This helpful resource contains tools and tricks to help companies excel in dynamic markets and provide groundbreaking products and services. The authors refer to this as “innovation” rather than “strategic planning,” but the truth is somewhere in-between: through a proven five-phase discovery process --for staging, aligning, exploring, creating, and mapping--strategic innovation will become a company-wide competency. In The Power of Strategy Innovation, you’ll learn how to: apply innovative thinking to your company’s business model to bridge the gap between strategy and product development; how to remain flexible, future-oriented, and responsive to market changes and your clients’ changing needs; and how to create a perpetual flow of viable new business opportunities. Informative interviews with corporate leaders dispersed throughout the book provide further insight into different industries and the ways they have committed to taking a more innovative approach. Through these shared methodologies, The Power of Strategy Innovation will forever transform the way you do business--and help you rise to become a leader in your industry.
BRIDGE THE GAP BETWEEN NOVICE AND PROFESSIONAL You've completed a basic Python programming tutorial or finished Al Sweigart's bestseller, Automate the Boring Stuff with Python. What's the next step toward becoming a capable, confident software developer? Welcome to Beyond the Basic Stuff with Python. More than a mere collection of advanced syntax and masterful tips for writing clean code, you'll learn how to advance your Python programming skills by using the command line and other professional tools like code formatters, type checkers, linters, and version control. Sweigart takes you through best practices for setting up your development environment, naming variables, and improving readability, then tackles documentation, organization and performance measurement, as well as object-oriented design and the Big-O algorithm analysis commonly used in coding interviews. The skills you learn will boost your ability to program--not just in Python but in any language. You'll learn: Coding style, and how to use Python's Black auto-formatting tool for cleaner code Common sources of bugs, and how to detect them with static analyzers How to structure the files in your code projects with the Cookiecutter template tool Functional programming techniques like lambda and higher-order functions How to profile the speed of your code with Python's built-in timeit and cProfile modules The computer science behind Big-O algorithm analysis How to make your comments and docstrings informative, and how often to write them How to create classes in object-oriented programming, and why they're used to organize code Toward the end of the book you'll read a detailed source-code breakdown of two classic command-line games, the Tower of Hanoi (a logic puzzle) and Four-in-a-Row (a two-player tile-dropping game), and a breakdown of how their code follows the book's best practices. You'll test your skills by implementing the program yourself. Of course, no single book can make you a professional software developer. But Beyond the Basic Stuff with Python will get you further down that path and make you a better programmer, as you learn to write readable code that's easy to debug and perfectly Pythonic Requirements: Covers Python 3.6 and higher
A fascinating account of the only airworthy Hawker Hurricane, “now regarded as the most historic British aircraft to survive in flying condition from WW2” (FLYER). In 1982 when he was traveling in India, Peter Vacher stumbled on the remains of a British plane—a Hurricane Mark I, a veteran of the Battle of Britain. It was in a dreadful state. Could he restore it? Would it fly again? Not until 14 years later did he decide to act and after six years of wrangling he got the icon home. Then the truly difficult process of restoration began—a worldwide search for parts, careful reconstruction, flight testing—-until in 2005 it flew again to the delight of thousands of enthusiasts. Along the way Peter reunited three auspicious veterans—Peter Thompson, Bunny Currant, and Bob Foster—with R4118, men who had flown her during the war. To this day, the aircraft’s grace and splendor in flight is enjoyed by crowds across the UK. “The amazing story of how this only surviving Hurricane from the Battle of Britain was discovered and lovingly restored.” —The Mail on Sunday
The world's multinational enterprises face a spell of rough weather, political economist Ray Vernon argues, not only from the host countries in which they have established their subsidiaries, but also from their home countries. Such enterprises--a few thousand in number, including Microsoft, Toyota, IBM, Siemens, Samsung, and others--now generate about half of the world's industrial output and half of the world's foreign trade; so any change in the relatively benign climate in which they have operated over the past decade will create serious tensions in international economic relations. The warnings of such a change are already here. In the United States, interests such as labor are increasingly hostile to what they see as the costs and uncertainties of an open economy. In Europe, those who want to preserve the social safety net and those who feel that the net must be dismantled are increasingly at odds. In Japan, the talk of hollowing out takes on a new urgency as the country's lifetime employment practices are threatened and as public and private institutions are subjected to unaccustomed stress. The tendency of multinationals in different countries to find common cause in open markets, strong patents and trademarks, and international technical standards has been viewed as a loss of national sovereignty and a weakening of the nation-state system, producing hostile reactions in home countries. The challenge for policy makers, Vernon argues, is to bridge the quite different regimes of the multinational enterprise and the nation-state. Both have a major role to play, and yet must make basic changes in their practices and policies to accommodate each other.
Game-changing trends are coming in business, technology, workforce, economy, security, and environment. Climate change, energy demand, and population growth will redefine global risk and power. Exponential new technologies will emerge in digital money, mobile commerce, and big data. An explosive new middle class of over one billion consumers will enter the marketplace. Every nation, job, business, and person will be transformed. To thrive in this future you have to become predictive, adaptive, and agile—to become Future Smart. Dr. James Canton, a renowned global futurist and visionary business advisor, illuminates the pivotal forces and global power shifts that everyone must understand today to thrive in a rapidly changing landscape: Regenerative medicine will extend our lifetimes and rebuild our bodies Robots and drones will drive our cars, teach our kids, and fight our wars Smart machines will design, manage, and service 40% of all global businesses—energy, commerce, finance, and manufacturing—without humans Digital consumers who live always connected will challenge every business to change its strategy Climate change wars will redefine security and resources Most of us are not prepared to meet the challenges the future will bring, but these changes are coming fast. Armed with knowledge, those who are Future Smart can take action to reinvent themselves, their businesses, and their world.