Book picks similar to
Building Successful Communities of Practice by Emily Webber
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Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference
William MacAskill - 2015
We donate our time and money to charities and causes we deem worthy, choose careers we consider meaningful, and patronize businesses and buy products we believe make the world a better place. Unfortunately, we often base these decisions on assumptions and emotions rather than facts. As a result, even our best intentions often lead to ineffective—and sometimes downright harmful—outcomes. How can we do better? While a researcher at Oxford, trying to figure out which career would allow him to have the greatest impact, William MacAskill confronted this problem head on. He discovered that much of the potential for change was being squandered by lack of information, bad data, and our own prejudice. As an antidote, he and his colleagues developed effective altruism, a practical, data-driven approach that allows each of us to make a tremendous difference regardless of our resources. Effective altruists believe that it’s not enough to simply do good; we must do good better. At the core of this philosophy are five key questions that help guide our altruistic decisions: How many people benefit, and by how much? Is this the most effective thing I can do? Is this area neglected? What would have happened otherwise? What are the chances of success, and how good would success be? By applying these questions to real-life scenarios, MacAskill shows how many of our assumptions about doing good are misguided. For instance, he argues one can potentially save more lives by becoming a plastic surgeon rather than a heart surgeon; measuring overhead costs is an inaccurate gauge of a charity’s effectiveness; and, it generally doesn’t make sense for individuals to donate to disaster relief. MacAskill urges us to think differently, set aside biases, and use evidence and careful reasoning rather than act on impulse. When we do this—when we apply the head and the heart to each of our altruistic endeavors—we find that each of us has the power to do an astonishing amount of good.
What They Don't Teach You at Harvard Business School: Notes from a Street-Smart Executive
Mark H. McCormack - 1984
Featuring a new foreword by Ariel Emanuel and Patrick WhitesellMark H. McCormack, one of the most successful entrepreneurs in American business, is widely credited as the founder of the modern-day sports marketing industry. On a handshake with Arnold Palmer and less than a thousand dollars, he started International Management Group and, over a four-decade period, built the company into a multimillion-dollar enterprise with offices in more than forty countries.To this day, McCormack's business classic remains a must-read for executives and managers at every level. Relating his proven method of "applied people sense" in key chapters on sales, negotiation, reading others and yourself, and executive time management, McCormack presents powerful real-world guidance on- the secret life of a deal - management philosophies that don't work (and one that does) - the key to running a meeting--and how to attend one - the positive use of negative reinforcement - proven ways to observe aggressively and take the edge - and much more Praise for What They Don't Teach You at Harvard Business School "Incisive, intelligent, and witty, What They Don't Teach You at Harvard Business School is a sure winner--like the author himself. Reading it has taught me a lot."--Rupert Murdoch, executive chairman, News Corp, chairman and CEO, 21st Century Fox "Clear, concise, and informative . . . Like a good mentor, this book will be a valuable aid throughout your business career."--Herbert J. Siegel, chairman, Chris-Craft Industries, Inc."Mark McCormack describes the approach I have personally seen him adopt, which has not only contributed to the growth of his business, but mine as well."--Arnold Palmer"There have been what we love to call dynasties in every sport. IMG has been different. What this one brilliant man, Mark McCormack, created is the only dynasty ever over all sport."--Frank Deford, senior contributing writer, Sports Illustrated
Impact Mapping: Making a Big Impact with Software Products and Projects
Gojko Adzic - 2012
The result is a tremendous amount of time and money wasted due to wrong assumptions, lack of focus, poor communication of objectives, lack of understanding and misalignment with overall goals. There has to be a better way to deliver!This handbook is a practical guide to impact mapping, a simple yet incredibly effective method for collaborative strategic planning that helps organisations make an impact with software. Impact mapping helps to create better plans and roadmaps that ensure alignment of business and delivery, and are easily adaptable to change. Impact mapping fits nicely into several current trends in software product management and release planning, including goal-oriented requirements engineering, frequent iterative delivery, agile and lean software methods, lean startup product development cycles, and design thinking.Who is this book for?The primary audience of this book are senior people involved in building software products or delivering software projects, from both business and delivery sides. This includes business sponsors and those whose responsibilities include product ownership, project oversight or portfolio management, architecture, business analysis, quality improvement and assurance and delivery. - Business people assigned to software projects will learn how to communicate their ideas better.- Senior product or project sponsors will learn how to communicate their assumptions more effectively to delivery teams, how to engage delivery teams to make better strategic decisions, and how to manage their project portfolio more effectively.- Delivery teams that are already working under the umbrella of agile or lean delivery methods, and more recently lean startup ideas, will learn how to better focus deliverables and engage business sponsors and users.- Delivery teams moving to agile or lean delivery methods will get ideas on how to address some common issues with scaling these practices, such as creating a big picture view, splitting work into small chunks that still have business value and reporting progress more meaningfully.About the authorGojko Adzic is a strategic software delivery consultant who works with ambitious teams to improve the quality of their software products and processes. Gojko won the 2012 Jolt Award for the best book, was voted by peers as the most influential agile testing professional in 2011, and his blog won the UK Agile Award for the best online publication in 2010. To get in touch, write to gojko@neuri.co.uk or visit http://gojko.net.
