This book will advance the understanding of leadership beyond the inherited myths and modalities of command and control. Leadership is separated from ideas and institutional seniority and explained as the collaborative power of one with others. Enabling the intelligent co-participation of all people, the constructive effect of this approach to leadership is in the engagement of people. This is significant when task accomplishment depends not on managerial direction, but on the interaction of people with each other, with technical systems, and with complex regulations which are often across jurisdictional boundaries. Examples and case studies are included.
"Command and Control is failing us. There is a better way to design and manage work - a better way to make work work - but it remains unknown to the vast majority of managers." An adherent of the Toyota Production System, John Seddon explains how traditional top-down decision making within service organizations leads to managers
The Oscar-shortlisted documentary Command and Control, directed by Robert Kenner, finds its origins in Eric Schlosser's book and continues to explore the little-known history of the management and safety concerns of America's nuclear aresenal. “A devastatingly lucid and detailed new history of nuclear weapons in the U.S. Fascinating.” —Lev Grossman, TIME Magazine “Perilous and gripping . . . Schlosser skillfully weaves together an engrossing account of both the science and the politics of nuclear weapons safety.” —San Francisco Chronicle A myth-shattering exposé of America’s nuclear weapons Famed investigative journalist Eric Schlosser digs deep to uncover secrets about the management of America’s nuclear arsenal. A groundbreaking account of accidents, near misses, extraordinary heroism, and technological breakthroughs, Command and Control explores the dilemma that has existed since the dawn of the nuclear age: How do you deploy weapons of mass destruction without being destroyed by them? That question has never been resolved—and Schlosser reveals how the combination of human fallibility and technological complexity still poses a grave risk to mankind. While the harms of global warming increasingly dominate the news, the equally dangerous yet more immediate threat of nuclear weapons has been largely forgotten. Written with the vibrancy of a first-rate thriller, Command and Control interweaves the minute-by-minute story of an accident at a nuclear missile silo in rural Arkansas with a historical narrative that spans more than fifty years. It depicts the urgent effort by American scientists, policy makers, and military officers to ensure that nuclear weapons can’t be stolen, sabotaged, used without permission, or detonated inadvertently. Schlosser also looks at the Cold War from a new perspective, offering history from the ground up, telling the stories of bomber pilots, missile commanders, maintenance crews, and other ordinary servicemen who risked their lives to avert a nuclear holocaust. At the heart of the book lies the struggle, amid the rolling hills and small farms of Damascus, Arkansas, to prevent the explosion of a ballistic missile carrying the most powerful nuclear warhead ever built by the United States. Drawing on recently declassified documents and interviews with people who designed and routinely handled nuclear weapons, Command and Control takes readers into a terrifying but fascinating world that, until now, has been largely hidden from view. Through the details of a single accident, Schlosser illustrates how an unlikely event can become unavoidable, how small risks can have terrible consequences, and how the most brilliant minds in the nation can only provide us with an illusion of control. Audacious, gripping, and unforgettable, Command and Control is a tour de force of investigative journalism, an eye-opening look at the dangers of America’s nuclear age.
Great is no longer good enough. Beyond Great delivers a powerful new playbook of 9 core strategies to thrive in a post-COVID world where all the rules of the game are being re-written. Beyond Great answers to two fundamental questions which face business leaders today in a world shaped by daunting and disruptive technological, economic, and social change. First, what is outstanding performance in this new volatile era? Second, how do we build competitive advantage in a world with new and often uncertain rules? Supported by years of research and hands-on consulting practice, this book presents a comprehensive framework for building a high performing, resilient, adaptive, and socially responsible global company. The book begins by taking an incisive look at these disruptive forces transforming globalization, including economic nationalism; the boom in data flows and digital commerce; the rise of China; heightened public concerns about capitalism and the environment; and the emergence of borderless communities of digitally connected consumers. Distilled from the study of hundreds of companies and interviews with dozens of business leaders, the authors have distilled nine core strategies – the new winning playbook of the 21st century. Beyond Great argues that business leaders today must lead with a new kind of openness, flexibility and light-footedness, constantly layering in new strategies and operational norms atop existing ones to allow for "always-on" transformation. Leaders must master a whole new set of rules about what it takes to be "global," becoming shapeshifters adept at handling contradiction, multiplicity, and nuance. This book will show them how.
This is a management book that challenges convention and aims to appeal to a wide target audience. It argues that while many commentators acknowledge command and control is failing us, no one provides an alternative.
