Higher Education providers face enormous challenges in an increasingly competitive and globalised environment. It is perhaps obvious to those engaged in teaching and research that academia is both a competitive and a collaborative endeavour. Many national systems now assume in their legal or governance frameworks competitive rather than co-operative behaviour and increasingly regulate based on that assumption. Institutional leaders and educators wrestle with the issues around the commoditisation of learning and the pressure to treat students as customers. In tandem, students themselves are experiencing cuts in public financing and a transfer of the cost burden to them as the perceived private beneficiaries of a product. This book asks whether there is an alternative approach to this now transnational competitive logic. Can collaboration and partnership (re-)emerge as an antidote to the consumerist and competitive approaches taken by governments toward regulating their higher education systems? The question of competition, collaboration and community is addressed here at three levels of analysis. The macro-level or the international system level, observes competition and collaboration between countries and between institutions. The meso-level, includes competition and collaboration between academics and students, and at inter- and intra-disciplinary levels across organisational boundaries. Finally, competition and collaboration at the micro-level considers the interface between individual academics, and between academics and students as learners.

"The role that leaders play in aligning organizations toward the common goal of keeping the population healthy is at the center of this book. Because such a focus is critical in dealing with the various forces that have the potential to push things in the wrong direction, we are seeking to actively encourage connections and dialogue across sectors and among stakeholders. We will espouse an ecosystem view and demonstrate that, done well, it can help make some very significant differences in overall population health--in the right direction. In this book, we offer an introduction to and explanation of our framework--our health ecosystem leadership model (HELM). This model has been developed over the past few years and is based on what we have learned from our work with health industry leaders who have been the pioneers of an ecosystem approach. It is their hard-won successes that have driven our learning. These leaders foster what we refer to as an ecosystem mind-set--an understanding of the importance of bringing together traditionally disparate organizations from the different health sectors to create shared, innovative health solutions. Throughout the book, you will see quotes from participants of personal interviews we conducted with leaders who provide great examples of ecosystem leadership in action. They collectively demonstrate how they have sought to implement the solutions we advocate and help demonstrate our model"--

'Collaborative Advantage offers the perfect recipe for successful businesses that improve lives' -- Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, co-founders of Ben and Jerry's 'A valuable contribution to the vital task of getting people to see the business world as a complex, interconnected ecosystem, rather than as a sharp-elbowed race to the bottom' -- Rory Sutherland, Vice-chairman of Ogilvy Group UK, and the Spectator's 'Wiki Man'. Strategic consultant and social entrepreneur Paul Skinner argues that we have now reached a turning point in history from which creating Competitive Advantage may no longer be in the best interests of an organization. He presents today's business and social challenges through a new strategic lens and offers this book as a practical guide to help you create Collaborative Advantage, transform your business and change the world. You will gain access to world-leading techniques to enable you to: · Mobilize staff, partners, collaborators and customers around a common purpose that gets everyone you need firmly on your side. · Foster improved innovation, reach more customers or beneficiaries, build greater loyalty, generate greater income and forge more ambitious partnerships. · De-couple your potential for growth from the level of resource your organization controls. This is an indispensable guide that will help you transform the growth of your business or the impact of your non-profit by bringing the fuller value-creating potential of the outside world inside your organization.

Collaborative Communities show how companies can develop this profitable new business pattern of seamless alliances. Profitably satisfy customers' personal needs and wants. Generate revenue from each business building process that lets you quickly try, quickly learn, and quickly adapt. As cofounders of The Rhythm of Business, a think tank for the networked economy, Jeffery Shuman and Janice Twombly have been featured in the Wall Street Journal, CIO Magazine, and Business Start-Ups, and provide expert advice and commentary on business start ups for a number of Web sites including altavista.com, campuscareercenter.com, and cio.com.

