Scaling Conversations


Book Description

Find out what your customers and employees are really thinking with this indispensable resource Scaling Conversations: How Leaders Access the Full Potential of People delivers invaluable strategies for how leaders can make their communications more inclusive and access the voices of those employees who rarely feel empowered to speak up. As constituent numbers scale, leaders have traditionally struggled to make communications a conversation with the entire organization, settling instead for small focus groups, talking at people in town halls, and delivering surveys after the fact. The result is exclusive, narrow decision-making that disengages and under-utilizes talent and human capital. And now, as the remote environment grows, the challenge and imperative for engaging conversations on a wider scale is even greater. Scaling Conversations provides the solution. Having led a remote team for over a decade and having worked with thousands of leaders across North America, Dave MacLeod teaches you how to: Scale your business by listening to the voices that really matter Access and maximize the human capital in your organization Make decisions that create unity and move the group forward Decrease employee turnover caused by poor communication Within these pages, you'll learn how to better facilitate conversations with a wider and more representative array of clients and employees, and not just the loudest ones in the town hall meeting or Slack channel. Perfect for any leader who's responsible for understanding what employees are really feeling and thinking, Scaling Conversations also belongs on the bookshelves of anyone who wants to learn how to discover what the “silent majority,” who are often drowned out by the loudest people in the room, actually believes.




Scaling Up Excellence


Book Description

Wall Street Journal Bestseller "The pick of 2014's management books." –Andrew Hill, Financial Times "One of the top business books of the year." –Harvey Schacter, The Globe and Mail Bestselling author, Robert Sutton and Stanford colleague, Huggy Rao tackle a challenge that determines every organization’s success: how to scale up farther, faster, and more effectively as an organization grows. Sutton and Rao have devoted much of the last decade to uncovering what it takes to build and uncover pockets of exemplary performance, to help spread them, and to keep recharging organizations with ever better work practices. Drawing on inside accounts and case studies and academic research from a wealth of industries-- including start-ups, pharmaceuticals, airlines, retail, financial services, high-tech, education, non-profits, government, and healthcare-- Sutton and Rao identify the key scaling challenges that confront every organization. They tackle the difficult trade-offs that organizations must make between whether to encourage individualized approaches tailored to local needs or to replicate the same practices and customs as an organization or program expands. They reveal how the best leaders and teams develop, spread, and instill the right mindsets in their people-- rather than ruining or watering down the very things that have fueled successful growth in the past. They unpack the principles that help to cascade excellence throughout an organization, as well as show how to eliminate destructive beliefs and behaviors that will hold them back. Scaling Up Excellence is the first major business book devoted to this universal and vexing challenge and it is destined to become the standard bearer in the field.




Smooth Scaling


Book Description

Why do some businesses “fail to scale”? Smooth Scaling offers a clear diagnosis, along with twenty practical Rituals to boost your organization’s performance and achieve frictionless growth. Where other books on scaling focus on strategy, fundraising, or product-market fit, Smooth Scaling addresses the most pervasive and least-understood fail point that threatens to kneecap even the best-laid scaling plan: organizational friction. Expert Rob Bier reveals why organizational frictions take hold as you grow and how they slow your company down. These growth pains are both predictable and preventable, yet they almost always take leaders by surprise. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Until now, there’s been no resource to guide executives through this challenge. As a result, they end up playing “Whack-a-Mole,” reacting to a never-ending stream of organizational, team, and people problems one at a time—only for new ones to crop up. Smooth Scaling addresses this gap, presenting a proven approach based on real-life experience and application. Drawing on his extensive experience building high-performance organizations, Bier has created twenty foundational Rituals that integrate seamlessly into the daily habits of your company. These Rituals make your organization as frictionless as possible, allowing you to scale faster—and more sustainably—than ever before. In Smooth Scaling, you will learn how to: Build trust proactively across your organization Turn your managers into a powerful driver of productivity and scalability Build high-performance teams with the people you’ve got Break down barriers between departments to prevent silos Maintain a cohesive high-trust culture as you grow Smooth Scaling is your indispensable guide to building a scalable, high-performing organization. It gives you the insights, frameworks, and tools you need to create a company that’s truly built to last.




Scaling up Learning for Sustained Impact


Book Description

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning, EC-TEL 2013, held in Paphos, Cyprus, in September 2013. The 31 full papers, 18 short papers, 14 demonstrations and 29 posters presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 194 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections. The topics addressed include open educational resources (OER), massive open online courses (MOOC), schools of the future, orchestration of learning activities, learning networks, teacher networks, bring your own device (BYOD), social media, learning analytics, personalization, mobile learning, computer-supported collaborative learning, game-based and simulation-based learning, and learning design.




Scaling Impact


Book Description

Scaling Impact introduces a new and practical approach to scaling the positive impacts of research and innovation. Inspired by leading scientific and entrepreneurial innovators from across Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Latin America, and the Middle East, this book presents a synthesis of unrivalled diversity and grounded ingenuity. The result is a different perspective on how to achieve impact that matters, and an important challenge to the predominant more-is-better paradigm of scaling. For organisations and individuals working to change the world for the better, scaling impact is a common goal and a well-founded aim. The world is changing rapidly, and seemingly intractable problems like environmental degradation or accelerating inequality press us to do better for each other and our environment as a global community. Challenges like these appear to demand a significant scale of action, and here the authors argue that a more creative and critical approach to scaling is both possible and essential. To encourage uptake and co-development, the authors present actionable principles that can help organisations and innovators design, manage, and evaluate scaling strategies. Scaling Impact is essential reading for development and innovation practitioners and professionals, but also for researchers, students, evaluators, and policymakers with a desire to spark meaningful change.




