"Brick by Brick" takes you inside the LEGO you've never seen. By following the teams that are inventing some of the world's best-loved toys, it spotlights the company's disciplined approach to harnessing creativity and recounts one of the most remarkable business transformations in recent memory.
"Brick by Brick" reveals how LEGO failed to keep pace with the revolutionary changes in kids' lives and began sliding into irrelevance. When the company's leaders implemented some of the business world's most widely espoused prescriptions for boosting innovation, they ironically pushed the iconic toymaker to the brink of bankruptcy. The company's near-collapse shows that what works in theory can fail spectacularly in the brutally competitive global economy.
It took a new LEGO management team - faced with the growing rage for electronic toys, few barriers to entry, and ultra-demanding consumers (ten-year old boys) - to reinvent the innovation rule book and transform LEGO into one of the world's most profitable, fastest-growing companies.
Along the way, "Brick by Brick" reveals how LEGO:
- Became truly customer-driven by co-creating with kids as well as its passionate adult fans
- Looked beyond products and learned to leverage a full-spectrum approach to innovation
- Opened its innovation process by using both the "wisdom of crowds" and the expertise of elite cliques
- Discovered uncontested, "blue ocean" markets, even as it thrived in brutally competitive red oceans
- Gave its world-class design teams enough space to create and direction to deliver
built a culture where "profitable" innovation flourishes
Sometimes radical yet always applicable, "Brick by Brick" abounds with real-world lessons for unleashing breakthrough innovation in your organization, just like LEGO. Whether you're a senior executive looking to make your company grow, an entrepreneur building a startup from scratch, or a fan who wants to instill some of that LEGO magic in your career, you'll learn how to build your own innovation advantage, brick by brick.

How do you implement mindfulness in the workplace? Today's leaders and organisations need to develop an agile mindset and take bold risks. This Authority Guide shows you how to link mindfulness directly to business challenges and offers practical and accessible tools for change. Written by an expert on leadership, meditation and mindfulness, the book teaches you how to manage your inner landscape of thoughts, emotions and interruptions so that you can create a compassionate, innovative and sustainable working culture.

In recent years, there has been increasing implementation of group and team decision-making within organizations, much of it managed electronically, between members of what are "virtual" groups or teams. Recent research into effective team implementation emphasizes "trust" as an intermediary process, and trust must be a part of any account of team decision-making. This book provides an integrated framework that represents process in decision-making by interactive groups and teams. This framework furthers both our understanding of process and our capabilities in implementation, based on an account of group decision-making that differentiates the information types contributing to decision quality and relates them to process in interactive groups and teams. Author Steve Silver emphasizes the social structure that is inherent in the interaction of decision-makers as group or team members and effects on the information they exchange.

As public and private sector organizations work more frequently in partnership, managing uncertainties, problems and controversies becomes increasingly difficult. Despite sophisticated technology and knowledge, the strategic networks and games required to solve uncertainties become more complex and more important than ever before.
Managing Uncertainties in Networks is a new text that examines developments in the area of network strategy. Differentiating itself from other policy network approaches which have a mainly research focus, this text has a managerial orientation presenting strategies and management recommendations for public and private sector organizations as well as the analytical tools required by practitioners seeking to support their own internal decision making and strategy formulation.
Topics covered include:
* Knowledge conflicts
* Uncertainties and governments
* Technological controversies
* Collaborative problem solving
* Managing networks
Tapping into the important and ever-growing area of risk and uncertainty management, this is a vital and long awaited staple for the arena written by two leading authors in the field. It will be key reading for students, scholars and policy makers seeking to understand the complexities of the network society.

As public and private sector organizations work more frequently in partnership, managing uncertainties, problems and controversies becomes increasingly difficult. Despite sophisticated technology and knowledge, the strategic networks and games required to solve uncertainties become more complex and more important than ever before.
Managing Uncertainties in Networks is a new text that examines developments in the area of network strategy. Differentiating itself from other policy network approaches which have a mainly research focus, this text has a managerial orientation presenting strategies and management recommendations for public and private sector organizations as well as the analytical tools required by practitioners seeking to support their own internal decision making and strategy formulation.
Topics covered include:
* Knowledge conflicts
* Uncertainties and governments
* Technological controversies
* Collaborative problem solving
* Managing networks
Tapping into the important and ever-growing area of risk and uncertainty management, this is a vital and long awaited staple for the arena written by two leading authors in the field. It will be key reading for students, scholars and policy makers seeking to understand the complexities of the network society.

