- Specifications: 3 x 2 1/2 inch mini soap box and mini megaphone - Mini book inside: 32-page illustrated mini book about the soapbox's history and its uses - Stickers included: sheet of 2 full-color stickers to customize your box - Perfect gift: a perfect stocking stuffer or gift for friends, family, coworkers

The #1 New York Times Bestseller From the bestselling author and columnist behind The Atlantic's popular "How to Build a Life" series, a guide to transforming the life changes we fear into a source of strength. In the first half of life, ambitious strivers embrace a simple formula for success in work and life: focus single-mindedly, work tirelessly, sacrifice personally, and climb the ladder relentlessly. It works. Until it doesn't. It turns out the second half of life is governed by different rules. In middle age, many strivers begin to find success coming harder and harder, rewards less satisfying, and family relationships withering. In response, they do what strivers always do: they double down on work in an attempt to outrun decline and weakness, and deny the changes that are becoming more and more obvious. The result is often anger, fear, and disappointment at a time in life that they imagined would be full of joy, fulfillment, and pride. It doesn't have to be that way. In From Strength to Strength, happiness expert and bestselling author Arthur C. Brooks reveals a path to beating the "striver's curse." Drawing on science, classical philosophy, theology, and history, he shares counterintuitive strategies for releasing old habits and forming new life practices, showing you how to: - Kick the habits of workaholism, success addiction, and self-objectification - Meditate on death-in order to beat fear and live well - Start a spiritual adventure - Embrace weakness in a way that turns it into strength. Change in your life is inevitable, but suffering is not. From Strength to Strength shows you how to accept the gifts of the second half of life with grace, joy, and ever deepening purpose.

Bringing together contributions from international scholars, this book explores the changing nature of young people's transitions and challenges assumptions about pathways from education into employment in contemporary society.

This book explores how we make sense of ourselves when work is precarious and intrinsically alienating. We know little about how this experience of work impacts the lives of men and women, and less about the way individuals understand themselves in the face of institutions and organizations from which they feel marginalized. Based on the narratives of men and women who underwent extraordinary work life changes, Crisis at Work examines how we negotiate greater meaning and fulfilment when our productive lives fail to sustain and satisfy. Reflecting a growing fracture between what we value, believe in, and are committed to and the degree to which work and career have become incapable of assuaging those desires, Potter examines how individuals attempt to assemble working-lives they find rich and rewarding and how that work is negotiated within the constraints and possibilities of the contemporary moment.

Machines dominate our lives, from alarm clocks that wake us up in the morning to radios that lull us to sleep. Most of our interactions with automated machines and computers are problem-free, but more often than we would like, they can be irritating and confusing. This is frequently harmless, such as a VCR recording the wrong show, but when it involves a critical system like an autopilot or medical device it can be a matter of life or death. Taming HAL seeks to explain these miscommunications between humans and machines by exploring user interfaces. Degani examines twenty-five different systems for human use, including watches, Internet applications, automobiles, medical equipment, and autopilots onboard commercial airplanes. Readers will discover why interfaces between people and machines all too often do not work and what needs to be done to avoid potential tragedies.

Work and well-being is one of the fastest growing areas of concern to business, public sector and government. This book looks at the causes of stress in the modern work-place, and offers practical advice for managers on how to combat stress in their employees, and put in place strategies for developing a healthy workplace.

This book investigates the extent of gender inequality in the division of labor in the modern household. Through comparisons of the time allocations of single couple families without children, couple families with children and lone parents, a comprehensive account of the evolution of gender inequality over a typical lifecourse is presented.

Work environments are paved with challenges and uncertainties that can result in the risk of setbacks and personal failure. Experiencing negative events such as these can be devastating for employees. This results in employees becoming distracted, detaching themselves from work and being unable to effectively engage in their work activities. Work Life after Failure?: How Employees Bounce Back, Learn, and Recover from Work-Related Setbacks brings together the knowledge from three distinct concepts that currently lack integration: resilience, learning, and recovery. The authors regard resilience as the positive adaptation after adversity and examine aspects of learning from failure as a process of improvement through enhanced knowledge and understanding after negative professional experiences. The exploration of recovery is situated in the context of a process of reducing strain symptoms that were caused by work-related events. Together, these three concepts advance our understanding of how to effectively use personal resources to overcome the experience of failure and what organizations can do to support employees during these difficult times. Encompassing both conceptual and empirical work from experts in the fields of resilience, learning from failure, and recovery, this book also sheds light on the classification of failures and setbacks and develops a measure of the setback severity.

