Although it was first published more than thirty-five years ago, Up the Organization continues to top the lists of best business books by groups as diverse as the American Management Association, Strategy + Business (Booz Allen Hamilton), and The Wharton Center for Leadership and Change Management. 1-800-CEO-READ ranks Townsend’s bestseller first among eighty books that “every manager must read.” This commemorative edition offers a new generation the benefit of Robert Townsend’s timeless wisdom as well as reflections on his work and life by those who knew and worked with him. This groundbreaking book continues to remind us not to get mired in all those sacred organizational routines that stifle people and strangle both profits and profitability. He shows a way to humanize business and a way to have fun while making it all work better than it ever worked before.
From the author of the New York Times #1 bestseller Up the Organization comes an engaging parable packed with valuable insights for the next generation of business. The most original, zany, and important management book of the '90s.--Warren Bennis, author of On Becoming a Leader. Photos & illustrations.
Townsend's freshly irreverent, punchy chapters are packed with uncompromising straight talk as they revamp tired thinking on such daily business concerns as corporate image, the business lunch, how to retire the boss, reorganizing, small business practices and company stock.
From the late nineteenth century until World War II, competing spheres of professional identity and practice redrew the field of history, establishing fundamental differences between the roles of university historians, archivists, staff at historical societies, history teachers, and others. In History’s Babel, Robert B. Townsend takes us from the beginning of this professional shift—when the work of history included not just original research, but also teaching and the gathering of historical materials—to a state of microprofessionalization that continues to define the field today. Drawing on extensive research among the records of the American Historical Association and a multitude of other sources, Townsend traces the slow fragmentation of the field from 1880 to the divisions of the 1940s manifest today in the diverse professions of academia, teaching, and public history. By revealing how the founders of the contemporary historical enterprise envisioned the future of the discipline, he offers insight into our own historical moment and the way the discipline has adapted and changed over time. Townsend’s work will be of interest not only to historians but to all who care about how the professions of history emerged, how they might go forward, and the public role they still can play.
In Reinventing Leadership, Bennis and Townsend discuss their concise leadership plan for the 21st century that reinvented leadership strategies and aims to empower both employees and organization. They focus on: •moving away from conventional standards of business practice •building trust •finding a mentor to encourage reflective backtalk •rewarding accomplishment
This volume focuses on how groups of economic agents organize themselves, with a special interest in the financial arrangements they adopt. This is achieved primarily through the development and refinement of neoclassical models incorporating transactions costs and impediments to trade, but also through parallels with the organization of real economies drawn from the history of early Europe. The author demonstrates that the key elements determining financial structure and economic organiation in history are key features in the described environments of modern economic models. These include the facts that economic agents are separated in time and space; economic life is full of uncertainty; there is often private information among agents; there are sometimes difficulties of communication among agents; and there can be problems in getting agents to commit to arrangements, the difficulties of costly and limited enforcement. Analyzing these central issues both in theory and in history, Professor Townsend makes a highly original contribution to the understanding of the diverse forms of economic and financial organization.
An economic analysis of what distributed ledgers can do, examining key components and discussing applications in both developed and emerging market economies. Distributed ledger technology (DLT) has the potential to transform economic organization and financial structure. In this book, Robert Townsend steps back from the hype and controversy surrounding DLT (and the related, but not synonymous, innovations of blockchain and Bitcoin) to offer an economic analysis of what distributed ledgers can do. Townsend examines the key components of distributed ledgers, discussing, evaluating, and illustrating each in the context of historical and contemporary economics, and reviewing featured applications in both developed economies and emerging-market countries.
