Does it seem you’ve formulated a rock-solid strategy, yet your firm still can’t get ahead? If so, construct a solid foundation for business execution—an IT infrastructure and digitized business processes to automate your company’s core capabilities. In Enterprise Architecture as Strategy: Creating a Foundation for Business Execution, authors Jeanne W. Ross, Peter Weill, and David C. Robertson show you how.The key? Make tough decisions about which processes you must execute well, then implement the IT systems needed to digitize those processes. Citing numerous companies worldwide, the authors show how constructing the right enterprise architecture enhances profitability and time to market, improves strategy execution, and even lowers IT costs. Though clear, engaging explanation, they demonstrate how to define your operating model—your vision of how your firm will survive and grow—and implement it through your enterprise architecture. Their counterintuitive but vital message: when it comes to executing your strategy, your enterprise architecture may matter far more than your strategy itself.

A bicycle shed is a building, but the Lincoln Cathedral is a piece of architecture. -Nicholaus Pevsner, architectural historian ______________________________________________________________ Traditional building architecture and enterprise architecture use similar processes for developing their respective end products. The architect calls upon architecture's first principles and combines them with the experience of doing architecture in the real world. Experienced architects apply first principles and add practical experience to integrate fit, balance and compromise into the architectural process. Qualified enterprise architects possess applied first principles including the understanding that most architectural decisions are driven by business decisions, particularly business investment decisions. This book brings the reader the insights from two enterprise architects with decades of real-world experience. The book consolidates the examples and experiences of innovative uses of enterprise architecture in enhancing transformation initiatives. The book clearly fills a gap in the current literature, and amplifies the role of enterprise architecture in building future-ready enterprises, an essential trait of all successful enterprises. Read it, learn from it, and put it to work for the future of your enterprise.

Digital transformation has accelerated nearly tenfold in recent years as both a business and technology journey. Yet, most white papers and how-to guides still focus solely on the business side, rather than include methods for optimizing the technology behind it. This handbook shows CIOs, IT directors, and architects how to balance these two concerns successfully.You'll explore current technology trends and shifts required to build a digital business, including how enterprise architecture should evolve if it's to sustain and grow your business. A CIO who can handle digital transformation along with business interests is a rare find. This is the ideal guide to modernizing IT.You'll examine: The latest trends and technologies driving the need for a digital enterprise architecture New components, layers, and concepts that comprise a framework for digital enterprise architecture Skills and technologies you need to modernize an enterprise architecture for a digital business Domains and characteristics of a digital enterprise architecture How to map digital enterprise technologies to the appropriate teams

Organizations have grown so complex in recent years that it is difficult to visualize or understand how all of the parts fit together.At the same time, executives want to reshape and transform their organizations to be more competitive and more customer centric.This requires that executives across business units view issues and solutions from a shared, enterprise-wide perspective.Business Architecture maps and documents the essence of the enterprise.Visualizing a business through architectural disciplines is not entirely new. Creating a business-friendly framework that allows business professionals to visualize and transform organizations, however, is a groundbreaking achievement!The most important aspect of business architecture is enabling business executives, managers and professionals to take ownership and drive enterprise transformation, a role that has oftentimes been delegated by default to IT. Historically, the term "enterprise architecture" has a tendency to turn off business professionals because they immediately assume that the concept is an IT focused creation. This is not an indictment of IT but rather a call to action for business executives to take ownership of business architecture and related business transformation strategies. The decisions that are made today can make or break organizations going forward into a complex, uncertain future.Make no mistake. This is not a book about IT, but a book for business professionals who want to address difficult challenges across enterprises that have become bewildering monoliths of complexity. This book puts the business back in the driver's seat when it comes to setting strategy, crystallizing a vision and turning that vision into bottom line business value.

