You'd think that leaders and managers would seek to understand what's broken before trying to fix anything, but many changes are implemented without all the facts. The results are disastrous: profits fall, expenses go up, and morale gets destroyed. In almost every instance, failure can be traced back to leaders who champion solutions without fully studying the problems at hand. In this guidebook to change leadership, you'll discover how to develop effective solutions by learning from the successes and failures of others. The authors present real-life scenarios so you can get better at diagnosing the problems plaguing your organization. Learn how to identify the subtle symptoms that sicken your organization; avoid placing your trust in the wrong people; design training programs to fix problem behaviors; and get leaders to lead and motivate the troops to change. Without a rigorous diagnostic process, consultants and organizational leaders will continue to choose the wrong solutions to problems. Take the time you need to implement effective change by learning the lessons in Grasp the Situation.

"Mike Woods urges his retired father into helping out a friend's failing company. But for Bob Woods, another struggle to introduce lean manufacturing quickly rehashes production battles that he's long since fought. And not even the senior Woods, son Mike, or friend Phil and his colleagues really grasp what's in store for them."--Cover.

Pursued by members of every species, Meris-the most ancient and legendary of the Jadamiin-is a stowaway on a ship bound for the Port Earth space station. But the pursuit isn't over-and suddenly Port Earth is embroiled in high level intrigue that could annihilate the entire station.

How do we learn? And how can we learn better? In this groundbreaking look at the science of learning, Sanjay Sarma, head of Open Learning at MIT, shows how we can harness this knowledge to discover our true potential. Drawing from his own experience as an educator as well as the work of researchers and innovators at MIT and beyond, in Grasp, Sarma explores the history of modern education, tracing the way in which traditional classroom methods—lecture, homework, test, repeat—became the norm and showing why things needs to change. The book takes readers across multiple frontiers, from fundamental neuroscience to cognitive psychology and beyond, as it considers the future of learning. It introduces scientists who study forgetting, exposing it not as a simple failure of memory but as a critical weapon in our learning arsenal. It examines the role curiosity plays in promoting a state of “readiness to learn” in the brain (and its troublesome twin, “unreadiness to learn”). And it reveals how such ideas are being put into practice in the real world, such as at unorthodox new programs like Ad Astra, located on the SpaceX campus. Along the way, Grasp debunks long-held views such as the noxious idea of “learning styles,” equipping readers with practical tools for absorbing and retaining information across a lifetime of learning.

This book suggests that religion, in its usual sense, can be replaced by something better, that the human spirit or subjectivity can be the subject of scientific study and that lack of purpose or design in the universe is not a handicap but a positive opportunity for intelligent beings to make of the universe and its contents what they reasonably can. The book breaks new ground in suggesting a radical alternative to religion. It offers a scientific and humanist alternative to religion which appeals to people’s critical faculties rather than emotions or intuitions. It also challenges current views of causation and the principle of sufficient reason by stressing the subjectivity of our reasoning powers and clarifying these in relation to an independent external reality. It develops and elaborates a notion of the ’noosphere’ within a theoretical system, this enables the notion to assume a scientific importance which it currently lacks because it is treated as an isolated, eccentric and rather mystical idea.

Understanding Wittgenstein's Tractatus provides an accessible and yet novel discussion of all the major themes of the Tractatus. The book starts by setting out the history and structure of the Tractatus. It then investigates the two main dimensions of the early Wittgenstein's thought, corresponding to the division between what language can say by means of its propositions and what language can only show. It goes on to discuss picture theory, logical atomism, extensionality, truth-functions and truth-operations, semantics, metalogic and mathematics, solipsism and value, metaphysics, and finally, Wittgenstein's idea of the duty of maintaining silence. Frascolla also proposes a new interpretation of the ontology of the Tractatus. Based on the identification of objects with qualia, the argument put forward in the book challenges the currently prevalent ideas of the ‘New Wittgenstein'. The paradoxical nature of the Tractatus itself, and the theme of "throwing away the ladder", are thus revisited in a new key. Understanding Wittgenstein's Tractatus is essential reading for anyone wishing to further their insight into one of the most influential works of twentieth-century philosophy.