Stuck in a job that’s boring you to tears? Slogging away at a business that’s never quite taken off? Still can’t decide what you’d rather do? It’s time to say ‘enough’.

The world has changed. It’s now possible for anyone to make a living from doing the things they love. The only problem is that no one has shown you how. Until now.

Based on life-changing ideas and tools proven with tens of thousands of people over the last decade, F**k Work Let’s Play is your blueprint to create a work-life full of fun, freedom and creativity; something more like play than work.

Packed full of stories from people who turned a passion into a living – or even a multi-million-pound business – you’ll discover 10 secrets to transform your working life, starting today.

There’s no need to suffer unfulfilling work a moment longer. Whether you want to start a business, create your ideal job, or change the world, F**k Work, Let’s Play is your guide to doing what you love and getting paid for it.

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.

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.

What can you learn from the world's most successful companies? Marvel characters have been shaping pop culture for decades and when comic books were no longer keeping the company afloat, Marvel Studios was born. Marvel Studios is the multibillion-dollar home to iconic franchises. They are known for creating brilliant multilayered worlds and storylines that allow their audiences to escape into a fantasy and inspire the creative side of every viewer. But, behind those visionaries is a well-oiled storytelling machine dedicated to getting the Hulk's smash fists in the hands of every child and a sea of Spiderman costumes deployed every Halloween. The Marvel Studios Story educates you on how one of the largest creative companies in the planetary universe runs their business and keeps their fans and their parent company, Disney, counting the profits. Through the story of Marvel Studios, you'll learn: How to recognize and pursue additional revenue streams. How a company can successfully balance the creative with business to appease investors and fans alike. And how to keep a decades-old superhero franchise new and exciting without losing sight of its roots. The Marvel Studios Story will help you understand and adopt the competitive strategies, workplace culture, and daily business practices that enabled a struggling comic book publisher to parlay the power of myth and storytelling to become one of history's most successful movie studios.

Pitman New Era shorthand is geared to the needs of top secretaries and professional shorthand writers. The fastest and most accurate shorthand system, it is in world-wide use with speeds of up to 350 words per minute. The phonetic system is ideal for specialist and technical use - for example on legal, medical and bilingual work - and its speed makes it the first choice for all verbatim recorders. Millions of people across the globe have studied New Era, qualified and entered well-paid professions. Each piece of new theory is reinforced with five practice sentences. Includes short forms, phrase drills and 'practical dictation' sections of letters, memos and reports. Provides appendices with advice on the treatment of figures and verbatim reporting. Gives a separate alphabetic list of short forms and intersections.

Social Contracts and Informal Workers in the Global South draws on the accounts of informal workers, who represent over 60 per cent of the global workforce, to advocate for radically new conceptualizations of state-society, capital-labour and state-capital-labour relations, illustrating how current social contracts may be considered inadequate, irrelevant or unjust. Bridging social contract theories, both mainstream and critical, and the experiences of informal workers - self-employed, wage employed and sub-contracted - this book sheds light on how many existing social contract models stigmatize informal workers and do not offer legal or social protection. Instead of ideologically driven 'top-down' calls to revitalize the social contract, it advocates for 'bottom-up' initiatives focused on the demands of the working poor in the informal economy. With a wealth of cross-national evidence, as well as promising case studies, this timely and thought-provoking book will prove vital for scholars and researchers of informal workers and of state-capital-labour relations; and for policy makers negotiating new social contracts.

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 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.

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.

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.

The definitive guide to eliminating the forces that make it harder, more complicated, or downright impossible to get things done in organizations. Find out why Adam Grant says "If every leader took the ideas in this book seriously, the world would be a less miserable, more productive place."

Every organization is plagued by destructive friction. Yet some forms of friction are incredibly useful, and leaders who attempt to improve workplace efficiency often make things even worse. Drawing from seven years of hands-on research, The Friction Project by bestselling authors Robert I. Sutton and Huggy Rao teaches readers how to become “friction fixers.”

Sutton and Rao kick off the book by unpacking how skilled friction fixers think and act like trustees of others’ time. They provide friction forensics to help readers identify where to avert and repair bad organizational friction and where to maintain and inject good friction. Then their help pyramid shows how friction fixers do their work, from reframing friction troubles they can’t fix right now, so they feel less threatening, to designing and repairing organizations. The heart of the book digs into the causes and solutions for five of the most common and damaging friction troubles: oblivious leaders, addition sickness, broken connections, jargon monoxide, and fast and frenzied people and teams.

Sound familiar? Sutton and Rao are here to help. They wrap things up with lessons for leading your own friction project, including linking little things to big things; the power of civility, caring, and love for propelling designs and repairs; and embracing the mess that is an inevitable part of the process (while still trying to clean it up).

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.

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.

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

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.

Algebraic Cryptanalysis bridges the gap between a course in cryptography, and being able to read the cryptanalytic literature. This book is divided into three parts: Part One covers the process of turning a cipher into a system of equations; Part Two covers finite field linear algebra; Part Three covers the solution of Polynomial Systems of Equations, with a survey of the methods used in practice, including SAT-solvers and the methods of Nicolas Courtois.

Topics include:

Analytic Combinatorics, and its application to cryptanalysis

The equicomplexity of linear algebra operations

Graph coloring

Factoring integers via the quadratic sieve, with its applications to the cryptanalysis of RSA

Algebraic Cryptanalysis is designed for advanced-level students in computer science and mathematics as a secondary text or reference book for self-guided study. This book is suitable for researchers in Applied Abstract Algebra or Algebraic Geometry who wish to find more applied topics or practitioners working for security and communications companies.

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.