Choosing the right people to carry out a project is essential to its success, and when multiple projects are combined into a complex program, the human aspect becomes even more important. Project and Program Management: A Competency-Based Approach, Fifth Edition balances a complete account of the technical aspects of project and program management with a practical approach to understanding and developing the core competencies required to accomplish desired goals. On the technical side, this book is a complete introduction to predicting costs, setting schedules, and assessing risks. On the human side, it sheds new light on how to mold different personality types into a team, how to motivate the team's members, and how to produce extraordinary results. The author details the blocking and tackling of the program management approach, describing the best way to define, organize, and schedule the work to be done, while identifying risks and controlling costs throughout the process.This fifth edition has been significantly revised, with every chapter updated. The volume considers the magnitude of recent social, political, and technological changes. Included are insights from numerous students who bring to the forefront their current real-world practices from their individual businesses, industries, and disciplines.

As technology erodes the impact of time and distance, more and more people live and work across cultures. This can be one of the most joyful experiences, as collaboration and diversity emerge as key drivers of innovation, yet there are also many challenges. Acknowledging that it is often the search for best practice, and the 'one right way', that creates prejudices, and even causes a disregard for diversity, this book brings an authentic and inclusive perspective to tackling the challenges of cultural diversity. Based on interviews with 145 individuals, it weaves together stories told in the voices of those who have experienced them, with key concepts, insights, and the expertise of each of the authors and editors, each of whom has lived and worked in at least 2 different countries. This book seeks sets out to inspire the reader, invite reflection, and nurture a curiosity and appreciation for those who are different from ourselves. Collectively, the authors and editors equip readers with the tools to embrace the richness and beauty brought by diversity, and ultimately engage with the key skills for thriving in today's fast-paced, highly interconnected and interdependent world. They envisage a mindset they call CulturAll Intelligentsia (c), which thrives on authenticity, embraces those who and that which is different, and thus creates a pathway to more sensitivity, and peace.

Equal opportunity in the workplace is thought to be the direct legacy of the civil rights and feminist movements and the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964. Yet, as Frank Dobbin demonstrates, corporate personnel experts--not Congress or the courts--were the ones who determined what equal opportunity meant in practice, designing changes in how employers hire, promote, and fire workers, and ultimately defining what discrimination is, and is not, in the American imagination.

Dobbin shows how Congress and the courts merely endorsed programs devised by corporate personnel. He traces how the first measures were adopted by military contractors worried that the Kennedy administration would cancel their contracts if they didn't take "affirmative action" to end discrimination. These measures built on existing personnel programs, many designed to prevent bias against unionists. Dobbin follows the changes in the law as personnel experts invented one wave after another of equal opportunity programs. He examines how corporate personnel formalized hiring and promotion practices in the 1970s to eradicate bias by managers; how in the 1980s they answered Ronald Reagan's threat to end affirmative action by recasting their efforts as diversity-management programs; and how the growing presence of women in the newly named human resources profession has contributed to a focus on sexual harassment and work/life issues.

"Inventing Equal Opportunity" reveals how the personnel profession devised--and ultimately transformed--our understanding of discrimination.

One of The Times' Best Business Books of 2022 A practical guide for bringing gender equality to the workplace with a new imperative: unburden women's careers from work that goes unrewarded. THE NO CLUB started when four women who were crushed by endless to-do lists banded together over $10 bottles of wine and vowed to get their work lives under control. Running faster than ever, they nevertheless trailed behind their male colleagues. And so, they vowed to say no to requests that pulled them away from the work that mattered most to their careers. This book reveals how their over-a-decade-long journey and groundbreaking research uncovered that women everywhere are unfairly burdened with "non-promotable work", a tremendous problem we can - and must - solve. All organizations have work that no one wants to do: planning the office party, screening interns, attending to that time-consuming client, or simply helping others with their work. From office housework to important assignments that inevitably go unrewarded, a woman, most often, takes on these tasks. In study upon study, professors Linda Babcock (bestselling author of WHY WOMEN DON'T ASK), Brenda Peyser, Lise Vesterlund, and Laurie Weingart - the original "No Club" - document that women are disproportionately asked and expected to do this kind of work. This imbalance leaves women overcommitted and underutilized as companies forfeit revenue, productivity, and top talent. But it doesn't have to be this way. THE NO CLUB walks you through how to make small, yet important, changes to your own workload and empowers women to make savvy decisions about what they take on. At the same time, the authors illuminate how lasting change calls for organizations to reassess how they assign and reward work to level the playing field. With hard data, personal anecdotes from women of all stripes, practical self- and workplace-assessments, and innovative advice from consulting in Fortune 500 companies, this book will forever change the conversation about how we advance women's careers and achieve equality in the twenty-first century.