The Influential Mind: What the Brain Reveals About Our Power to Change Others
Tali Sharot - 2017
We all have a duty to affect others—from the classroom to the boardroom to social media. But how skilled are we at this role, and can we become better? It turns out that many of our instincts—from relying on facts and figures to shape opinions, to insisting others are wrong or attempting to exert control—are ineffective, because they are incompatible with how people’s minds operate. Sharot shows us how to avoid these pitfalls, and how an attempt to change beliefs and actions is successful when it is well-matched with the core elements that govern the human brain. Sharot reveals the critical role of emotion in influence, the weakness of data and the power of curiosity. Relying on the latest research in neuroscience, behavioral economics and psychology, the book provides fascinating insight into the complex power of influence, good and bad.
Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead
Sheryl Sandberg - 2013
The book soared to the top of bestseller lists internationally, igniting global conversations about women and ambition. Sandberg packed theatres, dominated opinion pages, appeared on every major television show and on the cover of Time magazine, and sparked ferocious debate about women and leadership. Ask most women whether they have the right to equality at work and the answer will be a resounding yes, but ask the same women whether they'd feel confident asking for a raise, a promotion, or equal pay, and some reticence creeps in. The statistics, although an improvement on previous decades, are certainly not in women's favour – of 197 heads of state, only twenty-two are women. Women hold just 20 percent of seats in parliaments globally, and in the world of big business, a meagre eighteen of the Fortune 500 CEOs are women. In Lean In, Sheryl Sandberg – Facebook COO and one of Fortune magazine's Most Powerful Women in Business – draws on her own experience of working in some of the world's most successful businesses and looks at what women can do to help themselves, and make the small changes in their life that can effect change on a more universal scale.
Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator
Ryan Holiday - 2012
A malicious online rumor costs a company millions. A political sideshow derails the national news cycle and destroys a candidate. Some product or celebrity zooms from total obscurity to viral sensation. What you don't know is that someone is responsible for all this. Usually, someone like me.I'm a media manipulator. In a world where blogs control and distort the news, my job is to control blogs--as much as any one person can. In today's culture... 1) Blogs like "Gawker," "Buzzfeed" and the "Huffington Post" drive the media agenda. 2) Bloggers are slaves to money, technology, and deadlines. 3) Manipulators wield these levers to shape everything you read, see and watch--online and off.Why am I giving away these secrets? Because I'm tired of a world where blogs take indirect bribes, marketers help write the news, reckless journalists spread lies, and no one is accountable for any of it. I'm pulling back the curtain because I don't want anyone else to get blindsided. I'm going to explain exactly how the media "really" works. What you choose to do with this information is up to you.
The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering
Frederick P. Brooks Jr. - 1975
With a blend of software engineering facts and thought-provoking opinions, Fred Brooks offers insight for anyone managing complex projects. These essays draw from his experience as project manager for the IBM System/360 computer family and then for OS/360, its massive software system. Now, 45 years after the initial publication of his book, Brooks has revisited his original ideas and added new thoughts and advice, both for readers already familiar with his work and for readers discovering it for the first time.The added chapters contain (1) a crisp condensation of all the propositions asserted in the original book, including Brooks' central argument in The Mythical Man-Month: that large programming projects suffer management problems different from small ones due to the division of labor; that the conceptual integrity of the product is therefore critical; and that it is difficult but possible to achieve this unity; (2) Brooks' view of these propositions a generation later; (3) a reprint of his classic 1986 paper "No Silver Bullet"; and (4) today's thoughts on the 1986 assertion, "There will be no silver bullet within ten years."
