The author of the bestselling The Art of Innovation reveals the strategies IDEO, the world-famous design firm, uses to foster innovative thinking throughout an organization and overcome the naysayers who stifle creativity. The role of the devil's advocate is nearly universal in business today. It allows individuals to step outside themselves and raise questions and concerns that effectively kill new projects and ideas, while claiming no personal responsibility. Nothing is more potent in stifling innovation. Over the years, IDEO has developed ten roles people can play in an organization to foster innovation and new ideas while offering an effective counter to naysayers. Among these approaches are the Anthropologist—the person who goes into the field to see how customers use and respond to products, to come up with new innovations; the Cross-pollinator who mixes and matches ideas, people, and technology to create new ideas that can drive growth; and the Hurdler, who instantly looks for ways to overcome the limits and challenges to any situation. Filled with engaging stories of how Kraft, Procter and Gamble, Safeway and the Mayo Clinic have incorporated IDEO's thinking to transform the customer experience, The Ten Faces of Innovation is an extraordinary guide to nurturing and sustaining a culture of continuous innovation and renewal.

Explores key perpsectives by which we gain insight into the cosmos.

The wombs of supernovas gave birth to all forms of life, including the human, the only one who knows that it is gifted with awareness of its own existence. With self-consciousness, our race become at once a spectator and a performer in the cosmic theather. Even though seemingly insignificant in a scenario that encompasses billions of galaxies, we cam become a fundamental link in the evolution of all that will ever exist.

Fred Hoyle was one of the most widely acclaimed and colourful scientists of the twentieth century, a down-to-earth Yorkshireman who combined a brilliant scientific mind with a relish for communication and controversy.Best known for his steady-state theory of cosmology, he described a universe with both an infinite past and an infinite future. He coined the phrase 'big bang' to describe the main competing theory, and sustained a long-running, sometimes ill-tempered, and typically public debate with his scientific rivals. He showed how the elements are formed by nuclear reactions inside stars, and explained how we are therefore all formed from stardust. He also claimed that diseases fall from the sky,attacked Darwinism, and branded the famous fossil of the feathered Archaeopteryx a fake.Throughout his career, Hoyle played a major role in the popularization of science. Through his radio broadcasts and his highly successful science fiction novels he became a household name, though his outspokenness and support for increasingly outlandish causes later in life at times antagonized the scientific community.Jane Gregory builds up a vivid picture of Hoyle's role in the ideas, the organization, and the popularization of astronomy in post-war Britain, and provides a fascinating examination of the relationship between a maverick scientist, the scientific establishment, and the public. Through the life of Hoyle, this book chronicles the triumphs, jealousies, rewards, and feuds of a rapidly developing scientific field, in a narrative animated by a cast of colourful astronomers, keeping secrets, losingtheir tempers, and building their careers here on Earth while contemplating the nature of the stars.