Perform Or Else


Book Description

In Perform or Else Jon McKenzie brilliantly explores the relationship between cultural, organisational, and technological performance.




Perform Or Else


Book Description

In Perform or Else Jon McKenzie brilliantly explores the relationship between cultural, organisational, and technological performance.




High Performance Habits


Book Description

THESE HABITS WILL MAKE YOU EXTRAORDINARY. Twenty years ago, author Brendon Burchard became obsessed with answering three questions: 1. Why do some individuals and teams succeed more quickly than others and sustain that success over the long term? 2. Of those who pull it off, why are some miserable and others consistently happy on their journey? 3. What motivates people to reach for higher levels of success in the first place, and what practices help them improve the most After extensive original research and a decade as the world’s leading high performance coach, Burchard found the answers. It turns out that just six deliberate habits give you the edge. Anyone can practice these habits and, when they do, extraordinary things happen in their lives, relationships, and careers. Which habits can help you achieve long-term success and vibrant well-being no matter your age, career, strengths, or personality? To become a high performer, you must seek clarity, generate energy, raise necessity, increase productivity, develop influence, and demonstrate courage. The art and science of how to do all this is what this book is about. Whether you want to get more done, lead others better, develop skill faster, or dramatically increase your sense of joy and confidence, the habits in this book will help you achieve it faster. Each of the six habits is illustrated by powerful vignettes, cutting-edge science, thought-provoking exercises, and real-world daily practices you can implement right now. If you’ve ever wanted a science-backed, heart-centered plan to living a better quality of life, it’s in your hands. Best of all, you can measure your progress. A link to a free professional assessment is included in the book.




The EU, Hamas and the 2006 Palestinian Elections


Book Description

This book addresses how institutional and diplomatic rituals shaped the European Union’s sanction of Hamas after the latter’s success in the 2006 Palestinian legislative elections. Through a lens of performance and performativity it explains how socialisation and the duress of performative rituals shapes agency and prevents the possibility of being creative with policy initiatives when confronted with difficult decisions. Interviews with senior Hamas representatives, EU bureaucrats, members of the European External Action Service, and electoral observers from Palestine and Europe, in addition to ethnographic research in Gaza and in Brussels, recreate the details of the failed diplomacy between Hamas and the EU. The book explores the social and visual cultures and discourses that shape the recognition of contemporary subjects, and it presents Hamas’s response to being treated as a terrorist movement. It advances queer and postcolonial understandings of European-Palestinian political encounter by interrogating the bureaucratic and professional pressures that shape the political agency of EU civil servants and the recognition of Palestinian politics. This is a performative and interdisciplinary text; it juxtaposes empirical investigation, with critical theory, performance art and everyday experiences. It will appeal to students of International Relations, Interdisciplinary Studies, Middle-East Area Studies, Foreign Policy and Diplomacy Analysis and Gender Studies.




Beyond Performance


Book Description

The secret of achieving and sustaining organizational excellence revealed In an ever-changing world where only a third of excellent organizations stay that way over the long term, and where even fewer are able to implement successful change programs, leaders are in need of big ideas and new tools to thrive. In Beyond Performance, McKinsey & Company's Scott Keller and Colin Price give you everything you need to build an organization that can execute in the short run and has the vitality to prosper over the long term. Drawing on the most exhaustive research effort of its kind on organizational effectiveness and change management, Keller and Price put hard science behind their big idea: that the health of an organization is equally as important as its performance. In the book's foreword, management guru Gary Hamel refers to this notion as "a new manifesto for thinking about organizations." The authors illustrate why copying management best practices from other companies is more dangerous than helpful Clearly explains how to determine the mutually reinforcing combination of management practices that best fits your organization's context Provides practical tools to achieve superior levels of performance and health through a staged change process: aspire, assess, architect, act, and advance. Among these are new techniques for dealing with those aspects of human behavior that are seemingly irrational (and therefore confound even the smartest leaders), yet entirely predictable Ultimately, building a healthy organization is an intangible asset that competitors copy at their peril and that enables you to skillfully adapt to and shape your environment faster than others—giving you the ultimate competitive advantage.




Performance Success


Book Description

Performance Success teaches a set of skills so that a musician can be ready to go out and sing or play at his or her highest level, working with energies that might otherwise be wasted in unproductive ways. This is a book of skills and exercises, prepared by a master teacher.




