A highly specific yet highly readable schematic for organizational change.
A management guide designed to help leaders introduce change into their organizations and tap into their full potential.
In their revised and updated nonfiction collaboration, business consultants Shea and Solomon, who both teach management classes at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, present a strategy based on the Work Systems Model. That model, developed in part by Shea, is itself based on the concept of sociotechnical systems, created in the 1950s. The aim is to help teach “change leaders” to become “system thinkers,” and, to that end, the book introduces eight Levers of Change of the Work Systems Model, from “Organization” and “Workplace design” to “Information distribution” and “Decision allocation.” Within these, the authors offer an array of sound approaches to revitalizing and reenvisioning the corporate environment, such as “Become the Screenwriter of Your Future” (“Why does the account manager care? Why does the person on the other end care? Who decides on a course of action, if any?”) and “Pulling the Task Lever” to streamline the manner in which something gets done (“Laying out the flow of work and converting it into a formal practice can help make it a habit—the way we do what we do”). Shea and Solomon analyze variables of various Task Levers by using real-world examples, and they reliably ground these in broader principles: “Inevitably,” they write, “the behavior of employees reflects the confluence of powerful forces. Aligning those forces through thoughtful application of the 8 Levers of Change in the Work System Model will precipitate behavioral change.” The book explains all aspects of the model in a succinct, compressed style, which may leave some readers wanting more; given the density of the material, the book is surprisingly short at under 110 pages.
A highly specific yet highly readable schematic for organizational change.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61363-094-5
Page Count: 108
Publisher: Wharton School Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 10, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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