Rose Randall is the archetypical reluctant project manager. Following a painful project failure years ago, Rose s life is cast into chaos when she is once again thrown into the role against her wishes. Faced with a struggling project, help comes from an unexpected source guiding Rose in the direction of Real Options.When you have read Commitment , you:* understand what the Real Options model is;* can apply the Real Options model to manage project risks successfully;* understand why much of your life involves options that you currently are treating as commitments;* see the world through a different filter opening up many new possibilities;* understand the difference between Commitments and Options.Because the book will:* provide specific examples of how a project can manage its risks using the Real Options model;* outline a simple technique for making decisions;* make you aware of all the decisions you make every day;* build your confidence in your ability to decide when to commit and when to leave options open.In short, this book is indispensable for new and experienced project managers plus anyone else who is interested in knowing more about managing large projects.

    But many managers and leaders struggle to apply these powerful tools within their organizations, as they often run counter to traditional managerial thinking and practice.Authors Nathan Furr and Jeff Dyer wrote this book to address that very problem. Following the breakout success of The Innovator’s DNA—which Dyer wrote with Hal Gregersen and bestselling author Clay Christensen to provide a framework for generating ideas—this book shows how to make those ideas actually happen, to commercialize them for success.Based on their research inside corporations and successful start-ups, Furr and Dyer developed the innovator’s method, an end-to-end process for creating, refining, and bringing ideas to market. They show when and how to apply the tools of their method, how to adapt them to your business, and how to answer commonly asked questions about the method itself, including: How do we know if this idea is worth pursuing? Have we found the right solution? What is the best business model for this new offering? This book focuses on the “how”—how to test, how to validate, and how to commercialize ideas with the lean, design, and agile techniques successful start-ups use.Whether you’re launching a start-up, leading an established one, or simply working to get a new product off the ground in an existing company, this book is for you.

    Now, from the AGI-Goldratt Institute and Jeff Cox, the same creative writer who co-authored The Goal, comes VELOCITY, the book that reveals how to achieve outstanding bottom-line results by integrating the world's three most powerful continuous improvement disciplines: Lean, Six Sigma, and Goldratt's Theory of Constraints. Used by the United States Navy and United States Marine Corps to dramatically improve some of the most complex, logistically vast supply chains in the world, the VELOCITY APPROACH draws on the strengths of all three disciplines to deliver breakthrough performance gains. In physics, speed with direction is velocity; in business, the application of VELOCITY means your organization can achieve operational speed with strategic direction to outmaneuver competitors, gain loyalty with customers, and rapidly build sustainable earnings growth -- in as little as one or two business quarters. Dee Jacob and Suzan Bergland, two princi-pals of AGI, have been teaching the concepts, techniques, and tools of VELOCITY to major corporations, including Procter & Gamble, ITT, and Northrop Grumman, for years. Now they unlock the door for you to see how to apply their insights and methods to your organization -- be it business, not-for-profit, manufacturing, or service based -- in order to shorten lead times, slash inventories, reduce production variability, and increase sales. Writer Jeff Cox returns with the vivid, realistic style that made The Goal so readable yet so edifying. Thrust into the presidency of the subsidiary company where she has managed sales and marketing, Amy Cieolara is mandated by her corporate superiors to implement Lean Six Sigma (LSS) in order to appease a key customer. Assigned to help her is LSS Master Black Belt Wayne Reese, installed as her operations manager. But as time goes on and corporate pressure mounts, Amy finds she has to start thinking for herself -- and learning from everyone around her -- and she arrives at the series of steps that form the core of the VELOCITY APPROACH. VELOCITY offers keen insight into the human and organizational factors that so often derail growth while teaching you proven, practical techniques for restarting and revving up the internal engines of your company to reach new levels of success. Colorful characters, believable situations, and everything from dice games to AGI's "reality tree" techniques make this business novel a vital resource for everyone seeking to deliver business improvement in these challenging economic times -- and far into the future.

    The more great people on your team, the more successful your organization will be. But that’s easier said than done. Statistically, half of all employment decisions result in a mishire: The wrong person winds up in the wrong job. But companies that have followed Bradford Smart’s advice in Topgrading have boosted their successful hiring rate to 90 percent or better, giving them an unbeatable competitive advantage. Now Smart has fully revised his 1999 management classic to reintroduce the topgrading concept, which works for companies large and small in any industry. The author spells out his practical approach to finding and managing A-level talent—as well as coaching B players to turn them into A players. He provides intriguing case studies drawn from more than four thousand in-depth interviews. As Smart writes in his introduction, “All organizations, all businesses live or die mostly on their talent, and any manager who fails to topgrade is nuts, or a C player. . . . Those who, way deep down, would sooner see an organization die than nudge an incompetent person out of a job should not read this book... Topgrading is for A players and all those aspiring to be A players.” On the web: http://www.topgrading.com/

    This second edition of a bestselling introduction to construction management walks you through each stage of the construction management process.Written from the constructor's perspective, this book will familiarize you with all the construction management fundamentals and how Building Information Modeling (BIM) is impacting the construction management profession.Covers interoperability of technology advances in the construction industry Explains how BIM is challenging the traditional approach to project delivery and how this affects the constructor's role Elaborates each stage of the design and construction process and the tasks associated with each of them Shows step-by-step how to estimate project costs, administer contracts, manage job site and construction operations, plan and schedule a project, monitor project performance, manage project quality and safety, and assess project risks Provides review questions at the end of each chapter to help enforce understanding The tried-and-true project management principles presented in this book will help ensure you a successful start to your career.