Systems Performance


Book Description

The Complete Guide to Optimizing Systems Performance Written by the winner of the 2013 LISA Award for Outstanding Achievement in System Administration Large-scale enterprise, cloud, and virtualized computing systems have introduced serious performance challenges. Now, internationally renowned performance expert Brendan Gregg has brought together proven methodologies, tools, and metrics for analyzing and tuning even the most complex environments. Systems Performance: Enterprise and the Cloud focuses on Linux(R) and Unix(R) performance, while illuminating performance issues that are relevant to all operating systems. You'll gain deep insight into how systems work and perform, and learn methodologies for analyzing and improving system and application performance. Gregg presents examples from bare-metal systems and virtualized cloud tenants running Linux-based Ubuntu(R), Fedora(R), CentOS, and the illumos-based Joyent(R) SmartOS(TM) and OmniTI OmniOS(R). He systematically covers modern systems performance, including the "traditional" analysis of CPUs, memory, disks, and networks, and new areas including cloud computing and dynamic tracing. This book also helps you identify and fix the "unknown unknowns" of complex performance: bottlenecks that emerge from elements and interactions you were not aware of. The text concludes with a detailed case study, showing how a real cloud customer issue was analyzed from start to finish. Coverage includes - Modern performance analysis and tuning: terminology, concepts, models, methods, and techniques - Dynamic tracing techniques and tools, including examples of DTrace, SystemTap, and perf - Kernel internals: uncovering what the OS is doing - Using system observability tools, interfaces, and frameworks - Understanding and monitoring application performance - Optimizing CPUs: processors, cores, hardware threads, caches, interconnects, and kernel scheduling - Memory optimization: virtual memory, paging, swapping, memory architectures, busses, address spaces, and allocators - File system I/O, including caching - Storage devices/controllers, disk I/O workloads, RAID, and kernel I/O - Network-related performance issues: protocols, sockets, interfaces, and physical connections - Performance implications of OS and hardware-based virtualization, and new issues encountered with cloud computing - Benchmarking: getting accurate results and avoiding common mistakes This guide is indispensable for anyone who operates enterprise or cloud environments: system, network, database, and web admins; developers; and other professionals. For students and others new to optimization, it also provides exercises reflecting Gregg's extensive instructional experience.




Teaching Postdramatic Theatre


Book Description

This book explores the concept and vocabulary of postdramatic theatre from a pedagogical perspective. It identifies some of the major anxieties and paradoxes generated by teaching postdramatic theatre through practice, with reference to the aesthetic, cultural and institutional pressures that shape teaching practices. It also presents a series of case studies that identify the pedagogical fault lines that expose the power-relations inherent in teaching (with a focus on the higher education sector as opposed to actor training institutions). It uses auto-ethnography, performance analysis and critical theory to assist university teachers involved in directing theatre productions to deepen their understanding of the concept of postdramatic theatre.




Great at Work


Book Description

The Wall Street Journal bestseller—a Financial Times Business Book of the Month and named by The Washington Post as “One of the 11 Leadership Books to Read in 2018”—is “a refreshingly data-based, clearheaded guide” (Publishers Weekly) to individual performance, based on a groundbreaking study. Why do some people perform better at work than others? This deceptively simple question continues to confound professionals in all sectors of the workforce. Now, after a unique, five-year study of more than 5,000 managers and employees, Morten Hansen reveals the answers in his “Seven Work Smarter Practices” that can be applied by anyone looking to maximize their time and performance. Each of Hansen’s seven practices is highlighted by inspiring stories from individuals in his comprehensive study. You’ll meet a high school principal who engineered a dramatic turnaround of his failing high school; a rural Indian farmer determined to establish a better way of life for women in his village; and a sushi chef, whose simple preparation has led to his unassuming restaurant being awarded the maximum of three Michelin stars. Hansen also explains how the way Alfred Hitchcock filmed Psycho and the 1911 race to become the first explorer to reach the South Pole both illustrate the use of his seven practices. Each chapter “is intended to inspire people to be better workers…and improve their own work performance” (Booklist) with questions and key insights to allow you to assess your own performance and figure out your work strengths, as well as your weaknesses. Once you understand your individual style, there are mini-quizzes, questionnaires, and clear tips to assist you focus on a strategy to become a more productive worker. Extensive, accessible, and friendly, Great at Work will help us “reengineer our work lives, reduce burnout, and improve performance and job satisfaction” (Psychology Today).




Performative Realism


Book Description

New forms of art, culture and theory have recently emerged through engagements with the realities of the social world and everyday life which are not primarily about representation but rather about participation and narration. These new forms are based on viewer responses and engagement, thus performatively creating open-ended situations rather than autonomous works with closure. Performative theory, drawing mostly on studies of speech acts, proves adequate to describe and analyse these new forms of art and culture and their engagement with the real. Performative Realism scrutinizes a range of contemporary works that experiment with audience participation and processuality within art and culture, as well as it takes issue with theories of performativity and performance. Performative Realism contains contributions from leading Danish scholars working within a broad range of academic fields such as Media Studies, Art History, Theatre Studies and Cultural Studies. The issues addressed covers Scandinavian as well as international installation art, performance art, theatre, photography, movies, literature and role-playing.




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