Lankhorst and his co‑authors present ArchiMate® 3.0, enterprise modelling language that captures the complexity of architectural domains and their relations and allows the construction of integrated enterprise architecture models. They provide architects with concrete instruments that improve their architectural practice. As this is not enough, they additionally present techniques and heuristics for communicating with all relevant stakeholders about these architectures. Since an architecture model is useful not only for providing insight into the current or future situation but can also be used to evaluate the transition from ‘as‑is’ to ‘to‑be’, the authors also describe analysis methods for assessing both the qualitative impact of changes to an architecture and the quantitative aspects of architectures, such as performance and cost issues.The modelling language presented has been proven in practice in many real‑life case studies and has been adopted by The Open Group as an international standard. So this book is an ideal companion for enterprise IT or business architects in industry as well as for computer or management science students studying the field of enterprise architecture.This fourth edition of the book has been completely reworked to be compatible with ArchiMate® 3.0, and it includes a new chapter relating this new version to other standards. New sections on capability analysis, risk analysis, and business architecture in general have also been introduced.

Work with data like a pro using this guide that breaks down how to organize, apply, and most importantly, understand what you are analyzing in order to become a true data ninja.From the stock market to genomics laboratories, census figures to marketing email blasts, we are awash with data. But as anyone who has ever opened up a spreadsheet packed with seemingly infinite lines of data knows, numbers aren't enough: we need to know how to make those numbers talk. In The Model Thinker, social scientist Scott E. Page shows us the mathematical, statistical, and computational models—from linear regression to random walks and far beyond—that can turn anyone into a genius. At the core of the book is Page's "many-model paradigm," which shows the reader how to apply multiple models to organize the data, leading to wiser choices, more accurate predictions, and more robust designs. The Model Thinker provides a toolkit for business people, students, scientists, pollsters, and bloggers to make them better, clearer thinkers, able to leverage data and information to their advantage.

This book reflects the tremendous changes in the telecommunications industry in the course of the past few decades – shorter innovation cycles, stiffer competition and new communication products. It analyzes the transformation of processes, applications and network technologies that are now expected to take place under enormous time pressure. The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and the TM Forum have provided reference solutions that are broadly recognized and used throughout the value chain of the telecommunications industry, and which can be considered the de facto standard. The book describes how these reference solutions can be used in a practical context: it presents the latest insights into their development, highlights lessons learned from numerous international projects and combines them with well-founded research results in enterprise architecture management and reference modeling. The complete architectural transformation is explained, from the planning andset-up stage to the implementation. Featuring a wealth of examples and illustrations, the book offers a valuable resource for telecommunication professionals, enterprise architects and project managers alike.

Describes seven innovations which can help corporations respond to the impact of information technology and remain competitive and profitable

Maybe you heard someone mention business architecture in a passing conversation or in a planning meeting? Perhaps you’ve heard stories of a financial services company in Scandinavia, government agencies in the UK, a bank in the Netherlands, a global shipping company, or a major U.S. airline using business architecture to enact strategic change or drive business transformation. Or perhaps in-house strategy, transformation, planning, product, or customer experience teams have suggested you adopt or support in-house business architecture efforts. The business architecture drumbeat is steadily growing louder, yet you still cannot figure out what people are talking about. Well, the wait is over. The Business Architecture Quick Guide will help you sort through the noise and disinformation, focus on the benefits, and take the next steps.The Quick Guide has a singularly focused purpose: to demystify business architecture for those business professionals likely to benefit from it the most. The Quick Guide represents the collective experiences of a worldwide community of practice, courtesy of the Business Architecture Guild®, and not just another opinion piece or the musings of a single individual. Look no further for the answers on business architecture; they are right here in this “little big book for game changers.” The Quick Guide will point you to a wealth of additional resources that will enable you to take the next steps and begin to reap the benefits that other organizations are already achieving. Either way, you will no longer be left out of the discussion and ready to take action the next time the topic of business architecture enters the conversation.

Information technology supports efficient operations, enterprise integration, and seamless value delivery, yet itself is too often inefficient, un-integrated, and of unclear value. This completely rewritten version of the bestselling Architecture and Patterns for IT Service Management, Resource Planning and Governance retains the original (and still unique) approach: apply the discipline of enterprise architecture to the business of large scale IT management itself. Author Charles Betz applies his deep practitioner experience to a critical reading of ITIL 2011, COBIT version 4, the CMMI suite, the IT portfolio management literature, and the Agile/Lean IT convergence, and derives a value stream analysis, IT semantic model, and enabling systems architecture (covering current topics such as CMDB/CMS, Service Catalog, and IT Portfolio Management). Using the concept of design patterns, the book then presents dozens of visual models documenting challenging problems in integrating IT management, showing how process, data, and IT management systems must work together to enable IT and its business partners. The edition retains the fundamental discipline of traceable process, data, and system analysis that has made the first edition a favored desk reference for IT process analysts around the world. This best seller is a must read for anyone charged with enterprise architecture, IT planning, or IT governance and management. Lean-oriented process analysis of IT management, carefully distinguished from an IT functional model Field-tested conceptual information model with definitions and usage scenarios, mapped to both the process and system architectures Integrated architecture for IT management systems Synthesizes Enterprise Architecture, IT Service Management, and IT Portfolio Management in a practical way