Globalization of business, internationalization of trade, and increasing prevalence of multi-cultural interdisciplinary teams are beginning to redefine the nature of office work. Different-time/different-place/different-culture teams will become the norm. Same-time/same-place/same-culture teams will become the exception. The International Office of the Future (IOF) will be a dramatically different environment than that which exists in the majority of today's organizations. Prospects for the IOF give rise to numerous questions, which are addressed in this book. What are the salient issues? What design options or solution strategies exist to address these issues? How might these design options be best implemented? What are their implications? In addition, a number of specific topics will be discussed including: multi-cultural team productivity, IT platform requirements, and global telecommunications.

An expert guide to women's quest for fairness in the workplace, marking the great legal and social advances as well as continuing inequalities. Women and Equality in the Workplace: A Reference Handbook is an expert overview of the issues of gender equity in the workplace as they have evolved from World War II to the present. Focusing primarily on the United States, while drawing broad contrasts with nations around the world, the book describes the practical impact of laws and social policies developed to combat the many forms of sex discrimination, as well as the legal remedies of equal pay law, affirmative action, and comparable worth. Women and Equality in the Workplace also reviews current sociological and economic theories as to why, despite the notable progress, men continue to have better pay and benefits, higher status, and more opportunities, while working women are still all too often harassed, stigmatized, and overlooked. A detailed chronology, statistics and legal cases, list of relevant organizations, bibliography, and nonprint resources A timeline of major developments, biographies of women pioneers, and information about organizations and academic programs devoted to women's studies and equal rights

This volume provides a Europe-wide comparative analysis of the role of civil society organizations active in the field of unemployment and precarity. It illustrates how crucial civil society organizations are for the inclusion of the young unemployed, mainly in two ways: by delivering services and by advocating policy.

Flexibility has become a key concept in discourses on developments in working life. However, it is an ambiguous concept in several ways, and theoretical clarity is lacking. Further, large parts of the literature are prescriptive and ideological rather than empirical and analytical. This book contributes both theoretically and empirically to expound the importance of clearer concepts in the national and international debates on economic systems, labour markets, work organisations, and experiences of work.

Secretaries have been in existence since the establishment of the office and will undoubtedly continue to exist as long as there are offices and bosses. But the role has expanded from earlier years, and the responsibilities and duties have evolved as well. In "The Elite Secretary," author Sandra C. Rorbak, who has been a secretary on three continents throughout her career of more than twenty years, provides specific information on how to succeed in the position.

"The Elite Secretary" clarifies what novice secretaries really need to know: what to do (and what not to do) on the first day, how to handle the bully boss and other unsavory office personalities, what to expect in the modern office, and how to become an elite secretary. It provides real-life examples for both new and experienced secretaries, explaining what to expect on the job and how to handle ambiguous situations. What are the advantages and disadvantages of temping? How do male and female employers differ? How does one navigate office politics?

An informative, how-to guide, "The Elite Secretary" includes practical tools such as resume suggestions, a day-by-day checklist for interview preparation, competency guidelines, and a sample dress code policy to help you become a top-notch secretary.

Beyond Inclusion adopts a holistic and systems view of the organization, presents a behavioral model of organizational inclusion based upon research with thousands of employees, and discusses elements of organizational design that need to be adjusted to create, nurture, and sustain an inclusive culture.

This book is about what we have called the "leadership illusion"; the hardwired habit of writers, researchers and leaders themselves, when examining the causes of success or failure, to focus on predominantly the individual and often the context. But very rarely both. Our argument is that to make sense of leadership we first have to make sense of the context in which leaders operate because context and the individual are inextricably linked.
To try to understand a leader without the context is only half the story. This is our attempt to tell the whole story.

This book explores the flexibility of work and labor markets based on studies of the temporary staffing sector in Sweden, Great Britain, and the US. It gives an inside view of what it means to be working as a "temp," and of notions of career and community, time and space. Moreover, it shows how the flexible worker is "made up" within the wider context of increasing globalization of labor markets, and new ways of organizing and of regulating work.

