The Collective Potential


Book Description

Information flow is the foundation of any project. However, the major limiting factor is not the lack of information, but the inability to effectively integrate useful information into a project. By bringing together the fields of organizational science, organizational behavior, and information science, this book explores the interplay of social, technical, and technological factors influencing information flow. By understanding these concepts, managers can strategically leverage the social and technical characteristics of their project team, processes, and tools to enable positive iterations of trust and learning. These serve as the basis for effective information flow and result in significant improvements in information sharing, decision-making, and project outcomes. This unique perspective provides holistic insights regarding the management of team interactions, project planning, and the overarching structure and strategies used within the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry. These findings have significant implications for the: 1) The types of competencies and tools needed in the AEC industry; 2) How the industry approaches management and integration; and 3) The types of organizational structures and innovative strategies that will allow teams to make the best use of their valuable knowledge and realize their greatest collective potential.




Collective Decisions and Voting


Book Description

When one thinks about how collective decisions are made, voting is the method that comes naturally to mind. But other methods such as random process and consensus are also used. This book explores just what a collective decision is, classifies the methods of making collective decisions, and identifies the advantages and disadvantages of each method. Classification is the prelude to evaluation. What are the characteristics of a method of making collective decisions, the book asks, that permit us to describe a collective decision as good? The second part of the book is detailed exploration of voting: the dimensions in which voting situations differ, the origins and logic of majority rule, the frequency of cycles in voting, the Arrow and Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorems, criteria for ways of cutting through cycles and the application of these criteria to a variety of rules, voting over continuums, proportional representation, and voting rules that take account of intensities of preferences. Relatively unknown methods of voting give voting a much greater potential than is generally recognized. Collective Decisions and Voting is essential reading for everyone with an interest in voting theory and in how public choices might be made.




The Advanced School of Collective Feeling


Book Description

Modern architecture's evolution during the interwar period represents one of the most radical turns in design history. While the role of new materials and production modes in this development is beyond dispute, of equal importance was the emergence of a distinctly modern physical culture. Largely unacknowledged today, new conceptions of body and movement had a profound influence on how architects designed not only public spaces like the gymnasium or the stadium, but also domestic spaces. Hannes Meyer, Swiss modernist and director of Bauhaus in Dessau from 1928 to 1930, colorfully encapsulated this phenomenon in his 1926 essay The New World as "the advanced school of collective feeling." In their new book, Matthew Kennedy and Nile Greenberg explore the impact of physical culture during the 1920s and '30s on the thinking of some of modern architecture's most influential figures. Using archival photographs, diagrams, and redrawn plans, they reconstruct an obscure constellation of domestic projects by Marcel Breuer, Charlotte Perriand, Richard Neutra, Franco Albini, and others. They argue that the impact of sport on modern architecture was a discursive phenomenon, best understood by going beyond a mere typological reading of the stadium or the gymnasium, to an examination of how gymnastic equipment and other trappings of physical culture were folded into domestic space. The featured houses, apartments, and exhibitions demonstrate their architects' response to, and attempt to dictate, the relationship between body, and the spaces and objects that give it shape.




The PerformanceStat Potential


Book Description

A Brookings Institution Press and Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation publication It started two decades ago with CompStat in the New York City Police Department, and quickly jumped to police agencies across the U.S. and other nations. It was adapted by Baltimore, which created CitiStat—the first application of this leadership strategy to an entire jurisdiction. Today, governments at all levels employ PerformanceStat: a focused effort by public executives to exploit the power of purpose and motivation, responsibility and discretion, data and meetings, analysis and learning, feedback and follow-up—all to improve government's performance. Here, Harvard leadership and management guru Robert Behn analyzes the leadership behaviors at the core of PerformanceStat to identify how they work to produce results. He examines how the leaders of a variety of public organizations employ the strategy—the way the Los Angeles County Department of Public Social Services uses its DPSSTATS to promote economic independence, how the City of New Orleans uses its BlightStat to eradicate blight in city neighborhoods, and what the Federal Emergency Management Agency does with its FEMAStat to ensure that the lessons from each crisis response, recovery, and mitigation are applied in the future. How best to harness the strategy's full capacity? The PerformanceStat Potential explains all.




Collective Genius


Book Description

Why can some organizations innovate time and again, while most cannot? You might think the key to innovation is attracting exceptional creative talent. Or making the right investments. Or breaking down organizational silos. All of these things may help—but there’s only one way to ensure sustained innovation: you need to lead it—and with a special kind of leadership. Collective Genius shows you how. Preeminent leadership scholar Linda Hill, along with former Pixar tech wizard Greg Brandeau, MIT researcher Emily Truelove, and Being the Boss coauthor Kent Lineback, found among leaders a widely shared, and mistaken, assumption: that a “good” leader in all other respects would also be an effective leader of innovation. The truth is, leading innovation takes a distinctive kind of leadership, one that unleashes and harnesses the “collective genius” of the people in the organization. Using vivid stories of individual leaders at companies like Volkswagen, Google, eBay, and Pfizer, as well as nonprofits and international government agencies, the authors show how successful leaders of innovation don’t create a vision and try to make innovation happen themselves. Rather, they create and sustain a culture where innovation is allowed to happen again and again—an environment where people are both willing and able to do the hard work that innovative problem solving requires. Collective Genius will not only inspire you; it will give you the concrete, practical guidance you need to build innovation into the fabric of your business.




