Balancing Act

Two mice have fun playing on a teeter-totter, but as more and larger friends join them, it becomes increasingly difficult to stay balanced.

In this leadership memoir, take a step backstage at Cirque du Soleil. Vice Chairman Daniel Lamarre shares his experiences leading the awe-inspiring organization, and teaches readers what it takes for anyone, regardless of position or industry, to embrace the value of creative leadership. Without creativity, there is no business. At the core of Cirque du Soleil’s lavish, multi-million-dollar productions is Vice Chairman Daniel Lamarre, who has mastered the ability to bring business and creativity together across multiple languages and cultures in a way that has never been seen before. The secrets he shares in Balancing Acts are rooted in tremendous faith in your own creative skills, even if you are convinced you have none, and those of the sharpest minds within your organization. In this book, Daniel shares the untold stories behind Cirques biggest shows, including Beatles Love, Michael Jackson One, the aquatic marvel, O, and many more. Through these tales of triumph and trials, he will teach you: How to shatter the perceived limitations standing in the way of your ability to think creatively and innovatively; When to step up and when to step back so that your team can create a masterpiece that doesn’t break the bank; How in using the methods Daniel has uncovered, modern companies with entrenched bureaucracies can bring creativity and business together to foster innovation; and How to use creative thinking to lead your organization to new heights. Whether you work for one of the most creative organizations on the planet like Cirque du Soleil, in a stuffy corporate job, or somewhere in between—Balancing Acts is filled with principles that can strengthen and accelerate any business on the planet.

Balancing Acts offers consultants and managers a simple, powerful way to think about change, and ascribes a four-phase iterative process for implementing change. Reviewing change initiatives from different types of organizations, Balancing Acts confronts the problems and pitfalls head-on that often arise during workplace transitions. Conklin explains why organizational change can be so difficult, and shows that by balancing a set of competing psychological and systemic challenges, interveners will increase their chance of success. Conklin shows that human groups function as complex systems, and that a change initiative is not a linear progression toward a predefined result. Instead, change is an iterative process that involves a search for feasible and useful solutions. The book’s central argument is that while leading or supporting this search, consultants and leaders must balance four critical concerns: confrontation and compassion, participation and observation, assertion and inquiry, and planfulness and emergence.

How do you create a life in balance? Mel and Mo may look alike, but these twins’ personalities are far from identical. As they grow up, their differences drive them apart . . . which suits them just fine. Mel’s umbrellas fly off the shelves and Mo’s high-wire feats are the talk of their seaside town. But then Theodora Tweedle’s Raincoats and Roller Skates draws Mo’s crowds away, and umbrellas go out of style. Finally, these siblings have something in common. And maybe each twin has just what they need to create something new . . . together. Mel and Mo’s Marvelous Balancing Act balances complex concepts of compromise and complementary differences with spare language and a simple story structure. The twins are non-binary characters, adding a layer of diverse representation for young readers that can also serve as an entry point for gender fluidity discussions.

Symbolic and statistical approaches to language have historically been at odds--the former viewed as difficult to test and therefore perhaps impossible to define, and the latter as descriptive but possibly inadequate. At the heart of the debate are fundamental questions concerning the nature of language, the role of data in building a model or theory, and the impact of the competence-performance distinction on the field of computational linguistics. Currently, there is an increasing realization in both camps that the two approaches have something to offer in achieving common goals. The eight contributions in this book explore the inevitable "balancing act" that must take place when symbolic and statistical approaches are brought together--including basic choices about what knowledge will be represented symbolically and how it will be obtained, what assumptions underlie the statistical model, what principles motivate the symbolic model, and what the researcher gains by combining approaches. The topics covered include an examination of the relationship between traditional linguistics and statistical methods, qualitative and quantitative methods of speech translation, study and implementation of combined techniques for automatic extraction of terminology, comparative analysis of the contributions of linguistic cues to a statistical word grouping system, automatic construction of a symbolic parser via statistical techniques, combining linguistic with statistical methods in automatic speech understanding, exploring the nature of transformation-based learning, and a hybrid symbolic/statistical approach to recovering from parser failures.

A holistic approach to acting. This book presents acting as a mind, body and spirit practice and actors as emotional athletes, spiritual stuntmen and stuntwomen exposed to a constant roller coaster of emotions. Going beyond where Michael Chekhov left off, it offers new acting techniques using discoveries from holistic and energy healing modalities. Answering an urgent -yet never addressed-need, this book offers invaluable tools to heal post-performance stress disorder and cutting edge information about recovering your Highest Creative Self, the essence of your character, and true emotional balance. Lisa Dalton, Co-founder, International Michael Chekhov Association, Award-Winning Actor/Producer/Director and Co-founder and Certifying Board, National Michael Chekhov Association wrote the Foreword. She says: "It is rare to find a subject that urgently needs to be discussed and about which too little is written. The need to train the entire being of the performing artist is just such a subject. Emmanuelle Chaulet's A Balancing Act is a godsend to performing artists of any sort. Knowing how to Energize allows us to endure and even thrive during the rise and fall, the constant state of transformation, the juggling of feelings, styles, jobs, and colleagues while maintaining an even keel." "Truly some of the freshest and most innovative 21st century contributions to the art of acting." says Mel Shrawder NYC AEA/SAG actor, Former Head of Performance, University of Miami, and faculty at the Michael Chekhov Acting Studio in NYC.

In the past decade, there has been much debate over the environmental impact of forestry. People are justifiably concerned about what is happening to the local and global forest environments, but they are also confused by the polarized rhetoric that has characterized both sides of the debate. In Balancing Act, Hamish Kimmins calls for a balanced, more objective approach to forestry issues in order to bridge the gap between the most extreme opponents in the debate. He suggests that we need to begin with a common understanding of what forestry is about and how forest ecosystems work. He outlines the scientific and ecological aspects of the major environmental issues facing British Columbia and the world today, arguing that we need to disentangle the scientific from the value-based social aspects of these questions. He also contends that much of the current debate about forests and their management ignores the time dimension of ecosystems, and he calls for a more dynamic view of current environmental issues in forestry -- one that accounts for change. The first few chapters provide an outline of the basic principles of forestry and ecology, and subsequent chapters discuss the major environmental issues facing forestry in the 1990s. These include clearcutting, slashburning, management chemicals, old growth, biological diversity, 'new forestry, ' climate change, acid rain, the comparison between temperate and tropical forestry, and long-term decisions in forestry. Balancing Act is essential reading for those who are searching for an objective, accurate, and readable evaluation of the issues at the heart of the forestry/environment debate. By emphasizing that forests are not static but change over time, Kimmins adds an important, often ignored, dimension to the discussion. Only by understanding all the intricacies of the ecosystems can we learn to manage our forests in a sustainable fashion.

There are few jobs more rarefied or as physically and mentally demanding as prima ballerina. And yet, despite very real professional risks, three dancers from the world-class San Francisco Ballet all decided to have children at the pinnacle of their careers. In Balancing Acts, photographer Lucy Gray takes readers on an unforgettable fourteen-year journey with these ballerinas, capturing their remarkable grit and determination. In dramatic black-and white photography, Gray documents their struggles to balance the demands of family and work—from their tireless preparation in rehearsals and dazzling mastery of craft displayed on stage, to their time spent relaxing at home with family and even while giving birth. In extensive interviews the dancers and their husbands discuss their stories with great candor, providing remarkable insight into the life of a ballerina and the everyday challenges and joys of mothers everywhere.