Enterprise Architecture is the discipline of managing the complexities of the Business-IT landscape. It has been around since the 1980's, when for the first time computers were connected in networks, and the already serious (and unsolved) problem of the complexity of computer programs for relatively simple business needs turned into the huge problem of large networks of them in complex business landscapes. In spite of many 'best practices' and 'frameworks' that have been introduced, Enterprise Architecture is not a great success. After thirty years, we still have the same problems. Chaos is still everywhere. Projects still fail far too often. In this book, (hidden) assumptions behind the existing approaches to enterprise architecture are challenged, and a more realistic perspective that helps us battle the complexities and unpredictabilities of today's Business-IT landscapes is described. Practical suggestions about enterprise architecture governance and products, based on real-world experience with the described approach, complete the book. From general management to IT professionals, everyone who is confronted with the problem of managing Business-IT landscapes can profit from the insights this book offers. No specialist prior knowledge is required. Gerben Wierda is author of Mastering ArchiMate, and was, amongst other things, Lead Architect of the Judiciary in The Netherlands, Lead Architect of APG Asset Management, and is now Team Coordinator Architecture & Design at APG. He holds an M.Sc in Physics from the University of Groningen and an MBA from RSM Erasmus, Rotterdam.

Pervasive, data is a unique organizational resource, and this distinction warrants its own strategy. Data, representing your single non-depletable, non-degradable, durable strategic asset, is likely also your most poorly leveraged and underutilized organizational asset.Lack of talent, barriers in organizational thinking, and seven specific data sins prevent most organizations from benefiting fully from their data asset investments. Solving these prerequisites will allow your organization to: Improve your organization's data; Improve the way your people use data; and Improve the way your people use data to achieve your organizational strategy. This method better focuses data and thinking in direct support of strategic objectives. After eliminating necessary prerequisites, organizations can develop a disciplined and repeatable means of improving their data, literacy, standards, and controls using data governance practices. Once in place, the process (based on the theory of constraints) becomes a variant of lather, rinse, and repeat. Several complementary concepts covered include: An overview of data strategy prerequisites; A repeatable process for identifying and removing data constraints; Why data strategy is necessary for effective data governance; Balancing operational results with capability development; An objective definition of data-centric thinking; and Ways to monetize these efforts.

The essential complement to the pathbreaking book Competitive Strategy, Michael E. Porter's Competitive Advantage explores the underpinnings of competitive advantage in the individual firm.Competitive Advantage introduces a whole new way of understanding what a firm does. Porter's groundbreaking concept of the value chain disaggregates a company into "activities," or the discrete functions or processes that represent the elemental building blocks of competitive advantage.Now an essential part of international business thinking, Competitive Advantage takes strategy from broad vision to an internally consistent configuration of activities. Its powerful framework provides the tools to understand the drivers of cost and a company's relative cost position. Porter's value chain enables managers to isolate the underlying sources of buyer value that will command a premium price, and the reasons why one product or service substitutes for another. He shows how competitive advantage lies not only in activities themselves but in the way activities relate to each other, to supplier activities, and to customer activities. Competitive Advantage also provides for the first time the tools to strategically segment an industry and rigorously assess the competitive logic of diversification.That the phrases "competitive advantage" and "sustainable competitive advantage" have become commonplace is testimony to the power of Porter's ideas. Competitive Advantage has guided countless companies, business school students, and scholars in understanding the roots of competition. Porter's work captures the extraordinary complexity of competition in a way that makes strategy both concrete and actionable.

