A native all his life, Chris Franks has been exploring England, its places and people, for nearly 20 years. Over that time, he has written about his experiences in several leading national magazines, including This England, The Yorkshire Dalesman, Wiltshire Life and The Great Outdoors. This collection gathers together over forty of those experiences in a nostalgic trip round some of the country's most exotic churches, castles, natural beauty spots and ot...

Total Value Development provides a framework to help businesses innovate and derive greater value from the services they offer. The secret is to devise an innovative model built on total value creation, identified as the total value development (TVD) model.The TVD model has broad applicability for any large organization. Here, case studies are presented showing the effectiveness of the TVD model in its practical application within companies. Statistical evidence is used to recommend improv...

About half of today’s nation-states originated as some kind of breakaway state. The end of the Cold War witnessed a resurgence of separatist activity affecting nearly every part of the globe and stimulated a new generation of scholars to consider separatism and secession.As the 150th anniversary of the American Civil War approaches, this collection of essays allows us to view within a broader international context one of modern history's bloodiest conflicts over secession. The cont...

New tools for managing complexityDoes your organization manage complexity by making things more complicated? If so, you are not alone.According to The Boston Consulting Group’s fascinating Complexity Index, business complexity has increased sixfold during the past sixty years. And, all the while, organizational complicatedness-that is, the number of structures, processes, committees, decision-making forums, and systems-has increased by a whopping f...

Design IT Organizations for Agility at ScaleAspiring digital businesses need overall IT agility, not just development team agility. In Agile IT Organization Design, IT management consultant and ThoughtWorks veteran Sriram Narayan shows how to infuse agility throughout your organization. Drawing on more than fifteen years’ experience working with enterprise clients in IT-intensive industries, he introduces an agile approach to “Business–IT ...

#1 Wall Street Journal and USA Today bestselling author Dave Ulrich offers HR professionals a new line of defense in the corporate “war for talent.”Destined to be a classic in the field, this game-changing book from HR visionary Dave Ulrich tackles one of the greatest challenges in Human Resources today: the talent wars. As companies grow increasingly and aggressively competitive in hiring and nurturing individual employees, this book offers a ref...

Without effective execution, no business strategy can succeed. This second edition delivers a powerful framework every leader can use to overcome the obstacles to successfully deploying business strategy. In this book, leading consultant and Wharton professor Lawrence Hrebiniak offers a comprehensive, disciplined process model for making strategy work in the real world. Drawing on his unsurpassed experience, Hrebiniak shows why execution is even more important than many senior executives r...

Lessons from Agile’s First Decade…Leadership for Agile’s Next DecadeThe agile software movement has now been around for a full decade. As coauthor of the original Agile Manifesto, Jim Highsmith has been at its heart since the beginning. He’s spent the past decade helping hundreds of organizations transition to agile/lean. When it comes to agile, he’s seen it all–in a variety of industries, worldwide.Now, in Adaptive Leadership

Staff members determine the success of any organization, and since staff members are people, they don’t behave the same way. This means managers have to be amateur psychologists when they hire, interview, orient, train, coach, discipline, and evaluate performance. But how many managers have specific human resources training? Human resources is like any other discipline; it requires study of proper processes to gain knowledge, and then practice to turn knowledge into skills. No one is born ...

Meet any business or competitive analysis challenge: deliver actionable business insights and on-point recommendations that enterprise decision makers can’t and won’t ignore! All you need is one book: Business and Competitive Analysis, Second Edition . This generation’s definitive guide to business and competitive analysis has now been thoroughly updated with additional methods, applications and examples. Craig S. Fleisher and Babette E. Bensoussan begin with a practical primer...

Many organizations struggle with the dynamics and the complexity of today's social ecosystems that connect everyone and everything, everywhere and all the time. Facing challenges at the intersection of business models, technical developments, and human needs, modern enterprises must overcome the siloed thinking and isolated efforts of the past, and instead address their relationships to people holistically. In Intersection, Milan Guenther introduces a Strategic Design approach that aligns ...

How can we ensure our strategy will succeed, especially in changing and uncertain times? The answer, as explained in Strategy Mapping for Learning Organizations, is to become a more responsive organization - one that captures its strategy in strategy maps, learns from that strategy and can adapt to deliver results. For anyone involved in managing strategy and performance, applying the powerful strategy mapping techniques will move your balanced scorecard from an operational tool to one of ...