Today's workforce represents individuals of various backgrounds and experiences. The influence of such individuals is becoming an important component in the workplace and researchers continue to explore the challenges of understanding the connection between employee profiles and the overall success of a company. Impact of Diversity on Organization and Career Development brings together a reflective discussion on the previous approaches and strategies of companies in relation to the paradigm shift in workplace equity of today's workforce. By examining both old and new strategies, the research included in this publication will present a unique approach for future company enhancement and employee success. This publication is an essential reference source for researchers, practitioners, managers, and students interested in the effects of multicultural representation on both a company and its employees through professional growth and advancement.

This book analyzes the nature and requirements of workplace e-learning based on relevant theories such as adult learning, community of practice, organizational learning, and the systems thinking. By integrating considerations on organization, pedagogy and technology, a performance-oriented e-learning framework is then presented, where performance measurement is used to: 1) clarify and link organizational goals and individual learning needs, 2) direct learning towards work performance; and 3) support social communication and knowledge sharing and management in the workplace. E-learning and related emerging technologies have been increasingly used by organizations to enhance the skills and performance of knowledge workers. However, most of the efforts tend to focus on the technology, ignoring the organizational context and relevant pedagogies of workplace learning. Many e-learning projects in the workplace settings fail to connect learning with work performance and align organizational goals and individual needs in a systemic way. Moreover, there is insufficient effort on externalizing and transferring tacit knowledge embedded in practices and expertise, based on which to maintain and expand knowledge assets for sustainable development. The book presents a systemic theoretical framework, design principles, and implementation methods, together with a case study to demonstrate the use and effectiveness of the performance-oriented approach to workplace e-learning, in which organizational, social and individual perspectives are integrated in a systemic way. The performance-oriented approach to workplace e-learning enables self-regulated and socially constructed learning activities to be clearly motivated and driven towards the goal of performance improvement, and makes learning at the organizational, social and individual levels integrated in a systemic way. The effects of individual and social learning support and organizational learning environment on employees' motivation to use performance-oriented e-learning are also investigated.

Employees of both sexes share the work environment, and a mishandled office romance can be disastrous for love, a life partnership, or a career. Avoid the pitfalls of love-at-work-from the corner office to the online "friend"-with this 21st-century guide. The typical workplace offers constant opportunities for face-to-face communication and social interaction. Individuals within a work environment have common experiences, share the same frustrations or feelings, and can easily garner details about one another from simple observation and casual conversation. It is not surprising that workplace romances happen so frequently, making it a topic of great interest to far more individuals than those who work in Human Resources departments. Finding Love from 9 to 5: Trade Secrets of Office Romance is not about workplace misbehavior. It's about love relationships that begin-and sometimes end-on company time, regardless of whether these individuals work in the same physical environment or not. Powerful emotions can and do ignite via a virtual connection as easily as in an actual shared workplace environment-real relationships spark in either context. This book is for anyone who has fallen in or out of love in the workplace, the single person who is dreaming of or on the brink of an office romance, and colleagues and supervisors who must learn to live and work among those involved in "in-house" relationships. Reveals original data from 774 adults who completed an online survey and interviews with 70 people who have experienced an office romance Provides a roadmap for navigating the brave new world of office romance that specifies the etiquette of workplace relationships and addresses issues involving email, text messages, Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter Contains chapters with compelling content such as "What HE is Thinking," "When the Office Romance Becomes Sexual," "Dating up and Down the Ranks," and "Marry Your Office Love?" Describes office policies, including love contracts

There is a void of research and other academic materials to support stakeholders operating within industry and the service sector with respect to their perceptions and experiences of remote work, particularly in the context of global business, sustainability, and change management. As more businesses consider remaining and maintaining a remote workforce, it is of paramount importance that new research be conducted regarding the multifaceted area of remote work and sustainable change for global business. Remote Work and Sustainable Changes for the Future of Global Business raises awareness of the multifaceted area of remote work in the context of sustainable change. In particular, it explores remote technology in an attempt to cope with the changing landscape of work environments amidst global change from a sociotechnical perspective. This book provides insight into the challenges both national and international businesses face during a world crisis. Covering topics such as crisis management, the human cloud, and virtual collaboration, this book is essential to business managers, project managers, business clusters, entrepreneurs, higher education practitioners, faculty and PhD researchers, educational boards, technology vendors and firms, and academic researchers.