The New York Times bestseller that gives readers a paradigm-shattering new way to think about motivation from the author of When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect TimingMost people believe that the best way to motivate is with rewards like money—the carrot-and-stick approach. That's a mistake, says Daniel H. Pink (author of To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Motivating Others). In this provocative and persuasive new book, he asserts that the secret to high performance and satisfaction-at work, at school, and at home—is the deeply human need to direct our own lives, to learn and create new things, and to do better by ourselves and our world.Drawing on four decades of scientific research on human motivation, Pink exposes the mismatch between what science knows and what business does—and how that affects every aspect of life. He examines the three elements of true motivation—autonomy, mastery, and purpose-and offers smart and surprising techniques for putting these into action in a unique book that will change how we think and transform how we live.

“Henry Mintzberg’s views are a breath of fresh air which can only encourage the good guys.” The Observer“My favourite management book of the last 25 years? No contest. The Rise & Fall of Strategic Planning.” Tom Peters, managment guruStrategy is the most prestigious but also the most confusing part of business. Managers are constantly bombarded with new jargon and the latest fads promising the magic bullet for every strategic problem. The world of strategy can seem to be an impenetrable jungle. Strategy Safari presents a powerful antidote to the dilemma of needing to know about strategy and yet not being able to find any comprehensible guidelines. This revised edition is a comprehensive, colourful and illuminating tour through the wilds of strategic management.In this provocative, jargon-free and extremely readable guide, top strategy authors Mintzberg, Ahlstrand & Lampel clearly set out and critique each of the ten major schools of strategic management thinking to help you grasp what you really need to know.Take the strategy safari – your business will thank you for it.

Enterprises, from small to large, evolve continuously. As a result, their structures are transformed and extended continuously. Without some means of control, such changes are bound to lead to an overly complex, uncoordinated and heterogeneous environment that is hard to manage and hard to adapt to future changes. Enterprise architecture principles provide a means to direct transformations of enterprises. As a consequence, architecture principles should be seen as the cornerstones of any architecture.In this book, Greefhorst and Proper focus on the role of architecture principles. They provide both a theoretical and a practical perspective on architecture principles. The theoretical perspective involves a brief survey of the general concept of principle as well as an analysis of different flavors of principles. Architecture principles are regarded as a specific class of normative principles that direct the design of an enterprise, from the definition of its business to its supporting IT. The practical perspective on architecture principles is concerned with an approach to the formulation of architecture principles, as well as their actual use in organizations. To illustrate their use in practice, several real-life cases are discussed, an application of architecture principles in TOGAF is included, and a catalogue of example architecture principles is provided.With this broad coverage, the authors target students and researchers specializing in enterprise architecture or business information systems, as well as practitioners who want to understand the foundations underlying their practical daily work.

OVER 4 MILLION COPIES SOLDWALL STREET JOURNAL AND BUSINESSWEEK BESTSELLERRECOGNIZED AS ONE OF THE MOST ICONIC AND IMPACTFUL STRATEGY BOOKS EVER WRITTENThe global phenomenon that has sold over 4 million copies, is published in a record-breaking 49 languages and is a bestseller across five continents—now updated and expanded with new content. Named by Fast Company as one of the most influential leadership books in its Leadership Hall of Fame. A strategy classic.In this perennial bestseller, embraced by organizations and industries worldwide, globally preeminent management thinkers W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne challenge everything you thought you knew about the requirements for strategic success. Recognized as one of the most iconic and impactful strategy books ever written, BLUE OCEAN STRATEGY, now updated with fresh content from the authors, argues that cutthroat competition results in nothing but a bloody red ocean of rivals fighting over a shrinking profit pool. Based on a study of 150 strategic moves (spanning more than 100 years across 30 industries), the authors argue that lasting success comes not from battling competitors but from creating "blue oceans"—untapped new market spaces ripe for growth.BLUE OCEAN STRATEGY presents a systematic approach to making the competition irrelevant and outlines principles and tools any organization can use to create and capture their own blue oceans. This expanded edition includes: A new preface by the authors: Help! My Ocean Is Turning Red Updates on all cases and examples in the book, bringing their stories up to the present time Two new chapters and an expanded third one—Alignment, Renewal, and Red Ocean Traps—that address the most pressing questions readers have asked over the past 10 yearsA landmark work that upends traditional thinking about strategy, this bestselling book charts a bold new path to winning the future. Consider this your guide to creating uncontested market space—and making the competition irrelevant.To learn more about the power of BLUE OCEAN STRATEGY, visit blueoceanstrategy.com. There you'll find all the resources you need—from ideas in practice and cases from government and private industry, to teaching materials, mobile apps, real-time updates, and tips and tools to help you make your blue ocean journey a success.

