Book: Social Network Analysis : Methods and Applications (Structural Analysis in the Social Sciences)

Social Network Analysis : Methods and Applications (Structural Analysis in the Social Sciences)


Product Description:
Social network analysis, which focuses on relationships among social entities, is used widely in the social and behavioral sciences, as well as in economics, marketing, and industrial engineering. Social Network Analysis: Methods and Applications reviews and discusses methods for the analysis of social networks with a focus on applications of these methods to many substantive examples. As the first book to provide a comprehensive coverage of the methodology and applications of the field, this study is both a reference book and a textbook.

Book: The Knowing-Doing Gap: How Smart Companies Turn Knowledge into Action

The Knowing-Doing Gap – How Smart Companies Turn Knowledge into Action

Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert L. Sutton

Every year, companies spend billions of dollars on training programs and management consultants, searching for ways to improve. But it's mostly all talk and no action, according to Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton, authors of The Knowing-Doing Gap. "Did you ever wonder why so much education and training, management consultation, organizational research and so many books and articles produce so few changes in actual management practice?" ask Stanford University professors Pfeffer and Sutton. "We wondered, too, and so we embarked on a quest to explore one of the great mysteries in organizational management: why knowledge of what needs to be done frequently fails to result in action or behavior consistent with that knowledge." The authors describe the most common obstacles to action---such as fear and inertia---and profile successful companies that overcome them.

1. Why before How: Philosophy is Important.

2. Knowing Comes from Doing and Teaching Others How.

3. Action Counts More Than Elegant Plans and Concepts.

4. There is No Doing without Mistakes. What is the company's Response?

5. Fear Fosters Knowing-Doing Gaps, So Drive Out Fear.

6. Beware of False Analogies: Fight the Competition, Not Each Other.

7. Measure What Matters and What Can Help Turn Knowledge into Action.

8. What Leaders Do, How They Spend their Time and How they Allocate Resources, Matters.

WAYS OF OVERCOMING DESTRUCTIVE INTERNAL COMPETITION

: Hire, reward, and retain people in part based on their ability and willingness to work cooperatively with others for the company's welfare

: Fire, demote, and punish people who act only in their individual short-term self-interest.

: Focus people's attention and energy on defeating external competitive threats, not on fighting each other.

: Avoid compensation and performance measurement systems that create internal competition.

: Establish measures that assess cooperation.

: Build a culture that defines individual success partly by the success of the person's peers.

: Encourage leaders to model the right behavior by acting collaboratively, sharing information, and helping others.

: Promote people to top management positions who have a history of building groups where members cooperate, share information, and provide each other mutual assistance.

: Use power and authority to get people and units to share information, to learn from each other, and to work collaboratively to enhance overall performance.

One of the more important insights from our research is that knowledge that is actually implemented is much more likely to be acquired from learning by doing than from learning by reading, listening, or even thinking.

One of our main recommendations is to engage more frequently in thoughtful action. Spend less time just contemplating and talking about organizational problems. Taking action will generate experience from which you can learn.

Great companies get remarkable performance from ordinary people. Not-so-great companies take talented people and manage to lose the benefits of their talent, insight, and motivation. That is why we focus on management practices that either create or reduce the knowing-doing gap.

There is evidence that knowledge of how to enhance performance doesn’t transfer readily even within firms. There are persistent and substantial differences in performance within facilities in the same company.

It is possible that differences in organizational performance come from differences in what firms know – the quality and depth of their insights about business strategy, technologies, products, customers, and operations – rather than from their ability to translate that knowledge into action. There are, however, numerous reasons to doubt this is the case.

A much larger source of variation in performance stems from the ability to turn knowledge into action.

Research demonstrates that the success of most interventions designed to improve organizational performance depends largely on implementing what is already known, rather than from adopting new or previously unknown ways of doing things.

Most workplace learning goes on unbudgeted, unplanned, and un-captured by the organization…Up to 70 percent of workplace learning is informal.

