Customer experiences are increasingly complicated—with multiple channels, touchpoints, contexts, and moving parts—all delivered by fragmented organizations. How can you bring your ideas to life in the face of such complexity? Orchestrating Experiences is a practical guide for designers and everyone struggling to create products and services in complex environments.

Orchestrating Collaboration at Work is an activity book for trainers, coaches, mediators and facilitators, who want to use the arts to create transformative learning experiences in organizations. All 70 activities are crafted using arts-based principles that offer new insights and skills development in creativity, communication, teamwork, and collaborative leadership. Painting, poetry, storytelling, music, and improvisational theater offer innovative and transformative learning experiences. You can use them as quick icebreakers or brainjuicers at meetings or training sessions, and as a means of mediating dialogue to stimulate employee engagement. You do NOT have to be an artist to use this book's offerings.

WINNER OF THE PORCHLIGHT BUSINESS BOOK AWARD • “A delightful, compelling book that offers a dazzling array of practical, thoughtful exercises designed to spark creativity, help solve problems, foster connection, and make our lives better.”—Gretchen Rubin, New York Times bestselling author and host of the Happier podcast In an era of ambiguous, messy problems—as well as extraordinary opportunities for positive change—it’s vital to have both an inquisitive mind and the ability to act with intention. Creative Acts for Curious People is filled with ways to build those skills with resilience, care, and confidence. At Stanford University’s world-renowned Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, aka “the d.school,” students and faculty, experts and seekers bring together diverse perspectives to tackle ambitious projects; this book contains the experiences designed to help them do it. A provocative and highly visual companion, it’s a definitive resource for people who aim to draw on their curiosity and creativity in the face of uncertainty. Teeming with ideas about discovery, learning, and leading the way through unknown creative territory, Creative Acts for Curious People includes memorable stories and more than eighty innovative exercises. Curated by executive director Sarah Stein Greenberg, after being honed in the classrooms of the d.school, these exercises originated in some of the world’s most inventive and unconventional minds, including those of d.school and IDEO founder David M. Kelley, ReadyMade magazine founder Grace Hawthorne, innovative choreographer Aleta Hayes, Google chief innovation evangelist Frederik G. Pferdt, and many more. To bring fresh approaches to any challenge–world changing or close to home–you can draw on exercises such as Expert Eyes to hone observation skills, How to Talk to Strangers to foster understanding, and Designing Tools for Teams to build creative leadership. The activities are at once lighthearted, surprising, tough, and impactful–and reveal how the hidden dynamics of design can drive more vibrant ways of making, feeling, exploring, experimenting, and collaborating at work and in life. This book will help you develop the behaviors and deepen the mindsets that can turn your curiosity into ideas, and your ideas into action.

In a career that has spanned four decades, choreographer Twyla Tharp has collaborated with great musicians, designers, thousands of dancers, and almost a hundred companies. She's experienced the thrill of shared achievement and has seen what happens when group efforts fizzle. Her professional life has been -- and continues to be -- one collaboration after another. In this practical sequel to her national bestseller The Creative Habit, Tharp explains why collaboration is important to her -- and can be for you. She shows how to recognize good candidates for partnership and how to build one successfully, and analyzes dysfunctional collaborations. And although this isn't a book that promises to help you deepen your romantic life, she suggests that the lessons you learn by working together professionally can help you in your personal relationships. These lessons about planning, listening, organizing, troubleshooting, and using your talents and those of your coworkers to the fullest are not limited to the arts; they are the building blocks of working with others, like if you're stuck in a 9-to-5 job and have an unhelpful boss. Tharp sees collaboration as a daily practice, and her book is rich in examples from her career. Starting as a twelve-year-old teaching dance to her brothers in a small town in California and moving through her work as a fledgling choreographer in New York, she learns lessons that have enriched her collaborations with Billy Joel, Jerome Robbins, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Bob Dylan, Elvis Costello, David Byrne, Richard Avedon, Milos Forman, Norma Kamali, and Frank Sinatra. Among the surprising and inspiring points Tharp makes in The Collaborative Habit: -Nothing forces change more dramatically than a new partnership. -In a good collaboration, differences between partners mean that one plus one will always equal more than two. A good collaborator is easier to find than a good friend. If you've got a true friendship, you want to protect that. To work together is to risk it. -Everyone who uses e-mail is a virtual collaborator. -Getting involved with your collaborator's problems may distract you from your own, but it usually leads to disaster. -When you have history, you have ghosts. If you're returning to an old collaboration, begin at the beginning. No evocation of old problems and old solutions. -Tharp's conclusion: What we can learn about working creatively and in harmony can trans- form our lives, and our world.

The authors present a dynamic approach to effectively link sales and marketing planning directly to the operations side of a business. Demonstrates how to create a connection between a company's business plan and each department's operations, accurately anticipate changes in customer's needs and significantly improve a firm's competitive position with an enhanced level of customer satisfaction.

Revitalizing Practice is designed to help theological faculties engage a common set of challenges, particularly in the areas of diversity, formation, and institutional identity. These are not technical problems but are instead the very stuff out of which teaching and learning are practiced. Yet addressing such issues requires intentional strategies and collaborative work. Revitalizing Practice offers four such intentional strategies: «A New Ecology Model», «An Improvisational Model», «An Appreciative Inquiry Model», and «A World Café Model». Each of these models provides a thorough and practical framework (based on sound theoretical concepts) designed to help faculties revitalize their practices of theological teaching and learning.

Company leaders feel the urgency to transform their organizations in the face of digital disruption. New rivals are digitizing whatever can be digitized to attack incumbents' value chains, gaining market share, eroding margins, and wreaking havoc to the competitive landscape in virtually every industry. For large and midsized companies, the imperative to transform is clear. How to transform is another matter. The hard truth is that despite leaders' best efforts, and billions spent in pursuit of digital transformation, the vast majority of organizational change programs fizzle, falling well short of their expected impacts. Because failed transformation programs put incumbents behind the eight ball in dealing with disruptive competition, organizations can ill-afford for their transformation programs to flop. With this important new book, Orchestrating Transformation: How to Deliver Winning Performance with a Connected Approach to Change, the team at the Global Center for Digital Business Transformation, an IMD and Cisco initiative, set out a new prescription for getting transformation right. The piecemeal strategies and pilot projects that are hallmarks of conventional transformation programs are hopelessly inadequate for the intricate, sprawling organizational environments found in most companies. Transformation practitioners need a different mindset and a new approach to executing change that can handle the complexity and scale of today's market leaders. Orchestration--"mobilizing and enabling so as to achieve a desired effect"--paves the way for a new, more holistic view of organizational resources and how they work together to drive change synergistically. The follow-up to 2016's award-winning Digital Vortex, Orchestrating Transformation is packed with quantitative and qualitative insights from years of applied research and engagement with executives around the world. A unique and indispensable guide for practitioners, the book moves past traditional change management doctrine to show how a connected approach to change can change everything.