Out-innovate, outsmart and outmaneuver your competitors with tactics from the CEO of TrendHunter.com, Jeremy Gutsche. In our world of chaos and change, what are you overlooking? If you knew the answer, you’d be a better innovator, better manager, and better investor. This book will make you better by teaching you how to overcome neurological traps that block successful people, like you, from realizing your full potential. Then, it will make you faster by teaching you 6 patterns of opportunity: Convergence, Divergence, Cyclicality, Redirection, Reduction and Acceleration. Each pattern you’ll learn is a repeatable shortcut that has created fortunes for ex-criminals, reclusive billionaires, disruptive CEOs and ordinary people who unexpectedly made it big. In an unparalleled study of 250,000 ideas, Jeremy and his TrendHunter.com team have leveraged their 100,000,000 person audience to study what actually causes opportunity: data-driven research that was never before possible. The result is a series of frameworks battle-tested with several hundred brands, and top executives at some of the most successful companies in the world who rely on Jeremy to accelerate their hunt for ideas. Better and Faster will help you learn to see patterns and clues wherever you look that will put you on the smarter, easier path to finding those breakthrough ideas, faster.

Effective and practical coaching strategies for new educators plus valuable online coaching tools Many teachers are only observed one or two times per year on average—and, even among those who are observed, scarcely any are given feedback as to how they could improve. The bottom line is clear: teachers do not need to be evaluated so much as they need to be developed and coached. In Get Better Faster: A 90-Day Plan for Coaching New Teachers, Paul Bambrick-Santoyo shares instructive tools of how school leaders can effectively guide new teachers to success. Over the course of the book, he breaks down the most critical actions leaders and teachers must take to achieve exemplary results. Designed for coaches as well as beginning teachers, Get Better Faster is an integral coaching tool for any school leader eager to help their teachers succeed. Get Better Faster focuses on what's practical and actionable which makes the book's approach to coaching so effective. By practicing the concrete actions and micro-skills listed in Get Better Faster, teachers will markedly improve their ability to lead a class, producing a steady chain reaction of future teaching success. Though focused heavily on the first 90 days of teacher development, it's possible to implement this work at any time. Junior and experienced teachers alike can benefit from the guidance of Get Better Faster while at the same time closing existing instructional gaps. Featuring valuable and practical online training tools available at http://www.wiley.com/go/getbetterfaster, Get Better Faster provides agendas, presentation slides, a coach's guide, handouts, planning templates, and 35 video clips of real teachers at work to help other educators apply the lessons learned in their own classrooms. Get Better Faster will teach you: The core principles of coaching: Go Granular; Plan, Practice, Follow Up, Repeat; Make Feedback More Frequent Top action steps to launch a teacher’s development in an easy-to-read scope and sequence guide It also walks you through the four phases of skill building: Phase 1 (Pre-Teaching): Dress Rehearsal Phase 2: Instant Immersion Phase 3: Getting into Gear Phase 4: The Power of Discourse Perfect for new educators and those who supervise them, Get Better Faster will also earn a place in the libraries of veteran teachers and school administrators seeking a one-stop coaching resource.

A bold and revolutionary thinker’s legacy for how business can meet the greatest economic challenge in decades... It’s no secret: everyone knows that the way most companies do things is screwed up. Surprisingly, though, herein lays the biggest opportunity for improving growth and profitability in a world in which consumers are tapped out and competition is coming from the devastating combination of low-wage countries with high skills. For more than a decade, following his landmark Reengineering the Corporation, Michael Hammer did “deep dives” into the processes of companies in every imaginable business—from oil refineries to software developers, factories, retailers, and hospitals—to understand the nuts and bolts of how they do their work, and then to advise them how to do it differently to become faster, cheaper, better. The results were the right product, at the right time, with the right price and quality—businesses that not only ate the competitions’ lunch but their breakfast and dinner, too. The research and passion Dr. Hammer brought to this book have been ably carried on, following his tragic and unexpected death in 2008, by his colleague, Lisa Hershman, now the CEO of Hammer and Company. Looking at a company's operations not in terms of piecemeal fragments of work performed in a slew of isolated functional departments but as large-scale holistic work units transformed many companies, enabling them to meet the unique challenges of our time. The late DR. MICHAEL HAMMER was the coauthor of Reengineering the Corporation and the author of The Agenda. LISA W. HERSHMAN is the CEO of Hammer and Company.

McCurdy examines NASA's recent efforts to save money while improving mission frequency and performance.".

Sometimes the simplest answer is the best. Many Enterprise Java developers, accustomed to dealing with Java's spiraling complexity, have fallen into the habit of choosing overly complicated solutions to problems when simpler options are available. Building server applications with "heavyweight" Java-based architectures, such as WebLogic, JBoss, and WebSphere, can be costly and cumbersome. When you've reached the point where you spend more time writing code to support your chosen framework than to solve your actual problems, it's time to think in terms of simplicity.In Better, Faster, Lighter Java, authors Bruce Tate and Justin Gehtland argue that the old heavyweight architectures are unwieldy, complicated, and contribute to slow and buggy application code. As an alternative means for building better applications, the authors present two "lightweight" open source architectures: Hibernate--a persistence framework that does its job with a minimal API and gets out of the way, and Spring--a container that's not invasive, heavy or complicated.Hibernate and Spring are designed to be fairly simple to learn and use, and place reasonable demands on system resources. Better, Faster, Lighter Java shows you how they can help you create enterprise applications that are easier to maintain, write, and debug, and are ultimately much faster.Written for intermediate to advanced Java developers, Better, Faster, Lighter Java, offers fresh ideas--often unorthodox--to help you rethink the way you work, and techniques and principles you'll use to build simpler applications. You'll learn to spend more time on what's important. When you're finished with this book, you'll find that your Java is better, faster, and lighter than ever before.