Optionality

Not Sure What the Future Holds? No Problem. It's hard not to be worried about the future, especially if you just lost your job, are trying to plan your career, or are suddenly missing thousands of dollars from your retirement account. In Optionality, finance journalist Richard Meadows lays out a guide for not only becoming resilient to shocks, but positioning yourself to profit from an unpredictable world. Meadows takes us on a journey from quitting his office job at age 25, to lounging on tropical beaches living the early retirement dream, to finding and adopting an ancient philosophy for systematically pursuing the good life. Learn how to: • Find investment opportunities with open-ended upside, and maximise the chances of a 'moonshot' success • Make life-changing choices under conditions of uncertainty • Achieve the kind of financial freedom that lets you live life on your own terms • Protect against disaster, build support networks, and create a safety buffer of resilience in every area of life • Develop a systems approach to making your own luck Optionality is the key to navigating an uncertain world. In this entertaining and insightful debut, Meadows delivers a timely message: optionality has never been so valuable, and only those who have it will survive and thrive.

This book offers a fresh approach to strategy by examining the idea of Optionality. Optionality is the right, but not the obligation, to take an action. Built on historic military tactics, static engineering principles, and equilibrium-seeking economics, conventional strategic-thinking suffers some weaknesses, principal of which is its inability to deal with conditions of high uncertainty. This book begins by dividing the business landscape into three distinct domains; (1) Fragile, (2) Robust, and (3) Long-shot (FRL), which alert us to the context-specificity of strategy tools, before suggesting that theoretical lenses are required to understand and implement strategy in VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous) domains. The authors explore the concept and methodology of Optionality in order to demonstrate how it can be used in conjunction with existing strategy tools in order to achieve competitive success. It will be of great interest to academics and students of strategy and innovation.

The architecture of the human language faculty has been one of the main foci of the linguistic research of the last half century. This branch of linguistics, broadly known as Generative Grammar, is concerned with the formulation of explanatory formal accounts of linguistic phenomena with the ulterior goal of gaining insight into the properties of the 'language organ'. The series comprises high quality monographs and collected volumes that address such issues. The topics in this series range from phonology to semantics, from syntax to information structure, from mathematical linguistics to studies of the lexicon.

Antifragile is a standalone book in Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s landmark Incerto series, an investigation of opacity, luck, uncertainty, probability, human error, risk, and decision-making in a world we don’t understand. The other books in the series are Fooled by Randomness, The Black Swan, Skin in the Game, and The Bed of Procrustes. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the bestselling author of The Black Swan and one of the foremost thinkers of our time, reveals how to thrive in an uncertain world. Just as human bones get stronger when subjected to stress and tension, and rumors or riots intensify when someone tries to repress them, many things in life benefit from stress, disorder, volatility, and turmoil. What Taleb has identified and calls “antifragile” is that category of things that not only gain from chaos but need it in order to survive and flourish. In The Black Swan, Taleb showed us that highly improbable and unpredictable events underlie almost everything about our world. In Antifragile, Taleb stands uncertainty on its head, making it desirable, even necessary, and proposes that things be built in an antifragile manner. The antifragile is beyond the resilient or robust. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better and better. Furthermore, the antifragile is immune to prediction errors and protected from adverse events. Why is the city-state better than the nation-state, why is debt bad for you, and why is what we call “efficient” not efficient at all? Why do government responses and social policies protect the strong and hurt the weak? Why should you write your resignation letter before even starting on the job? How did the sinking of the Titanic save lives? The book spans innovation by trial and error, life decisions, politics, urban planning, war, personal finance, economic systems, and medicine. And throughout, in addition to the street wisdom of Fat Tony of Brooklyn, the voices and recipes of ancient wisdom, from Roman, Greek, Semitic, and medieval sources, are loud and clear. Antifragile is a blueprint for living in a Black Swan world. Erudite, witty, and iconoclastic, Taleb’s message is revolutionary: The antifragile, and only the antifragile, will make it. Praise for Antifragile “Ambitious and thought-provoking . . . highly entertaining.”—The Economist “A bold book explaining how and why we should embrace uncertainty, randomness, and error . . . It may just change our lives.”—Newsweek

The Glot International State-of-the-Article books constitute the ideal solution for every-one who wants to have a good idea of what the others are doing but does not have time to follow the developments in all other parts of the field on a day to day basis. All articles were previously published in Glot International and have been revised and updated, and special attention was given to the extensive bibliography, which constitutes an important part of each overview article. Among the essays in the first volume are overview articles dealing with VP ellipsis (by Kyle Johnson), Ergativity (by Alana Johns), tone (by San Duanmu), acquisition of phonology (by Paula Fikkert), and semantic change (by Elizabeth Closs Traugott). The second volume offers articles on subjects ranging from the development of grammars (by David Lightfoot) and markedness in phonology (by Keren Rice) to the syntactic representation of linguistic events (by Sara Thomas Rosen), optionality in Optimality syntax (by Gereon Müller) and the nature of coordination (by Ljiljana Progovac).

If you're looking for the inside scoop on the latest version of FileMaker, you've come to the right place. Authors Scott Love and Steve Lane are FileMaker experts who were involved in the development of FileMaker 8, and they bring that knowledge to you in Special Edition Using FileMaker 8. Frequent tips, case studies, and thorough examples show you how to avoid mistakes and save time in developing databases with FileMaker 8. This is the comprehensive reference that every database developer needs on their shelf.

In this business bestseller, how companies can adapt in an era of continuous disruption: a guide to responding to such acute crises as COVID-19. Gold Medalist in Business Disruption/Reinvention. When COVID-19 hit, businesses had to respond almost instantaneously--shifting employees to remote work, repairing broken supply chains, keeping pace with dramatically fluctuating customer demand. They were forced to adapt to a confluence of multiple disruptions inextricably linked to a longer-term, ongoing digital disruption. This book shows that companies that use disruption as an opportunity for innovation emerge from it stronger. Companies that merely attempt to "weather the storm" until things go back to normal (or the next normal), on the other hand, miss an opportunity to thrive. The authors, all experts on business and technology strategy, show that transformation is not a one-and-done event, but a continuous process of adapting to a volatile and uncertain environment. Drawing on five years of research into digital disruption--including a series of interviews with business leaders conducted during the COVID-19 crisis--they offer a framework for understanding disruption and tools for navigating it. They outline the leadership traits, business principles, technological infrastructure, and organizational building blocks essential for adapting to disruption, with examples from real-world organizations. Technology, they remind readers, is not an end in itself, but enables the capabilities essential for surviving an uncertain future: nimbleness, scalability, stability, and optionality.

This textbook provides a hands-on approach to relational database design and database management within an Oracle context.