Pursuing Perfection

In Pursuing Perfection, authors Margo Maine and Joe Kelly explore the emotional, social and cultural factors behind the ongoing epidemic of disordered eating and body image despair in adult women at midlife and beyond. Written from a biopsychosocial and feminist perspective, Pursuing Perfection describes the many issues women encounter as they navigate a rapidly changing culture that promotes unhealthy standards for beauty and appearance. This updated and expanded edition (originally published as The Body Myth: Adult Women and the Pressure to Be Perfect) is a unique guide for anyone seeking practical tools and strategies for adult women looking to establish health and body acceptance.

How would Socrates and Plato react to a modern world where secularism and religious fundamentalism are growing while the gap between the human mind and animal mind is narrowing? Using some creative license mixed with real history, science, and philosophy, Seeking Perfection addresses that question. Matt J. Rossano uses a narrative/dialogue format to superimpose on modern times ancient Greece’s two most eminent philosophers, along with its government and culture. The story begins with Plato’s daring escape from Sicily, where he tutored Dionysius II in philosophy. On board his homebound ship, Plato recounts his experiences in Sicily. In this narrative, the intellectual difference between practical rewards and the pursuit of ideals provides the basis for a series of dialogue on science, secularism, religion, and the uniqueness of the human mind. Upon the ship’s arrival home, Plato’s mentor, Socrates, is arrested and his trial provides the venue for the book’s final dialogue. The final dialogue serves as a counterweight to the earlier ones. Rossano begins and ends with a philosopher imprisoned by his views, indicative of one of its main messages: the true philosopher uses a well-disciplined mind and the best knowledge of the day to get as close to the truth as possible. In doing so, he invariably gets into trouble. This imaginatively constructed tale will absorb those interested in what the philosophical masters might say about today’s world.

In Pursuing Perfection, authors Margo Maine and Joe Kelly explore the emotional, social and cultural factors behind the ongoing epidemic of disordered eating and body image despair in adult women at midlife and beyond. Written from a biopsychosocial and feminist perspective, Pursuing Perfection describes the many issues women encounter as they navigate a rapidly changing culture that promotes unhealthy standards for beauty and appearance. This updated and expanded edition (originally published as The Body Myth: Adult Women and the Pressure to Be Perfect) is a unique guide for anyone seeking practical tools and strategies for adult women looking to establish health and body acceptance.

Written by the President and CEO of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) and a leading health care journalist, this groundbreaking book examines how leading organizations in the United States are pursuing the Triple Aim—improving the individual experience of care, improving the health of populations, and reducing the per capita cost of care. Even with major steps forward – including the Affordable Care Act and the creation of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation -- the national health care debate is too often poisoned by negativity. A quieter, more thoughtful, and vastly more constructive conversation continues among health care leaders and professionals throughout the country. Innovative solutions are being designed and implemented at the local level, and countless health care organizations are demonstrating breakthrough remedies to some of the toughest and most expensive challenges in health care. Pursuing the Triple Aim shares compelling stories that are emerging in locations ranging from Pittsburgh to Seattle, from Boston to Oakland, focused on topics including improving quality and lowering costs in primary care; setting challenging goals to control chronic disease with notable outcomes; leveraging employer buying power to improve quality, reduce waste, and drive down cost; paying for care under an innovative contract that compensates for quality rather than quantity; and much more. The authors describe these innovations in detail, and show the way toward a health care system for the nation that improves the experience and quality of care while at the same time controlling costs. As the Triple Aim moves from being largely an aspirational framework to something that communities all across the US can implement and learn from, its potential to become a touchstone for the work ahead has never been greater. Pursuing the Triple Aim lays out the vision, the interventions, and promising examples of success.