Business Model Generation is a handbook for visionaries, game changers, and challengers striving to defy outmoded business models and design tomorrow's enterprises. If your organization needs to adapt to harsh new realities, but you don't yet have a strategy that will get you out in front of your competitors, you need Business Model Generation.Co-created by 470 "Business Model Canvas" practitioners from 45 countries, the book features a beautiful, highly visual, 4-color design that takes powerful strategic ideas and tools, and makes them easy to implement in your organization. It explains the most common Business Model patterns, based on concepts from leading business thinkers, and helps you reinterpret them for your own context. You will learn how to systematically understand, design, and implement a game-changing business model--or analyze and renovate an old one. Along the way, you'll understand at a much deeper level your customers, distribution channels, partners, revenue streams, costs, and your core value proposition.Business Model Generation features practical innovation techniques used today by leading consultants and companies worldwide, including 3M, Ericsson, Capgemini, Deloitte, and others. Designed for doers, it is for those ready to abandon outmoded thinking and embrace new models of value creation: for executives, consultants, entrepreneurs, and leaders of all organizations. If you're ready to change the rules, you belong to "the business model generation!"

Blend industry best practices to architect and deliver packaged Force.com applications that cater to enterprise business needsAbout This BookBuild your own application from start to finish, making use of unique tools and platform features Learn how to use the platform to build a truly integrated, scalable, and robustly engineered application to design, develop, package, and support an application focusing on enterprise-level customer demands Build the first iteration of your own ready-to-install packaged application with the help of a mix of step-by-step, worked examples and tips and tricks that discuss and answer key architectural questionsWho This Book Is ForThis book is for advanced Force.com developers and architects who need to understand the Salesforce platform from the perspective of enterprise-level requirements. You should have an existing understanding of Apex and Visualforce. Those familiar with other enterprise software ecosystems will also find this book ideal as they adopt Force.com.What You Will LearnLearn how to package, install, test, and upgrade an application, and understand how best to license and support an application Define architecture-aligning data storage and functional requirements with the platform for a consistent and integrated user experience using the platforma€™s declarative features Develop Apex code that is easy to navigate, self-documenting, testable, robust, and organic leveraging the Separation of Concerns principle Leverage your application's client-agnostic Service layer backbone to support numerous platform areas such as Batch, Scheduler, Visualforce, and the latest Salesforce1 client Apply querying, indexing and asynchronous best practices, guidelines, and patterns for large data volumes and complex processes covering custom indexes and Batch Apex Explore approaches and tips on how to develop advanced application life cycle processes around Source Control, Continuous Integration, and testing, utilizing the Metadata and Tooling APIs from SalesforceIn DetailSuccessful enterprise applications require planning, commitment, and investment in understanding the best practices, processes, tools, and features available.This book will teach you how to architect and support enduring applications for enterprise clients with Salesforce by exploring how to identify architecture needs and design solutions based on industry standard patterns. As your development team grows, managing the development cycle with more robust application life cycle tools and using approaches such as Continuous Integration becomes increasingly important. There are many ways to build solutions on Force.com—this book cuts a logical path through the steps and considerations for building packaged solutions from start to finish, covering all aspects from engineering to getting your application into the hands of your customers, and ensuring that they get the best value possible from your Force.com application.

The Balanced Scorecard translates a company's vision and strategy into a coherent set of performance measures. The four perspectives of the scorecard--financial measures, customer knowledge, internal business processes, and learning and growth--offer a balance between short-term and long-term objectives, between outcomes desired and performance drivers of those outcomes, and between hard objective measures and softer, more subjective measures. In the first part, Kaplan and Norton provide the theoretical foundations for the Balanced Scorecard; in the second part, they describe the steps organizations must take to build their own Scorecards; and, finally, they discuss how the Balanced Scorecard can be used as a driver of change.