Robert Townsend has made path- breaking contributions to contract theory and general equilibrium analysis. In this book, he combines the theory of general economic equilibrium with the notion that allocations and institutions of a given economy might be Pareto optimal to try to explain various salient features of the medieval village economy. The medieval village economy in many ways reflects the economies of poor high-risk agrarian villages of the contemporary world and serves as an ideal testing ground for Townsend's theories. The environment of the medieval village resembles those of relatively simple models with such key elements as uncertainty and private information, and its institutions display distinctive features such as fragmented landholding patterns. In this book standard models of macroeconomics and the literature on contract theory and mechanism design are reinterpreted, applied, and extended. The author draws both descriptive institutional material and particular parameter values from historical observations, and characterizes solutions to the models analytically and numerically. The idea is to see whether the observed outcomes can be explained, shedding light both on the historical material and the models themselves.
Spirit Falls, is a coming-of-age novel set in the empty hardscrabble borderland between Michigan's Upper Peninsula and northern Wisconsin. It is an affecting story of childhood friendship growing into profound love. The gypsy-like refugee Marina Svetaeva unexpectedly joins Ricky Belisle and Marie Jeanne, "M.J.," Charbonneau at curtain call on the night of their school's Christmas program. Her arrival looses a cascade of events that ultimately finds Ricky carrying M.J. in his arms across the Great Bogus Swamp into the teeth of a 100-year Lake Superior storm. If she survives he vows an ultimate sacrifice. Ricky Belisle is a boy born to first-generation immigrants. They bring with them the beliefs, manners and stories of the homeland and in so doing they create a disconnect in Ricky that forces him to begin the exploration that will eventually take him away from the land that has leached into his bones. Robert Townsend, a retired Air Force officer, was born and raised on a farm in northern Wisconsin and writes of a life he has witnessed. After graduating from the University of Wisconsin in 1969 at the height of the Vietnam War protests, Townsend flew 175 combat missions in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. In early 1971, he transferred to Berlin, Germany as a signals intelligence officer, then to the National Security Agency before returning as a war planner at HQ USAFE, Ramstein. From 1982-1989 he was deputy chief, Air Force Intelligence Agency, counter-deception directorate (at CIA). He is among some of the few men in America familiar with the war of ruse and stratagem between the US and the USSR. Spirit Falls is the prologue to a trilogy about deception and war and peace in a 20th century world of contrived and real moral ambiguities.
A remedy for the gap between micro and macro data, making measures of inequality and national income consistent with each other Increasing inequality, the impact of globalization, and the disparate effects of financial regulation and innovation are extraordinarily important topics that fuel spirited policy debates. And yet the facts underlying these debates are of doubtful accuracy. In reality, as Archawa Paweenawat and Robert Townsend show in Inequality and Globalization, there is a large gap between micro household surveys, which measure key outcomes such as inequality, and aggregated financial accounts, which measure macroeconomic totals and growth. Paweenawat and Townsend propose a remedy: integrated financial accounts, in which the flows in income statements, including saving and investment, are consistent with the changes in financial assets and liabilities in the balance sheet at micro and macro levels. None of the leading US micro household surveys or macro accounts meets this criterion. Drawing on extensive data from fieldwork in Thailand, Paweenawat and Townsend show how consistent integrated financial accounts at the individual household and small enterprise level can be created using household and firm survey data. Aggregated to the village level, these accounts can link anecdotal stories of individual households to their financial accounts, document the real impact on them from growth, and assess what would have happened to them if trade and financial liberalization had not been allowed. Paweenawat and Townsend then describe the next logical step: creating integrated financial accounts for the United States, working from the ground up and the top down. Only with these integrated accounts will policy debates on inequality and globalization have a solid factual basis.
Unique in its approach and in the variety of methods and data employed, this book is the first of its kind to provide an in-depth evaluation of the financial system of Thailand, a proto-typical Asian developing economy. Using a wealth of primary source qualitative and quantitative data, including survey data collected by the author, it evaluates the impact of specific financial institutions, markets for credit and insurance, and government policies on growth, inequality, and poverty at the macro, regional, and village level in Thailand. Useful not only as a guide to the Thai economy but more importantly as a means of assessing the impact that financial institutions and policy variation can have at the macro- and micro-level, including the distribution of gains and losses, this book will be invaluable to academics and policymakers with an interest in development finance.
