This book provides clear strategies and processes for boards faced with the challenge to make their governing model, either Coherent GovernanceÒ or Policy GovernanceÒ, work in real life. The Art of Governing Coherently is a practical guide loaded with down-to-earth solutions, all based on processes successfully in use today by boards across the United States and internationally. While many of the examples offered here come from the world of public school boards and non-profit boards, the implementation processes are equally applicable to boards of all types. The challenge of governing and leading a complex organization is difficult enough without struggling to develop and use clear, logical and accountable processes. The Art of Governing Coherently does exactly what the title promises. The authors draw from their combined 70-plus years of experience in working with public and non-profit boards, including work with hundreds of boards using both Coherent GovernanceÒ and Policy GovernanceÒ, as they present their insight about how to use the models effectively. Their common-sense implementation strategies for helping real boards deal with real issues, and doing it through faithful utilization of their new governing tools, makes this a continuing reference source for boards as they translate theory into practice.

Good Governance is a Choice, 2nd edition is a book about, and for, boards of public and non-profit organizations. Its central focus is on public school boards and the special challenges they face, but the governing model it introduces, Coherent Governance , is applicable to any board of any type. Coherent Governance is a policy-based governing model that features a fail-proof means for creating absolute role clarity for boards and their CEOs. The model offers a process for boards to control operational decisions without making them, allowing them to spend the dominant part of their time on what matters—whether the organization is delivering the goods for the clients it serves. The authors challenge readers to consider themselves to be the very first board elected or appointed to serve their organization and to thoughtfully craft a governance role and board processes to allow them to best do their work—unencumbered by past practice and tradition. They draw from their combined 60-plus years of experience in working with public and non-profit boards as they present their state-of-the-art governing model.

Cyber-physical systems (CPSs) consist of software-controlled computing devices communicating with each other and interacting with the physical world through sensors and actuators. Because most of the functionality of a CPS is implemented in software, the software is of crucial importance for the safety and security of the CPS. This book presents principle-based engineering for the development and operation of dependable software. The knowledge in this book addresses organizations that want to strengthen their methodologies to build safe and secure software for mission-critical cyber-physical systems. The book: • Presents a successful strategy for the management of vulnerabilities, threats, and failures in mission-critical cyber-physical systems; • Offers deep practical insight into principle-based software development (62 principles are introduced and cataloged into five categories: Business & organization, general principles, safety, security, and risk management principles); • Provides direct guidance on architecting and operating dependable cyber-physical systems for software managers and architects.

This book clears the smoke for boards faced with the challenge to make their governing model, either Policy Governance® or Coherent Governance®, work in real life. Boards of directors thoughtfully engage in the exciting work of developing new policies and adopting their new governing model, then immediately confront reality: how does the board actually put the new model into motion and allow it to deliver on its promise of excellent board performance? Boards That Matter is a practical guide that takes the mystery out of that process. It is a book that is loaded with down-to-earth solutions.

From the acclaimed author and scholar James C. Scott, the compelling tale of Asian peoples who until recently have stemmed the vast tide of state-making to live at arm’s length from any organized state society For two thousand years the disparate groups that now reside in Zomia (a mountainous region the size of Europe that consists of portions of seven Asian countries) have fled the projects of the organized state societies that surround them—slavery, conscription, taxes, corvée labor, epidemics, and warfare. This book, essentially an “anarchist history,” is the first-ever examination of the huge literature on state-making whose author evaluates why people would deliberately and reactively remain stateless. Among the strategies employed by the people of Zomia to remain stateless are physical dispersion in rugged terrain; agricultural practices that enhance mobility; pliable ethnic identities; devotion to prophetic, millenarian leaders; and maintenance of a largely oral culture that allows them to reinvent their histories and genealogies as they move between and around states. In accessible language, James Scott, recognized worldwide as an eminent authority in Southeast Asian, peasant, and agrarian studies, tells the story of the peoples of Zomia and their unlikely odyssey in search of self-determination. He redefines our views on Asian politics, history, demographics, and even our fundamental ideas about what constitutes civilization, and challenges us with a radically different approach to history that presents events from the perspective of stateless peoples and redefines state-making as a form of “internal colonialism.” This new perspective requires a radical reevaluation of the civilizational narratives of the lowland states. Scott’s work on Zomia represents a new way to think of area studies that will be applicable to other runaway, fugitive, and marooned communities, be they Gypsies, Cossacks, tribes fleeing slave raiders, Marsh Arabs, or San-Bushmen.

Research consistently shows how through the years more of our time gets spent using media, how multitasking our media has become a regular feature of everyday life, and that consuming media for most people increasingly takes place alongside producing media. Media Life is a primer on how we may think of our lives as lived in rather than with media. The book uses the way media function today as a prism to understand key issues in contemporary society, where reality is open source, identities are - like websites - always under construction, and where private life is lived in public forever more. Ultimately, media are to us as water is to fish. The question is: how can we live a good life in media like fish in water? Media Life offers a compass for the way ahead.

Generally referring to all forms of social coordination and patterns of rule, the term 'governance' is used in many different contexts. In this Very Short Introduction, Mark Bevir explores the main theories of governance and considers their impact on ideas of governance in the corporate, public, and global arenas.