A Passion for Performance: Sarah Siddons and Her Portraitists brings together three engaging essays – by Robyn Asleson, Shelley Bennett and Mark Leonard, and Shearer West – that recreate the eventful life, both on and off the stage, of the great eighteenth-century actress Sarah Siddons. Siddons was renowned for her bravura performances in tragic roles, and her fame was enhanced by the many portraits of her painted by the leading artists of the day. The greatest of these was Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Sarah Siddons as the Tragic Muse, a painting now in the Huntington Art Collections and recently studied at the Getty Center. A Passion for Performance places this magnificent portrait within the context of Siddons’s career as an actress and cultural icon. Includes a chronology of Siddons’s life by volume editor Robyn Asleson.

Build high-performing teams with an evidence-based framework that delivers results Committed is a practical handbook for building great teams. Based on research from Wharton’s Executive Development Program (EDP), this concise guide identifies the common challenges that arise when people work together as a group and provides key guidance on breaking through the barriers to peak performance. Committed draws its insights from the EDP’s living lab: an intensive two-week simulation during which executive-level participants run complex global businesses. The authors have observed over 100 teams collaborating and competing for over 100 combined years in this intense environment. It has yielded fundamental insights about teamwork: what usually goes wrong, what frequently goes right, and the methods and techniques that will help you access your team’s full potential. These insights have been distilled into a simple, repeatable process that you can start applying today. Getting teams engaged and aligned is hard. Committed will give you the tools you need to deal with all of the familiar teamwork challenges that get in the way: organizational politics, delegation, coordination, and aligning skills and motivation. Using vivid stories and examples from the worlds of business, sports, and non-profits, it will teach you how to: Understand the dynamics of successful teams Achieve peak performance using a research-backed methodology Gain expert insight into why most teams underperform Learn the critical points common to all great teams Committed gives you the perspective you need to combine the right people with the right way of collaborating to achieve extraordinary results.

Leadership drives purpose, culture drives passion, and strategy drives performance. Together, the 3Ps - purpose, passion and performance - equal profit. And profit is the life-giving blood keeping the economy flowing and growing. How do I maximise the performance and engagement of my people? How do I create a business where people are motivated to achieve and passionate about what they do? How do I build my business to be resilient and adaptive in dynamic and volatile markets? If you are a CEO, founder, director or leader, you can't control what happens in the broader social, environmental or economic context. What you can influence is the way your organisation is set up to respond. What you can do is create the conditions for performance in your business by focusing on the systems that connect, align and inspire your people. This book is about how you can build a high-performance system which enables your business to adapt to any market condition and weather any storm. It describes and explains how to implement three key systems that enable high performance: - A leadership system. - A culture system. - A strategy system. If you want to lead a high-performing team, this is your guide to building high-performance systems.

This volume provides a comprehensive understanding of passion for work by addressing the origin of the concept and its theoretical issues: how can passion for work be developed, what are the consequences to be expected at the individual and organizational levels, and how can passion for work shed new light on contemporary issues in the workplace.

Based on open source principles of transparency, participation, and collaboration, "open management" challenges conventional business ideas about what companies are, how they run, and how they make money. This book provides the blueprint for putting it into practice in your own firm. He covers challenges that have been missing from the conversation to date, among them: how to scale engagement; how to have healthy debates that net progress; and how to attract and keep the "Social Generation" of workers. Through a mix of vibrant stories, candid lessons, and tested processes, Whitehurst shows how Red Hat has blown the traditional operating model to pieces by emerging out of a pure bottom up culture and learning how to execute it at scale. And he explains what other companies are, and need to be doing to bring this open style into all facets of the organization.

Do you want to become great at motivating others? Would you like to learn how to ignite passion and performance in your life and the lives of those around you? With this book, you can learn to energize yourself. Energize others. Inspire change. Positive change is now more than a feel-good concept. It s a process of transformation that uses decades of scientific research to increase confidence, calm fears, energize passion, and motivate others. Positive change consultant Bob Faw has turned these scientific insights into usable tools. He has already taught thousands of people around the world how to ignite passion for goals, involve people in meaningful ways, and inspire action for change. Now, his proven strategies are available in this engaging, practical guide for organizations and individuals. Leaders can use his principles to motivate their teams, create a positive environment, and influence others. Become the best you can be by replacing the old, limiting stories playing in your head with positive "inner movies" that inspire you daily. Rewrite your "inner autobiography" to broaden your horizons and increase confidence. Bob's advice will engage your brain in new and powerful ways. Bob will help you energize the way you think and then take the steps to enact change.

The coauthors of the bestselling Peak Performance dive into the fascinating science behind passion, showing how it can lead to a rich and meaningful life while also illuminating the ways in which it is a double-edged sword. Here’s how to cultivate a passion that will take you to great heights—while minimizing the risk of an equally great fall. Common advice is to find and follow your passion. A life of passion is a good life, or so we are told. But it's not that simple. Rarely is passion something that you just stumble upon, and the same drive that fuels breakthroughs—whether they're athletic, scientific, entrepreneurial, or artistic—can be every bit as destructive as it is productive. Yes, passion can be a wonderful gift, but only if you know how to channel it. If you're not careful, passion can become an awful curse, leading to endless seeking, suffering, and burnout. Brad Stulberg and Steve Magness once again team up, this time to demystify passion, showing readers how they can find and cultivate their passion, sustainably harness its power, and avoid its dangers. They ultimately argue that passion and balance--that other virtue touted by our culture--are incompatible, and that to find your passion, you must lose balance. And that's not always a bad thing. They show readers how to develop the right kind of passion, the kind that lets you achieve great things without ruining your life. Swift, compact, and powerful, this thought-provoking book combines captivating stories of extraordinarily passionate individuals with the latest science on the biological and psychological factors that give rise to—and every bit as important, sustain—passion.