Humanizing Strategy

- Based on more than 25 years of experience - Unique perspective that emphasizes values, beliefs and emotions - Unconventional approach Strategy execution is complex. Three out of four organizations fail to implement their strategies, despite consultancies, literature on the subject and all available best practices. But why exactly do most strategies fail? Based on leading research, real stories, case studies and practical tools, the author takes you into the world of values, beliefs, emotions and often hidden underlying motivational forces that influence individual and collective behavior in organizations. He shows how consciously and effectively dealing with these human dynamics, often neglected in the strategic process, has a major influence on the performance of your organization and the successful realization of your strategy. If you are serious about making your strategy a success, have the urge to keep asking "why", and have the courage to take a less conventional approach, this book will inspire you.

Written by a former hostage negotiator, Taken Hostage provides specific daily behavioral, situational, and long-term psychological strategies used successfully by hostages who survived months and years of mental and physical torture by terrorists, religious extremists, and criminal gangs. The book describes in detail the five stages of a hostage taking. Whether taken hostage for ransom, political leverage, or as a human shield, the book suggests what treatment the hostage can expect during each stage and how to best counter them. Taken Hostage describes how a hostage can moderate the physical and mental effects caused by physical tortures such as binding, suspension, beatings, starvation, and sexual assault and against mental tortures such as social deprivation, false executions, and brainwashing. The book identifies the mental hazards of depression, suicide, and barbed-wire psychosis and how to combat them. Particular strategies such as passive compliance and humanizing will instruct the hostage on how to apply recognized psychological strategies to the hostages advantage, and as such, play a more active role in their day-to-day physical treatment and sustain positive mental health. The book stresses safer travel planning as the most important strategy against being kidnapped in the first place. It details hotel security, insider accomplices, finding the right hotel and the right taxi, and how to use countersurveillance techniques to identify and thwart a potential kidnapping. The book coaches the hostages family and employers back home how to effectively manage the media and one another, thereby reducing the incidence of hostage and family PTSD and reintegrating a changed person back into their changed family. The detailed survival strategies will inspire a hostages will to live and sustain a familys hope. It is written for domestic and international travelers, UN and NGO volunteers, military personnel, and anyone in harms way.

Hunger, disease, poverty, environmental insecurity, illegitimate governance, civil war, and international conflict are only a few of the causes of today's global turmoil and gross human suffering. Written in honour of Ivan Head, foreign affairs advisor to former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, past president of Canada's International Development Research Centre, and professor emeritus of International law at the University of British Columbia, this collection of distinguished essays addresses the imperative to enhance human dignity and protect human life by humanizing our global order and improving international relations - goals Professor Head strove for throughout his career. The authors argue that the search for possible solutions to these challenges, which has so far tended to proceed without due recognition of the needs, demands, and solutions that emanate from the geo-political South, must in future be conducted with alternate visions that take these factors into account. Each essay seeks to re-assess and re-imagine a specific topic that relates in some significant way to our current global circumstance in ways that advance the book's thematic. With essays grappling with such issues as Multilateral Environmental Agreements, the Use of Force, the Prevention of Civil War through Minority Protection, Common Heritage of Humankind, and the Civil Dimensions of Strategy, the volume deals with a range of diverse topics that are as crucial as they are topical.

For decades, we have looked to management theorists, organizational psychologists and economists to tell us how we can squeeze the most out of people at work. The result? People are uninspired, feel like cogs in a machine and prefer to leave traditional work structures behind. Numbers and productivity can only get you so far. What Philosophy Can Teach You About Being a Better Leader offers a different route that will allow you to reconnect with the humanist values of work. By turning to philosophy, and what it teaches us about finding fulfilment and living a good life, this book uncovers the ways you can re-engage your workforce by valuing its members as people, rather than just tools within the process. The four authors argue that the rise of the 'omnipotent leader', who focuses on telling rather than leading, risks creating a new generation of feudal CEOs and needs to be resisted. With the help of Aristotle, Socrates, Kant and Nietzsche, as well as a whole host of other brilliant minds, they turn traditional management practices on their head, showing how moving away from traditional, hierarchical, risk focused control structures can lead to improved employee engagement, increased productivity and better outcomes for the entire business.

