Industrial tourism presents opportunities, both in terms of income and as a tool of management, for individual firms who open their doors - and consequently their local regions - to the public. But how can these opportunities be organised in a way that enables both the city and the enterprise to take advantage? This book analyzes the conditions for successful industrial tourism development using case studies of Wolfsburg, Cologne, Pays de la Loire, Turin, Shanghai and Rotterdam, and makes astute recommendations for cities and companies with ambitions in this field.
From its earliest days, the city of Auckland thrived on business; it quickly became, and still remains, the commercial and financial capital of the country. This important book, "City of Enterprise", sets Auckland's business history in the wider context of national economic growth, and includes cutting-edge studies on aspects of that history. Written by leading scholars, chapters cover the stock and station agent industry, Maori enterprise, maritime history, leading companies, the timber trade, newspapers and accounting. This book is part of a larger project to reinvigorate the research, teaching and dissemination of business history. It vividly demonstrates the insights, as well as the lively interest this type of history, too long neglected, can provide.
A brilliant, kaleidoscopic narrative of Oklahoma City—a great American story of civics, basketball, and destiny, from award-winning journalist Sam Anderson NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review • NPR • Chicago Tribune • San Francisco Chronicle • The Economist • Deadspin Oklahoma City was born from chaos. It was founded in a bizarre but momentous “Land Run” in 1889, when thousands of people lined up along the borders of Oklahoma Territory and rushed in at noon to stake their claims. Since then, it has been a city torn between the wild energy that drives its outsized ambitions, and the forces of order that seek sustainable progress. Nowhere was this dynamic better realized than in the drama of the Oklahoma City Thunder basketball team’s 2012-13 season, when the Thunder’s brilliant general manager, Sam Presti, ignited a firestorm by trading future superstar James Harden just days before the first game. Presti’s all-in gamble on “the Process”—the patient, methodical management style that dictated the trade as the team’s best hope for long-term greatness—kicked off a pivotal year in the city’s history, one that would include pitched battles over urban planning, a series of cataclysmic tornadoes, and the frenzied hope that an NBA championship might finally deliver the glory of which the city had always dreamed. Boom Town announces the arrival of an exciting literary voice. Sam Anderson, former book critic for New York magazine and now a staff writer at the New York Times magazine, unfolds an idiosyncratic mix of American history, sports reporting, urban studies, gonzo memoir, and much more to tell the strange but compelling story of an American city whose unique mix of geography and history make it a fascinating microcosm of the democratic experiment. Filled with characters ranging from NBA superstars Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook; to Flaming Lips oddball frontman Wayne Coyne; to legendary Great Plains meteorologist Gary England; to Stanley Draper, Oklahoma City's would-be Robert Moses; to civil rights activist Clara Luper; to the citizens and public servants who survived the notorious 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah federal building, Boom Town offers a remarkable look at the urban tapestry woven from control and chaos, sports and civics.
Looks at the works of women historians, from the late nineteenth century to the end of World War II, and their impact on the social and cultural history of the United States.
