A leadership and learning expert shows you how to change your behavior, develop soft skills, and achieve personal and professional growth through a series of small experiments she calls “Flexing.” A personnel shift at your organization puts you into a leadership role you don't feel prepared for. Your boss tells you that you seem aloof and unapproachable in client meetings. You need to win the support of the members of a local community group for a project you feel passionate about. Addressing these diverse issues depends on improving your soft skills—such as time management, team building, communication and listening, creative thinking, and problem-solving. But this isn’t as easy as it may seem. Sue Ashford, the chair of the Management and Organizations group at the Ross School of Business, has the solution. In this timely book, she introduces Flexing—a technique individuals, teams, and entire organizations can use to learn, grow, and develop their skills and knowledge with every new project, work assignment, and problem. Flexing empowers you to embrace any challenge and adapt to any change, yielding practical, valuable takeaways that ensure growth. Flexing helps you move ahead when you’re confronted with a new challenge, or simply want to develop a vital skill. It’s a journey that begins with setting a flex goal—stating explicitly what you want to learn and how you want to grow. Once that flex goal is set, you then begin to run experiments, solicit feedback from peers or colleagues, and monitor and tweak your progress on the way to achieving your goal. Flexing can be tailored to each person, allowing you to reflect on your own experiences and incorporate the lessons you learn in the next project you tackle. It’s a growth mindset that will help you become the best version of yourself. Flexing also works with teams and organizations. Ashford teaches small groups and large how to implement flexing to ensure their members are ready for new challenges. With more people moving to remote working full-time and developing new ways of collaborating in teams, this warm and practical guide will help every professional and any organization on the journey to greater effectiveness.

Nestled on the shore of Lough Corrib, Ashford Castle has only grown in esteem over the last eight centuries, passing through the hands of esteemed Lords and Ladies and hosting visitors over the years ranging from King George V, Oscar Wilde, and John Lennon. The reputed estate even provided a setting for the Hollywood production of The Quiet Man starring John Wayne. This publication will present the newly renovated Ashford Castle, a window into its illustrious past and a preview of its promising future.

Over recent years, the issues of Brexit, COVID and the ‘migrant crisis’ put Kent in the headlines like never before. Images of asylum seekers on Kent beaches, lorries queued on motorways and the crumbling white cliffs of Dover all spoke to national anxieties, and were used to support ideas that severing ties with the EU was the best – or worst – thing the UK has ever done. In this coastal driftwork, Phil Hubbard – an exiled man of Kent – considers the past, present and future of this corner of England, alighting on a number of key sites which symbolise the changing relationship between the UK and its continental neighbours. Moving from the geopolitics of the Channel Tunnel to the cultivation of oysters at Whitstable, from Derek Jarman’s feted cottage at Dungeness to the art-fuelled gentrification of Margate, Borderland bridges geography, history, and archaeology, to pose important questions about the way that national identities emerge from contested local landscapes.

First published in 1974, The Literature and Study of Urban and Regional Planning discusses the processes of spatial planning and the range of subject knowledge which is required to contribute to it. It describes the physical forms in which the literature relating to spatial planning is usually presented and the ways in which this literature is made available in different types of organization. The author gives details of the most useful libraries whose facilities are available to students, and of the research which is being undertaken into the principal problems of planning information. The second part of the book consists of a subject bibliography, divided for ease of reference into twenty-six sections each concerned with a component part of spatial planning and containing annotated references to books, official publications, developmental plans, legislation, and other material. This book will be of interest to students of sociology and urban studies.