Is your training function viewed as a cyclical expense that can be eliminated periodically, or as a vital strategic tool that is absolutely necessary to achieving the goals of your business? Make the training function absolutely vital with Strategic Learning Alignment, Book jacket.
Provides information for school administrators and curriculum specialists on ways to align the curriculum to state standards to improve student achievement and teacher effectiveness.
Business results, major change, project initiatives can be achieved more easily than imagined. Strategic Organizational Alignment shows you how and points out the reasons why most excuses businesses make for inadequate implementations are wrong. Through stories, illustrations, and step-by-step guides, Crosby shows you a simple, profound, and repeatable way to ensure your business aligns its employees and has a clear path to success. This book will help you to learn how to focus your workplace on the dynamics critical to achieving greater productivity.
A jaw-dropping exploration of everything that goes wrong when we build AI systems and the movement to fix them. Today’s “machine-learning” systems, trained by data, are so effective that we’ve invited them to see and hear for us—and to make decisions on our behalf. But alarm bells are ringing. Recent years have seen an eruption of concern as the field of machine learning advances. When the systems we attempt to teach will not, in the end, do what we want or what we expect, ethical and potentially existential risks emerge. Researchers call this the alignment problem. Systems cull résumés until, years later, we discover that they have inherent gender biases. Algorithms decide bail and parole—and appear to assess Black and White defendants differently. We can no longer assume that our mortgage application, or even our medical tests, will be seen by human eyes. And as autonomous vehicles share our streets, we are increasingly putting our lives in their hands. The mathematical and computational models driving these changes range in complexity from something that can fit on a spreadsheet to a complex system that might credibly be called “artificial intelligence.” They are steadily replacing both human judgment and explicitly programmed software. In best-selling author Brian Christian’s riveting account, we meet the alignment problem’s “first-responders,” and learn their ambitious plan to solve it before our hands are completely off the wheel. In a masterful blend of history and on-the ground reporting, Christian traces the explosive growth in the field of machine learning and surveys its current, sprawling frontier. Readers encounter a discipline finding its legs amid exhilarating and sometimes terrifying progress. Whether they—and we—succeed or fail in solving the alignment problem will be a defining human story. The Alignment Problem offers an unflinching reckoning with humanity’s biases and blind spots, our own unstated assumptions and often contradictory goals. A dazzlingly interdisciplinary work, it takes a hard look not only at our technology but at our culture—and finds a story by turns harrowing and hopeful.
How to use Strategic Learning to rapidly respond to change and gain a sustainable advantage over your competitors What's even harder than creating a breakthrough strategy? Making it stick. As companies are fighting to survive in a tough economy, this new book by Willie Pietersen demonstrates the power of the Strategic Learning process, a four-step dynamic cycle guaranteed to create and sustain winning performance. Adopted by a wide range of corporations and not-for-profit organizations, the Strategic Learning process builds on eight years of practicing, adapting and honing the original concepts Pietersen first introduced in Reinventing Strategy to explain how organizations can generate superior insights about their customers and competitors, craft a Winning Proposition, focus on a vital few key priorities, create buy-in throughout the organization and achieve success – again and again. Teaches organizations to make smarter decisions that help them win customers and earn superior profits Explains how to instill a culture of openness, learning, and courage that can face and respond to the constantly changing business environment Is a tool that can benefit leaders at all levels, in organizations both large and small, global and domestic, for-profit and not-for-profit Author Willie Pietersen, a former president of Tropicana and Seagram USA, is a professor of management at Columbia Business School, and the author of Reinventing Strategy, from Wiley Strategic Learning shows you how your business or nonprofit organization can develop better, more effective strategies for long-term competitive advantage.
CEOs regularly identify strategic execution as their biggest challenge, and the top priority facing today's business leaders. Based on their research with senior executives across a variety of industries—and including firms like Marriott, Microsoft, SunTrust, UPS, and Vail Resorts—Kenneth J. Carrig and Scott A. Snell have distilled the elements that are most critical for execution. This book addresses the challenges of execution, why it matters, and why the approach remains elusive. It introduces an integrated framework for understanding four priorities underlying execution excellence. Ultimately, it all comes down to alignment, agility, ability, and architecture. The authors lay out a process for applying the framework, helping business leaders to diagnose their challenges and to determine their path toward breakthrough performance.
Strategic execution drives business success. This book covers strategy from the ground up, explaining what strategy is, how to put together a strategic plan, what tools and resources are necessary to execute it, and how to measure results. The Harvard Business Essentials series is designed to provide comprehensive advice, personal coaching, background information, and guidance on the most relevant topics in business. Whether you are a new manager seeking to expand your skills or a seasoned professional looking to broaden your knowledge base, these solution-oriented books put reliable answers at your fingertips.
"The best sales book of the year" — strategy+business magazine That gap between your company’s sales efforts and strategy? It’s real—and a huge vulnerability. Addressing that gap, actionably and with attention to relevant research, is the focus of this book. In Aligning Strategy and Sales, Harvard Business School professor Frank Cespedes equips you to link your go-to-market initiatives with strategic goals. Cespedes offers a road map to articulate strategy in ways that people in the field can understand and that will fuel the behaviors required for profitable growth. Without that alignment, leaders will press for better execution when they need a better strategy, or change strategic direction with great cost and turmoil when they should focus on the basics of sales execution. With thoughtful, clear, and engaging examples, Aligning Strategy and Sales provides a framework for diagnosing and managing the core levers available for effective selling in any organization. It will give you the know-how and tools to move from ideas to action and build a sales effort linked to your firm’s unique goals, not a generic selling formula. Cespedes shows how sales efforts affect all elements of value creation in a business, whether you’re a start-up seeking to scale or an established firm looking to jump-start new growth. The book provides key insights to optimize your firm’s customer management activities and so improve selling and strategy.
The defining attributes of the 21st-century economy and fourth industrial revolution are innovation, technology, globalization, and a rapid pace of change. Therefore, an organization's capacity to enhance the capabilities of its workforce and create a culture of continuous learning are vital to remaining competitive. These trends make an effective learning-and-development (L&D) function more critical than ever. This compendium of articles, from L&D professionals at McKinsey & Company, discusses every facet of professional development and training-from ensuring that L&D's efforts are closely aligned with business strategy to elements of advancing the L&D function, designing learning solutions, deploying digital learning, executing flawlessly, measuring impact, and ensuring good governance. For L&D professionals seeking to hone their organization's efforts, Elevating Learning & Development: Insights and Practical Guidance from the Field is the ideal resource.