Most organizations fail to take full advantage of their employees' knowledge, initiative, and imagination. In this accessible and practical book, J.-C. Spender and Bruce Strong provide a guide for building entrepreneurial workforces through carefully designed conversations between management and employees. These 'strategic conversations' make employees partners in the strategy development process, engaging them to help shape the organization's future. The result is transformational: instead of strategy being a dry, periodic planning exercise for the few, it becomes a dynamic and continuous act of co-creation enriched by the many. Case studies illustrate how leading organizations have used strategic conversations to build sustained competitive advantage, create innovative business models, make better decisions under uncertainty, reduce the need for change management, and enhance employee engagement. The book will appeal to managers, entrepreneurs of all stripes, and teachers and students in schools of business and public administration.

Ancient Greece is famous as the civilization which "gave" the world democracy. Democracy has in modern times become the rallying cry of liberation from supposed totalitarianism and dictatorship. It is embedded in the assumptions of Western powers who proclaim their faith in the global spread of democratic governance and at the same time wielded by protesters in the developing world who challenge what they view as the West's cultural imperialism. Thus, a lively and well informed treatment of the nexus between politics in antiquity and political discourse in the modern era is both timely and apposite. As Kostas Vlassopoulos shows, much can be learned about the practice of politics from a comparative discussion of the classical and the contemporary. His starting point is that the value of looking back to a political system with different assumptions and elements can help us think, and even shape, what the future of modern politics might be. He discusses the contrasting political systems of Athens, Sparta and Rome; the political theories of thinkers like Plato, Aristotle and Cicero; how great events like the Peloponnesian War or the Roman civil wars shaped the course of political theory; and the discovery of freedom, participation and equality as political values in antiquity. Above all, the book shows how important and surprising an analysis of the ancient world can be in reassessing and revaluating modern political debates.

A COMPANION TO GREEK AND ROMAN POLITICAL THOUGHT Justice, virtue, and citizenship were at the center of political life in ancient Greece and Rome and were frequently discussed by classical poets, historians, and philosophers. This Companion illuminates Greek and Roman political thought in all its range, diversity, and depth. Thirty-four essays from leading scholars in history, classics, philosophy, and political science provide stimulating discussions of classical political thought, ranging from the Archaic Greek epics to the final days of the Roman Empire and beyond. These essays strike a judicious yet thought-provoking balance between theoretical and historical perspectives. A Companion to Greek and Roman Political Thought is an authoritative guide to the ancient Greek and Roman political questions that continue to shape and challenge the modern world.

This volume on Thucydides, the most important historian of the ancient world, comprises articles by thirty leading international scholars. The contributions cover a wide range of issues, including Thucydides’ life, intellectual milieu and predecessors, Thucydides and the act of writing, his rhetoric, historical method and narrative techniques, narrative unity in the History, the speeches, Thucydides’ reliability as a historian, and his legacy through the centuries. Other topics dealt with include warfare, religion, individuals, democracy and oligarchy, the invention of political science, Thucydides and Athens, Sparta, Macedonia/Thrace, Sicily/South Italy, Persia, and the Argives. The volume aims to provide a survey of current trends in Thucydidean studies which will be of interest to all students of ancient history. Brill's Companion to Thucydides was awarded Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2007.

Ancient Greece was a place of tremendous political experiment and innovation, and it was here too that the first serious political thinkers emerged. Using carefully selected case-studies, in this book Professor Cartledge investigates the dynamic interaction between ancient Greek political thought and practice from early historic times to the early Roman Empire. Of concern throughout are three major issues: first, the relationship of political thought and practice; second, the relevance of class and status to explaining political behaviour and thinking; third, democracy - its invention, development and expansion, and extinction, prior to its recent resuscitation and even apotheosis. In addition, monarchy in various forms and at different periods and the peculiar political structures of Sparta are treated in detail over a chronological range extending from Homer to Plutarch. The book provides an introduction to the topic for all students and non-specialists who appreciate the continued relevance of ancient Greece to political theory and practice today.

The information age has enabled unprecedented levels of data to be collected and stored. At the same time, society and organizations have become increasingly complex. Consequently, decisions in many facets have become increasingly complex but have the potential to be better informed. Technologies for Supporting Reasoning Communities and Collaborative Decision Making: Cooperative Approaches includes chapters from diverse fields of enquiry including decision science, political science, argumentation, knowledge management, cognitive psychology and business intelligence. Each chapter illustrates a perspective on group reasoning that ultimately aims to lead to a greater understanding of reasoning communities and inform technological developments.