More than a decade ago, Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton introduced the Balanced Scorecard, a revolutionary performance measurement system that allowed organizations to quantify intangible assets such as people, information, and customer relationships. Then, in The Strategy-Focused Organization, Kaplan and Norton showed how organizations achieved breakthrough performance with a management system that put the Balanced Scorecard into action.Now, using their ongoing research with hundreds of Balanced Scorecard adopters across the globe, the authors have created a powerful new tool--the "strategy map"--that enables companies to describe the links between intangible assets and value creation with a clarity and precision never before possible. Kaplan and Norton argue that the most critical aspect of strategy--implementing it in a way that ensures sustained value creation--depends on managing four key internal processes: operations, customer relationships, innovation, and regulatory and social processes. The authors show how companies can use strategy maps to link those processes to desired outcomes; evaluate, measure, and improve the processes most critical to success; and target investments in human, informational, and organizational capital. Providing a visual "aha!" for executives everywhere who can't figure out why their strategy isn't working, Strategy Maps is a blueprint any organization can follow to align processes, people, and information technology for superior performance.

The creators of the revolutionary performance management tool called the Balanced Scorecard introduce a new approach that makes strategy a continuous process owned not just by top management, but by everyone. In The Strategy-Focused Organization, Robert Kaplan and David Norton share the results of ten years of learning and research into more than 200 companies that have implemented the Balanced Scorecard. Drawing from more than twenty in-depth case studies--including Mobil, CIGNA, and AT&T Canada--Kaplan and Norton illustrate how Balanced Scorecard adopters have taken their groundbreaking tool to the next level. These organizations have used the scorecard to create an entirely new performance management framework that puts strategy at the center of key management processes and systems.Kaplan and Norton articulate the five key principles required for building strategy-focused organizations: 1) translate the strategy into operational terms, 2) align the organization to the strategy, 3) make strategy everyone's everyday job, 4) make strategy a continual process, and 5) mobilize change through strong, effective leadership. The authors provide a detailed account of how a range of organizations in the private, public, and nonprofit sectors have deployed these principles to achieve breakthrough, sustainable performance improvements.

"Stafford Beer is undoubtedly among the world's most provocative, creative, and profound thinkers on the subject of management, and he records his thinking with a flair that is unmatched. His writing is as much art as it is science. He is the most viable system I know."―Dr Russell L Ackoff, The Institute for Interactive Management, Pennsylvania, USA"If...anyone can make it [Operations Research] understandably readable and positively interesting it is Stafford Beer...everyone in management...should be grateful to him for using clear and at times elegant English and ... even elegant diagrams."―The EconomistThis is the companion volume to Brain of the Firm and addresses the nature of viable systems, those capable of surviving. It does not use the neurophysiological basis elucidated in brain, but develops the same theory from first principles. This book declares that every enterprise is a system, and in particular must be a viable system. Viability is not just a matter of economic solvency; we need laws that govern the capacity of any enterprise to maintain independent existence. The Heart of Enterprise is full of examples (actual, author-generated examples) taken from management practice."I consistently find that Stafford Beer provides the most useful analytical framework for understanding and managing an enterprise--public or private. Heart of The Enterprise offers a demanding but rewarding exposition of his approach and applications."―Sir Douglas Hague, CBE

How to design and market services to create outstanding customer experiencesService design thinking is the designing and marketing of services that improve the customer experience, and the interactions between the service providers and the customers. If you have two coffee shops right next to each other, and each sell the exact same coffee at the exact same price, service design is what makes you walk into one and not the other. Maybe one plays music and the other doesn't. Maybe one takes credit cards and the other is cash only. Maybe you like the layout of one over the other, or one has more comfortable seating. Maybe the staff at one is friendlier, or draws fun shapes on the top of their lattes. All of these nuances relate to service design.This Is Service Design Thinking combines the knowledge of twenty-three international authors and even more online contributors from the global service design community and is divided into three sections: Basics: outlines service design thinking along five basic principles Tools: describing a variety of tools and methods used in Service Design Thinking Cases: vivid examples for the introduced fundamentals with real-life case studies from 5 companies that did inspiring projects within the field of Service DesignAt the end, a one-page "Customer Journey Canvas" is included, which can be used to quickly sketch any service on a single sheet of paper―capturing different stakeholder concerns: e.g. customers, front-line staff and management.

