Are you a passenger in your career, wanting more but fearful of change or failure? Do you wish you could just be yourself at work? Two Mirrors and a Cheetah will help you to challenge the assumptions and choices that hold you back, and inspire you to find real career fulfilment just by being yourself. Providing insights, examples and simple exercises, this book will equip you to: Understand and showcase your unique capabilities Identify the contexts and conditions that help you to thrive Recognise and successfully navigate change Deal with challenges like the 'bad' manager, the job hunt, the promotion, and coaching your own team Define your own work-life rhythm If you learn better with stories than with detailed handbooks, then this easy-to-read book is all the empowerment you need to get into the driving seat and take control of your career today! Reviews from the cover 'This book holds a career's worth of wisdom from an inspirational leader. Read this if you want a happier and healthier career!' Doug Gurr, former CEO Amazon UK 'Dedicated to exploring and understanding yourself, this book is packed with inspiring, insightful and practical advice and exercises to get you to where you want to go. The wisdom in these pages is priceless.' Amanda Mackenzie OBE, Chief Executive, Business In the Community

Reinvent best practices that have become bad habits Without meaning to, and often with the best of intentions, most organizations continually waste precious time and money on processes and activities that don't create value and no longer make sense in today's business environment. Until now, the relatively slow speed of marketplace evolution has allowed wasteful habits to continue without consequence. This reality is ending. Detonate explains how organizations built up bad habits, identifies which ones masquerade as "best practices," and suggests alternatives that can contribute to winning in the marketplace. With a focus on optimism and empowerment, it focuses on an approach and mindset which are critical to successfully compete in an era characterized by profound technological advances and uncertainty. - Core themes challenge how you think about and approach problems - Case studies illustrate the challenges you face and how to overcome them - Recommendations are pragmatic and steer clear of suggesting a brand-new, complicated wiring diagram - Actionable advice provides the first steps down an evolutionary path If you want to compete differently in today's marketplace and to challenge the things your company does which you have a nagging feeling are actually just a waste of time - and maybe value-destroying - Detonate gives you what you need to ignite change.

Across the social sciences, scholars are increasingly showing how people 'work' to construct organizational life, including the rules and routines that shape and enable organizational activity, the identities of people who occupy organizations, and the societal norms and assumptions that provide the context for organizational action. The idea of work emphasizes the ways in which people and groups engage in purposeful, reflexive efforts rooted in an awareness of organizational life as constructed in human interaction and changeable through human effort. Studies of these efforts have identified new forms of work including emotion work, identity work, boundary work, strategy work, institutional work, and a host of others. Missing in these conversations, however, is a recognition that these forms of work are all part of a broader phenomenon driven by historical shifts that began with modernity and dramatically accelerated through the twentieth century. This book introduces the social-symbolic work perspective, which addresses this broader phenomenon. The social-symbolic work perspective integrates diverse streams of research to examine how people purposefully and reflexively work to construct organizational life, including the identities, technologies, boundaries, and strategies that constitute their organizations. In this book, the authors define social-symbolic work and introduce three forms - self work, organization work, and institutional work. Social-symbolic work highlights people's efforts to construct the social world, and focuses attention on the motivations, practices, resources, and effects of those efforts. This book explores eight distinct streams of social-symbolic work research, drawing on a broad range of examples from the worlds of business, politics, sports, social movements, and many others. It provides researchers, students, and practitioners with an integrative theoretical framework useful in understanding social-symbolic work, a survey of the main forms of social-symbolic work, a rich set of theoretical opportunities to inspire new studies, and practical methodological guidance for empirical research on social-symbolic work.

"Teams have evolved into an important structure in business today--and are now needed more than ever. An insightful collection of activities, "Team Workout" provides facilitators, trainers, leaders, and managers with a wide variety of tools to increase team effectiveness and upgrade skills and knowledge within today's challenging organizational environment. The book focuses on such current team issues as virtual teams, trust-building, customer satisfaction, recognition, and respect. Trainers will learn the key ideas that underlie all of the activities in this manual, including: * Each team has a common purpose, mission, or goal * Members are interdependent; they need each other to achieve their purpose * Agreement that working together effectively will help to reach their goal. This collection will help team leaders, team-building specialists, trainers, and others interested in creating collaborative, harmonious and effective work teams."