Tools for Effective Therapy with Children and Families


Book Description

Tools for Effective Therapy with Children and Families provides mental health professionals with step-by-step tools and strategies for effective therapeutic outcomes with children and their families. An integration of solution-focused brief therapy and play therapy, this groundbreaking book is uniquely suited to clinicians working with school-aged children and their parents. Tools for Effective Therapy with Children and Families uses clearly articulated and creative play activities to elicit conversations about solutions, successes, and collaborative goals with clients. Session transcripts and technique illustrations throughout the chapters allow clinicians to see the solution-focused approach in action.




Information Systems Outsourcing


Book Description

This book highlights research that contributes to a better understanding of emerging challenges in information systems (IS) outsourcing. Important topics covered include: how to digitally innovate through IS outsourcing; how to govern outsourced digitalization projects; how to cope with complex multi-vendor and micro-services arrangements; how to manage data sourcing and data partnerships, including issues of cybersecurity; and how to cope with the increasing demands of internationalization and new sourcing models, such as crowdsourcing, cloud sourcing and robotic process automation. These issues are approached from the client’s perspective, vendor’s perspective, or both. Given its scope, the book will be of interest to all researchers and students in the fields of Information Systems, Management, and Organization, as well as corporate executives and professionals seeking a more profound analysis of the underlying factors and mechanisms of outsourcing.




Scaling for Success


Book Description

Managing a high-growth organization requires both strategy and adaptability. Unfortunately, start-up founders and executives seeking to scale up to the next level find all too frequently that growth turns into chaos. Rather than laying the groundwork for the future, organizations get stuck by covering up complex problems with unsustainable band-aids and duct-tape fixes, implementing anecdote-based solutions from the latest tech-industry unicorns or leadership books, and relying on too much on-the-fly learning from inexperienced managers. This book is the definitive guide for leaders of high-growth organizations seeking to understand and execute the people-management principles that are essential to continued success. Combining a wealth of practical experience, well-grounded academic research, and easy-to-apply frameworks, Andrew Bartlow and T. Brad Harris offer a practical toolkit that founders, functional leaders, and managers of people can use to rethink their practices to meet their organizations’ needs. They help readers identify the core people-management programs and practices that are best for an organization at its current stage and size while also supporting a foundation for continued development and the capacity to adapt to inevitable surprises. Practical, actionable, and supplemented with numerous diagnostic tools and illustrative examples, Scaling for Success is a must-have playbook for organizational leaders pursuing smart and sustainable growth.




From Underestimated to Unstoppable


Book Description

In K–12 education, your job title or place of work should not prevent you from offering unique insights and pathways for creating change. You have a voice. Working in education today is to continually be on the precipice of change. However, far too many educators don't recognize the power they have to control and shape that change into what’s best for students. Individual contributions create collective change, and you are an integral part of the change inevitably happening around you. With that in mind, Ashley Lamb-Sinclair invites you to identify and examine your personal leadership style (or change archetype), which includes what motivates you, how you respond to adversity, how you position yourself in the larger story, how you help move that story forward, and how you deal with the unexpected. How do you create change? You might be a * Diplomat if you build relationships and value fairness and integrity. * Champion if you are passionate about a cause and advocate for people and ideals. * Creative if you approach things through novelty and ingenuity. * Storyteller if you are thoughtful, attentive to details, and a clear communicator. * Inventor if you are a forward thinker who operates through free experimentation. * Sage if you are perceptive, insightful, and persuasive. * Investigator if you have an analytical curiosity, ask probing questions, and conduct thorough research. * Guardian if you have compassion for and are drawn to nurture and protect others. Many schools tend to ignore or underestimate the powerful catalysts for change that exist in their buildings. Don't let the change story continue without its most vital character—you! Find the lightning bolts of lasting change only you can wield. Become unstoppable!




Seeking SRE


Book Description

Organizations big and small have started to realize just how crucial system and application reliability is to their business. Theyâ??ve also learned just how difficult it is to maintain that reliability while iterating at the speed demanded by the marketplace. Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) is a proven approach to this challenge. SRE is a large and rich topic to discuss. Google led the way with Site Reliability Engineering, the wildly successful Oâ??Reilly book that described Googleâ??s creation of the discipline and the implementation thatâ??s allowed them to operate at a planetary scale. Inspired by that earlier work, this book explores a very different part of the SRE space. The more than two dozen chapters in Seeking SRE bring you into some of the important conversations going on in the SRE world right now. Listen as engineers and other leaders in the field discuss: Different ways of implementing SRE and SRE principles in a wide variety of settings How SRE relates to other approaches such as DevOps Specialties on the cutting edge that will soon be commonplace in SRE Best practices and technologies that make practicing SRE easier The important but rarely explored human side of SRE David N. Blank-Edelman is the bookâ??s curator and editor.