In Balancing act: South African gay and lesbian youth speak out, twenty one young gay and lesbian South Africans from a wide range of social backgrounds speak candidly about their experiences, hopes and dreams. This collection of stories gives a fascinating insight into choices faced by young South African gay and lesbian people.

Align your leadership team to deliver the highest possible value to your customers

Too many organizations today suffer from silo-centric behavior and intra-organizational conflict. Yet most don't understand what's holding them back from achieving outstanding performance.

Value stream mapping--an essential but underused methodology--is a proven approach to help you visualize and resolve disconnects, redundancies, and gaps in your value delivery system. More than merely a tool to eliminate operational waste, value stream mapping is a highly effective means to transform leadership thinking, define strategy and priorities, and create customer-centric work flow.

In this detailed guide, business performance improvement experts Karen Martin and Mike Osterling present a practical way to deeply understand how work gets done--in any environment--and how to design improved work systems.

You'll learn how to: Prepare and engage your leadership team in the transformation process Gain a deep understanding about your current work systems and the related barriers to delivering value Design a future state that enables outstanding performance on all fronts Adopt the new design and lay the foundation for continued improvement

Whether you are a novice, an experienced improvement practitioner, or a leader, "Value Stream Mapping" will help you design and operate your business more effectively. And if your organization already uses value stream mapping, this book will help you improve your transformation efforts.

In today's rapid-fire business environment, there are too many problems to be solved and too many opportunities to be leveraged to operate without a highly effective means for accomplishing the important work to be done. Value stream mapping is the missing link in business management and, properly executed, has the power to address many business woes.

PRAISE FOR "VALUE STREAM MAPPING"

""Value stream mapping has evolved from its roots as a tool used by geeks to reimagine and reconfigure manufacturing operations to a process to enable deep organizational intervention and transformation. With Value Stream Mapping, Karen Martin and Mike Osterling provide an outstanding guide for practitioners engaged in the challenging work of improving the horizontal flow of value across organizations."" -- John Shook, Chairman and CEO, Lean Enterprise Institute, and author, Learning to See

""Despite decades of viewing value stream mapping as the core tool of Lean transformations, there is still confusion. Karen and Mike put mapping in its proper perspective as a methodology for getting high-performing teams to see waste, share a future state vision, and build meaningful actions that are carried out with passion and purpose."" -- Jeffrey Liker, author, The Toyota Way

""In Value Stream Mapping, Karen and Mike not only provide a great how-to book for transforming value streams, they also demonstrate the benefits that taking a holistic view can have on an organization's culture and commitment to customer value. There is something to learn for the novice and expert on every page."" -- Jeff Chester, Chief Revenue Officer & Senior Vice President, Availity

""Martin and Osterling have written an excellent book that shows you how to do value stream mapping and do it right. Follow their advice and your organization will get the profoundly radical change required to better serve your customers and create unprecedented profits and agility."" -- Brian Maskell, author, Practical Lean Accounting

""VSM is often misunderstood and underutilized. Strategically, it can be a Rosetta Stone to help bring disparate organizational silos together and a catalyst for stimulating and prioritizing enterprise-wide transformation. Karen and Mike have produced another terrific guide. Read it, practice it, share it, teach it."" -- Steve Bell, author, Run Grow Transform

""Value Stream Mapping is well worth picking up. It's a straightforward user's guide to constructing current-state and designing future-state value stream maps that help you visualize and improve your efforts to flow value to your customer."" -- Matthew May, author of The Laws of Subtraction

Kaizen Events are an effective way to train organizations to break unproductive habits and adopt a continuous improvement philosophy while, at the same time, achieve breakthrough performance-level results. Through Kaizen Events, cross-functional teams learn how to make improvements in a methodological way. They learn how to quickly study a process, identify and prioritize improvement opportunities, implement change, and sustain their gains. Most importantly, they learn how to work with one another to solve problems rapidly and in a highly effective way.In The Kaizen Event Planner: Achieving Rapid Improvement in Office, Service, and Technical Environments, authors Karen Martin and Mike Osterling provide a practical how-to guide for planning and executing Kaizen Events in non-manufacturing settings, and conducting post-Event follow-ups to sustain the improvements made.Geared to continuous improvement professionals and leaders within the office areas of manufacturing, the service sector and knowledge-worker environments, this book provides the methodology and practical tools for generating measurable results, while building a motivated workforce and laying the foundation for continuous improvement.The Kaizen Event Planner provides those responsible for improving office, service, and technical processes with the skills to effectively scope the activity, engage the right people, and facilitate successful Events!An accompanying CD provides immediate access to a number of Excel-based tools.

The cause of the number-one killer of apparently healthy infants between the ages of one week and one year Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) continues to defy science. This cruel mystery intensifies an already painful experience for bereaved parents, who frequently blame themselves for their baby's death. This book explores how parents grieve, the meanings and casual explanations they attribute to a SIDS death, the effects of their grief on family relationships, and the strategies they use to cope and carry on. Karen Martin's grounded theory study describes in detail the experiences of mothers and fathers whose babies died of SIDS ranging from less than one to over twenty-five years after the baby's death. Her work makes an important contribution to health fields and to the social science of medicine, and is a critical resource for family doctors, public health nurses, counsellors, ministers, and all those working with grieving parents.