The Collective Wisdom of Practice


Book Description

Leverage Professional Wisdom with Asset-Based Professional Learning Many professional learning designs are built on the assumption that we learn best by studying our failures. However, learning from failure often evokes responses of denial, avoidance and the same defensive dynamics that contributed to the failure in the first place. Schechter’s resource, presents the Collective Learning-from-Success approach. This fresh, new, assets-based framework will shift educators’ minds from focusing in isolation on failure to continuously deliberating together, sharing past experiences and best practices, and solving problems related to teaching and learning. Whether you serve as a teacher, school or district leader, or a policy maker, your professional growth will benefit by reflecting on actionable knowledge through collective inquiry. This book offers educators an opportunity to come together in forming a productive alternative to the learning from failure paradigm. The Collective Wisdom of Practice provides a model for how to learn from successes by providing • An assets-based approach to designing and implementing professional learning • Strategies to focus on learning from educators’ past successes • Multinational case studies, sample learning materials, templates, and tools • A framework that can be applied to multiple levels, such as grade and subject areas, building level, system level, and policy level Grounded in more than 20 years of extensive research in the US and internationally, this approach will have a powerful influence on professional learning. Learn to nurture your wisdom of practice to meet the challenge of preparing students to be co-creators of society.




Big Mind


Book Description

"A new field of collective intelligence has emerged in the last few years, prompted by a wave of digital technologies that make it possible for organizations and societies to think at large scale. This "bigger mind"--human and machine capabilities working together--has the potential to solve the great challenges of our time. So why do smart technologies not automatically lead to smart results? Gathering insights from diverse fields, including philosophy, computer science, and biology, Big Mind reveals how collective intelligence can guide corporations, governments, universities, and societies to make the most of human brains and digital technologies"--Amazon.com.




Impact of Organizational Trauma on Workplace Behavior and Performance


Book Description

Provides a comprehensive examination of the multiple types of workplace traumas and the solutions which will heal these challenges to increase overall organisational culture and success. This publication highlights extensive coverage of relevant topics such as downsizing, change management, trauma exposure, and organisational leadership.




Give Me My Crown Back


Book Description

Unashamedly, the author begs you, to read this eBook. You must spare ‘two hours’ to save humanity from definite ‘annihilation’. Beg others too, to join the conclusive crusade against ‘Enemy Number One’ of 7.5 billion people. There is no choice; you destroy it or it eliminates us all. Either you reclaim your ‘Crown’; be the sovereign, or die a slave. It’s now, or never. Dead, for sure, can’t yearn. Even the mightiest of human colossal, in the long history of humanity, feared only one thing – The Question; even simple, innocuous and straight question; the Question of Ultimate Reason! This fear emanates out of the universal causality of reality that power and authority comes out of series of successes one has and every success is a complex conglomeration of hypocrisies, often forceful, which an individual piles up to be successful. The mighty and great is usually sitting on top of a Mountain of Hypocrisies with a glittering but slippery Crown on his head. The single, simple and straight-forward question, which every mighty individual or even the mightiest state and governments are terribly scared of and out to kill is – ‘What Happened To Human Dignity?’ If an individual is the sole ‘Media’ of all Reality; if ‘I Is God’, none and nothing else can and should take away the ‘Crown Position’ from ‘You’; the individuality and Your Liberty to be ‘You’. This acceptance is option-less! The mounting and huge hypocrisies of contemporary human world and culture, by which state, governments, politics, economy, commerce, religion et all are reducing ‘You’ and personal spaces as slave to their nefarious agenda, must end. They must bow down to the Real and True Sovereign – ‘You’. For this to happen, the ‘You’, the individual must rise and insist – Give Me My Crown Back…! In this eBook, we shall discuss issues in two parallel streams. First is the detailed deliberation of stupidities, hypocrisies and calamitous consequences of current politics, stupidities of state and oligarchic governance systems, along with the nexus with economic structures and practices they have sustained since decades to destroy the dignity and sovereignty of individual, making life hell for him or her. Secondly, there is elaboration of the scientific-objective basis of people rule and de-empowerment of state-governments in 21st century. In the light of irrefutable objective logic of modern science about Reality, Human Consciousness and Cognitive science et al, we shall prove how and why the true sovereign, the people Must Get Its Crown Back and for what novel, true and right purposes. All futilities and utilities, all rights and wrongs, all good and bad etc shall be decided and installed on the basis of modern contemporary Science Of Reality, nothing else! There shall also be details of the possible alternative model of politics, governance, administration and economic prudence that need to be put in place, replacing the current dispensations to install Human Dignity and sovereignty of individual. We talk about them in broad principles as small details can always be filled in, depending upon requirements at grassroots levels of operations. However, the most difficult part of the eBook shall be, ‘How To Go About It’. But we shall try… and, we may succeed if you all align with the idea and lend support to it. Do step in for a novel experience and experiment, welcome…




New Trends in Nuclear Collective Dynamics


Book Description

"New Trends in Nuclear Collective Dynamics" emphasizes research toward understanding collective and statistical aspects of nuclear dynamics. Well-known lecturers from centers of nuclear research present reviews of recent developments. The topics covered are: -order and chaos in finite quantum systems -dissipation in heavy-ion collisions -collective motionsin warm nuclei -time-dependent mean-field theory with collision terms -nuclear fission and multi-dimensional tunneling -large-scale collective motion