strategy research and offers theoretical, research-based and practical suggestions for future exploration. This book will appeal to students and scholars of second language acquisition, vocabulary and applied linguistics.
This book examines how and why collaborative quality assurance techniques, particularly pair programming and peer code review, affect group cognition and software quality in agile software development teams. Prior research on these extremely popular but also costly techniques has focused on isolated pairs of developers and ignored the fact that they are typically applied in larger, enduring teams. This book is one of the first studies to investigate how these techniques depend on and influence the joint cognitive accomplishments of entire development teams rather than individuals. It employs theories on transactive memory systems and functional affordances to provide answers based on empirical research. The mixed-methods research presented includes several in-depth case studies and survey results from more than 500 software developers, team leaders, and product managers in 81 software development teams. The book’s findings will advance IS research and have explicit implications for developers of code review tools, information systems development teams, and software development managers.
Challenging Bruce McCormack's paradigm of post-Kantian Barth scholarship, this book builds on the interpretative model that Sigurd Baark developed in 2018. This model interprets Barth's innovative adoption of an Anselmian mode of theological speculation, against the intellectual-historical background of the idealist tradition of speculative metaphysics that culminated in Hegel. This book argues that Barth adopted the Anselmian mode of speculation in which immediate self-identity between subject, object, and act is found in the triune God alone, while the speculative identity that enables human knowledge of God is none other than the identity between God-in-and-for-Godself and God-for-us. Exploring the nationalistic dimension of speculative metaphysics in 19th-century Germany, Tseng identifies this as an important aspect of the context of Barth's development of a Christocentric form of speculative theology.
THE INSPIRATION FOR THE MAJOR MOTION PICTURE OPPENHEIMER • "A riveting account of one of history’s most essential and paradoxical figures.”—Christopher Nolan #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • The definitive biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer, one of the iconic figures of the twentieth century, a brilliant physicist who led the effort to build the atomic bomb for his country in a time of war, and who later found himself confronting the moral consequences of scientific progress. In this magisterial, acclaimed biography twenty-five years in the making, Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin capture Oppenheimer’s life and times, from his early career to his central role in the Cold War. This is biography and history at its finest, riveting and deeply informative. “A masterful account of Oppenheimer’s rise and fall, set in the context of the turbulent decades of America’s own transformation. It is a tour de force.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review “A work of voluminous scholarship and lucid insight, unifying its multifaceted portrait with a keen grasp of Oppenheimer’s essential nature.... It succeeds in deeply fathoming his most damaging, self-contradictory behavior.” —The New York Times
After the horrors of an alien attack, the world is no longer as it once was. But thanks to a heroic human resistance, the powerful fire lord Zeda and his armies have been destroyed. the world, while currently tranquil, remains vigilant. That sense of safety is tested by a series of avalanches in Canada. Could this be simply a series of natural phenomena--or the beginning of a new campaign of destruction by terrorists? Hero Winfred Cowell decides to attack them at their home base in Africa, but his plans are complicated by the arrival of strange, deadly beings who have emerged from the Bermuda Triangle. Forces unknown have transformed humans into Allosaurus-like monsters. Worse, just when he needs them the most, Winfred has lost his abilities. Winfred and Margaret set out on a quest to take the royal items of Zeda and release his prisoners. Once freed, the creatures now follow Winfred and Margaret back to the Bermuda Triangle, where a terrifying monster named Polkren is preparing to attack the world. But when the creatures betray their human partners, events take a dire turn. Now following the commands of their new master, Polkren, the creatures attack New Jersey. Meanwhile, Polkren has activated the machine that transforms half of the USA and Mexico civilians into zombies. the battle will claim a powerful leader before everything is done. the forces of good and evil will both risk everything to win. Winfred must summon all of his courage and creativity when the unimaginable happens: Foxpin, the son of Zeda, comes to the Earth with a hundred spaceships at his command. and only one of the commanders is destined to survive this brutal, epic battle.
Pop Masculinities explores the many ways in which twenty-first century pop artists perform masculinity through their songs, music videos, and public appearances. This offers a point of entry for addressing broader gender issues in contemporary popular culture and society.
Since the publication of the by now classical Johnson and Kotz Continuous Multivariate Distributions (Wiley, 1972) there have been substantial developments in multivariate distribution theory especially in the area of non-normal symmetric multivariate distributions. The book by Fang, Kotz and Ng summarizes these developments in a manner which is accessible to a reader with only limited background (advanced real-analysis calculus, linear algebra and elementary matrix calculus). Many of the results in this field are due to Kai-Tai Fang and his associates and appeared in Chinese publications only. A thorough literature search was conducted and the book represents the latest work - as of 1988 - in this rapidly developing field of multivariate distributions. The authors are experts in statistical distribution theory.
Multilateral negotiations on worldwide challenges have grown in importance with rising global interdependence. Yet, they have recently proven slow to address these challenges successfully. This book discusses the questions which have arisen from the highly varying results of recent multilateral attempts to reach cooperation on some of the critical global challenges of our times. These include the long-awaited UN climate change summit in Copenhagen, which ended without official agreement in 2009; Cancún one year later, attaining at least moderate tangible results; the first salient trade negotiations after the creation of the WTO, which broke down in Seattle in 1999 and were only successfully launched in 2001 in Qatar as the Doha Development Agenda; and the biosafety negotiations to address the international handling of Living Modified Organisms, which first collapsed in 1999, before they reached the Cartagena Protocol in 2000. Using in-depth empirical analysis, the book examines the determinants of success or failure in efforts to form regimes and manage the process of multilateral negotiations. The book draws on data from 62 interviews with organizers and chief climate and trade negotiators to discover what has driven delegations in their final decision on agreement, finding that with negotiation management, organisers hold a powerful tool in their hands to influence multilateral negotiations. This comprehensive negotiation framework, its comparison across regimes and the rich and first-hand empirical material from decision-makers make this invaluable reading for students and scholars of politics, international relations, global environmental governance, climate change and international trade, as well as organizers and delegates of multilateral negotiations. This research has been awarded the German Mediation Scholarship Prize for 2014 by the Center for Mediation in Cologne.
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