Now, Discover Your Strengths: The revolutionary Gallup program that shows you how to develop your unique talents and strengths
Marcus Buckingham - 2001
This updated assessment includes reports and resources that go far beyond the standardized reports of the older assessment by providing you with personalized insight statements unique to your specific combination of strengths.Many people have little sense of their talents and strengths, much less the ability to build their lives around them. Instead, they are raised and taught to become experts in their weaknesses — and spend their lives trying to fix them — while their strengths lie dormant. Led by Don Clifton, the Father of Strengths-Based Psychology, Gallup created a revolutionary program to help people identify their talents; develop them into strengths; and enjoy consistent, near-perfect performance. Twenty years ago, Gallup released Now, Discover Your Strengths to bring this program to the world. At the heart of this book is CliftonStrengths, the assessment that is the product of decades of research and hundreds of thousands of interviews to identify the most prevalent human strengths. CliftonStrengths reveals 34 dominant talent themes that you can translate into personal and career success. To develop this assessment, Gallup conducted psychological profiles with more than 2 million individuals to help people around the world focus and perfect these themes. Since Now, Discover Your Strengths was first released two decades ago, more than 20 million people worldwide have taken the CliftonStrengths assessment. The 20th anniversary edition includes a unique access code to take CliftonStrengths — previously known as StrengthsFinder 2.0 — which is a significantly more robust program than the assessment that appeared in the original edition of the book. This web-based assessment analyzes your instinctive reactions and immediately presents you with your top five themes. Once you know which of the 34 themes you lead with — such as Achiever, Activator, Empathy, Futuristic and Strategic — the book will show you how to use your top themes for your own development, for your success as a manager and for the success of your organization. With accessible and profound insights into how to turn talents into strengths, and with immediate online feedback from the CliftonStrengths assessment at its core, Now, Discover Your Strengths is one of the most groundbreaking and powerful business books ever written.
Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming
Peter Seibel - 2009
As the words "at work" suggest, Peter Seibel focuses on how his interviewees tackle the day–to–day work of programming, while revealing much more, like how they became great programmers, how they recognize programming talent in others, and what kinds of problems they find most interesting. Hundreds of people have suggested names of programmers to interview on the Coders at Work web site: http://www.codersatwork.com. The complete list was 284 names. Having digested everyone’s feedback, we selected 16 folks who’ve been kind enough to agree to be interviewed:- Frances Allen: Pioneer in optimizing compilers, first woman to win the Turing Award (2006) and first female IBM fellow- Joe Armstrong: Inventor of Erlang- Joshua Bloch: Author of the Java collections framework, now at Google- Bernie Cosell: One of the main software guys behind the original ARPANET IMPs and a master debugger- Douglas Crockford: JSON founder, JavaScript architect at Yahoo!- L. Peter Deutsch: Author of Ghostscript, implementer of Smalltalk-80 at Xerox PARC and Lisp 1.5 on PDP-1- Brendan Eich: Inventor of JavaScript, CTO of the Mozilla Corporation - Brad Fitzpatrick: Writer of LiveJournal, OpenID, memcached, and Perlbal - Dan Ingalls: Smalltalk implementor and designer- Simon Peyton Jones: Coinventor of Haskell and lead designer of Glasgow Haskell Compiler- Donald Knuth: Author of The Art of Computer Programming and creator of TeX- Peter Norvig: Director of Research at Google and author of the standard text on AI- Guy Steele: Coinventor of Scheme and part of the Common Lisp Gang of Five, currently working on Fortress- Ken Thompson: Inventor of UNIX- Jamie Zawinski: Author of XEmacs and early Netscape/Mozilla hackerWhat you’ll learn:How the best programmers in the world do their jobWho is this book for?Programmers interested in the point of view of leaders in the field. Programmers looking for approaches that work for some of these outstanding programmers.
The People's Scrum: Agile Ideas for Revolutionary Transformation
Tobias Mayer - 2012
Whether you agree or disagree with him, and you're likely to do both, the essays in this book will always give you something worth thinking about.Mike Cohn, author of Succeeding with Agile: Software Development using ScrumTobias Mayer’s signature move is to pick up a stone and throw it through our glass house, smashing our old paradigms and causing us, after some pain and turmoil, to say, “OK, my comfortable way doesn’t work anymore. Now what?”Lyssa Adkins, author of Coaching Agile TeamsTobias Mayer has a really interesting mind: wide, deep, imaginative, and quirky. I value the quirky most because it's unpredictable. But in hindsight his jumps reveal themselves as the result of intelligence and rigor. What's more, he gets those jumps gracefully down on paper so that we can all participate.Lee Devin, author of Artrful Making and The Soul of DesignTobias Mayer is known in the agile community as a brilliant and evangelical orator, an innovative trainer and an extraordinary trouble maker. You could call him the Hunter S. Thompson of the software arena, and no one who knows him would laugh. This book is a collection of essays drawn from his writing over the past seven years on the blogs Agile Thinking and Agile Anarchy, missives from the front lines of agile practice that represent the next generation of thinking on conventional agile topics like self-organization, technical debt and estimation–and utterly original writing on new topics like organizational anarchy, corporate oppression, the effect of testosterone on business practices, and artisanal product development.Moving beyond the mere how-to, this is a book to excite the emotions and the intellect in those of us who have chosen the path of scrum to guide us in our work lives. Not since Paul Graham’s Hackers and Painters has the discussion of software development been elevated to this level of world-view-changing discourse. In Tobias Mayer, technology has an exciting new voice to lead us into the brave new world of agile practice.