Which business structures are best suited to the unpredictable 21st century? How can a business reconfigure itself with minimum disruption and maximum impact?Every executive grapples with problems of restructuring--and most need hands-on guidance to solve them. Based on Jay Galbraith’s world-renowned approach to organization design and featuring a broad selection of practical tips and tools developed by Diane Downey and Amy Kates, Designing Dynamic Organizations gives business leaders at all levels everything they need to implement positive, progressive change.In this book, business executives will learn how to examine their choices by leading them systematically through these fundamental questions: Should we restructure to meet our strategic goals? What are the best structural options to achieve our success? What lateral processes are necessary to support the new structure? How do we staff the restructured organization to optimize results?Designing Dynamic Organizations includes examples and worksheets that pilot you through the essential steps of organizational design.

A historical study of Chile's twin experiments with cybernetics and socialism, and what they tell us about the relationship of technology and politics.In Cybernetic Revolutionaries, Eden Medina tells the history of two intersecting utopian visions, one political and one technological. The first was Chile's experiment with peaceful socialist change under Salvador Allende; the second was the simultaneous attempt to build a computer system that would manage Chile's economy. Neither vision was fully realized—Allende's government ended with a violent military coup; the system, known as Project Cybersyn, was never completely implemented—but they hold lessons for today about the relationship between technology and politics.Drawing on extensive archival material and interviews, Medina examines the cybernetic system envisioned by the Chilean government—which was to feature holistic system design, decentralized management, human-computer interaction, a national telex network, near real-time control of the growing industrial sector, and modeling the behavior of dynamic systems. She also describes, and documents with photographs, the network's Star Trek-like operations room, which featured swivel chairs with armrest control panels, a wall of screens displaying data, and flashing red lights to indicate economic emergencies.Studying project Cybersyn today helps us understand not only the technological ambitions of a government in the midst of political change but also the limitations of the Chilean revolution. This history further shows how human attempts to combine the political and the technological with the goal of creating a more just society can open new technological, intellectual, and political possibilities. Technologies, Medina writes, are historical texts; when we read them we are reading history.

No matter where you are on the organizational ladder, the odds are high that you've delivered a high-stakes presentation to your peers, your boss, your customers, or the general public. Presentation software is one of the few tools that requires professionals to think visually on an almost daily basis. But unlike verbal skills, effective visual expression is not easy, natural, or actively taught in schools or business training programs. slide:ology fills that void.Written by Nancy Duarte, President and CEO of Duarte Design, the firm that created the presentation for Al Gore's Oscar-winning film, An Inconvenient Truth, this book is full of practical approaches to visual story development that can be applied by anyone. The book combines conceptual thinking and inspirational design, with insightful case studies from the world's leading brands. With slide:ology you'll learn to:Connect with specific audiences Turn ideas into informative graphics Use sketching and diagramming techniques effectively Create graphics that enable audiences to process information easily Develop truly influential presentations Utilize presentation technology to your advantageMillions of presentations and billions of slides have been produced -- and most of them miss the mark. slide:ology will challenge your traditional approach to creating slides by teaching you how to be a visual thinker. And it will help your career by creating momentum for your cause.

The acclaimed bestseller about visual problem solving-now bigger and better"There is no more powerful way to prove that we know something well than to draw a simple picture of it. And there is no more powerful way to see hidden solutions than to pick up a pen and draw out the pieces of our problem."So writes Dan Roam in The Back of the Napkin, the international bestseller that proves that a simple drawing on a humble napkin can be more powerful than the slickest PowerPoint presentation. Drawing on twenty years of experience and the latest discoveries in vision science, Roam teaches readers how to clarify any problem or sell any idea using a simple set of tools.He reveals that everyone is born with a talent for visual thinking, even those who swear they can't draw. And he shows how thinking with pictures can help you discover and develop new ideas, solve problems in unexpected ways, and dramatically improve your ability to share your insights.Take Herb Kelleher and Rollin King, who figured out how to beat the traditional hub-and-spoke airlines with a bar napkin and a pen. Three dots to represent Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio. Three arrows to show direct flights. Problem solved, and the picture made it easy to sell Southwest Airlines to investors and customers.Now with more color, bigger pictures, and additional content, this new edition does an even better job of helping you literally see the world in a new way. Join the teachers, project managers, doctors, engineers, assembly-line workers, pilots, football coaches, marine drill instructors, financial analysts, students, parents, and lawyers who have discovered the power of solving problems with pictures.