"For those whose jobs have been a victim of the economic impact of the pandemic, it is a timely reminder not only to stay determined, but hopeful." - Financial Times 'This book reminded me why an ending - especially an unexpected one - can be the best kind of beginning' Viv Groskop, author of Lift As You Climb 'This book will help you escape the valleys of rejection bound for the peaks of opportunity' Bruce Daisley, bestselling author of The Joy of Work 'So much more than a user guide to life after redundancy, it's an inspiring lesson on how to deal with the knocks of everyday life; written with humour, empathy and honesty' Debbie Hewitt MBE, Chair, Visa Europe Why Losing Your Job Could be the Best Thing That Ever Happened to You is a compassionate guide that will inform and engage anyone who is facing redundancy or job loss; with deeply inspiring case studies and clear and brilliantly accessible, practical advice for getting back on course with your life and career. Learn how to: -Navigate feelings of anger, guilt and shame -Search for new beginnings -Overcome analysis paralysis -Progress with small steps Eleanor Tweddell's five-step plan will support you through the early stages of shock, through to building up the skills, self-confidence and motivation to thrive after redundancy; whether that is in your previous sector or something new.

This wide-ranging volume brings together the commissioned papers that are the basis of James O'Toole and Edward E. Lawler's "The New American Workplace," their follow-up to the groundbreaking 1973 "Work in America" report. Here leading scholars in the fields of business, management, and human resources offer new research and insightful analyses of existing studies, providing a definitive assessment of the state of the workplace today. Covering wage trends, worker health, education and the workforce, the effects of outsourcing, careers, human resources management, and a variety of other vital issues, this illuminating collection will prove indispensable for scholars, professionals, and policymakers.

Many managers are frustrated by a bewildering array of advice about what works in the workplace. This volume contributes to a growing consensus about effective workplace practices. The collection combines detailed studies of single industries (automobile assembly, apparel, and machine tools) with cross-industry studies of financial performance. Compared to most past investigations, the research here has better measures of both workplace practices and organizational performance. The contributors find that systems of innovative human resource management practices can have large effects on business performance. Success does not come from any single innovation, but from a coherent system encompassing pay, training, and employee involvement. Although a majority of contemporary US businesses now have adopted some innovative work practices, only a small percentage of businesses have adopted a coherent new system. A concluding chapter outlines barriers to diffusion and discusses public policies to remove barriers and enhance dissemination of effective management.

The history of how a deceptively ordinary piece of office furniture transformed our relationship with information The ubiquity of the filing cabinet in the twentieth-century office space, along with its noticeable absence of style, has obscured its transformative role in the histories of both information technology and work. In the first in-depth history of this neglected artifact, Craig Robertson explores how the filing cabinet profoundly shaped the way that information and data have been sorted, stored, retrieved, and used. Invented in the 1890s, the filing cabinet was a result of the nineteenth-century faith in efficiency. Previously, paper records were arranged haphazardly: bound into books, stacked in piles, curled into slots, or impaled on spindles. The filing cabinet organized loose papers in tabbed folders that could be sorted alphanumerically, radically changing how people accessed, circulated, and structured information. Robertson's unconventional history of the origins of the information age posits the filing cabinet as an information storage container, an "automatic memory" machine that contributed to a new type of information labor privileging manual dexterity over mental deliberation. Gendered assumptions about women's nimble fingers helped to naturalize the changes that brought women into the workforce as low-level clerical workers. The filing cabinet emerges from this unexpected account as a sophisticated piece of information technology and a site of gendered labor that with its folders, files, and tabs continues to shape how we interact with information and data in today's digital world.

