From Workplace to Playspace is about visionary, courageous, innovative, and persistent organizations that challenge long-held preconceptions about the incompatibility of workplace and playspace. Each day organizations across industries and with wide-ranging missions are discovering that playspace is the space they can and must create every day at work if they are to think creatively, question old assumptions, respond effectively to the unexpected, and engage all to work at the top of their talent. Filled with case examples from such organizations as Learning Curve International, Google, Chicago Public Schools, Umpqua Bank, and Threadless, the author provides both the conceptual framework and the principles to guide practitioners to create playspace for innovating, learning and changing in their organizations.

As contrary as it sounds, "planning" -- as we traditionally understand the term--can be the worst thing a company can do. Consider that volatile weather events disrupt trusted supply chains, markets, and promised delivery schedules. Ever-shifting geo-political tensions, as well as internal political upheaval within U.S. and global governments, derail long-planned new ventures. Technology failures block opportunities. Competitors suddenly change their product or release date; your team cannot meet the pace of innovations in your market niche, leaving you sidelined. There are myriad ways in the current business environment for a company's well-considered business plans to go awry. Most business schools continue to prepare managers to be effective in stable and predictable environments, conditions that, if they ever existed at all, are long gone. The Agility Shift shows business leaders exactly how to make the radical mindset and strategy shift necessary to create an agile, entrepreneurial organization that can innovate and thrive in complex, ever-changing contexts. As author Pamela Meyer explains, there is much more involved than a reconfiguration of the org chart and job descriptions. It requires relinquishing the illusion of control at the very foundation of most management training and business practice. Despite most leaders' approaches, "Agility is not simply accelerated planning." Unlike many agility books on the market, The Agility Shift provides specific, actionable strategies and tactics for leaders at all levels of the organization to put into practice immediately to improve agility and achieve results.

This book examines the question of why ‘play’ is a happy and benevolent verb in childhood, yet a subjective label of behaviour in adulthood. It studies the transformation of the positively labelled term ‘child’s play’, used to refer to our early years, into an aberrance or deviation from normal social relationships in later life, when we speak of playing up or playing around. It answers the question by proposing play as a theory of learning, an ideology that circumscribes behaviour, and a way of thinking. Written by scholars of early childhood through to further and higher education, the book presents research on play enacted in a way that arches beyond the specificity of age groups or predictive, normative patterns. It is international in its focus, moving beyond insular, inward and parochial educational standards and limitations in one city, province, state or nation. Finally, it demonstrates the value of play to educational policy and theories of learning.

Policymakers consider enterprise education, and the skills it develops, as increasing student’s employability skills. This book delivers further insight to validate this. Authors provide evidence to inform the entrepreneurial education discipline in terms of best practice, success stories and identify its future direction for key stakeholders.

Believers and teachers of faith regularly know the in-breaking of God's Spirit in their midst, when revelatory experiencing unexpectedly shifts habits of thinking, feeling, and doing toward more life-giving ways of being and becoming. When the moment is right, Spirit breathes new life into dry bones. Though religious educators have much practical wisdom about facilitating learning that is creative and transformative, sharper concepts, cases, and theory can help them do it more critically and assist learners to practice openness to wonder, surprise, and authenticity. The Grace of Playing explains how we can create the conditions for revelatory experiencing by understanding it in light of playing. The notion of playing "as if" can be powerfully reclaimed from ecclesial ambivalence, casual speech, and commercial interests that often lead playing to be associated with childishness, frivolity, or entertainment. This book theorizes adults playing for the sake of faith, drawing on D. W. Winnicott's psychoanalytic theory, a revision of Jurgen Moltmann's theology of play, biblical texts, medieval devotional practices, as well as art and aesthetics that help local faith communities engage in theological reflection. Communal forms of playing in/at God's new creation provide insights into pedagogies in which learners are creating and are created anew.

The Corruption of Play explores how neoliberal ideology corrupts play in AAA videogames by creating conditions in which play becomes unbound from leisure, allowing play to be understood, undertaken, and assessed in economic terms, and fundamentally undermining the nature of play.

Imagining the universities of the future. How can we re-envision the university? Too many examples of what passes for educational innovation today—MOOCs especially—focus on transactions, on questions of delivery. In Alternative Universities, David J. Staley argues that modern universities suffer from a poverty of imagination about how to reinvent themselves. Anyone seeking innovation in higher education today should concentrate instead, he says, on the kind of transformational experience universities enact. In this exercise in speculative design, Staley proposes ten models of innovation in higher education that expand our ideas of the structure and scope of the university, suggesting possibilities for what its future might look like. What if the university were designed around a curriculum of seven broad cognitive skills or as a series of global gap year experiences? What if, as a condition of matriculation, students had to major in three disparate subjects? What if the university placed the pursuit of play well above the acquisition and production of knowledge? By asking bold "What if?" questions, Staley assumes that the university is always in a state of becoming and that there is not one "idea of the university" to which all institutions must aspire. This book specifically addresses those engaged in university strategy—university presidents, faculty, policy experts, legislators, foundations, and entrepreneurs—those involved in what Simon Marginson calls "university making." Pairing a critique tempered to our current moment with an explanation of how change and disruption might contribute to a new "golden age" for higher education, Alternative Universities is an audacious and essential read.