The business environment has changed. Sharper competition requires organizations to exhibit greater effectiveness in their operations and services and faster creation of new products and services all hallmarks of the knowledge economy. Up until now, most of the knowledge management literature has focused on technology, systems, or culture. This book moves to the next stage, to focus on the people the knowledge workers themselves. Noted expert Karl Wiig synthesizes recent research findings in cognitive science and related fields to describe how people actually work. He focuses on how people learn, remember, make decisions, solve problems and act in general, how knowledge relates to work behavior. By understanding how people work, managers can improve effectiveness to gain competitive advantage.

From the multimillion-copy bestselling author of "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People"--hailed as the #1 Most Influential Business Book of the Twentieth Century--"The 3rd Alternative "turns Dr. Stephen R. Covey's formidable insight to a powerful new way to resolve professional and personal difficulties and create solutions to great challenges in organizations and society.
There are many methods of "conflict resolution," but most involve compromise, a low-level accommodation that stops the fight without breaking through to amazing new results. "The 3rd Alternative "introduces a breakthrough approach to conflict resolution and creative problem solving, transcending traditional solutions to conflict by forging a path toward a third option, a 3rd Alternative that moves beyond your way or my way to a higher and better way--one that allows both parties to emerge from debate or even heated conflict in a far better place than either had envisioned. With the 3rd Alternative, nobody has to give up anything, and everyone wins.

Contents:
1. Introduction: Costs associated with occupational stress: Risk Management of stress: The Structure of the book: 2. The Effects of Stress on Employee-Related Outcomes: Absenteeism, Turnover and Productivity: Work-Related Accidents: 3. Environmental Factors and Occupational Safety: Organisational Accidents: Organisation and Management: Safety Management Practices: Safety Culture: Safety Climate: Leadership: Supervision: Safety Subclimates: 4. Psychological Factors and Occupational Safety: Human Factors: Human Error: Violations: Accident Proneness: Personality Characteristics: Risk Propensity: 5. Job-Stress and Work-Related Accidents: Job Stress and Unsafe Acts: Job Stress and Safety Behavior: Individual Differences: 6. A Risk Management Approach to Occupational Stress: The Concept of Risk Assessment: Risk Assessment Methodologies: Risk Assessment of Occupational Stress: Risk Evaluation: Risk Reduction: Stress Interventions: 7. Assessment of Job Stress: Stress Audit Tools: Case Study - Stress Auditing at Somerset County Council: Stage One: Assessment of Job Stress: 8. Risk Evaluation: Risk Factors: Assessing Safety Risks: Case Study - Managing Stress and Accidents in the Offshore Oil and Gas Industry: Stage Two: Risk Evaluation: Risk Control: 9. Risk Reduction: Secondary / Tertiary Stress Prevention: Primary Stress Prevention: Reducing Safety Risks: Stage Three: Risk Reduction: Index

Working in a stressful environment not only increases the risk of physical illness or distress, but also increases the likelihood of workplace accidents. While legislation provides some guidelines for risk assessment of physical hazards, there remains limited guidance on the risks of psychosocial hazards, such as occupational stress.
This book takes the risk management approach to stress evaluation in the workplace, offering practical guidelines for the audit, assessment and mitigation of workplace stressors. Based on both research and case-studies, this book provides a comprehensive source of theoretical and practical information for students and practitioners alike.
This book includes chapters on:
*environmental stress factors
* psychological stress factors
*work-related accidents
*job stress evaluation methods
With its up-to-date approach to a fascinating area of study, Managing the Risk of Workplace Stress is key reading for all students of organizational psychology and those responsible for workplace safety.

