For centuries we've believed that work was where you learned discipline, initiative, honesty, self-reliance--in a word, character. A job was also, and not incidentally, the source of your income: if you didn't work, you didn't eat, or else you were stealing from someone. If only you worked hard, you could earn your way and maybe even make something of yourself. In recent decades, through everyday experience, these beliefs have proven spectacularly false. In this book, James Livingston explains how and why Americans still cling to work as a solution rather than a problem--why it is that both liberals and conservatives announce that "full employment" is their goal when job creation is no longer a feasible solution for any problem, moral or economic. The result is a witty, stirring denunciation of the ways we think about why we labor, exhorting us to imagine a new way of finding meaning, character, and sustenance beyond our workaday world--and showing us that we can afford to leave that world behind.

What does it take to find oil in an area where many have tried, but failed? What does it take to design buildings that become prize-winning cultural landmarks? And what can the best architects, oil explorers, business lawyers, journalists, and business developers within banking and trading analysis have in common? Idea Work can provide the answers. This book builds on a four-year research project and describes what extraordinary idea work looks like in practice. The authors take you behind the scenes of some of Norways leading companies and show how surprisingly similarly they work when they are working creatively to develop and realise new ideas. The book gives us, for example, a glimpse of how Snøhetta designed the Opera and the 9/11 memorial, and how explorers at Statoil discovered the most oil of all oil companies in the world in 2011. Narratives are presented on how prepping, sketches, pin-ups, drama, wonder, and punk are important aspects of the extraordinary. Examples are supported by theory, placing this book at the forefront of international research. Idea Work will appeal to practitioners as well as students. It recounts engaging stories from actual production processes and combines new theoretical perspectives with practical advice. It will also be of interest to anyone working with development, particularly with developing new ideas. From a professional standpoint, this book is an uncommon contribution to describing and understanding creativity as something collective and grounded in everyday activity.

Directors of Product Development, VPs of R&D, and Innovation Consultants should have this book on their shelves! Dr. Brian Glassman, a Ph.D. in Innovation Management from Purdue University, provides a detailed an authoritative review of the front-end of innovation, idea generation, and idea management. Plus, his seminal process model, explained in detail, provides innovation practitioners a framework with which to generate ideas in a controlled manner, and then capture, screen, store, a diffuse those ideas throughout their enterprises. This powerful model can employ the best idea generation methods, such as Blue Ocean Strategies, IDEO, TRIZ, and more; resulting in a steady stream of disruptive to incremental ideas for new products and services. This seminal work is highly authoritative and separates itself from the rest of the innovation literature by providing insights cited by highly creditable sources, and by providing structured arguments based on data driven research.

Presents a plan of action for CEOs, managers, and employees at all levels, based on the lessons Petersen learned from his decade as president and then chairman of Ford.

In the tradition of Phil Knight's Shoe Dog comes the incredible untold story of how Netflix went from concept to company-all revealed by co-founder and first CEO Marc Randolph. Once upon a time, brick-and-mortar video stores were king. Late fees were ubiquitous, video-streaming unheard was of, and widespread DVD adoption seemed about as imminent as flying cars. Indeed, these were the widely accepted laws of the land in 1997, when Marc Randolph had an idea. It was a simple thought—leveraging the internet to rent movies—and was just one of many more and far worse proposals, like personalized baseball bats and a shampoo delivery service, that Randolph would pitch to his business partner, Reed Hastings, on their commute to work each morning. But Hastings was intrigued, and the pair—with Hastings as the primary investor and Randolph as the CEO—founded a company. Now with over 150 million subscribers, Netflix's triumph feels inevitable, but the twenty first century's most disruptive start up began with few believers and calamity at every turn. From having to pitch his own mother on being an early investor, to the motel conference room that served as a first office, to server crashes on launch day, to the now-infamous meeting when Netflix brass pitched Blockbuster to acquire them, Marc Randolph's transformational journey exemplifies how anyone with grit, gut instincts, and determination can change the world—even with an idea that many think will never work. What emerges, though, isn't just the inside story of one of the world's most iconic companies. Full of counter-intuitive concepts and written in binge-worthy prose, it answers some of our most fundamental questions about taking that leap of faith in business or in life: How do you begin? How do you weather disappointment and failure? How do you deal with success? What even is success? From idea generation to team building to knowing when it's time to let go, That Will Never Work is not only the ultimate follow-your-dreams parable, but also one of the most dramatic and insightful entrepreneurial stories of our time.

