Agile may be the best-kept management secret on the planet and if you want a quickstart introduction, then Agile NOW is essential reading. Agile is a different way of thinking that’s steeped in common sense and produces immediate results. That’s why there’s a quiet revolution going on.

Agile will help you design better products, get faster results, cut down costs, and keep improving as you go. With a simple system called The Golden Triangle - Prioritising, Time Boxing and Change Management - you can hit the ground running and get started immediately.

Agile NOW is slim, accessible and easy to dip into - yet covers all the essential theory and provides practical advice. Agile is for everyone - from one-person start-ups to multinationals – the promise of quicker, cheaper, better has universal appeal. Agile NOW shows you how to get going fast at minimal cost.

Effective knowledge work depends on bringing people together to form a team with the right mix of expertise for the project or problem on hand. Increasingly, that mix can only be created by finding people who are geographically dispersed across sites of the company or across several companies. These virtual teams typically work by linking through electronic tools, such as the telephone, fax, email, NetMeeting, Lotus Notes, and other web-based communication systems. Recent research suggests that these teams have all of the challenges of face-to-face teams in addition to others, such as the limitations of technology, cultural differences, and multiple supervisors. The papers included in this volume identify some of the problems and some of the solutions to these kinds of problems, but most importantly, in a dynamic field such as virtual teams, the papers provide a framework for thinking about such problems and a collection of ideas that can form a foundation for advancing both research and practice in the field. Much of the literature on virtual teams focuses on the technology. The technology is an enabler, but it does not seem to have advanced far enough to make electronic communications as effective as face-to-face meetings. Like other teams, virtual teams consist of human beings and they have interpersonal and identity needs that must be met to optimize their ability to work and to collaborate. So, issues such as member solidarity, cooperation and unity of actions and values become special concerns. Such issues are addressed in this volume with the hope that this work will provide a foundation for moving ahead in this field toward more effective virtual teams.

Analysts are generally agreed - dramatic changes are unfolding in the character of work, managerial authority, and the employment relationship. However, there is little agreement as to precisely how such changes are reshaping people's working lives, the nature of their careers, and the distribution of opportunity among members of different classes, genders, and ethnic groups. Confronting these issues head on, this text focuses on a series of critical questions concerned with the restructuring of work under capitalism at the beginning of the 21st century. The papers collected here address a wide array of workplace settings, from traditional manufacturing settings to "knowledge work" in high tech and university contexts. The volume devotes attention to the impact of production concepts in various national settings, ranging from Germany to Mexico and Australia. Among other themes, the volume also examines the linkage between gender inequality and efforts to establish innovative, "flexible" forms of work organization.

Do you know how your brain functions? Do you sometimes feel like you're fighting your own brain and habits in order to be productive at work? What if there was a way to work with your brain to become more efficient, effective and productive... and transform the way you operate? Make Your Brain Work is here to help. Author Amy Brann is fascinated by the application of brain science to business, and you don't have to be an expert to understand - she explains the principles and latest insights in practical and easy-to-understand language, enabling you to understand the way you work, and form the helpful habits that will revolutionize your output. With clear, in-context examples; hands-on tips; and focused case studies on how companies are doing things well and the pitfalls to avoid, this entertaining book will help you reduce the stress and overwhelm of poor time management, and help get you to that next professional level. Including brand-new content on developing resilience and creativity, and managing your work-life balance, now it's even easier to Make Your Brain Work!

Written by a team of experts in the field of workplace diversity, The Global Diversity Desk Reference offers a strategic approach for international organizations that want to succeed in the worldwide marketplace by maximizing the potential of all their employees. You'll discover how to increase effectiveness in managing diversity at three levels--the individual, interpersonal, and organizational. You'll also get the practical tools, concrete suggestions, and pragmatic methods you need to successfully manage a global workforce and create and align organizational systems, policies, and practices with the requirements of an international workforce.

What can you learn from the most successful companies in the world? The NBA Story will help you understand and adopt the competitive strategies, workplace culture, and daily business practices that enabled the exciting basketball league to become the powerhouse it is today. Today's NBA is filled with larger-than-life figures, like LeBron James, James Harden and Stephen Curry, who effortlessly dominate the courts. But it wasn't always so glamorous. The multi-billion-dollar league has grown from humble roots into a sports powerhouse that is loved around the world due to savvy digital marketing and a global focus. Thanks to the popularity of individual players and team rivalries, the NBA has survived league mergers and financial crisis. Teams have earned the respect of millions of loyal fans who are dedicated to the success of each and every organization within the league. Through the story of the NBA, you'll learn: How to keep a dream alive when it seems like no one wants to see it come true. How a company can find their way out of a financial crisis. How presentation is the secret sauce to the success of any show. And how a company can build a loyal fanbase who will do anything to keep them on top.