In The Age of Thrivability, Michelle Holliday offers a bold reinterpretation of human history and a clear course to a better future. At the root of every major problem we face - individually and collectively - is the need for a new way of understanding ourselves, our work and the purpose and patterns of our lives. In contrast to the still-dominant mechanistic paradigm of the Industrial Era, an expanded story is emerging, this time with life solidly at the center of its plot. This new narrative invites us to see our organizations, communities - and even all of humanity - as dynamic, self-organizing, living systems. To embrace this view and to operate effectively within it, you need to understand how to support a living system's ability to thrive - its thrivability. With this knowledge, you can step into wise stewardship of life wherever you find it-and you find it everywhere. As real-life stories throughout the book demonstrate, viewing our businesses and communities through this lens reveals tremendous new possibilities for success and sustainability. With mounting threats to the continued existence of life on Earth, nothing could be more important. The Age of Thrivability represents a comprehensive guide, describing the nature of the transition humanity is undergoing and outlining a straightforward framework for enabling life to thrive within it. As real-life stories throughout the book demonstrate, viewing our businesses and communities through this lens reveals tremendous new possibilities for success and sustainability. In fact, in an increasingly complex world, aligning with life's elegant core patterns is the only viable option. And with mounting threats to the continued existence of life on Earth, nothing could be more important. In all, The Age of Thrivability offers profound insights, practical guidance, and plenty of inspiration for organizational and community leaders-and for anyone who is deeply concerned about the future of humanity. Visit www.ageofthrivability.com to learn more and to share your own thoughts and observations.

In the United States, some populations suffer from far greater disparities in health than others. Those disparities are caused not only by fundamental differences in health status across segments of the population, but also because of inequities in factors that impact health status, so-called determinants of health. Only part of an individual's health status depends on his or her behavior and choice; community-wide problems like poverty, unemployment, poor education, inadequate housing, poor public transportation, interpersonal violence, and decaying neighborhoods also contribute to health inequities, as well as the historic and ongoing interplay of structures, policies, and norms that shape lives. When these factors are not optimal in a community, it does not mean they are intractable: such inequities can be mitigated by social policies that can shape health in powerful ways. Communities in Action: Pathways to Health Equity seeks to delineate the causes of and the solutions to health inequities in the United States. This report focuses on what communities can do to promote health equity, what actions are needed by the many and varied stakeholders that are part of communities or support them, as well as the root causes and structural barriers that need to be overcome.

Stop trying to beat everyone else. True success is playing by your own rules, creating work that no one can replicate. Don't be the best, be the only. You're on the conventional path, checking off accomplishments. You might be doing okay by normal standards, but you still feel restless, bored, and limited. Srinivas Rao gets it. As a new business school graduate, Srinivas's dreams were crushed by a soulless job that demanded only conformity. Sick of struggling to keep his head above water, Srinivas quit his job and took to the waves, pursuing his dream of learning to surf. He also found the freedom to chart his own course. Interviewing more than five hundred creative people on his Unmistakable Creative podcast was the ultimate education. He heard how guests including Seth Godin, Elle Luna, Tim Ferriss, Simon Sinek, and Danielle LaPorte blazed their own trails. Srinivas blends his own story with theirs to tell you: You can find that courage too. Don't be just one among many--be the only. Be unmistakable. Trying to be the best will chain you to others' definition of success. Unmistakable work, on the other hand, could only have been created by one person, so competition is irrelevant. Like Banksy's art or Tim Burton's films, unmistakable work needs no signature and has no precedent. Whether you're a business owner, an artist, or just someone who wants to leave your mark on the world, Unmistakable will inspire you to create your own path and define your own success.

Voluntary distributed computing projects divide large computational tasks into small pieces of data or work that are sent out over the Internet to be processed by individual users, who participate voluntarily in order to provide solutions that would ordinarily require investments of millions of dollars. This approach is contributing to the transformation of computationally heavy scientific research, opening up participation in science to interested lay people and greatly reducing the cost-barriers to computation for financially challenged researchers. Drawing on face-to-face and online ethnographic, survey and interview data with participants in distributed computing projects around the world, this book sheds light on the organizational and social structures of voluntary distributed computing projects, communities and teams, with close attention to questions of motivation in projects that offer little or no traditional forms of reward, either financially or in terms of participants' careers. With its focus on non-market, non-hierarchical cooperation, this book is a case study of networked individuals around the world who are part of a new social production of information. A rich study of the transformative potential inherent in globalization and connectedness, Community, Competition and Citizen Science will appeal to sociologists and political scientists with interests in globalization, networks and science and technology studies, together with scholars and students of media and communication and those working in relevant fields of computing, information systems and scientific collaboration.

"This book shows how partnerships can be cultivated through projects, programming, funding, and extending the library's presence through unique avenues, offering librarians a better understanding of what might be possible for their situational requirements and limitations"--Provided by publisher.

Using a community-based participatory research approach, Shariq A. Siddiqui, Abdul Samad, and Rafeel Wasif investigate the challenges and opportunities in collaborations between nonprofit organizations. With a focus on diverse minority communities, particularly under-resourced, racialized and stigmatized nonprofits and Muslim-led organizations, this book provides different approaches to connect them with the broader philanthropic community.