Determined to find an answer, Jack and Michelle Townsend set out on a quest to find the original ending to the Gospel of Mark. Following ancient clues, they head for Rome, but what starts out as a scholarly search turns violent as two separate groups strive to stop the Townsends, plunging their quiet research into chaos. After a bomb destroys their office, the Townsends are pushed to the limits of their determination and commitment to God’s will. Can faith in God’s purposes endure in a swirl of conspiracy and espionage that brings the couple to the brink of death? "This is a story of well-hidden biblical secrets that have endured throughout the ages and of a couple's devotion to finding the truth. It's a story fraught with death, danger, and deception--of never knowing who to trust, and with a twist of an ending I didn't see coming. Great read!" --Sharon Sala, author of The Searcher's Trilogy: Blood Stains, Blood Ties, Blood Trails
We develop a micro-founded general equilibrium model with heterogeneous agents to identify pertinent constraints to financial inclusion. We evaluate quantitatively the policy impacts of relaxing each of these constraints separately, and in combination, on GDP and inequality. We focus on three dimensions of financial inclusion: access (determined by the size of participation costs), depth (determined by the size of collateral constraints resulting from limited commitment), and intermediation efficiency (determined by the size of interest rate spreads and default possibilities due to costly monitoring). We take the model to a firm-level data from the World Bank Enterprise Survey for six countries at varying degrees of economic development—three low-income countries (Uganda, Kenya, Mozambique), and three emerging market countries (Malaysia, the Philippines, and Egypt). The results suggest that alleviating different financial frictions have a differential impact across countries, with country-specific characteristics playing a central role in determining the linkages and tradeoffs between inclusion, GDP, inequality, and the distribution of gains and losses.
Why do many households remain exposed to large exogenous sources of non-systematic income risk? We use a series of randomized field experiments in rural India to test the importance of price and non-price factors in the adoption of an innovative rainfall insurance product. Demand is significantly price sensitive, but widespread take-up would not be achieved even if the product offered a payout ratio comparable to U.S. insurance contracts. We present evidence suggesting that lack of trust, liquidity constraints and limited salience are significant non-price frictions that constrain demand. We suggest contract design improvements to mitigate these frictions.
A guide to improving sales and profits in consumer financial services that stresses the development of a sales and service culture. The key principles discussed are interaction with customers, cultural support and values, service from the customer's point of view, service selling, characteristics of successful sales organizations, star sales people, perfecting the sales process, dealing with prospective clients, and ongoing interaction with the client.
Now with a new chapter that focuses on what great bosses really do. Dr. Sutton reveals new insights that he's learned since the writing of Good Boss, Bad Boss. Sutton adds revelatory thoughts about such legendary bosses as Ed Catmull, Steve Jobs, A.G. Lafley, and many more, and how you can implement their techniques. If you are a boss who wants to do great work, what can you do about it? Good Boss, Bad Boss is devoted to answering that question. Stanford Professor Robert Sutton weaves together the best psychological and management research with compelling stories and cases to reveal the mindset and moves of the best (and worst) bosses. This book was inspired by the deluge of emails, research, phone calls, and conversations that Dr. Sutton experienced after publishing his blockbuster bestseller The No Asshole Rule. He realized that most of these stories and studies swirled around a central figure in every workplace: THE BOSS. These heart-breaking, inspiring, and sometimes funny stories taught Sutton that most bosses - and their followers - wanted a lot more than just a jerk-free workplace. They aspired to become (or work for) an all-around great boss, somebody with the skill and grit to inspire superior work, commitment, and dignity among their charges. As Dr. Sutton digs into the nitty-gritty of what the best (and worst) bosses do, a theme runs throughout Good Boss, Bad Boss - which brings together the diverse lessons and is a hallmark of great bosses: They work doggedly to "stay in tune" with how their followers (and superiors, peers, and customers too) react to what they say and do. The best bosses are acutely aware that their success depends on having the self-awareness to control their moods and moves, to accurately interpret their impact on others, and to make adjustments on the fly that continuously spark effort, dignity, and pride among their people.
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