Great things don't happen in a vacuum. But creating an environment for creative thinking and innovation can be a daunting challenge. How can you make it happen at your company? The answer may surprise you: gamestorming.This book includes more than 80 games to help you break down barriers, communicate better, and generate new ideas, insights, and strategies. The authors have identified tools and techniques from some of the world's most innovative professionals, whose teams collaborate and make great things happen. This book is the result: a unique collection of games that encourage engagement and creativity while bringing more structure and clarity to the workplace. Find out why -- and how -- with Gamestorming. Overcome conflict and increase engagement with team-oriented games Improve collaboration and communication in cross-disciplinary teams with visual-thinking techniques Improve understanding by role-playing customer and user experiences Generate better ideas and more of them, faster than ever before Shorten meetings and make them more productive Simulate and explore complex systems, interactions, and dynamics Identify a problem's root cause, and find the paths that point toward a solution

Programming Legend Charles Petzold unlocks the secrets of the extraordinary and prescient 1936 paper by Alan M. TuringMathematician Alan Turing invented an imaginary computer known as the Turing Machine; in an age before computers, he explored the concept of what it meant to be computable, creating the field of computability theory in the process, a foundation of present-day computer programming.The book expands Turing’s original 36-page paper with additional background chapters and extensive annotations; the author elaborates on and clarifies many of Turing’s statements, making the original difficult-to-read document accessible to present day programmers, computer science majors, math geeks, and others.Interwoven into the narrative are the highlights of Turing’s own life: his years at Cambridge and Princeton, his secret work in cryptanalysis during World War II, his involvement in seminal computer projects, his speculations about artificial intelligence, his arrest and prosecution for the crime of "gross indecency," and his early death by apparent suicide at the age of 41.

Help groups deliver results with an updated approach to facilitation and consultingThe Skilled Facilitator: A Comprehensive Resource for Consultants, Facilitators, Trainers, and Coaches, Third Edition is a fundamental resource for consultants, facilitators, coaches, trainers, and anyone who helps groups realize their creative and problem-solving potential. This new edition includes updated content based on the latest research and revised models of group effectiveness and mutual learning. Roger M. Schwarz shows how to use the Skilled Facilitator approach to: boost improvement processes such as Six Sigma and Lean, create a psychologically safe learning environment for training, and help coaches work with teams and individuals in real-time. This edition features a new chapter that explains how to facilitate virtual teams using conferencing technology.Facilitation skills are essential in many kinds of work, and if you are looking to bring your skills up to date it is critical that you rely on trusted information like the knowledge offered in this go-to reference. Develop the facilitative mentality and skills that enable you to help groups get better results, even in the most challenging situations Help groups achieve greater performances, stronger working relationships, and higher levels of individual well-being Quickly develop productive and trusting work relationships with the groups you help Establish the functions of your facilitative role Implement a research-based, systematic approach to diagnose and intervene in groups and improve their performance and resultsThe Skilled Facilitator is a practical resource for corporate, government, non-profit, and educational practitioners, as well as graduate students in group-focused programs. This edition contains up-to-date material, based on recent studies, to help facilitators move beyond arbitrary tactics to utilize cutting edge, research-based strategies that improve group processes, relationships, mindsets, and outcomes.

What went wrong with American business at the end of the 20th century? Until the spring of 2001, Enron epitomized the triumph of the New Economy. Feared by rivals, worshipped by investors, Enron seemingly could do no wrong. Its profits rose every year; its stock price surged ever upward; its leaders were hailed as visionaries. Then a young Fortune writer, Bethany McLean, wrote an article posing a simple question how, exactly, does Enron make its money? Within a year Enron was facing humiliation and bankruptcy, the largest in US history, which caused Americans to lose faith in a system that rewarded top insiders with millions of dollars, while small investors lost everything. It was revealed that Enron was a company whose business was an illusion, an illusion that Wall Street was willing to accept even though they knew what the real truth was. This book - fully updated for the paperback - tells the extraordinary story of Enron's fall.