This book reevaluates the role of work in society and its place in our lives as technology, economics, and environmental necessity are creating the possibility of working less and working better. COVID-induced work from home, demand for government support, changing attitudes toward paternity leave, climate change and advances in AI: these and other factors have profoundly changed our relationship to work. Work is so integral to our lives and our culture that we have internalized beliefs about its value and have built our economies and lifestyles around those beliefs. Expert Matthew Taylor reviews how the meaning, status, and structure of work have changed across history and societies. He goes on to posit that we are approaching a new era of work. He outlines some of the factors that might lead to change, including the adoption of forms of universal basic income, the growth of the zero- or low-cost economy (renewable energy, user-generated content, community mutual support), and the growth of self-employment and quasi- autonomous ways of working (including from home) in organizations. He concludes that such changes might foster a more fundamental shift: a growing intolerance of the idea of work as a burden and a desire to transform it from something imposed on us into simply the means by which we live our best lives together, recreating in modern conditions with modern resources a prehistoric unity between being and working.

Considering a career change, freelancing, dropping your hours while maintaining your pay, starting a business, or going after that big dream job? Executive coach Gary Crotaz's 6-week program will help you reach full potential, play to natural talents, excite you every day, and focus on what's most important to you.

The definitive history of America’s greatest incubator of innovation and the birthplace of some of the 20th century’s most influential technologies “Filled with colorful characters and inspiring lessons . . . The Idea Factory explores one of the most critical issues of our time: What causes innovation?” —Walter Isaacson, The New York Times Book Review “Compelling . . . Gertner's book offers fascinating evidence for those seeking to understand how a society should best invest its research resources.” —The Wall Street Journal From its beginnings in the 1920s until its demise in the 1980s, Bell Labs-officially, the research and development wing of AT&T-was the biggest, and arguably the best, laboratory for new ideas in the world. From the transistor to the laser, from digital communications to cellular telephony, it's hard to find an aspect of modern life that hasn't been touched by Bell Labs. In The Idea Factory, Jon Gertner traces the origins of some of the twentieth century's most important inventions and delivers a riveting and heretofore untold chapter of American history. At its heart this is a story about the life and work of a small group of brilliant and eccentric men-Mervin Kelly, Bill Shockley, Claude Shannon, John Pierce, and Bill Baker-who spent their careers at Bell Labs. Today, when the drive to invent has become a mantra, Bell Labs offers us a way to enrich our understanding of the challenges and solutions to technological innovation. Here, after all, was where the foundational ideas on the management of innovation were born.

"Of all the books on democracy in recent years one of the best is James Miller’s Can Democracy Work? . . . Miller provides an intelligent journey through the turbulent past of this great human experiment in whether we can actually govern ourselves." —David Blight, The Guardian A new history of the world’s most embattled idea Today, democracy is the world’s only broadly accepted political system, and yet it has become synonymous with disappointment and crisis. How did it come to this? In Can Democracy Work? James Miller, the author of the classic history of 1960s protest Democracy Is in the Streets, offers a lively, surprising, and urgent history of the democratic idea from its first stirrings to the present. As he shows, democracy has always been rife with inner tensions. The ancient Greeks preferred to choose leaders by lottery and regarded elections as inherently corrupt and undemocratic. The French revolutionaries sought to incarnate the popular will, but many of them came to see the people as the enemy. And in the United States, the franchise would be extended to some even as it was taken from others. Amid the wars and revolutions of the twentieth century, communists, liberals, and nationalists all sought to claim the ideals of democracy for themselves—even as they manifestly failed to realize them. Ranging from the theaters of Athens to the tents of Occupy Wall Street, Can Democracy Work? is an entertaining and insightful guide to our most cherished—and vexed—ideal.