About this product: An updated edition of the national bestseller—now with a new introduction and a new chapter
Today, encyclopedias, jetliners, operating systems, mutual funds, and many other items are being created by teams numbering in the thousands or even millions. While some leaders fear the heaving growth of these massive online communities, Wikinomics proves this fear is folly. Smart firms can harness collective capability and genius to spur innovation, growth, and success.
A brilliant guide to one of the most profound changes of our time, Wikinomics challenges our most deeply-rooted assumptions about business and will prove indispensable to anyone who wants to understand competitiveness in the twenty- first century.
Based on a $9 million research project led by bestselling author Don Tapscott, Wikinomics shows how masses of people can participate in the economy like never before. They are creating TV news stories, sequencing the human genome, remixing their favorite music, designing software, finding a cure for disease, editing school texts, inventing new cosmetics, or even building motorcycles. You'll read about: • Rob McEwen, the Goldcorp, Inc. CEO who used open source tactics and an online competition to save his company and breathe new life into an old-fashioned industry. • Flickr, Second Life, YouTube, and other thriving online communities that transcend social networking to pioneer a new form of collaborative production. • Mature companies like Procter & Gamble that cultivate nimble, trust-based relationships with external collaborators to form vibrant business ecosystems.
An important look into the future, Wikinomics will be your road map for doing business in the twenty-first century.
About this product: Presented by The Drucker Foundation
"Austin has uncovered the common elements and key strategies that make for effective collaborations.... In The Collaboration Challenge, he illuminates these key lessons for all leaders, and makes it possible for each of us to meet the collaboration challenge." --Frances Hesselbein, chairman of the board of governors, The Drucker Foundation, and John C. Whitehead, founder, The John C. Whitehead Fund for Not-for-Profit Management, Harvard Business School
"Austin has performed a valuable service for nonprofit organizations and their corporate partners by illuminating the dynamics of successful relationships. His useful book deserves to be widely read by leaders in both sectors concerned about increasing the effectiveness of their social action agenda." --Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Harvard Business School, author of World Class and Rosabeth Moss Kanter on the Frontiers of Management
"The entire nonprofit sector has been searching for the expertise and tools this book provides. Nothing else like it exists." --Bill Shore, executive director of Share-Our-Strength and author of The Cathedral Within and Revolution of the Heart
In these complex times, when no organization can succeed alone, nonprofits and businesses are embracing collaboration for mutual benefits. Nonprofits are partnering with businesses to further their missions, develop resources, strengthen programs, and thrive in the competitive world. Companies are also discovering that alliances with nonprofits generate significant rewards: increased customer preference, improved employee morale, greater brand identity, stronger corporate culture, and higher innovation.
In this timely and insightful book, James E. Austin provides a practical framework for understanding how traditional philanthropic relationships can be transformed into powerful strategic alliances. He offers advice and lessons drawn from the experiences of numerous collaborations, including Timberland and City Year; Starbucks and CARE; Georgia-Pacific and The Nature Conservancy; MCI WorldCom and The National Geographic Society; Reebok and Amnesty International; and Hewlett-Packard and the National Science Resource Center. Readers will learn how to: * Find and connect with high-potential partners * Ensure strategic fit with the partner's mission and values * Generate greater value for each partner and society * Manage the partnering relationship effectively
Click here to read Chapter 8, Guidelines for Collaborating Successfully.
About this product: The Summary
Evan Rosen has consolidated the latest ideas on collaboration and brought them together into an informative and practical book. Collaboration is becoming more and more important whether you are trying to manage a global workforce or just need to get stove-pipe departments to work together you will learn a lot from this book.
The Audience
The Culture of Collaboration is a practical guide aimed at anyone interested in fostering collaboration in their workplaces. Managers and leaders should definitely check this book out. The ideas around collaboration with a multi-cultural and global work force are extremely interesting to anyone leading off-shore initiatives. The book is full of practical advice that can be leveraged immediately.
The Details
There have been a number of books recently on collaboration from Group Genius, X-Teams to some older titles like `Organizing Genius' and `How Breakthroughs Happen'. There have also been many books on recent technologies that leverage the genius of groups i.e. wikinomics, the wealth of networks. Evan Rosen's book brings all these elements together from the technologies, tools, and theories around collaboration into a practical guide. This is not by any means a lightweight `how-to' guide, but more of a roadmap to not only understand the power of collaboration but also to leverage it in your organization.
Rosen explains the principles of collaboration through personal stories and examples from some new and unique sources. Other books on collaboration use examples from the usual suspects Lockheed's SunkWorks and IDEO but Rosen draws examples from the Mayo Clinic, George Lucas's ILM (Industrial Light and Magic), Boeing and Toyota. The choice of the Mayo clinic was surprising at first and then as Rosen explained the culture behind how the clinic was started and some of their collaborative practices; it became obvious that this was an important and often over-looked example of a collaborative and innovative environment.
While the first half of the book explores the current trends and the need for collaboration, the last few chapters bring the ideas of collaboration together into a practical guide that is worth the price of the book alone. How to use collaboration tools to foster the right culture, which tools to use to solve different issues and challenges and advice to managers and leaders on fostering collaboration.
The Ideas:
Rosen draws from some unique examples and there were many ideas that made me think:
- Presence - the use of tools like IM to foster collaboration across teams. Being able to tell if someone is available or not. The in-box culture is dead and now replaced by tools that incorporate elements of `Presence'
- Why Smoking can get you promoted - ok that wasn't the point that was made, but Rosen does explain that conversations and groups that form around stepping outside for a `smoke', can generate the kind of cross-functional and cross-hierarchical connections that companies need.