    Step-by-step strategy of how to successfully organize sales, marketing and business development for a new product or company. The book offers insight into what makes some startups successful and leaves others selling off their furniture. Packed with concrete examples, the book will leave you with new skills to organize sales, marketing and your business for success.

    But honest and open conversations are not taking place between management and Agile delivery teams.In A Seat at the Table, CIO Mark Schwartz explores the role of IT leadership as it is now and opens the door to reveal IT leadership as it should be - an integral part of the value creation engine. With wit and easy style, Schwartz reveals that the only way to become an Agile IT leader is to be courageous - to throw off the attitude and assumptions that have kept CIOs from taking their rightful seat at the table. CIOs, step on up, your seat at the table is waiting for you.Listening Length: 9 hours and 20 minutes

    Through four years of groundbreaking research, Dr. Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim set out to find a way to measure software delivery performance—and what drives it—using rigorous statistical methods. This book presents both the findings and the science behind that research. Readers will discover how to measure the performance of their teams, and what capabilities they should invest in to drive higher performance.

    In The Knowledge-Creating Company, Nonaka and Takeuchi provide an inside look at how Japanese companies go about creating this new knowledge organizationally.The authors point out that there are two types of knowledge: explicit knowledge, contained in manuals and procedures, and tacit knowledge, learned only by experience, and communicated only indirectly, through metaphor and analogy. U.S. managers focus on explicit knowledge. The Japanese, on the otherhand, focus on tacit knowledge. And this, the authors argue, is the key to their success--the Japanese have learned how to transform tacit into explicit knowledge.To explain how this is done--and illuminate Japanese business practices as they do so--the authors range from Greek philosophy to Zen Buddhism, from classical economists to modern management gurus, illustrating the theory of organizational knowledge creation with case studies drawn from such firmsas Honda, Canon, Matsushita, NEC, Nissan, 3M, GE, and even the U.S. Marines. For instance, using Matsushita's development of the Home Bakery (the world's first fully automated bread-baking machine for home use), they show how tacit knowledge can be converted to explicit knowledge: when the designerscouldn't perfect the dough kneading mechanism, a software programmer apprenticed herself with the master baker at Osaka International Hotel, gained a tacit understanding of kneading, and then conveyed this information to the engineers. In addition, the authors show that, to create knowledge, thebest management style is neither top-down nor bottom-up, but rather what they call middle-up-down, in which the middle managers form a bridge between the ideals of top management and the chaotic realities of the frontline.As we make the turn into the 21st century, a new society is emerging. Peter Drucker calls it the knowledge society, one that is drastically different from the industrial society, and one in which acquiring and applying knowledge will become key competitive factors. Nonaka and Takeuchi go a stepfurther, arguing that creating knowledge will become the key to sustaining a competitive advantage in the future.Because the competitive environment and customer preferences changes constantly, knowledge perishes quickly. With The Knowledge-Creating Company, managers have at their fingertips years of insight from Japanese firms that reveal how to create knowledge continuously, and how to exploit it to makesuccessful new products, services, and systems.

    

    However, he has discovered that "being successful" is only part of life's challenge. Success is very often a short-lived high. People arrive at the goal line in life, look into the end zone and discover that it contains many of the things that money will buy, but it contains very little of what money won't buy. Zig believes that yes, success is worth it, but it is not enough. The next step is to move from success into significance. In A View from the Top Zig will teach you: to bring in spiritual dimention in all areas of your life the power of giving others a hand up, not just a hand out to make radical changes with minute steps to develop a wall of gratitude to combine your mission and your vision A View from the Top will help you achieve success and significance, so when you reach the top you'll find the view simply magnificent.

    Aging computer systems present complex technical challenges for organizations both large and small, and Kill It with Fire provides sound strategies for spearheading modernization efforts.Kill It with Fire examines aging computer systems, the evolution of technology over time, and how organizations can modernize, maintain, and future-proof their current systems.In playful and engaging prose, Marianne Bellotti uses real-world case studies to illustrate the technical challenges of modernizing complex legacy systems, as well as the organizational challenges of time-intensive maintenance efforts. The book explains how to evaluate existing architecture, create upgrade plans, and handle communication structures. Team exercises and historical analyses of complex computer systems make this a valuable resource for those in both older and newer companies, and will help readers restore or create systems built to evolve as time goes on.

    Customer service, they assert, is only needed when a company does something wrong--eliminating the need for service is the best way to satisfy customers. To be successful, companies need to treat service as a data point of dysfunction and figure what they need to do to eliminate the demand. The Best Service Is No Service outlines these seven principles to deliver the best service that ultimately leads to no service: Eliminate dumb contacts Create engaging self-service Be proactive Make it easy to contact your company Own the actions across the company Listen and act Deliver great service experiences

    Senge's best-selling The Fifth Discipline led Business Week to dub him the "new guru" of the corporate world; here he offers executives a step-by-step guide to building "learning organizations" of their own.

    S. Air Force, Dan Ward explored these questions during tours of duty at military research laboratories, the Air Force Institute of Technology, an intelligence agency, the Pentagon and Afghanistan. The pattern he noticed revealed that the most successful project leaders in both the public and private sectors delivered top-shelf products with a skeleton crew, a shoestring budget, and a cannonball schedule. Excessive investment of time, money or complexity actually reduced innovation. He concluded the secret to innovation is to be fast, inexpensive, simple, and small.FIRE presents an entertaining and practical framework for pursuing rapid, frugal innovation. A story-filled blend of pop culture and engineering insight, FIRE has something for everyone: strategic concepts leaders can use as they cast a vision, actionable principles for managers as they make business decisions, and practical tools for workers as they design, build, assess and test new products. Plus, there's a funny story about buying a dishwasher.