Discover how to cope with life's surprises. Some people like to be surprised. They find it funny or exciting or simply interesting. They may seek out experiences where they're likely to encounter the unexpected. Other people, however, are uncomfortable with surprise. It may make them feel anxious or stressed. Psychologists say that people who are comfortable with surprise are more emotionally flexible than people who aren't. When life takes them by surprise, they cope without becoming upset. You can learn to be more flexible. Each time you're confronted with a surprise, tell yourself, "This is an opportunity, a chance to be curious, to be creative, to think about things differently, to accept something new." Find out more inside this book!
On Flexibility presents a force planning concept that will enable armies to cope with the growing diversity of battlefield requirements, and especially with technological and doctrinal surprises, through applied adaptability and flexibility, minimizing the over dependence on intelligence and prediction involved in this process today.
How do firms cope with changing environments? Is flexibility really the solution? How can we measure a firm's flexibility? Can a more flexible firm be created? Based on an Igor Ansoff Award-winning study and now available for the first time in paperback, Henk Volberda's Building the Flexible Firm shows how flexibility has become the new strategic challenge for contemporary firms. Although traditional organizational forms have worked well in the relatively stable environments of the past, the globalization of markets, rapid technological change, shortening product life cycles, and increasing aggressiveness of competitors have radically altered the ground rules for competing in the 1990s and beyond. Increased competition forces firms to move more quickly and boldly than before, and to experiment in ways that do not conform to traditional administrative theory. This book offers a wealth of insights into the way firms can increase their flexibility. It is based on extensive interviews with practitioners and supported by many longitudinal case studies on flexibility improvement within large corporations. The author provides a strategic framework which explains what types of flexibility are effective under different organizational conditions and environmental characteristics. He also demonstrates an integrated method for diagnosing a firm's flexibility and for guiding the transition to greater flexibility and responsiveness.
Technology and its proper use constitute key components in the strength of any armed forces. However, battlefield technologies constantly evolve in the quest for competitive advantage, with the rate at which new concepts and devices appear steadily increasing. In the world of technological intelligence, militaries worldwide not only seek to advance their technologies but to gather information about the latest technological and scientific developments of present and future adversaries, evaluate their possible impacts, and prevent as much as possible, the advantages gained by technological surprise—that sudden appearance of novel weapon systems that can tilt the success of an operation, battle, or even war. While ample documentation circulates on operational intelligence—defined as information about an enemy's order of battle and intentions—and “operational surprise,” technological intelligence (and consequently technological surprise) receives far less attention than today’s military reality merits. In Ready for Battle: Technological Intelligence on the Battlefield, Azriel Lorber rectifies this slant towards operational intelligence, engaging through historical example and policy prescription technology's role in modern warfare, and the dangers presented by technological inferiority on the one hand, and technological surprise on the other. Throughout, he offers examples of well-kept technological secrets that turned the tides of battle—as well as less well-hidden efforts that failed in their effect. Ready for Battle analyzes the challenges presented and possible methods for addressing questions of technological surprise, drawing on historical examples of failure and success and offering insights into the intricacies of technological deception. This work will interest military historians and officers, security analysts, and defense industry professionals.
Understanding Land Warfare provides a thorough grounding in the vocabulary, concepts, issues and debates associated with modern land warfare. The book is a thematic, debate-driven analysis of what makes land warfare unique; how it interacts with the other environments; the key concepts that shape how it is executed; the trade-offs associated with its prosecution; and the controversies that continue to surround its focus and development. Understanding Land Warfare contains several key themes: the difficulty of conducting land warfare the interplay between change and continuity the growing importance of co-operation the variety of ways in which land warfare is fought; the competing theoretical debates; the tensions and trade-offs. This book will be essential reading for military personnel studying on cadet, intermediate and staff courses. In addition, it will also be of use to undergraduate and postgraduate students of military history, war studies and strategic studies.
