WE LIVE IN AN ERA OF WICKED PROBLEMS. Can your company keep up? Technology and the evolution of the experience economy have created a reality that most companies can't just buy or work their way into. These are wicked problems: issues that continue to evolve and morph beyond your solutions even as you form them. The days of tame problems-mass production, building bridges, solving for x-are behind us, but we're still designing companies to solve those tame problems. Marcus Kirsch is here to change all that. Anyone can create a wicked company, but not without implementing ways of working and thinking that are as comprehensive and complex as the problems you're trying to solve. The Wicked Company provides a roadmap to developing a mindset about operations, corporate capability, governance, and the people your organization is made up of that will help you identify, evaluate, and solve wicked problems before they slow you down-and before the other guys have a chance to catch up.

"Dazzling her patrons with scrumptious cupcakes at her Salem, Massachusetts, bakery, Elizabeth Tucker continues to fall for the irresistible Diesel, who protects her from a villain who is seeking mystical stones tied to the seven deadly sins"--Provided by publisher.

The acclaimed author of The Vertigo Years tells the remarkable story of the Parisian salon that brought together the greatest minds of the 18th century - Rousseau, Hume, Diderot, Voltaire, Benjamin Franklin - and changed the world forever. The Paris salon of Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d'Holbach - where friendship and radical philosophy flourished throughout the 1760s - stands as a seminal event in Western history. Over wine-soaked dinner parties, the finest minds of the Western world matched wits and scandalized one another with their radical ideas. Holbach's house became an epicenter of free thinking, a place like no other in repressive eighteenth-century Europe, frequented by men and women united by their love of intellectual freedom, their contempt for the conventional, and often the danger of persecution. It was a moment of astonishing radicalism in European thought, so uncompromising and bold that its vision has still not been fully realized. In A Wicked Company, acclaimed historian Philipp Blom describes the fortunes of this group of friends: writers of genius all, full of wit and courage, but also personal contradictions, doubts, conflicts of conscience, and their fair share of arguments and love affairs. Their bracing, liberating, humanist vision bursts free of the page in Blom's telling, and their analysis of our culture remains as valid as it was then. A startlingly relevant work of narrative history, Wicked Company forces us to confront with new eyes modern debates about our society and its future.

Each title in The Applause Libretto Library Series presents a Broadway musical with fresh packaging in a 6 x 9 trade paperback format. Each Complete Book and Lyrics is approved by the writers and attractively designed with color photo inserts from the Broadway production. All titles include introduction and foreword by renowned Broadway musical experts. Long before Dorothy dropped in, two other girls meet in the Land of Oz. One, born with emerald green skin, is smart, fiery, and misunderstood. The other is beautiful, ambitious, and very popular. The story of how these two unlikely friends end up as the Wicked Witch of the West and Glinda the Good Witch makes for the most spellbinding new musical in years.

In business, some problems are so complex, intractable and threatening to organizations—or entire industries—that they are best described as “wicked.” These problems appear to be unsolvable and they render traditional analytical tools of strategy virtually impotent. Wicked Strategies offers a comprehensive framework for identifying, responding to and profiting from wicked problems. John C. Camillus, drawing on detailed, real-life examples from companies across the globe, has skillfully woven together the analytical techniques, processes and organizational designs that will enable managers to navigate a disruptive marketplace. His feed-forward framework for fashioning wicked strategies empowers firms to presciently transform their business models before they are made obsolete by the competition. Wicked Strategies is a practical and evocative guide that demonstrates how business leaders can profitably capitalize on unknowable futures.

No matter who you are, sometimes it's fun to pretend to be wicked! Dante loves playing make believe. When he's with his friends, he's the wizened wizard or regal ruler. But when he's by himself, Dante would rather be the wicked queen. Then, one day, his dress and makeup are just so perfect that he braves the outdoors, delighting in his playful evilness. Will Dante find someone to play the hero to his villain?

This book disrupts the way practitioners and academic scholars think about crowds, crowdsourcing, innovation, and new organizational forms in this emerging period of ubiquitous access to the internet. The authors argue that the current approach to crowdsourcing unnecessarily limits the crowd to offering ideas, locking out those of us with knowledge about a problem. They use data from 25 case studies of flash crowds — anonymous strangers answering online announcements to participate in a 7-10 day innovation challenge — half of whom were unleashed from the limitations of focusing on ideas. Yet, these crowds were able to develop new business models, new product lines, and offer useful solutions to global problems in fields as diverse as health care insurance, software development, and societal change. This book, which offers a theory of collective production of innovative solutions explaining the practices that the crowds organically followed, will revolutionize current assumptions about how innovation and crowdsourcing should be managed for commercial as well as societal purposes.