Safety is not easy, it is a full time effort, and is equally important whether people are on the job or on personal time. If an organization is serious about mission success, it must take 'risk' seriously as well. Leaders need to be involved in the risk game at every turn, and understand the key elements (discussed throughout this book) that help them to win. Winning the risk game is what safety is all about. As in operational success, risk management requires the best human faculties to achieve victory; talent of organizational players and commitment from top leadership rule the day. The book covers leadership, safety programs, and risk management for organizations and individuals. It helps in professional development, grooming current and future leaders to understand their roles in safety and risk management. Central to the author's message are: Seven truths of safety that the author discovered as a senior safety officer. Four roadblocks to achieving zero mishaps that must be aggressively addressed. Nine elements to risk reduction, with which leaders must become familiar. He establishes the importance of an organizational leader's role in the safety/risk management game and provides the answer to, 'How safe is safe enough?' Often, managers at various levels do not have an understanding of what goes into a safety program, this book tells them, from an expert's view. The readership includes: executives and middle management; all leaders as a professional development book and students. It is also a supplemental textbook for safety and risk management courses.

Recent work has demonstrated that incidents, accidents and disasters tend to result from complex socio-technical failures, rather than just 'human error' on the one hand, or simple technical failures on the other. For the reduction of accidents, therefore, it is necessary to deal with systems factors, in which both technical and human-factors elements play an equal and complementary role. However, many of the existing techniques in ergonomics and risk management concentrate on plant/technical issues and downplay human factors and "subjectivity". The present text describes a body of theory and data which addresses this issue squarely, drawing on systems theory and applied psychology, and which stresses the importance of human agency within systems. The central roles of social consensus and reliability, and the nature of verbal reports and 'functional discourse' are explained in some detail.

This book therefore presents a new, 'Qualitative Systems Approach' to safety management, offering both greater safety and economic savings. It presents a series of methodological 'tools' whose reliability and validity have been shown through extensive work in the rail and nuclear industries and which allow organisational and systems failures to be analysed much more effectively in terms of quantity, precision and usefulness.

This is a textbook for undergraduate and graduate students in occupational psychology, human factors, ergonomics and HCI, and the sociology of disasters and risk. It is also useful for safety managers and professionals in many safety critical firms and organisations, reliability engineers, risk managers, and human factors specialists.

The fun and simple problem-solving guide that took Japan by storm
Ken Watanabe originally wrote "Problem Solving 101" for Japanese schoolchildren. His goal was to help shift the focus in Japanese education from memorization to critical thinking, by adapting some of the techniques he had learned as an elite McKinsey consultant.
He was amazed to discover that adults were hungry for his fun and easy guide to problem solving and decision making. The book became a surprise Japanese bestseller, with more than 370,000 in print after six months. Now American businesspeople can also use it to master some powerful skills.
Watanabe uses sample scenarios to illustrate his techniques, which include logic trees and matrixes. A rock band figures out how to drive up concert attendance. An aspiring animator budgets for a new computer purchase. Students decide which high school they will attend.
Illustrated with diagrams and quirky drawings, the book is simple enough for a middleschooler to understand but sophisticated enough for business leaders to apply to their most challenging problems.

This book shows business leaders how to develop successful online communities of practice in their organizations by describing the approach for organizing and supporting such communities used by Clarica Life Insurance Company in Canada--widely regarded as one of the best companies for managing knowledge under the direction of Hubert Saint-Onge. Saint-Onge has been recognized by Fortune magazine as a leader in the field of leveraging knowledge capital. He is responsible for integrating progressive knowledge-based strategies within Clarica's overall strategy. Communities of Practice are an integral part of Clarica's Knowledge Capital Initiative to increase intellectual capital through knowledge creation and sharing. Based on the success of a recent project to establish an online community of practice for Clarica's independent agents, this book combines theory and practice to outline a model for successfully developing communities of practice. The authors argue that by acknowledging the value of such communities (e.g., recognition of membership contribution, support for time commitment) and providing them with an infrastructure (e.g., communication platforms, facilitation, information resources), organizations can increase the speed at which communities innovate, extend the reach of the community's knowledge sharing, and provide an opportunity to make the community's knowledge persistent.