The bestselling Emotion Thesaurus, often hailed as “the gold standard for writers” and credited with transforming how writers craft emotion, has now been expanded to include 56 new entries! One of the biggest struggles for writers is how to convey emotion to readers in a unique and compelling way. When showing our characters’ feelings, we often use the first idea that comes to mind, and they end up smiling, nodding, and frowning too much. If you need inspiration for creating characters’ emotional responses that are personalized and evocative, this ultimate show-don’t-tell guide for emotion can help. It includes: • Body language cues, thoughts, and visceral responses for over 130 emotions that cover a range of intensity from mild to severe, providing innumerable options for individualizing a character’s reactions • A breakdown of the biggest emotion-related writing problems and how to overcome them • Advice on what should be done before drafting to make sure your characters’ emotions will be realistic and consistent • Instruction for how to show hidden feelings and emotional subtext through dialogue and nonverbal cues • And much more! The Emotion Thesaurus, in its easy-to-navigate list format, will inspire you to create stronger, fresher character expressions and engage readers from your first page to your last.
Since the first edition of Managing the Unexpected was published in 2001, the unexpected has become a growing part of our everyday lives. The unexpected is often dramatic, as with hurricanes or terrorist attacks. But the unexpected can also come in more subtle forms, such as a small organizational lapse that leads to a major blunder, or an unexamined assumption that costs lives in a crisis. Why are some organizations better able than others to maintain function and structure in the face of unanticipated change? Authors Karl Weick and Kathleen Sutcliffe answer this question by pointing to high reliability organizations (HROs), such as emergency rooms in hospitals, flight operations of aircraft carriers, and firefighting units, as models to follow. These organizations have developed ways of acting and styles of learning that enable them to manage the unexpected better than other organizations. Thoroughly revised and updated, the second edition of the groundbreaking book Managing the Unexpected uses HROs as a template for any institution that wants to better organize for high reliability.
This book presents the theory and methods of flexible and generalized uncertainty optimization. Particularly, it describes the theory of generalized uncertainty in the context of optimization modeling. The book starts with an overview of flexible and generalized uncertainty optimization. It covers uncertainties that are both associated with lack of information and that more general than stochastic theory, where well-defined distributions are assumed. Starting from families of distributions that are enclosed by upper and lower functions, the book presents construction methods for obtaining flexible and generalized uncertainty input data that can be used in a flexible and generalized uncertainty optimization model. It then describes the development of such a model in detail. All in all, the book provides the readers with the necessary background to understand flexible and generalized uncertainty optimization and develop their own optimization model.
Creativity, the highest level of human wisdom, has become an increasingly important concept in different fields of psychological enquiry, particularly because it is portrayed as contributing to many aspects of society, including personal development, economic prosperity and technological advancement. However, although considerable research attention from a wide range of disciplinary backgrounds has focused on trying to understand creativity, the specific nature of creativity, its theoretical underpinnings and cognitive mechanisms, remain unclear, not least when it comes to the understanding of creativity at the individual level and creativity at the collective level. On the one hand, there are crucial distinctions between individual and collective creativity. On the other hand, the process of being creative involves not only independent or individual efforts but also interdependent or collective efforts. Understanding these differences and interrelationships is crucially important in studies of creativity. In this Research Topic, we bring together research from a wide variety of cognitive and psychological approaches and perspectives in order to provide a comprehensive and in-depth understanding of creativity at both the individual and collective levels. Furthermore, cognitive mechanisms in the creativity process are unavoidably affected by sociocultural factors and these mechanisms look different across cultures, particularly between Eastern cultures and Western cultures, two worlds that often imply dramatically dissimilar values and perspectives. Despite the fact that many studies have compared and contrasted these two cultures in various respects, little research has focused on the specific topic of cultural variation in creative cognition. In addition, very few studies have examined the differences in the cognitive mechanisms underpinning the cultural variations that can be observed at a surface level. This Research Topic aims to fill this gap in the literature and examine the cognitive processes and mechanisms in the creativity process at both individual and collective levels across different cultures by using theoretical and empirical evidence.
