Fish! A Remarkable Way to Boost Morale and Improve Results

The thorough and comprehensive collection of essays is essential reading for human resource professionals, managers, consultants, trainers, students -- anyone who wants to understand the dymanics of human interaction.

Motorola relied heavily on teams to surpass its competition in building the lightest, smallest, and highest-quality cell phones. At 3M, teams are critical to meeting the company's goal of producing half of each year's revenues from the previous five years' innovations. Kodak's Zebra Team proved the worth of black-and-white film manufacturing in a world where color is king.

But many companies overtook the potential of teams in turning around tagging profits, entering new markets, and making exciting innovations happen -- because they don't know how to utilize teams successfully. Authors Jon R. Katzenbach and Douglas K. Smith talked with hundreds of people in more than thirty companies to find out where and how teams work best and how to enhance their effectiveness. They reveal:

Comprehensive and proven effective, The Wisdom of Teams is the classic primer on making teams a powerful tool for success in today's global marketplace.

It isn't enough merely to foster cultural diversity in the workplace -- dynamic leadership is required as well. This follow-up to Cultural Diversity in Organizations identifies the issues around diversity and provides tools to enhance overall performance.

Trust & Betrayal in the Workplace: Building Effective Relationships in Your Organization.......2007-07-17

Probably the most powerful part of the book is the section on Betrayal. Betrayal is a huge factor in our lives and we rarely talk about it. This book offers a language, method, and solution for both talking about betrayal and beginning the process of healing from it.

This is an important book for people interested in getting to the root of systemic problems in institutions, families, and relationships.

Rachel Spilka brings together nineteen previously unpublished essays concerned with ways in which recent research on workplace writing can contribute to the future direction of the discipline of technical and professional writing. Hers is the first anthology on the social perspective in professional writing to feature focused discussions of research advances and future research directions.

The workplace as defined by this volume is a widely diverse area that encompasses small companies and large corporations, public agencies and private firms, and a varied population of writers—engineers, managers, nurses, social workers, government employees, and others. Because much research has been conducted on the relationship between workplace writing and social contexts since the ground~breaking 1985 publication of Odell and Goswami’s Writing in Nonacademic Settings, Spilka contends that this is an appropriate time for the professional writing community to consider what it has learned to date and where it should be heading next in light of these recent discoveries. She argues that now professional writers should try to ask better questions and to define new directions.

Spilka breaks the anthology into two parts. Part 1 is a collection of ten essays presenting textual and qualitative studies conducted by the authors in the late l980s on workplace writing. Spilka has chosen these studies as representative of the finest research being conducted in professional writing that can serve as models for current and future researchers in the field. Barbara Couture, Jone Rymer, and Barbara Mirel report on surveys they conducted relying on the social perspective both to design survey instruments and to analyze survey data. Jamie MacKinnon assesses a qualitative study describing what workplace professionals might need to learn about social contexts and workplace writing. Susan Kleimann and editor Rachel Spilka discuss multiple case studies they conducted that help explain the value during the composing process of social interaction among the participants of a rhetorical situation. Judy Z. Segal explores the negotiation between the character of Western medicine and the nature of its professional discourse. Jennie Dautermann describes a qualitative study in which a group of nurses "claimed the authority to restructure their own procedural information system." Anthony Paré finds in a case study of social workers that writing can be constrained heavily by socially imposed limitations and restrictions. Graham Smart describes a study of discourse conventions in a financial institution. Geoffrey A. Cross reports on a case study of the interrelation of genre, context, and process in the group production of an executive letter and report.

Part 2 includes nine essays that assess the implications of recent research on workplace writing on theory, pedagogy and practice, and future research directions. Mary Beth Debs considers research implications for the notion of authorship. Jack Selzer explores the idea of intertextuality. Leslie A. Olson reviews the literature central to the concept of a discourse community. James A. Reither suggests that writing-as-collaboration in the classroom focuses "more on the production of texts to be evaluated than on ways in which texts arise out of other texts." Rachel Spilka continues Reither’s discussion of how writing pedagogy in academia might be revised with regard to the social perspective. Patricia Sullivan and James E. Porter respond to the debate about the authority of theory versus that of practice on researchers’ notions of methodology. Mary Beth Debs considers which methods used in fields related to writing hold promise for research in workplace writing. Stephen Doheny-Farina discusses how some writing researchers are questioning the underlying assumptions of traditional ethnography. Finally, Tyler Bouldin and Lee Odell suggest future directions for the research of workplace writing.

Computer-supported cooperative work is a field devoted to understanding group work processes and developing tools to enhance collaborative efforts. This book provides a comprehensive view of this dynamic area through a collection of articles from its diverse contributing fields, with introduction and analysis by the editor.

Part 1 provides a concise history of the field, defining its early goals and seminal projects. In Part 2, current projects and their underlying technologies, including hypertext and database technologies for information sharing, are presented and evaluated. Finally, Part 3 outlines the theories and empirical studies guiding system design based on understanding human dynamics as well as system dynamics. Each section includes reprints, attractively re-typeset, of important papers from the seminal conferences and publications laying the foundations for the field.

Reading Work: Literacies in the New Workplace explores changing understandings of literacy and its place in contemporary workplace settings. It points to new questions and dilemmas to consider in planning and teaching workplace education. By taking a social perspective on literacies in the workplace, this book challenges traditional thinking about workplace literacy as functional skills, and enables readers to see the complexity of literacy practices and their embeddedness in culture, knowledge, and action. A mixture of ethnographic studies, analysis, and personal reflections makes these ideas accessible and relevant to a wide range of readers in the fields of adult literacy and language education and helps to bridge the divide between theory and practice in the field of workplace education.

Reading Work: Literacies in the New Workplace features:
*four distinct but related ethnographies of literacy use in contemporary workplaces;
*a social practice view of literacy brought to the workplace;
*collaborative research undertaken by experienced workplace educators and academics working in the areas of adult literacy and second language learning;
*implications chapters for both practice and theory--presented not as a series of steps but rather as reflections by seasoned educators on shared dilemmas; and
*engaging, accessible writing that encourages workplace practitioners to read, learn from, and do their own research.

This book is an important resource for practicing workplace educators, trainers, and instructors; academics who teach workplace educators; unionists, policymakers, human resource managers, supervisors, or quality coordinators who believe education can make a difference and are interested in seeing maximum results from workplace learning. Visit the In-Sites Research Group Web site: http://www.nald.ca/insites/.