What does it take to develop an enterprise application with Rails? Enterprise Rails introduces several time-tested software engineering principles to prepare you for the challenge of building a high-performance, scalable website with global reach. You'll learn how to design a solid architecture that ties the many parts of an enterprise website together, including the database, your servers and clients, and other services as well. Many Rails developers think that planning for scale is unnecessary. But there's nothing worse than an application that fails because it can't handle sudden success. Throughout this book, you'll work on an example enterprise project to learn first-hand what's involved in architecting serious web applications. With this book, you will: Tour an ideal enterprise systems layout: how Rails fits in, and which elements don't rely on Rails Learn to structure a Rails 2.0 application for complex websites Discover how plugins can support reusable code and improve application clarity Build a solid data model -- a fortress -- that protects your data from corruption Base an ActiveRecord model on a database view, and build support for multiple table inheritance Explore service-oriented architecture and web services with XML-RPC and REST See how caching can be a dependable way to improve performance Building for scale requires more work up front, but you'll have a flexible website that can be extended easily when your needs change. Enterprise Rails teaches you how to architect scalable Rails applications from the ground up. "Enterprise Rails is indispensable for anyone planning to build enterprise web services. It's one thing to get your service off the ground with a framework like Rails, but quite another to construct a system that will hold up at enterprise scale. The secret is to make good architectural choices from the beginning. Chak shows you how to make those choices. Ignore his advice at your peril."-- Hal Abelson, Prof. of Computer Science and Engineering, MIT
Two experts in enterprise architecting lay out a holistic approach to creating a blueprint for future enterprise transformation. Every enterprise evolves continuously, driven by changing needs or new opportunities. Most often this happens gradually, with small adjustments to strategy, organization, processes, or infrastructure. But sometimes enterprises need to go beyond minor fixes and transform themselves, in response to a disruptive event or dramatically changing circumstances—a merger, for example, or a new competitor. In this book, enterprise architecting experts Deborah Nightingale and Donna Rhodes offer a framework for enterprise transformation. Successful transformation, they believe, starts with a holistic approach, taking into consideration all facets of the enterprise and its environment rather than focusing solely on one factor—information technology, for example, or organizational structure. This is architecting the future enterprise: creating a blueprint for what the enterprise will look like after the transformation. Nightingale and Rhodes introduce the ARIES (Architecting Innovative Enterprise Strategy) framework, including a ten enterprise element model and an architecting process model, and show how to apply it, from start to finish. They explain how to create a holistic vision for the future enterprise and how to generate concepts and alternative architectures; they describe techniques for evaluating possible architectures, tools for implementation planning, and strategies for communicating with stakeholders. Nightingale and Rhodes offer real-world examples throughout, drawing on their work at MIT, with an extensive case study of enterprise transformation at a medical device manufacturer. An appendix offers two additional architecting projects. Seven Architecting Imperatives • Make architecting the initial activity in transformation. • Develop a comprehensive understanding of the enterprise landscape. • Understand what stakeholders value and how that may change in the future. • Use multiple perspectives to see the whole enterprise. • Create an architecting team suited to the transformation challenges. • Engage all levels of leadership in transformation. • Architect for the enterprise's changing world.
Cloud computing is the most significant technology development of our lifetimes. It has made countless new businesses possible and presents a massive opportunity for large enterprises to innovate like startups and retire decades of technical debt. But making the most of the cloud requires much more from enterprises than just a technology change. Stephen Orban led Dow Jones's journey toward digital agility as their CIO and now leads AWS's Enterprise Strategy function, where he helps leaders from the largest companies in the world transform their businesses. As he demonstrates in this book, enterprises must re-train their people, evolve their processes, and transform their cultures as they move to the cloud. By bringing together his experiences and those of a number of business leaders, Orban shines a light on what works, what doesn't, and how enterprises can transform themselves using the cloud.
Eliza Pratt Greatorex (1819–1897) was America’s most famous woman artist in the mid-nineteenth century, but today she is all but forgotten. Beginning with her Irish roots, this biography brings her art and life back into focus. Breaking conventions for female artists at that time, Greatorex specialized in landscapes and streetscapes, traveling from the Hudson River to the Colorado Rockies and across Europe and North Africa. Her crowning achievement, a monumental tome of drawings and narratives titled Old New York, awakened the public to the destruction of the city’s architectural heritage during the post–Civil War era. Exploring Greatorex’s fierce ambition and creative path, Katherine Manthorne reveals how her success at forging an independent career in a male-dominated world shaped American gender politics, visual culture, and urban consciousness.
Almost two decades of research in U.S. city politics has produced a compelling empirical account of the nature of urban governance revolving around the alliance of business interests and local public officials. In Reconstructing City Politics, author David L. Imbroscio urges that urban political economy must now move forward beyond the question of "what is?" to a consideration of "what might be?" He systematically poses the possibilities for reconstructing the nature of contemporary city politics, while integrating a wealth of innovative urban analysis. To bring about this reconstruction, Imbroscio explores three comprehensive alternative urban economic development strategies--entrepreneurial mercantilism, community based economic development, and municipal enterprise. He considers whether these three strategies are likely to be effective for bringing about urban economic vitality and whether it is feasible for cities to pursue these efforts in the current political economic context. By addressing these questions, Imbroscio is able to reach conclusions about the possibilities for a successful and sustainable reconstruction of U.S. city politics. This important volume will be vital for professionals and and researchers in urban planning, urban studies, urban and regional economics, as well as urban politics.
