From Workplace to Playspace is about visionary, courageous, innovative, and persistent organizations that challenge long-held preconceptions about the incompatibility of workplace and playspace. Each day organizations across industries and with wide-ranging missions are discovering that playspace is the space they can and must create every day at work if they are to think creatively, question old assumptions, respond effectively to the unexpected, and engage all to work at the top of their talent. Filled with case examples from such organizations as Learning Curve International, Google, Chicago Public Schools, Umpqua Bank, and Threadless, the author provides both the conceptual framework and the principles to guide practitioners to create playspace for innovating, learning and changing in their organizations.
As contrary as it sounds, "planning" - as we traditionally understand the term-can be the worst thing a company can do. Consider that volatile weather events disrupt trusted supply chains, markets, and promised delivery schedules. Ever-shifting geo-political tensions, as well as internal political upheaval within U.S. and global governments, derail long-planned new ventures. Technology failures block opportunities. Competitors suddenly change their product or release date; your team cannot meet the pace of innovations in your market niche, leaving you sidelined. There are myriad ways in the current business environment for a company's well-considered business plans to go awry. Most business schools continue to prepare managers to be effective in stable and predictable environments, conditions that, if they ever existed at all, are long gone. The Agility Shift shows business leaders exactly how to make the radical mindset and strategy shift necessary to create an agile, entrepreneurial organization that can innovate and thrive in complex, ever-changing contexts. As author Pamela Meyer explains, there is much more involved than a reconfiguration of the org chart and job descriptions. It requires relinquishing the illusion of control at the very foundation of most management training and business practice. Despite most leaders' approaches, "Agility is not simply accelerated planning." Unlike many agility books on the market, The Agility Shift provides specific, actionable strategies and tactics for leaders at all levels of the organization to put into practice immediately to improve agility and achieve results.
GET TO THE TRUTH
People--friends, family members, work colleagues, salespeople--lie to us all the time. Daily, hourly, constantly. None of us is immune, and all of us are victims. According to studies by several different researchers, most of us encounter nearly 200 lies a day.
Now there's something we can do about it. Liespotting links three disciplines--facial recognition training, interrogation training, and a comprehensive survey of research in the field--into a specialized body of information developed specifically to help business leaders detect deception and get the information they need to successfully conduct their most important interactions and transactions.
Some of the nation's leading business executives have learned to use these methods to root out lies in high stakes situations. Liespotting for the first time brings years of knowledge--previously found only in the intelligence community, police training academies, and universities--into the corporate boardroom, the manager's meeting, the job interview, the legal proceeding, and the deal negotiation.