Is work taking over your life? Is your life interfering with your success at work? Work-life balance is ever-evolving and can be hard to find and maintain, especially as your career develops and circumstances change. Get A Life! is a highly practical handbook to help you do just that. Written by experienced coach, counsellor and wellbeing consultant Rick Hughes, this book covers everything from assessing your own needs, delegation and workload management and the myths of perfectionism, to managing and investing in relationships at work and at home, considering professional and personal development, and creativity and self-worth. With a wealth of advice, case studies and useful action plans founded in over 25 years of real-world experience, Get A Life! will help you find the balance that works for you, now.

Work: love it or hate it, it's an all-consuming part of our society, it's changing fast, and the impact on our working lives will be extraordinary. We are now facing a revolution in the way we work. Low carbon economies, new technology and globalisation are fundamentally transforming much of what we take for granted. Middle managers are disappearing. The working week is collapsing. And now more than ever, our careers are governed by global forces. Why will things change so quickly? What will these changes look like? Who will benefit and who will suffer? How do we navigate our career through these times? In 'The Shift', Professor at London Business School Lynda Gratton takes a look ground-breaking look at the five forces that will fundamentally change the way we work in the next ten to fifteen years. Having collaborated with companies around the world for the past three years, she has drawn up a guidebook for the future of work, instructing you how to harness specialisation, connections, enthusiasm and make the three key shifts essential for survival.

JetBlue Chairman Joel Peterson provides the playbook for establishing and maintaining a culture of trust that breaks down the operational silos and CYA mentality that plague many organizations. Trust is the glue that holds an organization together. It turns deflection into transparency, suspicion into empowerment, and conflict into creativity. With it, a tiny company like John Deere grew into a worldwide leader. Without it, a giant corporation like Enron toppled. How does it feel to work for a firm where leaders and colleagues trust one another? Freed from micromanagement and rivalry, every employee contributes his or her best. Risk-taking and innovation become the norm. With compelling examples, JetBlue Chairman Joel Peterson details how to establish and maintain a culture of trust, including: Start with integrity Invest in respect Empower everyone Require accountability Create a winning vision Keep everyone informed Budget in line with expectations Embrace conflict Forget "you" to become an effective leader This fully expanded edition includes a powerful self-assessment tool for organizations to evaluate their culture of trust and discover areas for improvement. Peterson has also added rich new case studies and chapters on the theme of betrayal, including how to manage and guard against it. With The 10 Laws of Trust Expanded Edition in hand, you'll be able to plant the seeds of trust-and reap the rewards of reputation, profits, and success.

A smart, science-based approach to retaining your talent and making the world of work a better place. Right now, we're confrontinga once-in-a-century opportunity to create a future of work that's better for everyone. The old corporate standard of extreme hours, sleep deprivation, and nonstop travel is dead. And knowledge workers don't miss it. They're expecting today's leaders to create the workplace of tomorrow: a hybrid ecosystem that thrives on flexibility, diversity of thought, and enables every employee to reach peak performance. In The Brain-Friendly Workplace, Friederike Fabritius offers a science-based and field-tested blueprint for tomorrow's workplace. Through her easy-to-follow program, entire organizations are discovering how small, inexpensive changes can lead to advantages like better employee performance, higher job satisfaction, and stronger talent retention.

Growing numbers of us work not only from home, but from anywhere; job flexibility has become a key requirement for employers and workers alike. This, in turn, has created new challenges for architects and designers - many of whom themselves start out working from home - who are tackling demand head on with innovative solutions that allow clients to transform their spaces to suit a wide range of needs, from multifunctional studios to homes that seamlessly combine work and family life. Divided into five thematic sections, this book explores the exciting variety of ways that the workplace can be integrated into the domestic environment. From stand-alone multifunctional furniture to mobile room dividers and dynamic solutions that fold out or pop up to create new work areas, each design addresses the unique needs of the space, client and working practices for which it was required, and tackles new questions about the rapidly evolving relationship between work and domestic life in the 21st century. This essential and timely resource for homeworkers and practitioners offers fresh ideas for how to strike the perfect balance between living and working at home.

This one-stop board leadership resource, written by one of the world's leading governance consultants and author of the bestselling Boards That Make a Difference, offers you a broad range of material including the best articles from the Board Leadership newsletter, articles from various publications, and previously unpublished short works. Each chapter has been carefully selected and arranged to provide you with a distillation of John Carver's revolutionary Policy Governance model.

Architects of the Business Revolution is a journey through the remarkable new territory of e-business and the new economy. Dearlove and Coomber identify the entrepreneurs, radicals and thinkers who have made the greatest contribution to this new world. From wunderkinds like Marc Andreessen and Sabheer Bhatia and rocket scientists like Tim Berners-Lee and Vinton Cerf to visionaries like Don Tapscott and Esther Dyson and business engineers like Scott McNealy and Jim Clark, these are the guys and girls you have to know about. Beyond the individuals themselves, Dearlove and Coomber take ideas into action and offer practical guidance drawn from these pioneers.