Negotiation Genius: How to Overcome Obstacles and Achieve Brilliant Results at the Bargaining Table and Beyond
Deepak Malhotra - 2007
Drawing on decades of behavioral research plus the experience of thousands of business clients, the authors take the mystery out of preparing for and executing negotiations—whether they involve multimillion-dollar deals or improving your next salary offer.What sets negotiation geniuses apart? They are the men and women who know how to:•Identify negotiation opportunities where others see no room for discussion•Discover the truth even when the other side wants to conceal it•Negotiate successfully from a position of weakness•Defuse threats, ultimatums, lies, and other hardball tactics•Overcome resistance and “sell” proposals using proven influence tactics•Negotiate ethically and create trusting relationships—along with great deals•Recognize when the best move is to walk away•And much, much moreThis book gets “down and dirty.” It gives you detailed strategies—including talking points—that work in the real world even when the other side is hostile, unethical, or more powerful. When you finish it, you will already have an action plan for your next negotiation. You will know what to do and why. You will also begin building your own reputation as a negotiation genius.
Improving Performance: How to Manage the White Space in the Organization Chart
Geary A. Rummler - 1990
It was the first such approach to bridge the gap between organization strategy and the individual. Now, in this revised and expanded new edition, Rummler and Brache reflect on the key needs of organizations faced with today's challenge of managing change. With multiple charts, checklists, hands-on tools and case studies, the authors show how they implemented their Performance Improvement methodology in over 250 successful projects with clients such as Hewlett-Packard, 3M, Shell Oil, and Citibank.
HR Transformation: Building Human Resources from the Outside in
Dave Ulrich - 2009
Businesses of the future need all hands on deck when implementing new ways to stimulate grown and cost efficiency, and this includes human resources. In HR Transformation, the team presents a four-phase model of transformation that shows you step-by-step how to make meaningful progress in contributing to the performance of your company by redesigning HR to work as a strategic partnership.From the "#1 Management Educator & Guru"-BusinessWeek"The authors have presented us with an accessible, readable, and practical illustration of a clear path for successful strategy execution in a complex environment." -Majed Al Romaithi, Executive Director, Abu Dhabi Investment Authority"HR can only transform organizations if it transforms HR. This book shows us how. HR Transformation would have been important in the past-it is critical now! We are entering a new world. HR Transformation can help our organizations thrive in the midst of uncertainty." -Marshall Goldsmith, author of the Wall Street Journal bestsellers What Got You Here Won't Get You There and Succession: Are You Ready? "Ulrich and his colleagues talk tough and provide a detailed blueprint for how those of us in the field can use our own tools to do a "720-degree" evaluation of ourselves. We cannot contribute to the success of our organizations until we upgrade ourselves." -Linda A. Hill, Wallace Brett Donham Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School"Based on groundbreaking research with hundreds of companies and thousands of executives, HR Transformation provides compelling theory and practical tools to create alignment between strategy, systems, and people. This important book should be read carefully by leadership teams everywhere." -Mark Huselid, Professor of HR Strategy, Rutgers University, Co-author of The HR Scorecard, The Workforce Scorecard, and The Differentiated WorkforceTurn to the front matter for more than thirty rousing endorsements of HR Transformation.INCLUDES CASE STUDIES FROM Intel, Pfizer, Takeda, Flextronics
The Circle Way: A Leader in Every Chair
Christina Baldwin - 1987
As organizations of all kinds move increasingly toward shared and rotating leadership, they are calling on the circle model to form sustainable teams and adopt circle-driven group processes such as World Café, Open Space, and Art of Hosting. Meetings in the round have become the preferred tool for moving individual commitment into group action. This book lays out the structure of circle conversation, based on the original work of the co-authors who have studied and standardized the essential elements that constitute circle practice. It takes readers through a circle visual (the Components of Circle) and presents both structure and story so that readers understand how these elements come into play and how they interrelate and interact. It also embeds circle process experience in stories and examples drawing on the authors’ 15 years of experience as global thought leaders and originators of this form, and it presents detailed instructions and suggestions for getting started, setting goals, and solving conflicts.
Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking
Susan Cain - 2012
They are the ones who prefer listening to speaking; who innovate and create but dislike self-promotion; who favor working on their own over working in teams. It is to introverts—Rosa Parks, Chopin, Dr. Seuss, Steve Wozniak—that we owe many of the great contributions to society. In Quiet, Susan Cain argues that we dramatically undervalue introverts and shows how much we lose in doing so. She charts the rise of the Extrovert Ideal throughout the twentieth century and explores how deeply it has come to permeate our culture. She also introduces us to successful introverts—from a witty, high-octane public speaker who recharges in solitude after his talks, to a record-breaking salesman who quietly taps into the power of questions. Passionately argued, superbly researched, and filled with indelible stories of real people, Quiet has the power to permanently change how we see introverts and, equally important, how they see themselves.Now with Extra Libris material, including a reader’s guide and bonus content.