Unveiling eight indispensable competencies for the new Network-Oriented Workforce, Strategic Connections provides practical advice anyone can use for building better, more productive business relationships. Smartphones, social media, and the Internet can only get a professional so far. At some point, the success of an organization will depend on face-to-face relationships, which means the isolated employees trying to do everything virtually will at some point have to fall back on the tried-and-true, essential skill of relationship building if they are going to survive in today’s increasingly collaborative workforce. You will discover how to: Commit to a positive, proactive networking mindset Earn trust Boost their social acumen and increase their likeability Master conversational skills and deepen interactions Employ storytelling to make communications memorable Businesses don’t have to look very far to find employees with a strong presence in the different social networks. If you want to stand out and make yourself invaluable to your organization, focus on making your presence known in the company’s physical networks.
This comprehensive reading text was designed especially for academically and professionally oriented students. The activities provide a wide variety of practice opportunities.
When women were denied a major speaking role at the 1963 March on Washington, Dorothy Height, head of the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW), organized her own women's conference for the very next day. Defying the march's male organizers, Height helped harness the womanpower waiting in the wings. Height's careful tactics and quiet determination come to the fore in this first history of the NCNW, the largest black women's organization in the United States at the height of the civil rights, Black Power, and feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Offering a sweeping view of the NCNW's behind-the-scenes efforts to fight racism, poverty, and sexism in the late twentieth century, Rebecca Tuuri examines how the group teamed with U.S. presidents, foundations, and grassroots activists alike to implement a number of important domestic development and international aid projects. Drawing on original interviews, extensive organizational records, and other rich sources, Tuuri's work narrates the achievements of a set of seemingly moderate, elite activists who were able to use their personal, financial, and social connections to push for change as they facilitated grassroots, cooperative, and radical activism.
We are living in an age of continual motion and change, and as a result traditional strategy planning has become outmoded. Every manager, perhaps even every employee, needs to become a strategist. Every strategist, in turn, needs to develop deep consumer insight - or empathy - as a basis for flexible strategy formation. This book offers a practical guide on how to develop and implement a systematic process of strategic empathy to lead to greater effectiveness and day-to-day success. Marketing With Strategic Empathy is written by Claire Brooks, the CEO of the global consulting firm where the strategic empathy framework and processes were developed. She has applied these in many successful projects for international corporations for more than 10 years.
Strategic Occidentalism examines the transformation, in both aesthetics and infrastructure, of Mexican fiction since the late 1970s. During this time a framework has emerged characterized by the corporatization of publishing, a frictional relationship between Mexican literature and global book markets, and the desire of Mexican writers to break from dominant models of national culture. In the course of this analysis, Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado engages with theories of world literature, proposing that “world literature” is a construction produced at various levels, including the national, that must be studied from its material conditions of production in specific sites. In particular, he argues that Mexican writers have engaged in a “strategic Occidentalism” in which their idiosyncratic connections with world literature have responded to dynamics different from those identified by world-systems or diffusionist theorists. Strategic Occidentalism identifies three scenes in which a cosmopolitan aesthetics in Mexican world literature has been produced: Sergio Pitol’s translation of Eastern European and marginal British modernist literature; the emergence of the Crack group as a polemic against the legacies of magical realism; and the challenges of writers like Carmen Boullosa, Cristina Rivera Garza, and Ana García Bergua to the roles traditionally assigned to Latin American writers in world literature.
