Books

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What Matters Now: How to Win in a World of Relentless Change, Ferocious Competition, and Unstoppable Innovation

Obviously, there are lots of things that matter now. But in a world of fractured certainties and battered trust, some things matter more than others. While the challenges facing organizations are limitless; leadership bandwidth is not. That is why you have to be clear about what really matters now. What are the fundamental, make-or-break issues that will determine whether your organization thrives or dives in the years ahead? Hamel identifies five issues are that are paramount: values, innovation, adaptability, passion and ideology. In doing so he presents an essential agenda for leaders everywhere.

The Fall of Public Man

“Public” life once meant that vital part one’s life outside the circle of family and close friends. Connecting with strangers in an emotionally satisfying way and yet remaining aloof from them was seen as the means by which the human animal was transformed into the social – the civilized – being. And the fullest flowering of that public life was realized in the 18th Century in the great capital cities of Europe. Sennett shows how our lives today are bereft of the pleasures and reinforcements of this lost interchange with fellow citizens. He shows how, today, the stranger is a threatening figure; how silence and observation have become the only ways to experience public life, especially street life, without feeling overwhelmed ; how each person believes in the right, in public, to be left alone. And he makes clear how, because of the change in public life, private life becomes distorted as we of necessity focus more and more on ourselves, on increasingly narcissistic forms of intimacy and self-absorption. Because of this, our personalities cannot fully develop: we lack much of the ease, the spirit of play, the kind of discretion that would allow us real and pleasurable relationships with those whom we may never know intimately.

The Social Organization: How to Use Social Media to Tap the Collective Genius of Your Customers and Employees

Being a social organization goes beyond experimenting with social media technology tools – the provide and pray approach. In fact, it is not about the technology at all. A social organization addresses significant business challenges and opportunities using the social media platform to create mass collaboration – what Gartner predicts will be the next evolutionary pillar defining how work gets done around the world. Mass collaboration extends beyond social media to enable your employees, customers, suppliers and all other stakeholders to participate directly in the creation of value. That, in broad strokes, is the promise of social media, declare Anthony J. Bradley and Mark P. McDonald, authors of The Social Organization, which reveals how executives from CEOs to managers can make mass collaboration a source of enduring competitive advantage in their enterprise.

The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social Life of Cities

With an eye toward the architecture, the art, the literature, and the technology of urban life, Richard Sennett gives an account of the search for shelter and the fear of exposure to strangers and new experience in Western culture – and how these two concerns have shaped the physical fabric of the city. “Why do we avert our eyes when we encounter the unaccustomed?” asks Sennett. In answer, he moves between past and present from the assembly hall of Athens to the Palladium Club; from Augustine’s City of God to the Turkish baths of the Lower East Side; from eighteenth-century English gardens to the housing projects of East Harlem; from Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy to subway graffiti. The Conscience of the Eye is an exploration of the politics of vision.

The Innovative University: Changing the DNA of Higher Education from the Inside Out

The Innovative University illustrates how higher education can respond to the forces of disruptive innovation , and offers a nuanced and hopeful analysis of where the traditional university and its traditions have come from and how it needs to change for the future. Through an examination of Harvard and BYU-Idaho as well as other stories of innovation in higher education, Clayton Christensen and Henry Eyring decipher how universities can find innovative, less costly ways of performing their uniquely valuable functions.

The Corrosion of Character: Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism

Drawing on interviews with dismissed IBM executives in Westchester, New York, bakers in a high-tech Boston bakery, a barmaid turned advertising executive, and many others, Sennett explores the disorienting effects of the new capitalism. He reveals the vivid and illuminating contrast between two worlds of work: the vanished world of rigid, hierarchical organizations, where what mattered was a sense of personal character, and the brave new world of corporate re-engineering, risk, flexibility, networking, and short-term teamwork, where what matters is being able to reinvent yourself on a dime. In some ways the changes characterizing the new capitalism are positive; they make for a dynamic economy. But they can also be destructive, eroding the sense of sustained purpose, integrity of self, and trust in others that an earlier generation understood as essential to personal character.The Corrosion of Character enables us to understand the social and political context for our contemporary confusions and Sennett suggests how we need to re-imagine both community and individual character in order to confront an economy based on the principle of “no long term.”