Kaizen Events are an effective way to train organizations to break unproductive habits and adopt a continuous improvement philosophy while, at the same time, achieve breakthrough performance-level results. Through Kaizen Events, cross-functional teams learn how to make improvements in a methodological way. They learn how to quickly study a process, identify and prioritize improvement opportunities, implement change, and sustain their gains. Most importantly, they learn how to work with one another to solve problems rapidly and in a highly effective way. In The Kaizen Event Planner: Achieving Rapid Improvement in Office, Service, and Technical Environments, authors Karen Martin and Mike Osterling provide a practical how-to guide for planning and executing Kaizen Events in non-manufacturing settings, and conducting post-Event follow-ups to sustain the improvements made. Geared to continuous improvement professionals and leaders within the office areas of manufacturing, the service sector and knowledge-worker environments, this book provides the methodology and practical tools for generating measurable results, while building a motivated workforce and laying the foundation for continuous improvement. The Kaizen Event Planner provides those responsible for improving office, service, and technical processes with the skills to effectively scope the activity, engage the right people, and facilitate successful Events! Many Excel-based tools, which complement the lessons in this book, are found here under the "support materials" tab..

The cause of the number-one killer of apparently healthy infants between the ages of one week and one year-Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS)-continues to defy science. This cruel mystery intensifies an already painful experience for bereaved parents, who frequently blame themselves for their baby's death. This book explores how parents grieve, the meanings and casual explanations they attribute to a SIDS death, the effects of their grief on family relationships, and the strategies they use to cope and carry on. Karen Martin's grounded theory study describes in detail the experiences of mothers and fathers whose babies died of SIDS ranging from less than one to over twenty-five years after the baby's death. Her work makes an important contribution to health fields and to the social science of medicine, and is a critical resource for family doctors, public health nurses, counsellors, ministers, and all those working with grieving parents.

Dementia is experienced in different forms, in different ways and is coped with differently by different people, but with nearly 10 million new cases every year, it is something many people face. It’s tough on those with the disease, but it is also incredibly hard for the loved ones around them. Karen Martin’s story about her friend Kathleen, however, is overwhelmingly one of love and persistence. Despite their nearly half–century age difference, their commonality drew them to each other, and their genuine friendship uplifted them both. Charting the story from pre–diagnosis to Kathleen’s eventual passing, this moving tale highlights the difficulties and joys of facing dementia, through the lens of friendship.

This anthology comes after the rousing international success of the award winning, Queer Africa: New and Collected Fiction (MaThoko’s Books, 2013). The 25 stories by writers from Kenya, Nigeria, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Africa, Uganda, USA present exciting and varied narratives on life. There are stories on desire, disruption and dreams; others on longing, lust and love - a range of human emotions abound on lives of Africans and those of the diaspora who identify variously along the long and fluid line of the sexuality, gender and sexual orientation spectrum in the African continent. Centered in these stories and their in attendant relationships is humanity. The writers showcase their artistry in storytelling in thought-provoking and delightful ways.

‘The art of telling my stories lies in saying the right things the right way, but sometimes, and sometimes more importantly, it lies in finding ways to say the things that are never said.’ The above quote, taken from Emil Rorke’s ‘Poisoned Grief’, one of the eighteen fine stories showcased in Queer Africa, beautifully captures both the motivation behind and urgent need for this anthology. Each of the authors represented here has found just the right way in which to talk about the things that are too often silenced, too often denied or violently opposed. Each one has also interpreted, explored and represented the theme ‘queer Africa’ in a unique way, resulting in a diverse and ground-breaking collection of short-form writing. Queer Africa brings together historical and contemporary stories, affirming and disquieting stories, urban and rural stories. It features characters who are rooted firmly in their countries and cultures, and others who could live anywhere in the world. At its heart, the collection celebrates the diversity and fluidity of queer and African identifications and expressions, offering a sometimes radical re imagining of life on the continent. The stories courageously – and often in surprising and delightful ways – challenge assumptions about what it means to represent particular human experiences. As such, this collection of well-crafted and absorbing stories is for everyone: male and female, queer and straight, young and old, African and non-African.

'Why have I not heard about this before? you mean the world's going to end this year and I've only just found out!' A feeling of panic hits Evie, 'Where's my notebook? I must make a list!' Whilst Evie works through the list of things she wants to achieve before the world ends, her mother harbors a troubling secret, shared only with her best friend. After fulfilling her own ambition in Borneo, she decides the possibility of a happy future lies in her own hands ...doesn't it? This fictitional story reveals the parellel lives of a mother and daughter over a year, as they approach 'the end of the world'. Both humerous and sad, the book will touch a range of emotions of women (and men!) of all ages.