It's time to acknowledge that not all working women are interested in climbing the corporate ladder or securing the corner office. Most want and need flexible, less life-consuming work to accommodate their real lives, and it's not weak, lacking ambition or letting down the sisterhood to pursue professional fulfillment and financial security through less lofty, or headline-making ways. Eye-opening and practical, Ambition Redefined is a welcome alternative to 'women's business books'. Sollmann calls it like it is: everyday women want and need flexible work that allows them to unapologetically pursue their own brand of ambition and success. She shows them how without sacrificing themselves, their careers or their families. Armed with practical insights and tools, readers will be empowered to go after opportunities beyond traditional definitions of work, career and success. They will learn why they should never leave the workforce, how to make a case for flexibility in a current full-time job, how to find flexible employers, industries and job functions and how to return to work after time away raising children or caring for elderly parents.

It's time to break down your barriers are a leader, as a team, and achieve. Just wanting to be better is never enough. The ability to elevate-to exceed and outperform expectations-is directly related to your ability to build capacity in yourself and others. What capacity exactly? Making time to not just tackle everything you place on your plate (personally and professionally) but to CRUSH each and every accomplishment.

Increasing customer needs, the globalization of markets and the evolution of e-commerce add to the complexity of logistic processes. In today's business, it is well understood that an effective management of logistic processes is impossible without the use of computer-based tools and quantitative methods. This book presents in a systematic way quantitative approaches to distribution logistics and supply chain management. The main orientation of the book is towards practical problem solving, and numerous case studies and practical applications are presented. The topics covered include: supply chain management, revers logistics, e-commerce, facility location and network planning, vehicle routing, warehousing, inventory control.

Managing Projects for success is a how to do it book of considerable value to practitioners and students alike. It provides the challenge of theory application through a series of exercises and is comprehensively illustrated. Managing Projects for Success equips the reader with specialist skills that can be immediately applied in practice and is written in three inter-related parts - Part 1: The framework; Part 2: Planning for control and Part 3: The tool kit - to promote clarity of understanding and study.

Investing in your returning talent Becoming a parent is life-changing. Our experience as employers, practitioners, researchers and working parents tells us this is a critical time for offering support to new parents as they navigate the transition, plan for their return and re-engage with work and career. At an organisational level, there are huge costs associated with losing experienced and talented employees when they start a family and, in the interest of building a more diverse and balanced workforce, organisations need their people to return engaged and motivated to progress their career. Written in partnership by two established coaching and mentoring professionals, Mentoring New Parents at Work makes the case for dedicated mentoring programmes in the workplace as a sustainable way of supporting new parents and improving talent retention for employers. The authors offer timely, practical guidance for each stage of the mentoring journey, from building the business case through to ideas for mentoring workshops. The book is grounded in theory and practice, and provides tools, techniques and real life case studies from a range of countries and organisations to illustrate good practice. Mentoring New Parents at Work will be invaluable to all HR practitioners and line managers who want to retain and support new parents, helping to pave the way for gender diversity at all levels of their organisations. Its themes and insights will also be of interest to students and researchers of HRM, diversity management, and coaching and mentoring.

There is recurrent public concern with enhancing the quality of professional performance. What is the con-temporary understanding of professionalism? Are the needs of professionals in various fields being met in today's world, as what is commonly called "continuing professional development" has become of a sizable industry? Many books treat the professions as a homo-geneous group and view them from an external stand-point. In Professional Practices Tony Becher investigates the differences as well as the similarities between and within professional groupings, and presents the perspec-tives of insiders. One particular theme concerns the main patterns of change in professional careers and the spe-cific problems faced by women professionals in a largely male-dominated environment. Brilliantly written, the book focuses on six professions-medicine, pharmacy, law, accountancy, architecture, and slructural engineering. The material is based on 190 interviews with a variety of members of the six professions. Becher's book offers original and sensitive insight into the working Ives of practitioners and an understanding of the ideas and values they embrace. He a'gjes that their high sense of commitment stems from a concern to enhance their individual reputations and to maintain their collective professional status. Becher highlights re variety of activities in which these professionals are engaged and the reasons for their reponses to social and political pressures from outside their fields. Above all, he seeks to demystify professionalism and to show that professional people share with others a wide range of universal human feelings and concerns. A postscript raises the issue of why -Diversities are little involved with continuing education in the professions. Practicing professionals will benefit from this insight into how people in their own and other professions cope with similar problems. Becher's volume will be particularly ap-pealing to educationists, policymakers, and social scientists interested in the subject of professionalism, those involved in the provision of initial and mid-career change for the orofessions, and those with a lay interest in the topic.