While firms keep investing millions of dollars to set up knowledge management groups, most of the knowledge that is actually used and useful is transferred by the stories people tell to each other, by the trials and errors that occur as people develop knowledge and skill, by inexperienced people watching those more experienced, and by experience people providing close and constant coaching to newcomers.

Knowledge management systems seem to work best when the people who generate the knowledge are also those who store it, explain it to others, and coach them as they try to implement the knowledge.

Part librarian, part consultant, and part coach.

Knowledge is intangible.

Knowledge management tends to focus on specific practices and ignore the importance of philosophy.

It is about philosophy and perspective, about such things as people, processes, quality, and continuous improvement. It is not just a set of techniques or practices – techniques, systems and philosophy.

What is important is not so much what we do – the specific people management techniques and practices – buy why we do it – the underlying philosophy and view of people and the business that provides a foundation for the practices.

Competitive advantage comes from being able to do something that others can’t do.

The trick is in turning the knowledge acquired into organizational action.

If you do it, then you will know.

At one level, the answer to the knowing-doing problem is deceptively simple. Embed more of the process of acquiring new knowledge in the actual doing of the task and less in formal training programs that are frequently ineffective.

How to overcome the tendency to substitute talk for action: impose a real deadline with real measures.

Planning can be a ritualistic exercise disconnected from operations and from transforming knowledge into action. Of course, planning can facilitate developing knowledge and generating action. But it does not invariably do so and often does the opposite.

Asia Trip, October 2004

Photos from my trip to Asia

Book: Now, Discover Your Strengths

Book - Now, Discover Your Strenths
Take the Assessment

Updated book - buy this: StrengthsFinder 2.0: A New and Upgraded Edition of the Online Test from Gallup's Now, Discover Your Strengths (Hardcover)

This is valuable as well: Go Put Your Strengths to Work: 6 Powerful Steps to Achieve Outstanding Performance (Hardcover)

Effectively managing personnel--as well as one's own behavior--is an extraordinarily complex task that, not surprisingly, has been the subject of countless books touting what each claims is the true path to success. That said, Marcus Buckingham and Donald O. Clifton's Now, Discover Your Strengths does indeed propose a unique approach: focusing on enhancing people's strengths rather than eliminating their weaknesses. Following up on the coauthors' popular previous book, First, Break All the Rules, it fully describes 34 positive personality themes the two have formulated (such as Achiever, Developer, Learner, and Maximizer) and explains how to build a "strengths-based organization" by capitalizing on the fact that such traits are already present among those within it. Most original and potentially most revealing, however, is a Web-based interactive component that allows readers to complete a questionnaire developed by the Gallup Organization and instantly discover their own top-five inborn talents. This device provides a personalized window into the authors' management philosophy which, coupled with subsequent advice, places their suggestions into the kind of practical context that's missing from most similar tomes. "You can't lead a strengths revolution if you don't know how to find, name and develop your own," write Buckingham and Clifton. Their book encourages such introspection while providing knowledgeable guidance for applying its lessons. --Howard Rothman

Book: Good to Great

Book: Good to Great
Jim Collins web site; Built to Last & Good to Great concepts: http://www.jimcollins.com/

Five years ago, Jim Collins asked the question, "Can a good company become a great company and if so, how?" In Good to Great Collins, the author of Built to Last, concludes that it is possible, but finds there are no silver bullets. Collins and his team of researchers began their quest by sorting through a list of 1,435 companies, looking for those that made substantial improvements in their performance over time. They finally settled on 11--including Fannie Mae, Gillette, Walgreens, and Wells Fargo--and discovered common traits that challenged many of the conventional notions of corporate success. Making the transition from good to great doesn't require a high-profile CEO, the latest technology, innovative change management, or even a fine-tuned business strategy. At the heart of those rare and truly great companies was a corporate culture that rigorously found and promoted disciplined people to think and act in a disciplined manner. Peppered with dozens of stories and examples from the great and not so great, the book offers a well-reasoned road map to excellence that any organization would do well to consider. Like Built to Last, Good to Great is one of those books that managers and CEOs will be reading and rereading for years to come. --Harry C. Edwards