Well-reasoned road map for a less mechanized and more people-focused management model.
In this business guide, a strategy consultant discusses why and how to manage today’s knowledge-based work to achieve faster and better results.
“Scientific management,” developed in the industrial era to oversee the output of factory workers, is an outdated approach for today’s knowledge-worker culture. In this guide, Bergstrand draws on research and case studies to showcase why the social sciences-based EDBA (Envision-Design-Build-Activate) approach is a better way to manage today’s knowledge-based workers, producing better and faster results and therefore a critical “velocity advantage” in business. EDBA helps individuals and teams collaboratively organize “the opposing forces of knowledge, work, subjectivity, and objectivity” by first becoming clear on the destination/time frame of a project (Envision), then establishing the priorities to implement the envisioned project (Design), and only after that building or executing the project by activating the right people assigned to the right work at the right time. “Through these four steps,” Bergstrand asserts, “human knowledge is converted into organizational outcomes.” He discusses how certain job roles tend to fall into certain quadrant areas and how EDBA creates a shared language, framework, and process that incorporates critical stakeholder insights, facilitates collaboration, and ensures integrated project management. Bergstrand also details the Strategic Profiling-Action Planning (SP-AP) process used to introduce EDBA into an organization, including issuing a Strategic Profiling (SP) survey to help people understand their individual/group preferences and abilities within the framework. Bergstrand (Reinvent Your Enterprise, 2009), a former Coca-Cola exec and currently a Drucker Institute board member and business strategy consultant, offers an authoritative and compelling case for implementing this business model. He goes deep into its concepts, providing dedicated chapters and charts on the many nuances by which people may fit in and play out the EDBA process, and also discusses how to make velocity a company’s “brand.” While such detail makes for a somewhat intimidating textbooklike experience, Bergstrand also thankfully provides helpful end-of-chapter summaries as well as enlivening “color” commentary, including a snapshot of how Star Trek’s main characters exemplify EDBA qualities.
Well-reasoned road map for a less mechanized and more people-focused management model.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-692-75386-6
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Brand Velocity
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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