A groundbreaking look at why our interactions with others hold the key to success, from the bestselling author of Think Again and Originals For generations, we have focused on the individual drivers of success: passion, hard work, talent, and luck. But in today's dramatically reconfigured world, success is increasingly dependent on how we interact with others. In Give and Take, Adam Grant, an award-winning researcher and Wharton's highest-rated professor, examines the surprising forces that shape why some people rise to the top of the success ladder while others sink to the bottom. Praised by social scientists, business theorists, and corporate leaders, Give and Take opens up an approach to work, interactions, and productivity that is nothing short of revolutionary.

This book leverages robust research studies and provides a practical resource for virtual team members and leaders. Based on a research study which is one of the most comprehensive studies ever conducted on virtual teams, this book offers a wealth of solid recommendations. To help organizations and leaders enhance virtual team performance, the book includes information on: key challenges, factors for success, characteristics of effective virtual teams, a model for success, effective practices, enhancing performance of low performing teams. The book also includes sections on future challenges and issues.

Is work taking over your life? Is your life interfering with your success at work? Work-life balance is ever-evolving and can be hard to find and maintain, especially as your career develops and circumstances change. Get A Life! is a highly practical handbook to help you do just that. Written by experienced coach, counsellor and wellbeing consultant Rick Hughes, this book covers everything from assessing your own needs, delegation and workload management and the myths of perfectionism, to managing and investing in relationships at work and at home, considering professional and personal development, and creativity and self-worth. With a wealth of advice, case studies and useful action plans founded in over 25 years of real-world experience, Get A Life! will help you find the balance that works for you, now.

Homework; work that is categorised as informal employment, performed in the home, mainly for subcontractors and mostly undertaken by women. The inequities and injustices inherent in homework conditions maintain women's weak bargaining position, preventing them from making any improvements to their lives via their work. The best way to tackle these issues is not to abolish, but to bring equality and justice to homework. This book contributes a gender justice framework to analyse and confront the issues and problems of homework. The authors propose four justice dimensions - recognition, representation, rights and redistribution - to examine and analyse homework. This framework also takes into account the structures and processes of capitalism and the patriarchy, and the relations of domination that are widely held to be the major factors that determine homework injustice. The authors discuss strategies and approaches that have worked for homeworkers, highlighting why they worked and the features that were beneficial for them. Homeworking Women will be of interest to individuals and organisations working with or for the collective benefit of homeworkers, academics and students interested in feminism, labour regulation, informal work, supply chains and social and political justice.

***WALL STREET JOURNAL BESTSELLER*** 'A smart, funny, brilliant book on how to be smart about being funny, brilliantly' Sarah Cooper 'This book has finally convinced me that joking around can actually be important and powerful' Ed Gamble 'Eye-opening, important and utterly enjoyable. Come for the humour, stay for the insights' Arianna Huffington Humour is a superpower. If you're not using it, the joke's on you. When we're kids we laugh all the time. The average four year-old laughs as many as 300 times a day, while the average forty year-old laughs 300 times every two and a half months! We grow up, start working and suddenly become "serious and important people", trading laughter for bottom lines and mind-dumbing zoom calls. But the benefits of humour for our work and life are huge. Studies have shown that humour makes us appear more competent and confident, strengthens our relationships, unlocks creativity and boosts resilience during difficult times. Dr. Jennifer Aaker and Naomi Bagdonas are on a mission to help everyone discover the power of humour. Based on the popular Stanford Business course, this book will show you how to mine your life for material, explore the Four Deadly Humour Myths and help you figure out which style of humour you fall into - The Magnet, The Sweetheart, The Sniper or the Stand Up. Drawing on behavioural science, advice from world-class comedians and stories from top leaders, Humour, Seriously will show you how to harness the power of humour every day.

Every couple wants a happy relationship and a meaningful career but how do we balance both? In Couples that Work, Professor Jennifer Petriglieri shifts away from the language of sacrifice and trade-offs and focuses on how couples can successfully tackle the challenges they will face throughout their lives--together. The book explores key questions like: - Can you and your partner have equally important careers or must you prioritise one over the other? - How can you juggle children or family commitments without sacrificing your work? - Does every decision require compromise or can you find solutions that benefit you both? Identifying common triggers and traps, and presenting engaging exercises to help you avoid and overcome them, this book will help every couple design their own unique way to combine love and work at every stage of their journey. 'Hugely insightful. A must-read for all couples' Susan David, author of Emotional Agility 'Managing one career is hard enough; two often seems impossible. In this book, Jennifer shares what she's learned about how couples can not only survive but thrive' Adam Grant, author of Originals