Wisdom Jones's mother needs a kidney and the only donor is one of his old enemies, Highnoon, who offers the organ for the chance to kill Wisdom. Jones accepts the proposition, but issues a stipulation of his own: he wants one week to intervene in the lives of his trifling family members and steer them away from a pathway of destruction. Take One For The Team leaves Wisdom Jones matching wits with deadly adversaries in an attempt to free his family from the hand of destruction and deliver them into the land of righteousness.
In his classic book, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Patrick Lencioni laid out a groundbreaking approach for tackling the perilous group behaviors that destroy teamwork. Here he turns his focus to the individual, revealing the three indispensable virtues of an ideal team player. In The Ideal Team Player, Lencioni tells the story of Jeff Shanley, a leader desperate to save his uncle’s company by restoring its cultural commitment to teamwork. Jeff must crack the code on the virtues that real team players possess, and then build a culture of hiring and development around those virtues. Beyond the fable, Lencioni presents a practical framework and actionable tools for identifying, hiring, and developing ideal team players. Whether you’re a leader trying to create a culture around teamwork, a staffing professional looking to hire real team players, or a team player wanting to improve yourself, this book will prove to be as useful as it is compelling.
Effective software teams are essential for any organization to deliver value continuously and sustainably. But how do you build the best team organization for your specific goals, culture, and needs? Team Topologies is a practical, step-by-step, adaptive model for organizational design and team interaction based on four fundamental team types and three team interaction patterns. It is a model that treats teams as the fundamental means of delivery, where team structures and communication pathways are able to evolve with technological and organizational maturity. In Team Topologies, IT consultants Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais share secrets of successful team patterns and interactions to help readers choose and evolve the right team patterns for their organization, making sure to keep the software healthy and optimize value streams. Team Topologies is a major step forward in organizational design for software, presenting a well-defined way for teams to interact and interrelate that helps make the resulting software architecture clearer and more sustainable, turning inter-team problems into valuable signals for the self-steering organization.
The User Experience Team of One prescribes a range of approaches that have big impact and take less time and fewer resources than the standard lineup of UX deliverables. Whether you want to cross over into user experience or you're a seasoned practitioner trying to drag your organization forward, this book gives you tools and insight for doing more with less.
All of us in the today's workforce are called upon more and more to work effectively in teams. But do you know how to build a team that truly takes advantage of the knowledge, experience, and motivation of its members? Most of us don't, and we quickly become frustrated, give up, and opt to go it alone-not a good solution in today's business environment. Fortunately, there is a better way. Here, expert authors Ken Blanchard, Alan Randolph, and Peter Grazier outline a 3-step process that will help you transform any kind of team into a Next-Level Team-one that uses all team members' ideas and motivation more effectively, makes better use of team members' and team leaders' time, and generates benefits for individual team members, the team, and the organization. Designed as a working guide filled with detailed instructions for people who want to build high performing teams, Go Team! will lead you, step by step, to great results. Through discussions, case examples, and questions to consider, you and your teammates will learn how to share information to build high levels of trust and responsibility; set clear boundaries to create the freedom for team members to act responsibly; and develop self-managing skills to make good team decisions. With Go Team! as a guide, you'll find that working in a team can be fun, satisfying, and highly productive.
There is one sound that will always be loudest in sports. It isn’t the squeak of sneakers or the crunch of helmets; it isn’t the grunts or even the stadium music. It’s the deafening roar of sports fans. For those few among us on the outside, sports fandom—with its war paint and pennants, its pricey cable TV packages and esoteric stats reeled off like code—looks highly irrational, entertainment gone overboard. But as Erin C. Tarver demonstrates in this book, sports fandom has become extraordinarily important to our psyche, a matter of the very essence of who we are. Why in the world, Tarver asks, would anyone care about how well a total stranger can throw a ball, or hit one with a bat, or toss one through a hoop? Because such activities and the massive public events that surround them form some of the most meaningful ritual identity practices we have today. They are a primary way we—as individuals and a collective—decide both who we are who we are not. And as such, they are also one of the key ways that various social structures—such as race and gender hierarchies—are sustained, lending a dark side to the joys of being a sports fan. Drawing on everything from philosophy to sociology to sports history, she offers a profound exploration of the significance of sports in contemporary life, showing us just how high the stakes of the game are.
