Step Change

Improve your life fearlessly with this essential guide to kaizen—the art of making great and lasting change through small, steady steps. The philosophy is simple: Great change is made through small steps. And the science is irrefutable: Small steps circumvent the brain's built-in resistance to new behavior. No matter what the goal—losing weight, quitting smoking, writing a novel, starting an exercise program, or meeting the love of your life—the powerful technique of kaizen is the way to achieve it. Written by psychologist and kaizen expert Dr. Robert Maurer, One Small Step Can Change Your Life is the simple but potent guide to easing into new habits—and turning your life around. Learn how to overcome fear and procrastination with his 7 Small Steps—including how to Think Small Thoughts, Take Small Actions, and Solve Small Problems—to steadily build your confidence and make insurmountable-seeming goals suddenly feel doable. Dr. Maurer also shows how to visualize virtual change so that real change can come more easily. Why small rewards lead to big returns. And how great discoveries are made by paying attention to the little details most of us overlook. His simple regiment is your path to continuous improvement for anything from losing weight to quitting smoking, paying off debt, or conquering shyness and meeting new people. Rooted in the two-thousand-year-old wisdom of the Tao Te Ching—“The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step”—here is the way to change your life without fear, without failure, and start on a new path of easy, continuous improvement.

No one likes change. Too often it’s viewed as something that must be endured; something to ‘get through’ as fast as possible so that everything can ‘return to normal'. We need to change our view of change and see it for the opportunity it really is. Step Change: The Leader’s Journey helps leaders to become gifted and skilful at moving through the change process gracefully and productively. Based on Joseph Campbell’s 'hero’s journey', Step Change: The Leader’s Journey offers a universal road map of change from step-1 (comfort zone) through to step-12 (post-delivery inspiration). The journey travels through four distinct phases of ‘discover’, ‘decide’, ‘develop’ and ‘deliver’. Step Change provides a proven formula for change, both personal and organisational, which allows us to know where we are on the Change Wheel and what to expect from each step, including what it looks and feels like at each step. By identifying what causes change to fail at each step as well as tools to navigate past the pitfalls and dead ends that leave us stuck at a particular step or retreating to the comfort zone, the change cycle can be understood and mastered. The book provides the ideal structure for senior managers, human resource managers, coaches and business leaders to follow in order to embed change across their teams and organisation.

From the ill-fated dot-com bubble to unprecedented merger and acquisition activity to scandal, greed, and, ultimately, recession -- we've learned that widespread and difficult change is no longer the exception. By outlining the process organizations have used to achieve transformational goals and by identifying where and how even top performers derail during the change process, Kotter provides a practical resource for leaders and managers charged with making change initiatives work.

This ground-breaking text brings together advances in the field of purchase order management (POM) and offers a comprehensive framework for lowering costs, improving efficiency, eliminating non-value activities, and optimising the POM process.

This book develops the understanding and skills needed to be able to tackle original control problems. The general approach to a given control problem is to try the simplest tentative solution first and, when this is insufficient, to explain why and use a more sophisticated alternative to remedy the deficiency and achieve satisfactory performance. This pattern of working gives readers a full understanding of different controllers and teaches them to make an informed choice between traditional controllers and more advanced modern alternatives in meeting the needs of a particular plant. Attention is focused on the time domain, covering model-based linear and nonlinear forms of control together with robust control based on sliding modes and the use of state observers such as disturbance estimation. Feedback Control is self-contained, paying much attention to explanations of underlying concepts, with detailed mathematical derivations being employed where necessary. Ample use is made of diagrams to aid these conceptual explanations and the subject matter is enlivened by continual use of examples and problems derived from real control applications. Readers’ learning is further enhanced by experimenting with the fully-commented MATLAB®/Simulink® simulation environment made accessible at insert URL here to produce simulations relevant to all of the topics covered in the text. A solutions manual for use by instructors adopting the book can also be downloaded from insert URL here. Feedback Control is suitable as a main textbook for graduate and final-year undergraduate courses containing control modules; knowledge of ordinary linear differential equations, Laplace transforms, transfer functions, poles and zeros, root locus and elementary frequency response analysis, and elementary feedback control is required. It is also a useful reference source on control design methods for engineers practicing in industry and for academic control researchers.