Learn Adapt

Adapt As An Architect: A Mid-Career Companion is the only book that helps design professionals to navigate the vast heart of the architect’s journey. It serves as a roadmap: a career GPS that provides options for architects getting from where they are today to where they really want to be. The focus of this optimistic, engaging book is on continued relevance, professional engagement, perseverance, and career longevity. It argues that mid-career is the lynchpin of the architect’s career, and provides the guidance and support that practices themselves are missing for emerging professionals, who are often left to their own devices to find their way as they approach the middle of their career. This book means architects don’t need to navigate these years on their own.

"This book is for senior executives who are frustrated by the slow pace and limited return on investment (ROI) of their digital transformations, and are unsure what's holding them back."-- Page 9.

Launch promotion: 25% off through 10/3/2022. In this user guide, we present Exploratory Product Development (ExPD), a strategy-to-launch product development approach that is adaptable and can respond nimbly to environments that are increasingly complex and uncertain. Using the ExPD approach, you can discover how to accelerate your product development process by removing bureaucracy and rework, learning through experimentation, and shifting your focus to the most critical product priorities. We examine the constraints imposed by a traditional phased-and-gated product development process and demonstrate the transformational role of the ExPD approach in adapting to individual product needs. This user guide is for product developers in established enterprises looking to install a new or improved product development process. Product developers in start-ups will also benefit from many of the ideas, tools, and techniques covered in this guide. We provide case studies and examples that transition these concepts from theory into practice. Implementing the ExPD approach will result in a product development function that is stronger, more focused, and more resilient to change. You will better understand the role strategy and business models play in product development and how to build a productive idea pipeline. Also, you will gain a new appreciation for the need to identify, assess and resolve uncertainty and risk before investing in a product, giving you greater confidence in your ability to win savings in resources and time to market and ultimately achieve greater product success.

“Ed Hess's Hyper-Learning is uniquely practical and is the essential starting point for charting new ways of thinking, living, working, leading, and being fulfilled in our new world.” —Gary Roughead, Admiral, US Navy (retired) former Chief of Naval Operations The Digital Age will raise the question of how we humans will stay relevant in the workplace. To stay relevant, we have to be able to excel cognitively, behaviorally, and emotionally in ways that technology can't. Professor Ed Hess believes that requires us to become Hyper-Learners: continuously learning, unlearning, and relearning at the speed of change. To do that, we have to overcome our reflexive ways of being: seeking confirmation of what we believe, emotionally defending our beliefs and our ego, and seeking cohesiveness of our mental models. Hyper-Learning requires a new way of being and a radical new way of working. In Part 1 of this how-to book, Hess takes a practical workbook approach and helps readers create their Hyper-Learning Mindset, choose and embrace their needed Hyper-Learning Behaviors, and adopt their daily Hyper-Learning Practices. In Part 2, Hess focuses on how to humanize the workplace to optimize Hyper-Learning. Featuring case studies of three business leaders and two public companies, this book shows how to harness the power of human emotions, choices, and behaviors to enable the highest levels of human cognitive, emotional, and behavioral performance—individually and organizationally.

The Undercover Economist - famed for his explanations - now offers solutions. Tim Harford introduces a new way of thinking about how to solve the world's most urgent problems, from climate change to terrorism, African poverty to global finance - even the problems we encounter in our own daily lives. When faced with such challenges, we instinctively look to leaders, experts, and gurus to provide us with pre-chewed solutions. Harford argues that the world has become too unpredictable and complex for that. Instead, we must adapt - improvise rather than plan, work from the bottom up, take baby steps. Adapt draws on exciting new work by passionate young economists and on innovative ideas from across the sciences. It looks at how and why innovation really comes about, extolling the value of trial and error and arguing that we should learn to embrace failure. Above all, Adapt applies hard-won lessons learned in the field, from a spaceport in the Mojave Desert to the street of Iraq, from a blazing offshore drilling rig to the frozen tundra of Siberia. The book shows that it's up to individuals - us - to change the world.

Adaptive programming and management principles focused on learning, experimentation, and evidence-based decision making are gaining traction with donor agencies and implementing partners in international development. Adaptation calls for using learning to inform adjustments during project implementation. This requires information gathering methods that promote reflection, learning, and adaption, beyond reporting on pre-specified data. A focus on adaptation changes traditional thinking about program cycle. It both erases the boundaries between design, implementation, and evaluation and reframes thinking to consider the complexity of development problems and nonlinear change pathways.Supportive management structures and processes are crucial for fostering adaptive management. Implementers and donors are experimenting with how procurement, contracting, work planning, and reporting can be modified to foster adaptive programming. Well-designed monitoring, evaluation, and learning systems can go beyond meeting accountability and reporting requirements to produce data and learning for evidence-based decision making and adaptive management. It is important to continue experimenting and learning to integrate adaptive programming and management into the operational policies and practices of donor agencies, country partners, and implementers. We need to devote ongoing effort to build the evidence base for the contributions of adaptive management to achieving international development results.

Today, a prosperous technology company can be disrupted and put out of business in a blink of an eye. The development of many different technologies that once took years can be done in months or weeks. There are also few examples where the engineering work is completely contained in one company or one engineering organization. Business strategies have evolved. The analysis of competitive forces in an industry has matured to include the concepts of disruptive innovation and coopetition.In an ecosystem characterized by rapid changes in technology and how it is developed, an engineering R&D organization will quickly become irrelevant if it fails to keep the pace of innovation needed to succeed. This book provides readers with a holistic approach to engineering management.We have seen that successful managers create a strong foundation of a common culture that enables learning, value creation, diversity and inclusion. They create organizations that tightly connect the core engineering functions of strategic planning, research and development and are able to comprehend and direct a broader R&D system that stretches well beyond their own organization's boundary. Doing all of this to extract the greatest value in the least amount of time is what we call holistic engineering management.The content for this book is based on over 105 years of combined experience working in a rapidly changing industry. In most chapters, practical examples and case studies of the concepts provided are given. As noted in the foreword by Pat Gelsinger (CEO, VMWare) and in comments from other technology leaders: Aart de Geus (Chairman and co-CEO, Synopsys, Inc.), Aicha Evans (CEO, Zoox, Inc.), William M Holt, (former Executive VP, GM, Intel, Corp.), and Amir Faintuch (Senior VP, GM, GlobalFoundries, Inc.), this book will be valuable for students of engineering management and current engineering managers.