The End of Assembly Line Management We’re in the midst of a revolution. Quantum leaps in technology are enabling organizations to observe and measure people’s behavior in real time, communicate internally at extraordinary speed, and innovate continuously. These new, software-driven technologies are transforming the way companies interact with their customers, employees, and other stakeholders. This is no mere tech issue. The transformation requires a complete rethinking of the way we organize and manage work. And, as software becomes ever more integrated into every product and service, making this big shift is quickly becoming the key operational challenge for businesses of all kinds. We need a management model that doesn’t merely account for, but actually embraces, continuous change. Yet the truth is, most organizations continue to rely on outmoded, industrial-era operational models. They structure their teams, manage their people, and evolve their organizational cultures the way they always have. Now, organizations are emerging, and thriving, based on their capacity to sense and respond instantly to customer and employee behaviors. In Sense and Respond, Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden, leading tech experts and founders of the global Lean UX movement, vividly show how these companies operate, highlighting the new mindset and skills needed to lead and manage them—and to continuously innovate within them. In illuminating and instructive business examples, you’ll see organizations with distinctively new operating principles: shifting from managing outputs to what the authors call “outcome-focused management”; forming self-guided teams that can read and react to a fast-changing environment; creating a learning-all-the-time culture that can understand and respond to new customer behaviors and the data they generate; and finally, developing in everyone at the company the new universal skills of customer listening, assessment, and response. This engaging and practical book provides the crucial new operational and management model to help you and your organization win in a world of continuous change.

Offers a resource for business executives seeking to capture maximum value from information technology by drawing on a wide range of company and industry examples

The authors argue that lean production should be driven by the desire to achieve optimal customer service by sensing and responding to the customer. The customer is at the centre of the process and the organisation needs to respond in a holistic way so that the customer can impact on the design and delivery of products and processes. The book is based upon substantial research and practice by leading practitioners and heralds a paradigm shift in thinking on these issues.

Explores the secret lives of various plants, from the colors they see to whether or not they really like classical music to their ability to sense nearby danger.

BOOKER PRIZE WINNER • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A novel that follows a middle-aged man as he contends with a past he never much thought about—until his closest childhood friends return with a vengeance: one of them from the grave, another maddeningly present. A novel so compelling that it begs to be read in a single setting, The Sense of an Ending has the psychological and emotional depth and sophistication of Henry James at his best, and is a stunning achievement in Julian Barnes's oeuvre. Tony Webster thought he left his past behind as he built a life for himself, and his career has provided him with a secure retirement and an amicable relationship with his ex-wife and daughter, who now has a family of her own. But when he is presented with a mysterious legacy, he is forced to revise his estimation of his own nature and place in the world.

User experience (UX) design has traditionally been a deliverables-based practice, with wireframes, site maps, flow diagrams, and mockups. But in today’s web-driven reality, orchestrating the entire design from the get-go no longer works. This hands-on book demonstrates Lean UX, a deeply collaborative and cross-functional process that lets you strip away heavy deliverables in favor of building shared understanding with the rest of the product team. Lean UX is the evolution of product design; refined through the real-world experiences of companies large and small, these practices and principles help you maintain daily, continuous engagement with your teammates, rather than work in isolation. This book shows you how to use Lean UX on your own projects. Get a tactical understanding of Lean UX—and how it changes the way teams work together Frame a vision of the problem you’re solving and focus your team on the right outcomes Bring the designer’s tool kit to the rest of your product team Break down the silos created by job titles and learn to trust your teammates Improve the quality and productivity of your teams, and focus on validated experiences as opposed to deliverables/documents Learn how Lean UX integrates with Agile UX

Companies today are using OKRs-Objectives and Key Results-to improve the way they set and work with goals. Along the way, they discover something else: changing the way you work with goals can lead to other changes. Changes in how you plan work, how you lead and reward people, how you make decisions, how you budget, and so much more.In short, if you really, sincerely start pursuing goal- setting in a new way, you will discover that goals live at the center of everything you do. What's exciting about this is where it leads: Changing how you work with goals has the potential to drive ongoing change and bring new ways of working to the whole organization. That's what this book is about: how goals live at the center of your organizational system and how you can leverage their potential for organizational development by adopting OKRs in an intentional way.This short, practical book includes case studies, examples, and practical guidance to help you get started on your own OKR journey.Written by Natalija Hellesoe and Sonja Mewes, who bring their extensive experience working OKRs in companies of all sizes. Natalija and Sonja are trainers, coaches, and change agents. They work with companies at different stages of the their OKR journeys-from first "know-how" workshops to OKR Practitioner coaching and organizational development."This book is a great explanation of how to set and deploy OKRs to improve your business. Whereas other books paint a rosy picture of best-case scenario for setting and deploying OKRs, this one focuses on reality. Many companies will see themselves in this book and be able to harness the practical advice in the book to fix their current scenarios and thrive. Highly recommended for every business that's trying to find focus and define impact." - Melissa Perri, author "Escaping The Build Trap"