One million. That's how many new ideas the Toyota organization receives from its employees every year. These ideas come from every level of the organization - from the factory floors to the corporate suites. And organizations all over the world want to learn how they do it. Now Matthew May, Senior Advisor to the University of Toyota, reveals how any company can create an environment of every day innovation and achieve the elegant solutions found only on the far side of complexity. A tactical guide for team-based innovation, THE ELEGANT SOLUTION delivers the formula to the three principles and ten practices that drive business creativity. Innovation isn't just about technology - it's about value, opportunity and impact. When a company embeds a real discipline around the pursuit of perfection, the sky is the limit. Dozens of case studies (from Toyota and other companies) illustrate the power and universality of these concepts; a unique 'clamshell strategy' prepares managers to ensure organizational success. At once a thought-shaper, a playmaker, and a taskmaster, THE ELEGANT SOLUTION is a practical field manual for everyone in corporate life.

Add Practice Perfect Softball to your dugout and begin your journey to a championship season. The National Fastpitch Coaches Association (NFCA) has put together an all-star lineup of coaches, including Connie Clark, Jo Evans, Rachel Lawson, Ken Eriksen, Donna Papa, Julie Lenhart, Lonni Alameda, Dot Richardson, and Beverly Smith.

In the late 1990s, treatment-related deaths or ''complications'' were the fifth leading cause of death for Americans. Yet healthcare practitioners decried attempts to standardize treatment. ''We're working with people, not cars,'' they said. The result: an epidemic of preventable mistakes in a medical landscape where patients wait for hours in ''emergency'' rooms, fill out the same paperwork at each visit, and increasingly run the risk of being dosed with the wrong medication or having the wrong limb amputated. These problems spurred a group of dedicated physicians like Paul Batalden and Don Berwick to study the concepts of ''quality improvement'' used at Toyota and NASA, and to dare to apply them to the practice of medicine. This book tells their story, and how these ''heretical'' ideas have blossomed into a movement, bringing the focus back to where it should have always been: the patient.

Expanded, updated, and more relevant than ever, this bestselling business classic by two internationally renowned management analysts describes a business system for the twenty-first century that supersedes the mass production system of Ford, the financial control system of Sloan, and the strategic system of Welch and GE. It is based on the Toyota (lean) model, which combines operational excellence with value-based strategies to produce steady growth through a wide range of economic conditions. In contrast with the crash-and-burn performance of companies trumpeted by business gurus in the 1990s, the firms profiled in Lean Thinking -- from tiny Lantech to midsized Wiremold to niche producer Porsche to gigantic Pratt & Whitney -- have kept on keeping on, largely unnoticed, along a steady upward path through the market turbulence and crushed dreams of the early twenty-first century. Meanwhile, the leader in lean thinking -- Toyota -- has set its sights on leadership of the global motor vehicle industry in this decade. Instead of constantly reinventing business models, lean thinkers go back to basics by asking what the customer really perceives as value. (It's often not at all what existing organizations and assets would suggest.) The next step is to line up value-creating activities for a specific product along a value stream while eliminating activities (usually the majority) that don't add value. Then the lean thinker creates a flow condition in which the design and the product advance smoothly and rapidly at the pull of the customer (rather than the push of the producer). Finally, as flow and pull are implemented, the lean thinker speeds up the cycle of improvement in pursuit of perfection. The first part of this book describes each of these concepts and makes them come alive with striking examples. Lean Thinking clearly demonstrates that these simple ideas can breathe new life into any company in any industry in any country. But most managers need guidance on how to make the lean leap in their firm. Part II provides a step-by-step action plan, based on in-depth studies of more than fifty lean companies in a wide range of industries across the world. Even those readers who believe they have embraced lean thinking will discover in Part III that another dramatic leap is possible by creating an extended lean enterprise for each of their product families that tightly links value-creating activities from raw materials to customer. In Part IV, an epilogue to the original edition, the story of lean thinking is brought up-to-date with an enhanced action plan based on the experiences of a range of lean firms since the original publication of Lean Thinking. Lean Thinking does not provide a new management "program" for the one-minute manager. Instead, it offers a new method of thinking, of being, and, above all, of doing for the serious long-term manager -- a method that is changing the world.