- Mayo Clinic's SPARC - as an example of collaboration at work. SPARC gets people out of their usual roles into cross-functional groups in a custom built innovative lab, an open area called the `program support space' which is fitted with everything any innovative group would need.
The Take-Away:
I can't emphasize the practical nature of this book enough. If you are going to read only one book on collaboration and you want to walk away with a guide to foster collaboration at work, then this is the book to get. This is a well written and engaging book and well worth the investment in time to read.
About this product: Many software development books teach you how to build the product right. This one focuses on building the right product. Ellen Gottesdiener introduces the breakthrough Requirements Workshop technique, and demonstrates how to use it to identify customer's needs far more effectively, and specify new software systems far more quickly and accurately. The authors begin by reviewing the challenges of specifying software requirements, showing how Requirements Workshops address these challenges, and explaining the process of designing and running workshops. Through practical examples and case studies, they identify the best approaches to workshop design, and thoroughly explain the deliverables that workshops generate. This is the first book to fully integrate coverage of user requirements modeling, including UML-based use cases, business rules, and collaborative techniques designed to strengthen the relationship between IT and the business. Author Ellen Gottesdiener also introduces her breakthrough collaboration patterns -- powerful collections of group behavior that can be reused in a wide variety of software projects. For every developer, analyst, architect, and manager involved with creating or utilizing requirements specifications.
About this product: The most widely-used text on the topic of collaboration, Interactions is a guide for preprofessionals and professionals to help them understand and participate effectively in their interactions with other school professionals and parents. It addresses collaboration as a style, with accompanying knowledge and skills, that guides practices in many education efforts. Interactions provides a cutting-edge look at how teams of school professionals-- special educators, general educators and related services professionals--can effectively work together to provide a necessary range of services to students with special needs. As a result, future teachers learn how to collaborate with school professionals and families to help special education students who are more often being placed in general education settings.The new edition features: discussion of collaboration in the context of IDEA 2004; Chapter Opening Vignettes; a new boxed feature entitled "A Basis in Research" that demonstrates the rigorous research underpinning the practical collaborative techniques; an expanded section on Ethics that includes a broader selection of ethical inquiries; Issues of diversity are now discussed in relevant passages throughout the text; the Foundations chapter has been expanded to include material on the evolution of inclusion strategies; the Teams chapter has been revised to demonstrate a more practical and less theoretical approach to teaming.
The most widely-used text on the topic of collaboration, Interactions is a guide for preprofessionals and professionals to help them understand and participate effectively in their interactions with other school professionals and parents. It addresses collaboration as a style, with accompanying knowledge and skills, that guides practices in many education efforts.
Interactions provides a cutting-edge look at how teams of school professionals— special educators, general educators and related services professionals—can effectively work together to provide a necessary range of services to students with special needs. As a result, future teachers learn how to collaborate with school professionals and families to help special education students who are more often being placed in general education settings.
About this product: Scottish artist Andy Goldsworthy uses a seemingly infinite array of purely natural materials, from snow and ice to leaves, stone, and twigs in the creation of his one-of-a-kind sculptures. Unlike such artists as Christo and Michael Hiezer, whose works leave definite marks on the landscape, Goldsworthy's approach is to interrupt, shape, or in some other way temporarily alter or work with nature to produce his fragile, mutable pieces. To create "Broken Icicle," for example, Goldsworthy was only able to work on the sculpture in the early morning, when temperatures were below freezing. As with most of his works, ultimately, the materials used to create this piece returned to their natural state, leaving no trace of the artwork's existence save for the stunning photos in this book.
Creativity has long been thought to be an individual gift, best pursued alone; schools, organizations, and whole industries are built on this idea. But what if the most common beliefs about how creativity works are wrong? Group Genius tears down some of the most popular myths about creativity, revealing that creativity is always collaborative-even when you’re alone. Sharing the results of his own acclaimed research on jazz groups, theater ensembles, and conversation analysis, Keith Sawyer shows us how to be more creative in collaborative group settings, how to change organizational dynamics for the better, and how to tap into our own reserves of creativity.
About this product: Collaboration is an everyday practice that many people find to be a frustrating, even exhausting, experience. How to Make Collaboration Work provides a remedy: five principles of collaboration that have been tested and refined in organizations throughout the world. Author David Straus shows that these methods can help any group make better decisions and function more effectively. The five principles are: Involve the Relevant Stakeholders, Build Consensus Phase by Phase, Design a Process Map, Designate a Process Facilitator, and Harness the Power of Group Memory. Each principle addresses the specific challenges people face when trying to work collaboratively, and each can be applied to any problem-solving scenario.
About this product: Collaboration Explained establishes the importance of collaboration in agile software development projects through the Agile Manifesto. It reviews the fundamentals of collaboration: what the primary collaboration roles, what the primary collaboration events are; what the fundamental collaboration techniques are that you can apply in any of the roles to any of these events; what to do for distributed, virtual teams for collaboration; and what guidelines to follow to conduct any of the key collaboration activities in your projects. The book's unique edge rests in its clarity around collaboration techniques, presented as straightforward, practical steps, similar to the simple approaches presented by other agile books around project planning and programming techniques. While other books confirm collaboration as critical to project success, they don't provide the real "how to" steps to their readers for accomplishing this important component. Some books, such as Jim Highsmith's "Adaptive Software Development" have given a great deal of emphasis to collaboration within their particular methodology.This book takes that importance and applies it both broadly and crisply across the variety of agile methodologies.
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