Can Scorpions Smoke Creative Adventures In The Corporate World

Imagination, creativity, improvisation and play are not words that adults normally associate with their work, but many secretly lament their absence in everyday life. They are also words that many of us wouldn't put at the top of our curriculum vitae either. However, the world is changing and the emergence of an Age of Applied Artistry is calling for modern organisations to take the development of these skills more seriously, as they become capabilities that are not just nice-to-have but essential for survival in the corporate world of the future. This book crashes together ideas from the world of Organisation Development (OD), gestalt psychology and improvisational theatre and distils them into some simple stories, concepts and practices that anybody and everybody can experiment with in order to awaken and unleash their own creative spirit. It is an unusual, entertaining and insightful mix of biography and field guide that helps defrost the little creative genius inside of us all.

The process of change in all organizations - corporate, public sector and not-for-profit - can be fraught, overwhelming and unpredictable, both for those experiencing change and for those charged with its implementation. Relational Change presents a refreshingly readable and accessible alternative to the normal rhetoric of mechanistic, top-down change. Instead, Liz Wiggins and Harriet Hunter show how paying closer attention to personal interactions and relationships lies at the very heart of effective and sustainable change in organizations. Exploring issues of power, politics, emotions and the way people and systems can become stuck in unhelpful patterns, this book will help you work practically with the messiness of change. The dynamic new ways discussed are highly relevant for life in organizations today and will apply to your life outside work too. Integrating research and theory from a wide range of sources, as well sharing their own extensive experience of leading change, the authors present a stimulating and thought-provoking people-centred and relational approach that focuses on doing with others, rather than doing to them. Relational Change combines academically-grounded, theoretically-robust thinking that explains the rationale for relational change with real-world stories that will resonate with your own experience of change, whether as a seasoned or novice leader.

Many companies want to make their sales agile. Some of them have tried to set up agile sales organizations, but such top-down approaches and big-bang rollouts seldom seem to work. This book shows how the elements of the leading agile framework “Scrum” should be applied to install agility in the salesforce, improve sales performance, and resolve typical performance issues in sales organizations. It contains concrete guidelines, real-world examples, and useful tools to create the necessary change step by step and built to last.

Instability, disturbance, emergence, networks, informal learning, trial, error, adaptability, low growth, fluctuation and momentum – these are the experiences that dominate the lives of today’s business leaders. There is a growing awareness that the old industrial constructs of detailed planning, perfection and process are no longer working as effectively as we might wish in our large, established organizations. This book is a challenge to the way we relate to each other and lead businesses in the post-industrial age; it is full of passionate stories, reflections and insights. The writing inspires the practice of alternative forms of courage, acceptance of our imperfections and new methods of contact with each other as we navigate the changing nature of the workplace.

Invite your jittery mind into quiet slips of timed or untimed writing experiments that are designed to encourage your timid heart to forge forgotten feelings and entice your shy-self to make friends with emerging emotions. With a bounty of prompts to select from, you’ll be inspired to explore all the wacky, confusing, brave, soul-stirring wonderings and wanderings of your emerging life’s inner treasure in a way that’s sure to unleash what you most need to say. In this book you’ll find: • On-the-Spot Drops that offer quick “free-fall” prompts on different themes, such as short-winded poems and seven-line stories. • Mini Memoirs to unlock personal narrative to share, or not. • Suddenly a Story suggestions to explore feelings and states of being like fear, reluctance, compassion, kindness, anxiety, anger, jealousy, happiness, and more. • Surprise Yourself Surveys for those who think they know everything about themselves. • Untie-Your-Mind Word Lists to jump-start stalled imaginations. • Definition Decoders to introduce new ideas and styles of writing. Created especially for tweens, teens, and other earthlings, this book provides you with a chance to create imaginative poems, stories, fragments, and real-life on-the-spot sketches. All that’s required is that you take a breath, relax, reset, and leap write in!

Writing exercises and creativity advice from Barry's pioneering, life-changing workshop The award-winning author Lynda Barry is the creative force behind the genre-defying and bestselling work What It Is. She believes that anyone can be a writer and has set out to prove it. For the past decade, Barry has run a highly popular writing workshop for nonwriters called Writing the Unthinkable, which was featured in The New York Times Magazine. Syllabus: Notes from an Accidental Professor is the first book to make her innovative lesson plans and writing exercises available to the public for home or classroom use. Barry teaches a method of writing that focuses on the relationship between the hand, the brain, and spontaneous images, both written and visual. It has been embraced by people across North America—prison inmates, postal workers, university students, high-school teachers, and hairdressers—for opening pathways to creativity. Syllabus takes the course plan for Barry’s workshop and runs wild with it in her densely detailed signature style. Collaged texts, ballpoint-pen doodles, and watercolor washes adorn Syllabus’s yellow lined pages, which offer advice on finding a creative voice and using memories to inspire the writing process. Throughout it all, Barry’s voice (as an author and as a teacher-mentor) rings clear, inspiring, and honest.

A triumphant tale of a young woman and her difficult childhood, The Glass Castle is a remarkable memoir of resilience, redemption, and a revelatory look into a family at once deeply dysfunctional and wonderfully vibrant. Jeannette Walls was the second of four children raised by anti-institutional parents in a household of extremes.