In this "deeply empowering and practical book"(Cecilia Muñoz), two technology and innovation leaders reveal dozens of tactics that enabled them to accomplish seemingly impossible reforms in organizations of all types and sizes.

Whether you just started your first entry-level job, run the entire company, or just feel trapped by your condo association bylaws, it’s time to it’s time to learn how to get big things done and make a lasting impact with Hack Your Bureaucracy.

From local government to the White House, Harvard to the world of venture capital, Marina Nitze and Nick Sinai have taken on some of the world’s most challenging bureaucracies—and won. Now, they bring their years of experience to you, teaching you strategies anyone can use to improve your organization through their own stories and those of fellow bureaucracy hackers, including:

• Find Your Paperclip: use small steps to achieve big change
• Set Your North Star: keep your end goal in sight
• Cultivate the Karass: assemble an adept team and network
• Don’t Waste a Crisis: turn every opportunity into a chance for change and more!

Change doesn’t happen just because the person in charge declares it should, even if that person is the CEO of your company or the President of the United States. Regardless of your industry, role, or team, Hack Your Bureaucracy shows how to get started, take initiative on your own, and transform your ideas into impact.

Communication is no longer considered an optional soft" skill for climbing the corporate ladder. More and more businesses are placing emphasis on being able to communicate effectively. Communicating Effectively For Dummies gives you the tools and insight you need to manage conflict, build teams and communicate persuasively at work."

Here is an inspiring book about awakening to the wholeness of who you are, and fulfilling that wholeness in how you earn your living. "Wisdom at Work" offers practical methods for integrating inner spiritual aspiration and the outer work of earning money, face to face with the realities of today's demanding jobs. They all creatively apply principles and techniques of the Perennial Philosophy to the workplace and corporate life. As a spiritual seeker, leadership coach, and historian, Davidson has explored the workaday world as a place of spiritual growth, service, and awakening to the non-dual. Since 1980, he has led hundreds of seminars on empowerment, stress and change management, and personal/spiritual development.

Twenty-four-year-old Megan may have her whole life ahead of her, but it already feels like a dead end, thanks to her dreadful job as a gastroenterologist's receptionist and her heart-clogging resentment of the success and happiness of everyone around her. But no one stokes Megan's bitterness quite like her coworker, Jillian, a grotesquely optimistic, thirty-five-year-old single mother whose chirpy positivity obscures her mounting struggles. Megan and Jillian's lives become increasingly precarious as their faulty coping mechanisms--denial, self-help books, alcohol, religion, prescription painkillers, obsessive criticism, alienated boyfriends, and, in Jillian's case, the misguided purchase of a dog--send them spiraling toward their downfalls. Wickedly authentic and brutally funny, Jillian is a subversive portrait of two women trapped in cycles of self-delusion and self-destruction, each more like the other than they would care to admit.

Even though office gossip is generally frowned upon, many studies show that gossip in organizations is not only inevitable, but can even be a positive communication tool. However, by gossiping in the wrong way, employees can easily lose the trust of their colleagues and be perceived negatively very quickly. Research shows that people who claim to never gossip tend to be considered as socially inept, but those that are constantly gabbing at the coffee machine are quickly seen as untrustworthy. There is an optimal amount of time one should gossip - somewhere in the middle - which we call the sweet spot of gossip. However, it's not only the amount of time one spends gossiping that will make or break an employee or manager. Other factors such as credibility, what we gossip about, whom we gossip with, culture, and place, all play an equally crucial role in the art of gossiping successfully at work. Finding the right balance for all of these factors is of the essence.

