Fix the machinery of your life . . . and serenity and wealth will follow. Starkly compelling in its simplicity, in The Systems Mindset: Managing the Machinery of Your Life, Sam Carpenter expands on the core inspirational element of his business bestseller, Work the System: The Simple Mechanics of Making More and Working Less, now in its third edition. Mindset is your path to quickly breaking free: to making a small tweak in how you see your world and then using that more accurate vision to get what you’ve always wanted from work, relationships, and health. When the systems mindset epiphany strikes, you will instantly see the visible and invisible machinery that determines your existence. With this startling new perception, you’ll see that your world is not a confusing array of sights, sounds, and events and, instead, grasp that it’s a simple and logical collection of systems, systems that can be quickly adjusted to deliver the life results you’ve always wanted. You will never be the same.
A Simple Mindset Tweak Will Change Your Life. After a fifteen-year nightmare operating a stagnant service business, Sam Carpenter developed a down-to-earth methodology that knocked his routine eighty-hour workweek down to a single hour—while multiplying his bottom-line income more than twenty-fold. In Work the System, Carpenter reveals a profound insight and the exact uncomplicated, mechanical steps he took to turn his business and life around without turning it upside down. Once you “get” this new vision, success and serenity will come quickly. You will learn to: • Make a simple perception adjustment that will change your life forever. • See your world as a logical collection of linear systems that you can control. • Manage the systems that produce results in your business and your life. • Stop fire-killing. Become a fire-control specialist! • Maximize profit, create client loyalty, and develop enthusiastic employees who respect you. • Identify insidious “errors of omission.” • Maximize your biological and mechanical “prime time” so that you are working at optimum efficiency. • Design the life you want—and then, in the real world, quickly create it! You can keep doing what you have always done, and continue getting mediocre, unsatisfactory results. Or you can find the peace and freedom you’ve always wanted by transforming your business or corporate department into a finely tuned machine that runs on autopilot!
"David Stroh has produced an elegant and cogent guide to what works. Research with early learners is showing that children are natural systems thinkers. This book will help to resuscitate these intuitive capabilities and strengthen them in the fire of facing our toughest problems."—Peter Senge, author of The Fifth Discipline Concrete guidance on how to incorporate systems thinking in problem solving, decision making, and strategic planning—for everyone! Donors, leaders of nonprofits, and public policy makers usually have the best of intentions to serve society and improve social conditions. But often their solutions fall far short of what they want to accomplish and what is truly needed. Moreover, the answers they propose and fund often produce the opposite of what they want over time. We end up with temporary shelters that increase homelessness, drug busts that increase drug-related crime, or food aid that increases starvation. How do these unintended consequences come about and how can we avoid them? By applying conventional thinking to complex social problems, we often perpetuate the very problems we try so hard to solve, but it is possible to think differently, and get different results. Systems Thinking for Social Change enables readers to contribute more effectively to society by helping them understand what systems thinking is and why it is so important in their work. It also gives concrete guidance on how to incorporate systems thinking in problem solving, decision making, and strategic planning without becoming a technical expert. Systems thinking leader David Stroh walks readers through techniques he has used to help people improve their efforts on complex problems like: ending homelessness improving public health strengthening education designing a system for early childhood development protecting child welfare developing rural economies facilitating the reentry of formerly incarcerated people into society resolving identity-based conflicts and more! The result is a highly readable, effective guide to understanding systems and using that knowledge to get the results you want.
The classic book on systems thinking—with more than half a million copies sold worldwide! "This is a fabulous book... This book opened my mind and reshaped the way I think about investing."—Forbes "Thinking in Systems is required reading for anyone hoping to run a successful company, community, or country. Learning how to think in systems is now part of change-agent literacy. And this is the best book of its kind."—Hunter Lovins In the years following her role as the lead author of the international bestseller, Limits to Growth—the first book to show the consequences of unchecked growth on a finite planet—Donella Meadows remained a pioneer of environmental and social analysis until her untimely death in 2001. Thinking in Systems is a concise and crucial book offering insight for problem solving on scales ranging from the personal to the global. Edited by the Sustainability Institute’s Diana Wright, this essential primer brings systems thinking out of the realm of computers and equations and into the tangible world, showing readers how to develop the systems-thinking skills that thought leaders across the globe consider critical for 21st-century life. Some of the biggest problems facing the world—war, hunger, poverty, and environmental degradation—are essentially system failures. They cannot be solved by fixing one piece in isolation from the others, because even seemingly minor details have enormous power to undermine the best efforts of too-narrow thinking. While readers will learn the conceptual tools and methods of systems thinking, the heart of the book is grander than methodology. Donella Meadows was known as much for nurturing positive outcomes as she was for delving into the science behind global dilemmas. She reminds readers to pay attention to what is important, not just what is quantifiable, to stay humble, and to stay a learner. In a world growing ever more complicated, crowded, and interdependent, Thinking in Systems helps readers avoid confusion and helplessness, the first step toward finding proactive and effective solutions.
A new approach to safety, based on systems thinking, that is more effective, less costly, and easier to use than current techniques. Engineering has experienced a technological revolution, but the basic engineering techniques applied in safety and reliability engineering, created in a simpler, analog world, have changed very little over the years. In this groundbreaking book, Nancy Leveson proposes a new approach to safety—more suited to today's complex, sociotechnical, software-intensive world—based on modern systems thinking and systems theory. Revisiting and updating ideas pioneered by 1950s aerospace engineers in their System Safety concept, and testing her new model extensively on real-world examples, Leveson has created a new approach to safety that is more effective, less expensive, and easier to use than current techniques. Arguing that traditional models of causality are inadequate, Leveson presents a new, extended model of causation (Systems-Theoretic Accident Model and Processes, or STAMP), then shows how the new model can be used to create techniques for system safety engineering, including accident analysis, hazard analysis, system design, safety in operations, and management of safety-critical systems. She applies the new techniques to real-world events including the friendly-fire loss of a U.S. Blackhawk helicopter in the first Gulf War; the Vioxx recall; the U.S. Navy SUBSAFE program; and the bacterial contamination of a public water supply in a Canadian town. Leveson's approach is relevant even beyond safety engineering, offering techniques for “reengineering” any large sociotechnical system to improve safety and manage risk.