Military command and control is not merely evolving, it is co-evolving. Technology is creating new opportunities for different types of command and control, and new types of command and control are creating new aspirations for technology. The question is how to manage this process, how to achieve a jointly optimised blend of socio and technical and create the kind of agility and self-synchronisation that modern forms of command and control promise. The answer put forward in this book is to re-visit sociotechnical systems theory. In doing so, the problems of 21st century command and control can be approached from an alternative, multi-disciplinary and above all human-centred perspective. Human factors (HF) is also co-evolving. The traditional conception of the field is to serve as a conduit for knowledge between engineering and psychology yet 21st century command and control presents an altogether different challenge. Viewing military command and control through the lens of sociotechnical theory forces us to confront difficult questions about the non-linear nature of people and technology: technology is changing, from platform centric to network centric; the interaction with that technology is changing, from prescribed to exploratory; and complexity is increasing, from behaviour that is linear to that which is emergent. The various chapters look at this transition and draw out ways in which sociotechnical systems theory can help to understand it. The sociotechnical perspective reveals itself as part of a conceptual toolkit through which military command and control can be transitioned, from notions of bureaucratic, hierarchical ways of operating to the devolved, agile, self-synchronising behaviour promised by modern forms of command and control like Network Enabled Capability (NEC). Sociotechnical system theory brings with it a sixty year legacy of practical application and this real-world grounding in business process re-engineering underlies the entire book. An attempt has been made to bring a set of sometimes abstract (but no less useful) principles down to the level of easy examples, design principles, evaluation criteria and actionable models. All of these are based on an extensive review of the current state of the art, new sociotechnical/NEC studies conducted by the authors, and insights derived from field studies of real-life command and control. Time and again, what emerges is a realisation that the most agile, self-synchronising component of all in command and control settings is the human.
In this grand history of naval warfare, Palmer observes five centuries of dramatic encounters under sail and steam. From reliance on signal flags in the seventeenth century to satellite communications in the twenty-first, admirals looked to the next advance in technology as the one that would allow them to control their forces. But while abilities to communicate improved, Palmer shows how other technologies simultaneously shrank admirals' windows of decision. The result was simple, if not obvious: naval commanders have never had sufficient means or time to direct subordinates in battle.
In this much-talked-about book, John Seddon dissects the changes that have been made in a range of services, including housing benefits, social care and policing. His descriptions beggar belief, though they would be funnier if it wasn't our money that was being wasted.
From bestselling author and mental toughness expert Jason Selk comes a mind-training regimen for reframing every problem into an opportunity for productive action. The most common cause of failing to reach our professional and personal goals is hardwired in us: Humans instinctively focus on problems. Over millennia, our very survival relied on our ability to be alert to any potential dangers that could threaten our existence. But today this negativity bias significantly limits our potential and increases stress, pressure, and underperformance. The one characteristic all phenomenally successful people share is mental toughness. Mentally tough people are better at making decisions more quickly and with better results. They possess the uncanny ability to control what goes on between their ears. Instead of allowing their minds to focus on their problems when adversity strikes, the most successful people have learned to direct their thoughts in a systematic manner that produces positive emotions and productive actions: they have a Relentless Solution Focus. In this book, top performance coach Dr. Jason Selk—former Director of Mental Training for the World Series champions St. Louis Cardinals—and his colleague Dr. Ellen Reed provide the insight, tools, and proven step-by-step framework for you to do the same. When you have Relentless Solution Focus, you think better. Your decisions garner positive results. You take action and follow through—every time. And when you do get off track, you get back on with less effort and less drama. Weakness shrinks and strength grows, creating confidence and momentum, taking you and your team to higher levels of performance and achievement.
How to repair the disconnect between designers and users, producers and consumers, and tech elites and the rest of us: toward a more democratic internet. In this provocative book, Ramesh Srinivasan describes the internet as both an enabler of frictionless efficiency and a dirty tangle of politics, economics, and other inefficient, inharmonious human activities. We may love the immediacy of Google search results, the convenience of buying from Amazon, and the elegance and power of our Apple devices, but it's a one-way, top-down process. We're not asked for our input, or our opinions—only for our data. The internet is brought to us by wealthy technologists in Silicon Valley and China. It's time, Srinivasan argues, that we think in terms beyond the Valley. Srinivasan focuses on the disconnection he sees between designers and users, producers and consumers, and tech elites and the rest of us. The recent Cambridge Analytica and Russian misinformation scandals exemplify the imbalance of a digital world that puts profits before inclusivity and democracy. In search of a more democratic internet, Srinivasan takes us to the mountains of Oaxaca, East and West Africa, China, Scandinavia, North America, and elsewhere, visiting the “design labs” of rural, low-income, and indigenous people around the world. He talks to a range of high-profile public figures—including Elizabeth Warren, David Axelrod, Eric Holder, Noam Chomsky, Lawrence Lessig, and the founders of Reddit, as well as community organizers, labor leaders, and human rights activists.. To make a better internet, Srinivasan says, we need a new ethic of diversity, openness, and inclusivity, empowering those now excluded from decisions about how technologies are designed, who profits from them, and who are surveilled and exploited by them.