Nowadays, managing and promoting diversity is of paramount importance to the future of sustainability and the political and business agenda. Despite a tremendous growth in diversity management scholarship in recent years, a strong tendency has emerged whereby existing theories focus on a single level of analysis, using a limited range of mostly Western research settings, and on a narrow range of diversity types. Diversity research has insofar focused on prioritizing visible forms of diversity, such as gender or disability, with less emphasis placed on diversity in culture and values internationally. This edited book provides new practical and strategic insights for practitioners, managers, students and policy makers; it delves into the strategic nature of policy intervention with thought-provoking contributions written by experts from around the world. Contributors aim to provide critical reflection of current debate areas on workplace equality and diversity in under-researched countries to inform and support evidence-based decision making for a wide variety of academic and practice-oriented stakeholders.

This book looks at how large organizations have managed and adapted to changing conditions of employment shaped by the recent economic and political environment. Additional data are presented based on evidence from other significant actors such as agency employment firms and trade unions. The book also engages with important North American debates on the changing nature of work, careers, and employment.

The "informal" economy economic activity and income outside government regulation, taxation and observation is, by its very nature, difficult to quantify. Recent estimates suggest it accounts, in OECD countries, for around 13% of national income (in the UK, the equivalent of GBP150 billion) and in developing nations it can make up as much as three-quarters of all non-agricultural employment. Whatever the exact figures, it is clear that the informal economy plays a significant role in national incomes (eventhough excluded from calculations of GDP or GNP) and affects a large share of the global workforce. Colin C. Williams provides an authoritative introduction to the topic, explaining what the informal economy is (and what it isn't) and how it can best be measured. Taking a global perspective, he examines its characteristics in developed, developing and transitional economies, and looks at its role as a driver of economic growth. The theoretical underpinnings are explored, from conceptual origins in the development models of the 1950s, through to present-day discussions, which question whether a formalised economy is always the ideal. The book considers the economic motivations of the informal economy workforce, which may include tax evasion, circumventing regulations and maintaining state benefits, and assesses the different policy options available to governments to combat them, whether a punitive policy of deterrence, or one of accommodation that recognises the value of the sector in generating income and in meeting the needs of poor consumers. The book provides a masterly summation of the published research on the informal economy and an expert assessment of the key areas for research going forward. It will be welcomed by students taking courses in development economics, economic growth, labour economics, welfare economics and public policy.

Organizational life has inevitably felt the knock-on effect of the economic downturn and the unease that has accompanied it. High unemployment, redundancy and fear for the future are commonplace. Studies repeatedly show that 'trust' in the workplace is critical to ensure a happy and productive workforce and yet trust in organizations and management is at an all-time low. As fear permeates organizations, from the top layers of management down to the ground floor, the knee-jerk reaction is often an attempt to impose control; hierarchical control supported by regulation, red tape and rigid administration; control through performance targets, and control of oneself, in order to survive in a toxic working climate. This approach rarely works. Fear and over-control lead to paralysis; risk aversion, a lack of innovation and a depressed workforce. It may seem counter-intuitive, but placing greater emphasis on 'human' values of trust, participation and greater autonomy in the workplace has been shown to promote a happier, more engaged and more pro-active workforce. People stay longer, put in more effort and work together more cooperatively. Equally important, productivity increases. This has been shown to hold true even in times of restructuring and redundancies. This essay explores the human and business costs of viewing staff primarily as a resource and looks at ways of re-thinking organizations. In particular, it examines Qualitative Productivity as a route to healthy, productive and innovative organizations.

The United States has a large number of well educated, experienced professional women ready, willing and able to move into the boardrooms and executive suites of corporate America. Together they represent a great, untapped economic resource, a resource no other country in the world can claim. This is America's competitive secret, argues Judy B. Rosener in this refreshingly pragmatic new book for managers who want to improve their bottom line.