As the foremost researcher in the area of correlating mindset with a variety of organizational learning factors, having performed a survey validation study of the Mindset Works, Inc. What’s My School Mindset? Survey and the Project for Educational Research That Scales (PERTS) academic mindset survey, the author has discovered links between the philosophical positions one holds and the theory of mind that describes what makes humans different from animals. This book proposes that the ability to recognize and respond to the differences between what we “see” and others “see” is the key reason for individuals, groups, and organizations to succeed or to fail. How we perceive differences and respond to them changes the way our brain develops and how our systems are designed. This book provides strategies for supporting continuous development and growth in individuals, in group dynamics, and in system/organizational development using the most current understanding and propositions of theories of mind. Our theories of physics are expanding through Newtonian, Classical, on to Quantum. Our technologies are expanding from simple tools, to industrialization, to digital information systems, and on to holographic imagery and virtual realities. Biological understandings have grown from magical beliefs about life, through static views of fixed DNA, to cloning, and the potential to regenerate organs and extend life. Our world is in need of an update on the social transformations occurring in human understanding that apply to addressing key issues of our day. This book revisits the concepts discussed in mindset theory and reframes it with a larger, more inclusive potential for understanding our world that empowers our ability for personal choice to improve our lives.
Most organizational books on the market profess to have a one-size-fits-all solution to home organization. Common anthems are to: go paperless, get rid of everything that doesn't spark joy and capsulize your wardrobe.While some find success using these methods the majority of American women are facing decades of delayed decisions piled high in unmarked boxes and shoved in storage rooms bursting at the seams. Fifteen minute a day organization tips and color coordinated plastic boxes are no match for the memories and clutter contained in those rooms. What is needed is a complete mindset shift. It's time to look at home organization in a whole new way. Each phase of life brings unique organizational challenges and emotional clutter to tackle. Looking at a women's life as a journey through 4 distinct phases of life provides a framework to anchor basic organization principals. "This is the home organization book that will make the rest of the books in your collection make sense." - Lisa Woodruff, Professional Organizer and Productivity Expert. As a professional organizer and productivity specialist, Lisa Woodruff has helped hundreds of women in Cincinnati, Ohio-and thousands of women around the world-get their homes organized and keep them that way. Her book the Mindset of Organization encourages women to take back their homes one phase at a time. Read more at www.organize365.com/mindset
*Major New York Times Bestseller *More than 2.6 million copies sold *One of The New York Times Book Review's ten best books of the year *Selected by The Wall Street Journal as one of the best nonfiction books of the year *Presidential Medal of Freedom Recipient *Daniel Kahneman's work with Amos Tversky is the subject of Michael Lewis's best-selling The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds In his mega bestseller, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman, world-famous psychologist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, takes us on a groundbreaking tour of the mind and explains the two systems that drive the way we think. System 1 is fast, intuitive, and emotional; System 2 is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. The impact of overconfidence on corporate strategies, the difficulties of predicting what will make us happy in the future, the profound effect of cognitive biases on everything from playing the stock market to planning our next vacation—each of these can be understood only by knowing how the two systems shape our judgments and decisions. Engaging the reader in a lively conversation about how we think, Kahneman reveals where we can and cannot trust our intuitions and how we can tap into the benefits of slow thinking. He offers practical and enlightening insights into how choices are made in both our business and our personal lives—and how we can use different techniques to guard against the mental glitches that often get us into trouble. Topping bestseller lists for almost ten years, Thinking, Fast and Slow is a contemporary classic, an essential book that has changed the lives of millions of readers.
In The A Level Mindset, Steve Oakes and Martin Griffin share the secrets of coaching students to develop the characteristics, habits and mindsets which will help them realise their potential. Those students who make real and sustained progress at A level aren't necessarily the ones with superb GCSEs. Some students leap from average results aged 16 to outstanding results aged 18. Others seem to hit a ceiling. But why? It was in trying to answer this question that the VESPA system emerged. Steve and Martin have cut through the noise surrounding character development and identified five key characteristics that all students need to be successful: vision, effort, systems, practice and attitude. These characteristics beat cognition hands down. Successful students approach their studies with the right behaviours, skills and attitudes: they understand how to learn and revise effectively, they're determined and organised, they give more discretionary effort and they get top results. Success at A level is a result of character, not intelligence. Much has been written about growth mindsets and character development in recent years, but teachers are still left wondering how to apply these ideas in their contexts: how can these theories help learners in practice? Taking cues from the work of Peter Clough, Carol Dweck and Angela Lee Duckworth, and informed by their collective 30 plus years of teaching and coaching, Steve and Martin have spent years researching how character and behaviours affect student outcomes in their sixth form. After identifying the core traits that contributed to student success, they developed practical activities to help every student develop the A Level Mindset. Discover 40 concrete, practical and applicable tools and strategies that will supercharge learners' ambition, organisation, productivity, persistence and determination. Suitable for teachers, tutors, heads of sixth form or anyone else who wants to help A level students achieve their potential, The A Level Mindset offers 40 easy-to-use activities to develop students' resilience, commitment, buoyancy, motivation and determination. It could be your key to transforming student outcomes.
