It's day one of the most exciting project of your career. You and your team are going to build the next great social media website! The potential rewards you will reap are exceeded only by how daunting the deadlines are. The whole team is energized and gets right down to business. You're all slinging code day and night, heads-down and in the flow. During one of your rare free moments during the day you pause and take a look around you. Right then it hits you: this is one of the best teams you've ever worked with! You all rock! And then somebody mentions that IT won't give the team a place to build their code for another six weeks. And the security team wants to review all of your code, but they can't get around to it for another 2 months. And your lead developer? Your main man? The man with a plan? His dog just died. Suddenly, you are totally screwed. That's what impediments feel like. It doesn't feel very good does it? All of a sudden, the project that looked like a guaranteed "win" just became a lot more likely to fail. The impediments that teams deal with are perhaps one of the most under appreciated subjects in the project management world. When not uncovered and resolved, impediments can do harm to an otherwise well run project in ways that are often subtle and easy to miss. That's what this book is all about: how you find, track, and destroy impediments.

"When we routinely kick our dreams down the road and put off doing what we truly desire or need to do, we feel paralyzed, powerless, and resentful. But it doesn't have to be that way .... In The little book of do, [the author] reveals the stumbling blocks to a life of doing and offers a practical methodology for deciding which pursuits to delay, which to dismiss and which to pursue as if your life depends on it."--Dust jacket.

Nigeria is a country shaped by internal diversity and transnational connections, past and present. Leading Nigerian writers from Chinua Achebe, Amos Tutuola and Wole Soyinka to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Teju Cole have portrayed these Nigerian issues, and have also written about some of the momentous events in Nigerian history. Afropolitan Horizons discusses their work alongside other novelists and commentators, as well as describing the ways in which Nigeria has appeared in foreign news reporting. It is all interwoven with the author’s own anthropological field research in a town in Central Nigeria.

A component in the America's Energy Future study, Electricity from Renewable Resources examines the technical potential for electric power generation with alternative sources such as wind, solar-photovoltaic, geothermal, solar-thermal, hydroelectric, and other renewable sources. The book focuses on those renewable sources that show the most promise for initial commercial deployment within 10 years and will lead to a substantial impact on the U.S. energy system. A quantitative characterization of technologies, this book lays out expectations of costs, performance, and impacts, as well as barriers and research and development needs. In addition to a principal focus on renewable energy technologies for power generation, the book addresses the challenges of incorporating such technologies into the power grid, as well as potential improvements in the national electricity grid that could enable better and more extensive utilization of wind, solar-thermal, solar photovoltaics, and other renewable technologies.

This book deals sequentially with major impediments to economic growth and their slow dissolution. It is original and quite different from standard economic history, which has always sought for one prime mover of the industrial revolution after another. These supposed positive forces are usually depicted as novel and little reference is made to inertia. Instead the barriers dealt with here run, in the first section, from early misallocations of resources to nineteenth-century reforms which of their nature indicate the problems to be overcome. The second section deals with more physical impediments and shocks, such as floods and settlement fires. These too are ignored in ordinary treatments, which this book will supplement or even replace. It will be of interest to academic economic historians and practitioners of neighbouring subjects such as economists, historians, historical geographers, and of course their students.

When conflicts become ingrained in communities, people lose hope. Dialogue is necessary but never sufficient, and often actions prove inadequate to produce substantial change. Even worse, chosen actions create more conflict because people have different lived experiences, priorities, and approaches to transformation. So what’s the story? In The Little Book of Transformative Community Conferencing, David Anderson Hooker offers a hopeful, accessible approach to dialogue that: Integrates several practice approaches including restorative justice, peacebuilding, and arts Creates welcoming, non-divisive spaces for dialogue Names and maps complex conflicts, such as racial tensions, religious divisions, environmental issues, and community development as it narrates simple stories Builds relationships and foundations for trust needed to support long-term community transformation projects And results in the crafting of hopeful, future-oriented visions of community that can transform relationships, resource allocation, and structures in service of communities’ preferred narratives. The Little Book Transformative Community Conferencing will prove valuable and timely to mediators, restorative justice practitioners, community organizers, as well as leaders of peacebuilding and change efforts. It presents an important, stand-alone process, an excellent addition to the study and practice of strategic peacebuilding, restorative justice, conflict transformation, trauma healing, and community organizing. This book recognizes the complexity of conflict, choosing long-term solutions over inadequate quick fixes. The Transformative Community Conferencing model emerges from the author’s thirty years of practice in contexts as diverse as South Sudan; Mississippi; Greensboro, North Carolina; Oakland, California; and Nassau, Bahamas.

Moses, Aristotle, Civil War hero Joshua Chamberlain, King George VI, Winston Churchill, Marilyn Monroe, distinguished historian Peter Brown, TV journalist John Stossel, Senator's wife Annie Glenn, ABC correspondent Byron Pitts, novelist John Updike. For all of these accomplished persons, stuttering was an enormous difficulty. None had a sure-fire remedy. Most had to blunder and stumble through. The persistence and courage they displayed tells us that there might be ways we too can survive and achieve--despite our own difficulties.