A surprisingly simple approach to help everyday people become everyday innovators. The pressure to generate big ideas can feel overwhelming. We know that bold innovations are critical in these disruptive and competitive times, but when it comes to breakthrough thinking, we often freeze up. Instead of shooting for a $10-billion payday or a Nobel Prize, the most prolific innovators focus on Big Little Breakthroughs-small creative acts that unlock massive rewards over time. By cultivating daily micro-innovations, individuals and organizations are better equipped to tackle tough challenges and seize transformational opportunities. How did a convicted drug dealer launch and scale a massively successful fitness company? What core mindset drove LEGO to become the largest toy company in the world? How did a Pakistani couple challenge the global athletic shoe industry? What simple habits led Lady Gaga, Banksy, and Lin-Manuel Miranda to their remarkable success? Big Little Breakthroughs isn't just for propeller-head inventors, fancy-pants CEOs, or hoodie-donning tech billionaires. Rather, it's a surpassingly simple system to help everyday people become everyday innovators.

Business Excellence and Total Quality Management (TQM) models provide a means of measuring the satisfaction of customers, employees and shareholders simultaneously. A number of such models currently exist, but, the author argues, none of these address all dimensions of TQM.
This book introduces the principles of TQM, and establishes their use in measuring Business Excellence in an organisational environment. It comparatively evaluates various TQM and Business Excellence models, and discusses the complexities of measuring success.
Presenting important, innovative work by one of the most eminent scholars in the field, this book is essential reading for both academics and professionals working in quality management.

'Knowledge Management Foundations' is just what it claims, the first attempt to provide a secure intellectual footing for the myriad of practices called "knowledge management." A breath of fresh air from the usual KM gurus, Fuller openly admits that the advent of KM is a mixed blessing that often amounts to the conduct of traditional management by subtler means. However, Fuller's deep understanding of both the history of management theory and knowledge production more generally enables him to separate the wheat from the chaff of the KM literature.
This ground-breaking book will prove of interest to both academics and practitioners of knowledge management. It highlights the ways in which KM has challenged the values associated with knowledge that academics have taken for granted for centuries. At the same time, Fuller resists the conclusion of many KM gurus, that the value of knowledge lies in whatever the market will bear in the short term. He pays special attention to how information technology has not only facilitated knowledge work but also has radically altered its nature. There are chapters devoted to the revolution in intellectual property and an evaluation of peer review as a quality control mechanism. The book culminates in a positive re-evaluation of universities as knowledge producing institutions from which the corporate sector still has much to learn.
A KMCI Press book - a definitive title from the leading, standard-setting KM organizationOnly book to describe fundamental KM concepts and theoriesApproach roots theory in current state of the procession/discipline

Risk as we now know it is a wholly new phenomenon, the by-product of our ever more complex and powerful technologies. In business, policy making, and in everyday life, it demands a new way of looking at technological and environmental uncertainty. In this definitive volume, four of the world's leading risk researchers present a fundamental critique of the prevailing approaches to understanding and managing risk - the 'rational actor paradigm'. They show how risk studies must incorporate the competing interests, values, and rationalities of those involved and find a balance of trust and acceptable risk. Their work points to a comprehensive and significant new theory of risk and uncertainty and of the decision making process they require. The implications for social, political, and environmental theory and practice are enormous. Winner of the 2000-2002 Outstanding Publication Award of the Section on Environment and Technology of the American Sociological Association

A tour de force of theoretical reasoning, this book presents the most advanced analytical model of the bargaining process so far conceived. Focused essentially on the dynamics of the bargaining process, Coddington's model employs elements of several conceptual constructs--individual decision-making, theories of expectations and their adjustment, and environment concepts--to explain the nature of consistency in a bargainer's system of expectations and intentions. The book begins with a description of the bargaining process in an economic context and establishes an analytical framework. There follows a critical survey of bargaining theory in which the author selects those concepts, which he finds most valid and most applicable to his decision-making/expectation/adjustment model. The internal consistency of a wide class of bargaining models is then examined in a chapter on the relationship between decision-making and expectations. Since the theory of games has been used as a basis for bargaining process theory, the author devotes a chapter to an examination of the game-theoretic approach and an assessment of its value relative to his own approach. The author concludes with a study of the specific capabilities of his own analytical model, with discussion of the possible combinations of assumptions with which the investigator may work. Although stemming from a problem in economic theory and of immediate intent to economists, the book's contribution to the general theory of conflict process and interdependent decision-making make it an important study for students of politics and international affairs as well as management and labor relations specialists.