This book explains how AI and Machine Learning can be applied to help businesses solve problems, support critical thinking and ultimately create customer value and increase profit. By considering business strategies, business process modeling, quality assurance, cybersecurity, governance and big data and focusing on functions, processes, and people’s behaviors it helps businesses take a truly holistic approach to business optimization. It contains practical examples that make it easy to understand the concepts and apply them. It is written for practitioners (consultants, senior executives, decision-makers) dealing with real-life business problems on a daily basis, who are keen to develop systematic strategies for the application of AI/ML/BD technologies to business automation and optimization, as well as researchers who want to explore the industrial applications of AI and higher-level students.

`An important and extremely welcome addition to the strategic management field. In this book the author builds on the work of an emerging community of scholars to lay out theoretical and methodological underpinnings of an activity-based framework for applying the practice lens to strategy' - Academy of Management Review `Paula Jarzabkowski has astutely signaled an agenda for future scholarship that will no doubt fuel the continued growth of this subfield' - Organization Studies `Pioneering work. As the first book in the new strategy-as-practice field, it offers readers both innovative models and exemplary field research' - Richard Whittington, Professor of Strategic Management, Said Business School, Oxford 'Extends and develops the emerging fields of strategy and practice as well as activity theory. It also demonstrates empirically, using University settings, how activity theory is itself bounded by the wider contexts of organisation, embedded routines and the heavy hand of history' - David C. Wilson, University of Warwick `An insightful book that would be of use to people interested in the actual practices of strategy and strategizing' - Organization Bridging the gap between what managers actually do and organizational strategies, this book provides an activity-based framework for studying strategy as practice, with empirical evidence to illustrate the dynamics of this framework in real terms.

“Humanization and the Law” combines two current and complementary trends in the business-to-business (B2B) market of the legal industry: digitalization and humanization. On the one hand, digital transformation in corporate legal departments and law firms continues to advance. Contract management, e-discovery, due diligence, legal operations, and forensic data analysis are just a few examples of task areas where the use of intelligent software solutions minimizes legal risks and increases compliance, enables efficiency gains and cost reductions through automation, and allows faster and more agile responses to changing market demands and client expectations. On the other hand, the increasing number of failed digitalization projects shows that technology alone is not enough to successfully transform legal departments and law firms. Software solutions must be integrated into existing work processes, be easy to use, and provide real benefits in order to be accepted by employees. People and their ability to make decisions and lead others remain the focus in an increasingly digitalized legal industry. More than 20 authors provide insights into why human aspects matter for business, what organizations can do to increase the mental well-being and motivation of their employees, and how to prevail in the upcoming war for talent in the legal industry. “The legal industry has been largely dismissive of “soft skills” and “humanizing law.” One of the paradoxes of our time is that the ascendency of automation, artificial intelligence, blockchain, Big Data, and other technological platforms has elevated, not diminished, the importance of humanity. It is not only what distinguishes us from machines but it also enables us to apply our humanity to machines. The legal function will play an important role in this process but must first take a hard look at itself.” (Mark A. Cohen, in “Foreword”)

This book highlights the relevance of the grand traditions of the humanities as an untapped resource for business-world problems. In a time where the humanities are viewed as in decline or in threat of collapse altogether, this book enacts and extends the best of the humanities toward prevailing challenges within the complex realities of our current cultural moment. The book presents how the humanities can contribute to humanizing business and management. It explores and discusses various ways to integrate the views and approaches of the humanities in business and management research, practice, and education responding to the unprecedented challenges of the Anthropocene. The relations between humanities and social sciences is also discussed, as models and theories of business and management are based on insights of social sciences. The book is an outcome of the “Humanities for Business” project of Princeton University Faith and Work Initiative, the European SPES Institute, Leuven, and the Business Ethics Center of Corvinus University of Budapest. It is of great value to researchers, students, policy makers and research institutions interested in using humanities for renewing and humanizing business and management.