'Reorganizes the field and challenges our preconceptions in both familiar areas and in disciplines that are not usually treated in studies on the classical tradition. A must read.' - Craig Kallendorf, Texas A&M University 'An exciting read: energetic, considered, sparklingly written. One gets the feeling that all angles have been properly covered. An ambitious project brilliantly realized.' - Matthew Bell, King's College London 'The authors have pulled off the seemingly impossible task of fusing their three voices into a single, urgently argued discourse, and for that reason among many others, this will be a wonderful book to read and to use, for all kinds of readers.' - Terence Cave, St John's College, Oxford 'I found the text very readable and I particularly enjoyed the post-postmodernist take on many issues. It is hugely stimulating and intriguing throughout.' - Deborah Howard, University of Cambridge 'I think this is an absolutely splendid text, unique in conception, elegant and ingenious in design, and extremely ???user-friendly??? in styling and presentation.' - David Hopkins, University of Bristol 'A prodigiously ambitious, cornucopian book . . . so rich that no review will do it justice.' - Paul Barolsky, University of Virginia, Arion 'Impressive power and learning.' - Justus Cobet, Universität Duisburg-Essen, Sehepunkte 'Succeeds in providing an overarching account of a huge sweep of cultural history without losing sight of the host of nuances and particularities associated with such an overwhelmingly large topic.' - Pablo Maurette, University of Chicago, Comparative Critical Studies 'Highly innovative...engrossing...the book is marvellously packed throughout with insights and provocations. It conducts, to its great benefit and ours, a properly theoretical enquiry.' - Charles Martindale, University of Bristol, Translation and Literature The classical tradition – the legacy of Ancient Greece and Rome – is a large, diverse, and important field that continues to shape human endeavour and engender wide public interest. The Classical Tradition: Art, Literature, Thought presents an original, coherent, and wide-ranging guide to the afterlife of Greco-Roman antiquity in later Western cultures and a ground-breaking reinterpretation of large aspects of Western culture as a whole – English-speaking, French, German, and Italian – from a classical perspective. Encompassing almost two millennia of developments in art, literature, and thought, the authors provide an overview of the field, a concise point of reference, and a critical review of selected examples, from Titian to T. S. Eliot, from the hero to concepts of government. They engage in current theoretical debate on various fronts, from hermeneutics to gender. Themes explored include the Western languages and their continuing engagement with Latin and Greek; the role of translation; the intricate relationship of pagan and Christian; the ideological implications of the classical tradition; the interplay between the classical tradition and the histories of scholarship and education; the relation between high and low culture; and the myriad complex relationships – comparative, contrastive, and interactive – between art, literature, and thought themselves. Authoritative and accessible, The Classical Tradition: Art, Literature, Thought offers new insights into the powerful legacy of the ancient world from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance to the present day.

This volume consists consists of forty contributions written by an internationally renowned selection of scholars. The authors adopt an interdisciplinary methodology, examining both literary and archaeological sources, and a comparative perspective that transgresses national, chronological, and cultural boundaries, in order to investigate the nature of the links between text and image. This multifaceted approach to the study of ancient artifacts enables the authors to treat art and artistic production as activities that do not merely mirror social or cultural relationships but rather, and more significantly, as activities that create social and cultural relationships. The essays in this book are motivated by their authors' belief that there is no simple direct link between art and myths, art and text, or art and ritual, and that art should not be delegated to the role of a by-product of a literate culture. Instead, the contextual and symbolic analyses of artifacts and representations offered in this volume elucidate how art actively shaped myth, how it changed texts, how it transformed ritual, and how it altered the course of local, regional, and Mediterranean histories.

This book presents a state-of-the-art debate about the origins of Athenian democracy by five eminent scholars. The result is a stimulating, critical exploration and interpretation of the extant evidence on this intriguing and important topic. The authors address such questions as: Why was democracy first realized in ancient Greece? Was democracy "invented" or did it evolve over a long period of time? What were the conditions for democracy, the social and political foundations that made this development possible? And what factors turned the possibility of democracy into necessity and reality? The authors first examine the conditions in early Greek society that encouraged equality and "people’s power." They then scrutinize, in their social and political contexts, three crucial points in the evolution of democracy: the reforms connected with the names of Solon, Cleisthenes, and Ephialtes in the early and late sixth and mid-fifth century. Finally, an ancient historian and a political scientist review the arguments presented in the previous chapters and add their own perspectives, asking what lessons we can draw today from the ancient democratic experience. Designed for a general readership as well as students and scholars, the book intends to provoke discussion by presenting side by side the evidence and arguments that support various explanations of the origins of democracy, thus enabling readers to join in the debate and draw their own conclusions.

The word democracy has been over-used and misused to the point it has begun to lose its meaning for many of us. When people start brandishing that word, we often suspect that they have a political agenda. A Greater Democracy Day by Day rehabilitates the word by bringing together 365 thought-provoking quotes from around the world and through time, all centered on this concept that is the keystone of modern society. The book presents a theme for each month and a quote about that theme to ponder on each day of the year. Like fingers pointing to the moon, these diverse daily readings point to the singular essence of democracy -- a greater democracy than any nation on earth has been able to achieve thus far -- the fuller democracy toward which we are growing. The format is user-friendly as well as inspirational. Throughout the year, the book focuses on twelve characteristic democratic themes such as interdependence or creativity and provides related quotations from individuals both famous and lesser-known. What emerges is a powerful sense of both the fragility and the durability of democracy in its many forms, as well as the ways its promise continues to prompt ordinary people to bring the angels of their better nature to the challenges they face. Quoted are such diverse figures as Albert Einstein, Martin Luther King, Jr., Plato, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Socrates, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, St. Francis of Assisi, Bruce Springsteen, Leonard Cohen, Whoopi Goldberg, and all sort of less well-known individuals who have given thought and voice to the meaning of democracy (and in many cases acted on their ideals). This inspirational book cuts through the rhetoric to integrate practicalspiritual themes. It re-infuses democracy with meaning and inspires readers to new vision and positive action.