Workers' compensation causes headaches throughout all levels of an organization. Injuries affect production, costs, and morale. Managing Workers' Compensation: A Guide to Injury Reduction and Effective Claim Management lays out - in logical order - management and safety procedures that reduce injuries and the aggravation that follows. The authors cover hiring, training, and managing employees with injury avoidance in mind. They provide a blueprint for dealing with injured employees and their families, and for determining the correct time for the employee to return to work.

The book discusses the all-important issues of fraud, modified duty, substance abuse testing and accident investigations. It also provides guidance for managing your organization's safety efforts in a manner that targets workers' compensation cost control as one of its major objectives. In addition to comprehensive coverage of workers' compensation, the book gives you a thorough explanation of additional sources of assistance, including the availability and utility of Internet safety resources, a complete listing of state workers' compensation agencies, and sample checklists that help you evaluate your workplace.

Although workers' compensation laws vary from state-to-state, the principles behind the system and the ability of employers to influence their own premiums remain consistent. By gaining a thorough understanding of these principles and implementing proven cost control strategies, you can realize substantial savings. Managing Workers' Compensation: A Guide to Injury Reduction and Effective Claim Management explains the process by which premiums are calculated and shows how you can impact - favorably - the amount your organization pays in premiums.

This title was first published in 2001. This volume brings together the 25-year output of the longest running programme of research into the making of decisions by top management. It describes and explains the processes of arriving at major decisions and how they are affected by the issue under decision, the form of organization and national differences and then, finally, success and failure in implementation. The programme continues with research on routes in successfully managing implementation.

Risk or uncertainty assessments are used as aids to decision making in nearly every aspect of business, education, and government. As a follow-up to the author's bestselling Risk Assessment and Decision Making in Business and Industry: A Practical Guide, Risk Modeling for Determining Value and Decision Making presents comprehensive examples of risk/uncertainty analyses from a broad range of applications.

Decision/option selection Manufacturing
Environmental assessment Pricing
Identification of business drivers Production sharing
Insurance Scheduling and optimization
Investing Security
Law

Emphasizing value as the focus of risk assessment, this book offers discussions on how to make decisions using each risk model and what insights the model can provide. The presentation of each model also includes computer code that encapsulates its logic and direction on how to apply the model to other types of problems.

The author devotes a chapter to techniques for consistently collecting data in an inconsistent world and offers another chapter on how to reflect the effect of "soft" issues in the value of an opportunity. The book's final chapters delineate the techniques and technologies used to perform risk/uncertainty analyses, including sections on distribution, Monte Carlo process, dependence, sensitivity analysis, time series analysis, and chance of failure.

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For the public sector, which is globally the largest employer of people and repository of information, managing information and knowledge is an extremely problematic area to address. The essence of both resources is that they are intangible, their impact and value cannot be measured through traditional accounting methods, yet they are also, paradoxically, where the greatest value and potential for improvement is located. In this book Eileen Milner introduces the reader to the concepts of information and knowledge and explores a variety of tools and techniques which may be usefully adopted in actively managing and developing these resources. Wherever possible real-life public sector case studies and examples are used to illustrate good practice, as well as some of the pitfalls of poor application. Down-to-earth and taking into account the critically important characteristics unique to public services, this will be an illuminating text both for managers and policy makers already working in the public sector and for those considering doing so.

Author Biography:
Eileen Milner is a Principal Lecturer in Information Management at the University of North London

Rejecting the idea that there are ready-made solutions to the challenges of constructing and managing knowledge in organizations, this book addresses the changing nature of knowledge construction and what can be achieved through innovative research practices. Key issues and debates include: working knowledge into the 21st century; the highly contextualized nature of research at work; post-modern perspectives on knowledge construction and practice and performance implications; the impact of globalization; the influences of new technology; language; power; and culture and gender upon the "construction" of knowledge. Leading experts from North America, Japan, Britain and Australia illustrate both practice and theory issues. This text should be of interest to researchers, teachers and students in the field of human resource management, policy-makers and all those concerned with continuing professional development.