How "Aha!" really happens. When do you get your best ideas? You probably answer "At night," or "In the shower," or "Stuck in traffic." You get a flash of insight. Things come together in your mind. You connect the dots. You say to yourself, "Aha! I see what to do." Brain science now reveals how these flashes of insight happen. It's a special form of intuition. We call it strategic intuition, because it gives you an idea for action-a strategy. Brain science tells us there are three kinds of intuition: ordinary, expert, and strategic. Ordinary intuition is just a feeling, a gut instinct. Expert intuition is snap judgments, when you instantly recognize something familiar, the way a tennis pro knows where the ball will go from the arc and speed of the opponent's racket. (Malcolm Gladwell wrote about this kind of intuition in Blink.) The third kind, strategic intuition, is not a vague feeling, like ordinary intuition. Strategic intuition is a clear thought. And it's not fast, like expert intuition. It's slow. That flash of insight you had last night might solve a problem that's been on your mind for a month. And it doesn't happen in familiar situations, like a tennis match. Strategic intuition works in new situations. That's when you need it most. Everyone knows you need creative thinking, or entrepreneurial thinking, or innovative thinking, or strategic thinking to succeed in the modern world. All these kinds of thinking happen through flashes of insight--strategic intuition. And now that we know how it works, you can learn to do it better. That's what this book is about. Over the past ten years, William Duggan has conducted pioneering research on strategic intuition and for the past three years has taught a popular course at Columbia Business School on the subject. He now gives us this eye-opening book that shows how strategic intuition lies at the heart of great achievements throughout human history: the scientific and computer revolutions, women's suffrage, the civil rights movement, modern art, microfinance in poor countries, and more. Considering the achievements of people and organizations, from Bill Gates to Google, Copernicus to Martin Luther King, Picasso to Patton, you'll never think the same way about strategy again. Three kinds of strategic ideas apply to human achievement: * Strategic analysis, where you study the situation you face * Strategic intuition, where you get a creative idea for what to do * Strategic planning, where you work out the details of how to do it. There is no shortage of books about strategic analysis and strategic planning. This new book by William Duggan is the first full treatment of strategic intuition. It's the missing piece of the strategy puzzle that makes essential reading for anyone interested in achieving more in any field of human endeavor.
The best managers ensure that the decisions and actions taken by their business are all connected to the same overall strategy. Managers who fail to do so squander time, money, and resources on unimportant tasks, then try to correct the problem with new plans and methods. Some of these solutions are worthwhile in their own right, but they too will inevitably fail if they’re not connected to the organization’s other decisions and actions. Strategic DNA helps readers build the vital connections their business needs to bring its strategy to life. Author Lawrence Hobbs explains how to unite managerial activities and focus strategies for maximum effect using alignment-building methods that retain the discipline needed to stay on course. Crammed full of insights and tricks of the trade, Strategic DNA is an invaluable guide to making management investments pay off in a strategy that works -- and keeps working.
Complete managerial emphasis throughout-makes this book relevant and interesting to the reader. * Up-to-date coverage. * Comprehensive coverage of e-commerce.
The concept of "funds of knowledge" is based on a simple premise: people are competent and have knowledge, and their life experiences have given them that knowledge. The claim in this book is that first-hand research experiences with families allow one to document this competence and knowledge, and that such engagement provides many possibilities for positive pedagogical actions. Drawing from both Vygotskian and neo-sociocultural perspectives in designing a methodology that views the everyday practices of language and action as constructing knowledge, the funds of knowledge approach facilitates a systematic and powerful way to represent communities in terms of the resources they possess and how to harness them for classroom teaching. This book accomplishes three objectives: It gives readers the basic methodology and techniques followed in the contributors' funds of knowledge research; it extends the boundaries of what these researchers have done; and it explores the applications to classroom practice that can result from teachers knowing the communities in which they work. In a time when national educational discourses focus on system reform and wholesale replicability across school sites, this book offers a counter-perspective stating that instruction must be linked to students' lives, and that details of effective pedagogy should be linked to local histories and community contexts. This approach should not be confused with parent participation programs, although that is often a fortuitous consequence of the work described. It is also not an attempt to teach parents "how to do school" although that could certainly be an outcome if the parents so desired. Instead, the funds of knowledge approach attempts to accomplish something that may be even more challenging: to alter the perceptions of working-class or poor communities by viewing their households primarily in terms of their strengths and resources, their defining pedagogical characteristics. Funds of Knowledge: Theorizing Practices in Households, Communities, and Classrooms is a critically important volume for all teachers and teachers-to-be, and for researchers and graduate students of language, culture, and education.
