In survey after survey, executives list attracting and retaining top talent as their #1 issue. Is it your top concern? While the people puzzle isn’t easy to solve, this book features compelling research, specific personal and client stories, and key perspectives from top business leaders and experts―all in a format that’s easy to read and prompts readers to act. Kathleen Quinn Votaw has years of experience working with CEOs who understand that traditional staffing methods don’t work for today’s companies, and in this book she offers advice on how to: keep “A Players” engaged, boosting retention and reducing turnover; attract people who will thrive in a demanding, uncertain, entrepreneurial environment; and Always Be Cultivating (ABC) by thinking of recruitment as a sales process.
The twenty-first century has brought the perfect storm of conditions to create substantive global instability. This contemporary operating environment (COE) is characterized by complexity, ambiguity, volatility, and constant danger. It is a human invention that requires a human solution. Special operations forces (SOF), a group comprised of highly trained personnel with the ability to deploy rapidly and apply special skills in a variety of environments and circumstances, is the logical force of choice to achieve success in the COE. Increasing their effectiveness is cultural intelligence (CQ) – the ability to recognize the shared beliefs, values, attitudes, and behaviours of a group of people and then apply that knowledge toward a specific goal. Empowered by CQ, SOF are positioned to dominate in the COE. Solving the People Puzzle makes a convincing argument for the powerful union of the "force of choice" with the "tool of choice." This book will inspire and inform.
Solving the People Puzzle is about management control of an organization and its people: How to get it, how to use it, and how to keep it. Real performance management systems may not be easy, but they are absolutely essential.
A vigorous attack on moral responsibility in all its forms argues that the abolition of moral responsibility will be liberating and beneficial. In Against Moral Responsibility, Bruce Waller launches a spirited attack on a system that is profoundly entrenched in our society and its institutions, deeply rooted in our emotions, and vigorously defended by philosophers from ancient times to the present. Waller argues that, despite the creative defenses of it by contemporary thinkers, moral responsibility cannot survive in our naturalistic-scientific system. The scientific understanding of human behavior and the causes that shape human character, he contends, leaves no room for moral responsibility. Waller argues that moral responsibility in all its forms—including criminal justice, distributive justice, and all claims of just deserts—is fundamentally unfair and harmful and that its abolition will be liberating and beneficial. What we really want—natural human free will, moral judgments, meaningful human relationships, creative abilities—would survive and flourish without moral responsibility. In the course of his argument, Waller examines the origins of the basic belief in moral responsibility, proposes a naturalistic understanding of free will, offers a detailed argument against moral responsibility and critiques arguments in favor of it, gives a general account of what a world without moral responsibility would look like, and examines the social and psychological aspects of abolishing moral responsibility. Waller not only mounts a vigorous, and philosophically rigorous, attack on the moral responsibility system, but also celebrates the benefits that would result from its total abolition.
A social epidemiologist looks at health inequalities in terms of the upstream factors that produced them. A political sociologist sees these same inequalities as products of institutions that unequally allocate power and social goods. Neither is wrong -- but can the two talk to one another? In a stirring new synthesis, Political Sociology and the People's Health advances the debate over social inequalities in health by offering a new set of provocative hypotheses around how health is distributed in and across populations. It joins political sociology's macroscopic insights into social policy, labor markets, and the racialized and gendered state with social epidemiology's conceptualizations and measurements of populations, etiologic periods, and distributions. The result is a major leap forward in how we understand the relationships between institutions and inequalities -- and essential reading for those in public health, sociology, and beyond.
This book seeks to demystify the re-ascendancy of China as a civilization state. China's politics and society are examined in the light of its living civilization, which is the only one of the ancient civilizations that has survived to this day. The book also contrasts China's development with that of the West and Japan. By combining the impact of internal political and socio-economic developments in China and its external relations (from the silk routes, the tribute system, to the modern day), it unravels the existing myths, puzzles, and paradoxes surrounding China and questions the adequacy of most of the Western political theories (such as realism in international relations) in an attempt to explicate China's re-emergence as a world power. It attempts to tackle squarely the question: Is China a threat to world order?The book traces the rationale for contemporary developments in China to the roots in the country's tradition as well as foreign influences and seeks to unravel the puzzle about the unique China Model that defies conventional thinking in political economy, with its sustained and incredibly rapid economic growth over the past three decades. This study on China's second rise provides a broad background that includes a meaningful scrutiny of the country's behavior during its first rise (713-1820) and beyond. In comparing China's ongoing second rise with its first ascent, the book not only refocuses on and reinterprets the example set during its first rise, but also takes into account the crucial lessons it learned during its century in eclipse in the interregnum, for the effects they have on the country's current orientation and behavior. The book follows an interdisciplinary approach, combining the cultural, intellectual-historical, normative-ideological, and social-scientific perspectives, to lend a more solid grasp of the present-day China. It ends with an educated speculation, based on the foregoing analyses, on the contours of a Pax Sinica that is likely to result from the impact of China's second rise as a world power.
